Bill Alexander, chemist and communist; born June 13, 1910, died July 10, 2000

BILL ALEXANDER lived long enough to see fascism (and especially Spanish fascism) defeated and the emergence of a new Spain. He retained his handsome figure and lovely Hampshire accent to the end. Both were very effective in the years he spent urging the cause of anti-fascism and establishing respect for the members of the International Brigade who, like him, went to Spain to fight for the Republican cause there.

He had a very typical upbringing, with a mother of considerable intelligence who was left with seven children to bring up following the early death of her husband. He often referred to her, and when we were once having a very tough disagreement he suddenly softened his attitude to me when the importance of buying and reading newspapers came up, and he said: ''Well, we'll agree on that. No matter how poor we were we always had a newspaper in the house''. The last time we met he looked at my carrier bag and its six newspapers and told me that I was right on the issue, but this was surely carrying things too far! Just as well he never saw the seven I get on a Sunday.

He won a scholarship which took him to Reading University to study chemistry, and he worked as an industrial chemist but joined both the Communist Party and the National Union of Printers, Bookbinders, and Papermakers . . . ever the printed word in his weaponry.

His service in Spain has been well documented by himself and others. Books, pamphlets, and some documentary films are all there, and he was, like many other former Brigaders, bemused but glad that they were called on - eventually - to visit schools, colleges, and universities to talk about their reasons for going, their experiences. But the Establishment of the 1930s persisted in making it difficult for the unrivalled experience of Brigaders to be used in the armed forces from 1939 onwards.

The Communist Party was his life and it, for all its faults, brought the most unlikely people together. The scientist JBS Haldane was a member, a frequent contributor to the Daily Worker; and when he was working on a project around the sinking of the Thetis submarine and asked for volunteers to take a test voyage, Alexander was one of the volunteers. Despite this, Bill had the all too common concern about ''intellectuals'', and one of my successes with him in this field was to get him to listen to the songs written by students - particularly Cambridge students - for the Aid to Spain campaigns. When I sang their version of Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye:

We'll fight with all our might and main/ To lift the ban on arms for Spain, he exclaimed that he had never heard it. I pointed out that he was at the Front, and it was never considered an important job for someone to gather up the ephemera and see that it was properly distributed.

In his later years it was possible for some of us to see that he got a platform wherever possible. He came to the European Parliament on a visit organised by a colleague whose enthusiasm for the cause of Republican Spain was great, but who also lacked experience. Never mind - he learned on the hoof, like we all did from time to time.

Life is full of ironies, and

when the Marx Memorial Library, to which he was devoted, sought funding, including Lottery funding, for their premises in Clerkenwell, he was, like most us of us, more than amused to know that Woodrow Wyatt had supported it.

He loved the memorabilia which the People's Palace in Glasgow had gathered in around the members of the Brigade who came from here, and often told me that he wished he'd known more about the considerable efforts made at home to support the Brigade and to bring Spansh refugees to live and be educated here. The spread of the cause was truly international, and his face was a picture when a Spanish comrade told him, in my presence, of his astonishment when he, in exile in New York, heard an American audience explode into applause when Pete Seeger struck up the opening chords of Long Live the Fifteenth Brigade at a concert in Carnegie Hall - and the Spanish comrade recognised that this Spanish Civil War campaign song had, in translation, become the anthem of

the anti-McCarthy forces in

the US.

In another context altogether, I was recently reading around TS Eliot, and used John Cornford's The schoolroom's full of hollow men/ Webster's skull and Eliot's pen/ But all we've got are our Party cards/ Which are no bloody good for your bloody charades - and Cornford, Guest, Caudwell, and Happy Cunningham from Glasgow swam back into my ken, and the good, committed, honourable life of Bill Alexander was with them.