My grandfather Ernie Clarke, who has died aged 89, was a lifelong communist who was dedicated to changing society for the better.
He was born in Southwark, London, into an impoverished working-class family, and grew up in Larcom Street, off the Walworth Road. Ernie was the youngest of four children of John, a tailor, and his wife, Ellen. John had served during the first world war and suffered from the effects of mustard gas.
Ernie went to King and Queen Street school (now the Robert Browning primary school) in Walworth, then Regent Street Polytechnic (now part of the University of Westminster), where he trained as a tailor. In his youth he was influenced by a charismatic Walworth communist politician and speaker, Joe Bent.
He told me he remembered hiding in doorways as bombs dropped during the second world war, and even one landing on his bedroom roof (but not going off). He was called up in 1941, but saw no active service. Before starting his RAF training in Devon, he spent some time as a temporary assistant at the Board of Trade, and there met Joyce Rayner, whom he later married. In 1944 he was sent to South Africa for further training, and was able to make contact with the South African Communist party. By the time he was demobbed in 1946 he had been promoted to flight sergeant.
The war affected him greatly. He told me he could see the outright inequalities in capitalism and the class divisions it produced. He said he would walk up to Buckingham Palace and watch all the posh cars driving up and down, while his family struggled to get food on the table. He believed strongly that this unequal system should be changed and it was this sense of injustice that was the driving force behind his communist beliefs.
He became a full-time political activist and did various jobs for the Daily Worker (now the Morning Star), the Communist party newspaper. At the 1950 general election, he was the agent for DN Pritt, the Labour MP who had been expelled from the party for his pro-Soviet views and was standing as an Independent Labour candidate.
During the 1950s and 60s Ernie worked full-time for the Communist party, eventually as organiser for the central London area. I think it was a disappointment to him that communism did not engage the consciousness of the British working class in the way that he hoped. To his dying day he still believed that capitalism would eventually meet its end.
In 1985 he met Kyoko at a peace fair, and in 1989 they married and moved to Japan. There Ernie worked as a translator for the Japan Press Weekly, which has connections with the Japanese Communist party. When he became ill, in 2006 they moved back to Britain to be closer to family.
He is survived by Kyoko; by Helen and John, the children of his first marriage, which ended in divorce; and by six grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren.