Joanna Rollo
Joanna Rollo was an inspirational organiser for the International Socialists (IS) and the Socialist Workers Party.
She was also a class traitor. Born into the impoverished branch of a family of aristocrats, she threw it all up for socialism and the revolution.
She was fearless—she carried forged passports and illegal pamphlets in a false-bottomed suitcase into a Stalinist Czechoslovakia in the early 1970s. She was committed—she worked for the Committee for Freedom in Mozambique and was then appointed the first International Secretary of IS.
During Portugal’s revolutionary upheaval, she organised the translation of Tony Cliff’s pamphlet, Portugal at the Crossroads, into six languages. She typed, designed and distributed them, inveigling Ian Morris, an IS member at Heathrow Airport, to get the Portuguese edition onto a plane bound for Lisbon.
In London, she organised a magnificent IS presence on a solidarity demonstration, carrying banners in the language and colours of the Portuguese revolution.
During the Battle of Lewisham in 1977, Joanna could be heard shouting “To the Station!” and leading a vast contingent to Ladywell Police Station, where the local police promptly locked themselves inside.
She took charge once more after the death of Blair Peach in 1979. She refused to let Commander Cass of the Met police into the flat where his friends had gathered, all the while dictating press statements and reports to the media.
She became editor of Socialist Worker, jointly with John Rose, in 1978, rising once again to the challenge by producing some notable front pages.
Throughout those years she was always writing, with forensic detail and clarity of thought. She wrote extensively, including a section on the aggressive tactics of the Special Patrol Group, for Policing the Police, a book she co-authored with Peter Hain, Martin Kettle and Duncan Campbell.
She also edited a new IS International Bulletin in 1976. In 1977 there were two long articles for IS Journal about the history of immigration in Britain and Europe—the following year she wrote Iran: the beginning of a revolution, an SWP pamphlet.
For Socialist Worker, she was committed to the fight for the truth about the New Cross Fire and the Bradford 12.
By the mid-1980s she moved to Amnesty International as an editor, where she is remembered for the spectacular year-long China campaign she ran after Tiananmen Square.
Always ready to embrace new technology, she taught herself web design and programming, landing her first job on a national newspaper as the web editor for the Financial Times.
When she retired, by which time she was the Financial Times’s deputy managing editor. Free of the inevitable political restraints, she returned to her radical roots, as those who followed her on Facebook will remember.
All racists, Nigel Farage, the witch hunt of the left in Labour, she damned them all. Her support for Gaza was continuous to the end.
She died in Greece in July after years of being treated for cancer. She is remembered by Andy, her daughter Georgia and grandson Louie.
