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Al Richardson born Barnsley, 1941; after University, he lectured at Exeter University and then became a history teacher in London. Richardson's politics were Trotskyite: he was a member of the Socialist Labour League, the International Marxist Group (IMG) and he was also involved in the Institute of Workers' Control. Richardson was expelled from the IMG at the end of the 1960s and co-founded the Chartist Group, which aimed to encourage revolutionary tendencies amongst the left of the Labour Party. Richardson worked with Sam Bornstein on histories of British Trotskyism and, in so doing, amassed a large archive. Two books were published in 1986 on the subject as a result of this research: Against the Stream, and War and the International. Al Richardson was also a member of the board of Socialist Platform Limited, which organised the deposit of this archive.
Jim Higgins was born in Harrow in 1930; joined the Young Communist League at the age of 14 and left school two years later; joined the Post Office as a telecommunications engineer and became active in the Post Office Engineering Union (POEU) and the Communist Party; left the latter in 1956 after the invasion of Hungary by the Soviet Union. Higgins joined the Socialist Labour League and then, at the end of the 1950s, the Socialist Review Group. By the 1960s, Higgins was the secretary of the International Socialists (IS). By the early 1970s, Higgins gave up his work as a POEU branch secretary to become the full-time national secretary of the IS. He left the Socialist Workers Party (the former IS) in 1977 and became a journalist. His political memoir, More years for the Locust, was published in 1997.