His father, Max Blank, was a Lithuanian Jewish emigré from Tavrig, who was involved in the mineral business, and his mother, Adelle, was originally from the Parisian district of Le Marais.

[2] In 1935, the Johannesburg-based Bolshevik-Leninist League joined with a similar group in Cape Town to form the Workers Party of South Africa.

In 1945, Ted Grant, together with Jock Haston and others, argued that there would be a new but limited period of economic expansion of the 1950s and 1960s in the west.

[9] Following the breakup of the RCP, Grant joined Gerry Healy's faction, but was soon expelled for failing to support other expulsions.

Grant worried that his organisation was shifting away from interpreting Trotsky's theories and indulging in "activism"; he had argued that Militant's MPs should pay the poll tax to protect the group.

[16] Following their expulsion Grant and Woods started a new group inside the Labour Party known by the name of its publication Socialist Appeal.