Ruth Frow: Collector of left-wing literature

Ruth Engel, political activist and book collector: born London 28 July 1922; married first Denis Haines (marriage dissolved), secondly 1960 Edmund Frow (died 1997); died Bolton, Lancashire 11 January 2008

Ruth Frow was the co-creator of the Working Class Movement Library and a political activist for over 60 years. The library, based in Salford, is an ecumenical collection covering the diversity of the British labour movement since the late 18th century, a statement of the richness and creativity of the left.

She was born Ruth Engel in London in 1922, the daughter of a Jewish father, a concert pianist turned salesman of ribbons, and a Catholic mother who had converted to Judaism. Her upbringing first in St John's Wood and then in Mill Hill was thoroughly middle class. Her brother later became Tory Mayor of Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire and a Methodist local preacher. She acknowledged that "we get on very well provided we don't discuss politics, religion or sex".

Ruth's schooling ended with the outbreak of war in 1939. She inflated her age to become a nurse, was detected and instead joined the Women's Royal Air Force. Working in the operations room at Fighter Command she was a participant in the Battle of Britain and later worked on radar at Sandwich in Kent. War brought political commitment. The progressive sentiments of the "People's War" and the successes of the Red Army were reinforced by her reading of the Daily Worker.She read Marxist texts, above all Emile Burns's What is Marxism (1939) – "a flash of light particularly on the religious question".

She and her first husband Denis Haines canvassed for the successful Labour candidate for Dover in the 1945 general election and joined the Communist Party, which had established a base among the Kent miners. They moved back to London where Ruth trained as a teacher under the post-war emergency scheme and by 1949 was working in Mile End. She allied with Party comrades within the National Union of Teachers and was fervently committed to peace campaigns in a deteriorating international climate. The commitment of Communists such as Ruth Haines could be used by critics to erode such campaigns' credibility.

By the early Fifies her marriage had effectively ended. At a Party school in the summer of 1953 she met Eddie Frow. He was 16 years her elder and had joined the Communist Party in 1924. A member of the Amalgamated Engineering Union, he was at the heart of the Manchester trade union left. Eddie was an autodidact who could epitomise the Communist proletarian ideal. His marriage too was in difficulties.

Their relationship quickly deepened but they had reckoned without some officials' concern for the Party's good name. Ruth was directed not to move to Manchester. Instead she lived and taught in Liverpool for a year, with Eddie visiting at weekends, before she eventually arrived in Manchester at the beginning of 1955.

Their partnership was based on complementary strengths and needs. Their shared commitment to the Communist Party survived Cold War rigours and Krushchev's disclosures of Stalin's crimes. Ruth became critical of the Soviet Union but remained resolutely loyal to the Party. She was also heavily involved in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. She reacted vigorously against the sexism of much male trade unionism, not least Eddie's beloved AEU, but she rejected feminist arguments for separate political initiatives.

They had each developed a book collection. "These books are complementary to mine" had been one of Eddie's earliest chat-up lines. When they moved into a semi-detached house in King's Road, Old Trafford in 1956, the Working Class Movement Library was born. Their collection expanded through the house. A visitor noted that "the only room where there is nothing to read is the loo".

Every summer they toured secondhand booksellers, beginning in a 1937 Morris van and graduating to a caravan. Books and pamphlets were supplemented by cartoons, trade union emblems and commemorative pottery. No 111, King's Road – a thoroughly suburban location – became a venue for researchers into the varieties of the British left. Ruth and Eddie became a well-known partnership – genial and enthusiastic hosts, publishers, presenters at conferences, typically in tandem, and organisers of walks around Manchester's radical sites. The library's move to Jubilee House on the Crescent in Salford came in 1987, with the backing of Salford City Council.

The vitality of the library contrasted with the fortunes of the political organisation to which Ruth Frow had given her life. In 1987 she and Eddie were expelled from the disintegrating Communist Party. Eddie died in 1997, a few weeks after Labour returned to government. Ruth commented at his funeral that at least he hadn't had time to become disillusioned.

Yet the library remains as an internationally acclaimed achievement, a demonstration of the power of the democratic intellect and of the commitment of its founders to collective virtues in an individualistic culture.

David Howell