Salisbury was present at many key events in the history of anti-fascism, including the Battle of Cable Street, and was also a member of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).

[1] In his later life, Alf Salisbury led a successful campaign to convince the BBC and other British news outlets to stop using the term "Mongols" to refer to people with Down Syndrome.

[4][6] In 1933 Alf Salisbury became one of a small number of CPGB activists working for Harry Pollitt that were tasked with being a clandestine courier supporting anti-nazi resistance belonging to the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).

[1][3][4][5] During protests with the NUWM, Salisbury chained himself to the Settles Street Labour Exchange, ordered tea at the Ritz hotel and refused to pay, and laid down in the road in Oxford Circus to block traffic.

Instead of joining the military, in 1940 he married Lilly Nicklansky,[1][4] travelled to Carlisle and became a CPGB communist party organiser in Maryport,[1][4] and also a shop steward in a munitions factory,[3][4] before moving to Leicester.

[5] After World War II Alf Salisbury became a well-known figure within the National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers, but was repeatedly sacked from employment.

During the 1949 Savoy workers strike, Alf made the news after throwing himself in front of a truck that sought to break the picket,[3] narrowly avoiding serious injury.

[3][8] During the mid-1960s he began working for the London Co-op,[1][4] and became well known at meetings of the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers (USDAW) where he would sell the Morning Star.

Nearing the final years of his life, Alf Salisbury began picketing the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) and the Independent Television News (ITN), arguing that their use of the term "Mongols" to describe people with Down Syndrome was racist.

[8] His homemade signs and his practice of stopping people on the streets to talk about the issue, gained the attention of the BBC and ITN who then reviewed the use of the term in the context of children with Downs Syndrome.

[8] Despite this success, Salisbury did not stop his campaign and began to hold similar pickets of the offices of major British newspapers including the Daily Mail, until they also dropped the use of the term.