His prominent involvement helped secure its recovery after the deep crisis and crushing defeat which followed the fall of the British Labour government in 1931.

In particular, he played a key role from the mid-1930s in reshaping Labour's foreign policy, especially as regards re-armament and through the all-party Anti-Nazi Council in which he worked with Winston Churchill.

After Ramsay MacDonald formed a coalition with the Conservatives to force his policies through, Citrine led the campaign to have him expelled from the party.

Citrine referred to his father as a 'big, burly and courageous man', who 'brought all his troubles home'; in the course of his labouring he suffered a crushed hand, lost two fingers, had his knee smashed, and was shipwrecked three times.

Although his son rated him highly as a father, with 'a clear intelligence and masterful personality', and 'neither cruel nor inconsiderate', he would sometimes overindulge in beer (despite 'long periods of sobriety' and general avoidance of spirits), which contributed to the family's poor financial situation.

This, and the family tendency to tuberculosis (which killed his mother and many other relatives) which led to his avoidance of smoking, inspired Citrine to endeavour to lead a healthy lifestyle.

In Fatherhood and the British Working Class, 1865-1914 (2015), Strange notes that, with many 'exceptional' individuals of working-class origin and 'banal beginnings', close relatives and friends are 'usually markedly more pedestrian'; in contrast with Citrine's distinguished career, his brothers were a pupil-teacher, a locksmith's apprentice, and a sheet-metal worker, and a sister was a clerk at a laundry.

As a member of the Independent Labour Party from 1906, he became widely read in the standard socialist tracts, including Marx's works and from the 1910s Citrine was quite left-wing with mildly-syndicalist views.

He was elected as the union's first full-time District Secretary in 1914 (the year he married his wife and life-time companion, Doris), a post he served in throughout World War 1 and until 1920, gaining much experience negotiating with major employers all round Birkenhead docks as well as with electrical contractors in the area.

In 1924, he was appointed Assistant General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress on account of his reputation for financial and administrative abilities.

Together with Bevin who became Minister of Labour and National Service, they mobilised and directed the organised working classes' enthusiastic productive effort for victory.

[9] However, Citrine had originally been a keen supporter of the Russian Revolution and trade with the Soviet Union – an admirer of what he described as Lenin's 'Electric Republic'.

He and Bevin were determined to prevent such an occurrence in Britain which perhaps gave them a heightened sense of communist conspiracy in its dealings with internal opposition within the unions and the Labour Party.

[10] Citrine wrote[9] that his robust exposure of the Communist International and the Communist Party of Great Britain attempts to subvert British trade union leaders' authority and to capture key posts in the trade union movement drew a "campaign of calumny" against him "in which everything I did was distorted into some sinister conspiracy against the workers".

Only The Daily Worker (later The Morning Star), organ of the Communist Party and the Comintern, were likely to criticize them for that since they were supporting the Nazi-Soviet Pact.

Citrine and his colleagues sued the Daily Worker for libel in April 1940 in a case that lasted six days, with Queen's Counsel on both sides.

In October 1941 a TUC delegation under his leadership travelled on the Australian warship HMAS Norman from Iceland to the Soviet Union (Archangel) via the Arctic route.

The Soviet Foreign Secretary, Molotov, asked to meet them to press for more British assistance in the war and Citrine briefed Churchill and Eden on his return.

In the 1960s, he published his autobiography in two volumes, Men and Work (1964) and Two Careers (1967), which demonstrate considerable writing skills, as well as being one of the best accounts of his times, based on the meticulous shorthand notes he kept as the events unfolded.