Margaret Hunter

Hunter was born in Bridgeton, Glasgow to mother Margaret Rippey and father James Anderson, who was a milk salesman. She grew up in Polmadie as the youngest of five children, attending Queen's Park Secondary School. Her first job was working as a typist for the British Oxygen Company, before later working at Barr and Stroud, where she met fellow communist James Hunter, whom she married in 1946.[2]

Hunter joined the CPGB's youth wing, the Young Communist League, in 1937 at the age of 14, before joining the CPGB in 1940. Not long after, while she was the T&G trade union's factory convener at Barr and Stroud, Hunter became secretary of the CPGB's Knightswood branch. She went on to become a full-time party secretary in Glasgow and ran in local elections in Dalmarnock in 1947 and 1949.[1]

In 1958,[1] Hunter become the party's Scottish organiser, part of the Scottish secretariat. She played a key role in organising the CPGB's 1958 celebrations to mark the bicentenary of Robert Burns' birth.[2] When Helen Crawfurd Anderson died in 1954, Hunter made an oration at her funeral, at which she said the international socialist movement had lost "one of its finest representatives".[3]

She ran for election to the UK Parliament in the Glasgow Gorbals constituency in 1964[1] (1,339 votes; 5.6%) and 1966 (819 votes; 4.1%).

In 1963, she relocated from Glasgow to London[1] to work as the party's national women's officer, which saw her continue to sit on the CPGB's Executive Committee, while also co-ordinating the work of the national Women's Advisory Committee (WAC).[2]

Hunter became unwell while taking part in a political delegation to East Germany in the early 1970s, which led her to retire from political activism. She continued to live in London until her death in 1986.[2]