Arthur Stuart Percival

Arthur Stuart Percival was my father and a very special man.

Leaving school at the age of 13 years due to his father's financial situation he was self-educated and deeply thoughtful. For thirty years he drove a London Transport bus, a form of life that he described as excruciatingly boring, but which he persisted in, rather than seeking more intesting employment, as he always believed that the hard times of the depression years would come again and his family's interests would be best served if he stayed in what he regarded as a particularly secure occupation.

A  member of the Communist Party most of his adult life, he was a commited defender of social justice and a passionate believer in racial equality, who, had he lived just a few more years, was too honest a man not to have acknowledged that his views on the nature of Soviet rRussia and Joseph Stalin were in the final analysis the product of his intense desire to believe in a better society than that which he had actually experienced and that , although honestly held, they were in error. 

A Union man through and through, he was a member of the Transport General Workers Union who, in the midst of the anti-communist hysteria of the Cold War, could unquestionable have had a comfortable career as a union official had he been prepared to renounce his beliefs.Instead he chose to remain as an ordinary worker and, in spite of his official exclusion from it's affairs, a loyal member of his union.

As to daily life however he was a wonderful friend, guide and mentor who devoted his life to his children in difficult circumstances and, to my sure and certain knowlege, would have unhesitatingly literally sacrificed that life for either of them had it been necessary. He taught me to be proud of my working class heritage, with it's long tradition of struggle for social justice, to believe implicitly in myself and my abilities, and, in the words of Martin Luther King, to judge my fellow human beings by the content of their characters and not by their race, creed, gender, or sexual preferences.

Vale Arthur, I owe you a debt beyond any measuring

Entered by Christopher John Percival 7.2.2009