A Communist on the Wall

Frank Graham (1913–2006), from Sunderland, joined the Communist Party in the 1930s and fought during the Spanish Civil War before becoming a schoolteacher in Newcastle and then the publisher (and often author) of over 300 local history titles. This chapter examines Frank Graham’s publishing endeavours and his engagement with the Roman North East from 1970 onwards, whether as an author or as the publisher of writers including Scott Dobson, T. H. Rowland, Robin Birley, Brian Dobson, David Breeze, Charles Daniels and H. Russell Robinson. Also involved in Graham’s Roman publications was Ronald Embleton, an illustrator with enthusiasm for and knowledge of imperial Rome. It places Graham’s Roman publications in the context of a North East in post-industrial transition; the Roman Wall was a focus of North-East identity and its cosmopolitan inhabitants the ancestors of an energetic and adaptive people. Graham’s last booklet cycle culminated in Hadrian’s Wall in the Days of the Romans , which through Graham’s text and Embleton’s illustrations emphasised the diversity of society around the wall, with military and civilians, commerce, shipbuilding and industry. Graham’s Roman Wall was a wall along which people lived and worked rather than an imposition on the landscape belonging to a foreign power. Graham’s publications anticipated the marketing of the wall in the later context of post-industrial regeneration but were informed by his socialism and belief in the education of the working man.