Ernest Tate memoir
July 2019
Ernest Tate was born on the Shankill Road, Belfast in 1934:
"I had left school before my fourteenth birthday, the legal age at that time for school leaving in Northern Ireland. Most of the young people in the area I grew up – Protestant working class Shankill Road – terminated their formal education at that age, or earlier if they could. In the whole time I lived in Belfast, I had never known or met anyone who had gone to a secondary school, never mind university. My family was the poorest of the poor. There was a common joke around my neighborhood that had a lot of truth to it: “If anyone around here paid their rent in two weeks in a row, the police would be visiting to see where the money came from".
Tate is the author of: REVOLUTIONARY ACTIVISM IN THE 1950s & 60s. Volume 1, Canada 1955-65; REVOLUTIONARY ACTIVISM IN THE 1950S & 60S. Volume 2, BRITAIN 1965-70
Tate left Belfast for Canada in 1955, where he became involved in left wing Trotskyist politics. He became a central organiser of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign in Britain in the mid 1960s.
Ernest Tate talks here (in
his Belfast accent):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXtiUt3ZjNA
Phil Hearse, who introduces
volume 2, talks here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrBRdIlg2ek
Review here: Palmer, Bryan D. (Spring 2015). "Review: A Tate Gallery for the New Left: Portraits, Landscapes, and Abstracts in the Revolutionary Activism of the 1950s and 1960s". Labour / Le Travail. 75: 231–262: https://journals.lib.unb.ca/…/…/article/download/24383/28237