Vic Allen

Allen died on 26 October 2014, aged 91. His funeral was held at a rural inn called the Craven Heifer, close to Skipton in the Yorkshire Dales. Vic Allen was married three times during his life, and fathered six children, and had 9 grandchildren and 10 great grandchildren by the time he died.

In 2010 Allen was awarded the Kgao ya Bahale award, the highest honour awarded by the South African NUM. After his death he was widely commendated by his fellow academics and activists for his lifelong commitment to worker's rights and racial equality.

In 2010, Allen was awarded the Kgao ya Bahale award, the highest honour awarded by the South African NUM. The award ceremony was held by a delegation of NUM leaders, including then President Senzeni Zokwana, General Secretary Frans Baleni, former President James Motlatsi and former General Secretary Cyril Ramaphosa. Also present at the awards ceremony were many South African activists who praised Allen as a 'true internationalist'.

He was revealed in September 1999 to have been an "agent of influence" for the East German Stasi secret police, from material contained in the Mitrokhin Archive, possessing the code name "Barber". Allen admitted "pass[ing] on information about CND's activities ... [but] considered that perfectly legitimate because he belonged to a pro-Soviet, pro-East German faction of the group." Allen defended his actions citing that none of the information he had discussed was secret.

In the early 1990s a close friend of Allen, Ramaphosa (who went on to become President of South Africa in 2018), took him on a trip to Johannesburg airport. To Allen's surprise, Nelson Mandela was present in the back seat of their car. Mandela and Allen shared a long car ride discussion of world politics and the two activists bonded over their shared love of boxing.

Allen was the mentor of British trade union leader Arthur Scargill, and also a brief acquaintance of Nelson Mandela. During attempts to establish trade unions in Nigeria, he was accused of conspiring to overthrow the Nigerian government and spent 6 months in jail. He was also involved in a successful mission to smuggle £100,000 into Apartheid South Africa to fund trade unions, and in 1988 was present at secret talks in Cuba between Fidel Castro and black South African union leaders.

Through his connections with NUM, in 1988 Allen was present in Cuba at secret talks between union activists and Fidel Castro. Also present at the talks were leading anti-apartheid activists Cyril Ramaphosa and James Motlatsi.

From the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s, Allen was a member of the management committee that owns the Morning Star.

Allen was the official historian of the British National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), a confidant of Arthur Scargill, Ken Gill and Mick McGahey and an adviser to British trade unionists for over 40 years. He also aided trade unionists and campaigners in the fight against apartheid in South Africa from the 1960s onwards and, after the fall of the regime, wrote a three-volume history of mineworkers in South Africa on behalf of the South African National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). He was a member of the national committee of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) for many years, and in 1985 he came last in a ballot to choose the chair of the organisation running on a pro-Soviet, unilateral disarmament ticket.

Allen was appointed a Lecturer in Industrial Relations in the School of Economic Studies at the University of Leeds in 1959, becoming a Senior Lecturer in 1963, Reader in 1970 and Professor of the Sociology of Industrial Society in 1973. He retired from Leeds in 1988 with the title Emeritus Professor.

Allen went up to the London School of Economics in 1946 and gained a BSc in Economics in 1949 followed by a PhD. His PhD thesis was published in 1954 as "Power in Trade Unions".

Vic Allen (1923 – 2014) was a British communist, human rights activist, political prisoner, sociologist, historian, economist and emeritus professor at the University of Leeds who worked closely with British trade unions, and was considered a key player in the resistance against Apartheid in South African. He was also known for being a key activist within the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), and for spending his life supporting the South African National Union of Mineworkers (NUM).