My friend Min Marks, who has died aged 100, was a communist activist and wartime Bletchley Park associate. She and her husband, Jack, were associated with virtually every peace movement, anti-racism and anti-fascist campaign in Leeds for more than 70 years.
Despite her sturdy communist affiliations, Min was ecumenical in her attitude to political campaigns, happily working with all who shared the objective in view. She and Jack were essentially secular Jews and their support of the Palestinian cause inevitably brought difficulties with some members of the Leeds Jewish community. Min also cultivated a wide array of friends and was a convivial host.
She was born in Leeds, to Isaac Druyan, a presser, and his second wife, Rachel (nee Israel), and attended Allerton high school in the city. During the second world war Min volunteered for the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service) and became an intercept operator, taking down encrypted German morse code messages that were then sent to Bletchley Park to be decoded. She is included on the roll of honour there, and is also commemorated on its “codebreakers’ wall”. She became highly skilled at morse code and retained the ability to read it until late in life.
Min married Jack in Leeds in 1946 and thereafter they were both active in the city’s Young Communist League. Unlike a number of Leeds party colleagues, they remained in the Communist Party of Great Britain following the Soviet regime’s crushing of the Hungarian party’s revolt against the rigidity of Stalinist control, saying that the communist cause was more important than any individual’s deviation from it. Min deplored the UK party’s 1991 decision to disband, and she and Jack then put their efforts into supporting the Communist party’s daily newspaper, the Morning Star, which had been able to continue independently.
Min worked for many years for the social and market research company RSL as an interviewer, trainer and area supervisor, only retiring when she was well into her 70s. She was also a fundraiser for a number of charities, particularly the Yorkshire PHAB (Physically Handicapped and Able Bodied), who put her and Jack’s names on one of their PHAB minibuses.
Jack died in 2017. Min is survived by by their three children, Ruth, Estelle and Anthony, five grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren.
