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Introduction
Wilf Page was a widely respected giant of the national and international trade union movement, a promoter of justice in the countryside, a communist councillor during the difficult cold war years and a lifelong community activist. He has recently been likened to his contemporary Nelson Mandela, on the grounds that he never became bitter about the discrimination he suffered because of his political beliefs. He accepted it as the price that had to be paid for the cause of progress. Instead of being dejected by discrimination - which affected him particularly in his search for work as a young father - it merely strengthened his resolve to abolish the unjust social system which spawned it.
Page is Norfolk dialect for an assistant shepherd, yet this seems to be one of the few jobs Wilf did not try his hand at. Blacklisted by employers because of his trade union activities, he had to scrape a living from a string of short-term jobs. He could have been a guest almost every week on the 1950s television programme What's My Line (in which a panel had to guess the occupation of guests from a mime). In his early days he had been a rag and bone man, a servant, an upholstery apprentice, a barman, a ballroom dancer-cum-gigolo, and a potato picker, before becoming an aerial photographer for the Royal Air Force in India. After the war he was a Labour Party agent, beach photographer, cafe manager, lorry driver, bus driver, gardener, caravan site attendant, travelling fish salesman, and occasional farmworker.
Perseverance was one of his qualities, and he kept plugging away against right-wing opposition in his union, the National Union of Agricultural Workers, finally being elected to its executive after seventeen years of standing. Once elected, his talent was officially appreciated and, when the union later merged with the Transport & General Workers' Union, he served on its executive, representing agricultural and rural workers. As he became recognised as an elder statesman of the union, he was elected as president of the European Federation of Agricultural Unions.
In all these prestigious positions he was well known for his communist views. But his honesty and integrity won him respect, even from those who vehemently opposed his politics. And it was this, coupled with his record of getting things done - both through official channels and more unorthodox means - which led to him being returned as a communist councillor time and again in Edgefield, Norfolk, during twenty-eight of the worst years of the cold war.
Wilf's humour and fortitude enabled him to come through many trying times - from being punished for organising a strike at school, to burying his own grandfather in a macabre do-it-yourself funeral, to being arrested and fined for cutting a wire fence around a US nuclear base. Even when, towards the end of his life, he saw the collapse of the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries, he did not see it as a reason to give up hope. Instead he drew a positive lesson, that communists should think more for themselves instead of accepting things without question as they had done in the past. He saw marxism not as a dogma but as a way of analysing society and the forces within it, as an essential part of the battle for social justice.
On his death, an obituary in The Times accurately reported that Wilf's communism
had not been of the 'big Russian bear' variety, but had been about 'the community
owning the wealth'. He was a man whose tireless battle for justice lasted
until the last day of his life.