Andy Durr, 1917–2014: a Memoir

Abstract

Andy Durr, who died at his home in Brighton in December 2014, will be remembered by those involved in the History Workshop movement and its conferences from the late 1970s until their end in the 1990s. Andy was in many ways typical of what was best about those meetings. A self-educated, deeply political man of the old trade-union left, he was also a bibliophile, a collector of commemorative china, Staffordshire figurines, banners and symbols, a working-class historian and a Freemason. In the last twenty years he had put a huge amount of his energy into founding and nurturing the Brighton Fishing Museum on the seafront of his adopted and much loved ‘home town’. Andy Durr was born in south London. He left school at fifteen and took up an apprenticeship in engineering. It was this which, after a brief period at sea, brought him to Sussex in the 1960s. Andy came to work on the Dungeness Power Station, then nearing completion, and lived in Hastings, however when that work came to an end he moved to Brighton. Brighton in the early late 1960s and 1970s suited Andy and Andy suited Brighton. The town had a lively mixture of seedy raffishness and bohemian leftism, which made it a great place to be young, but it also had a long-established and very solid labour and co-operative movement. This was based firstly on the railways (there was a locomotive works and railway workshop in Brighton until 1962 and a carriage works at nearby Lancing until 1965) and secondly on the large number of small-scale manufacturing units which had grown up around the town after the Second World War. Finally there were still the residual ‘trades’ of late Victorian and Edwardian Brighton. From 1964–70 it had a Labour MP, the late Dennis Hobden.