Person

Cedric Ralph, a stalwart of the Communist movement for over six decades, has died in Melbourne, aged 100. Cedric is best known for his important role as an activist and lawyer in the struggle against fascism and for peace and democratic rights from the 1940s to the 1970s. Cedric was a son of the establishment. His father was one of the early solicitors in Melbourne, and Cedric started his working life at his father’s firm, later setting up his own law practice. Like many of his generation, the Great Depression of the 1930s left an indelible mark on Cedric. He would walk with his father to work in the city through Melbourne’s Royal Botanical Gardens in which homeless unemployed men ‘slept rough’. It caused him to begin to question the kind of society which could produce the huge disparity of wealth such as between his own privileged circumstances and those of the unemployed. Cedric fought in the Pacific in the Second World War and his contact with Communists in the armed forces further developed his radical ideas. He joined the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) and became close to the great E. F. (Ted) Hill, Victorian Secretary of the CPA and brilliant barrister. In the immediate post World War II period, the Soviet Red Army victories over Nazi Germany, the expectations of soldiers returning to civilian life and the advance of anticolonial struggles around the world led to significant growth of the Communist Party and the progressive movement generally around the developed world, including in Australia. There was a wave of militant working class strikes and other struggles and substantial progressive reforms were won. In the late 1940s, the most reactionary section of the ruling class launched a worldwide counter-offensive, graphically heralded by Churchill’s infamous “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946. McCarthyism – an all-round assault on democratic rights, the working class and unions under the pretext of attacking communism – was launched. Its Au