After passing the scholarship he progressed to Reading University where he read chemistry

After passing the scholarship he progressed to Reading University, where he read chemistry. It was at the height of the Depression, and when the Welsh hunger marchers came through the town, Bill and his fellow students went down and listened. After graduating he worked in a paper mill, where he joined the National Union of Printers, Bookbinders and Paperworkers and, at the age of 22, became a member of the Communist Party.Jai was born six decades later just down the road in Southampton. After an upbringing in the "sterile environment" of a new housing estate with parents who "aspired to middle-class consumer comfort", he also went to university in Reading, to read Fine Art. But it was politics rather than his chosen subject which fired him too.

"There was no real politics on the campus: just the old groups. The Tories were the biggest, opposed by the Socialist Workers' Party." But then came animal rights protests and campaigns against student loans and the poll tax. "It taught me the importance of individual action, of people taking control of their lives."The defining moment for Jai came with the plan to cut a motorway through Twyford Down. "I had passed it every weekend as a child on the way to my grandparents and I had always thought that this totally circular hill was something romantic, other-worldly, magical." He got on the next train there and finished his degree from the protest camp, switching from sculpture to photography to document the fight against the road .Bill Alexander's righteousness was roused by something which was more immediately menacing - fascism.

"The essence of fascism is that there are superior nations, races and religions and that the superior can use power to maintain that position." Bill heard of the persecution of Jews, communists and trade unionists - and feared for the same thing in Britain if Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts triumphed. "We all turned out to stop him at the Battle of Cable Street. But when in Spain the people stood up to stem the tide, I decided the natural thing for me was to go and help stop it there before it reached my home and my family."He fought for 18 months, becoming a Commander in the British Battalion of the International Brigade, before he was wounded and invalided out. "Franco was backed by an experienced Italian army fresh from its war in Abyssinia and by the full might of Germany, which wanted to practise its Blitzkrieg and dive-bombing techniques. The Republicans had no supply of arms and the British government pursued a policy of 'non-intervention', which meant we would not supply the arms.

Bravery and conviction will take you a long way, but in the end the bomb and the bullet will win out. So all the time we were doing what we could to influence public opinion back here to change the Government's non-intervention policy. We sent postcards home and wrote to local papers hammering away and saying: 'For God's sake, change the policy'."There was also a big movement to collect money and medical aid The aim was to carry public opinion. That was the big lesson we learned in Spain, and have followed ever since. You've got to combine what you do with winning more people to your point of view.