My grandfather Brian Bennett, who has died aged 84, was an old-fashioned socialist. His socialism was built not on books and theories, but on the sacrifices and struggle of making a better life for his family. Growing up hungry was something that he carried with him for life, whether in never letting anybody in his company leave a crumb on their plate or giving anyone who needed it a lift home, a hot meal or the last tenner in his wallet.
All his life Brian lived within a few miles of Atherton, where he was born into the dire poverty of a Lancashire mining village in the 1930s. Even by the standards of the time, his childhood was not an easy one. His mother, Nancy (nee Farrimond), died when he was seven, and rheumatic fever almost killed him before he reached his teens. But it was that illness that saved Brian from following his father, Tom, and his brothers, Tom and Jack, down the pit when he left the local school. Instead, he got a job with the Royal London, cycling round the small towns and villages that had grown out of the coalfields between Bolton and Leigh collecting insurance premiums.
