"After walking past him a few times, I summoned enough courage to speak to him. That was Harry Wilkes. He as a commercial traveller around various districts in north Queensland and took with him a suitcase of communist literature. I went to his room and became enraptured with his literature."
Tripp was recruited to the CPA by Herbert Moxon, at that time the Brisbane organiser of the CPA, and later to become CPA general secretary. Tripp and Moxon worked closely together for the next three years.
Tripp organised the first CPA group in Townsville and represented the branch at the 1927 CPA conference.
During a state-wide rail strike in 1926, Tripp played a key organising role, which included producing a daily strike newspaper, which was distributed throughout the state. It was one of the first such daily strike newspapers in Australia.
One of the debates at the 1927 CPA conference was over what became known as the Queensland Resolution — whether the CPA should stand candidates against the Labor Party.
The conference decided the CPA should run its own candidates in the next Queensland elections.
As one of the three CPA candidates in the elections, Tripp received a large vote, which led the electoral officer to ask whether he wanted a recount. Tripp told the electoral officer that the result was already a victory for the CPA and a recount was not necessary. Peter Beilhartz, in notes from a 1976 interview with Tripp, says Tripp won about 1500 votes to the ALP candidate's 4000.
This was at a time when CPA support was strong among the working-class of north Queensland's ports, railways and meatworks.
Two months later, Tripp became the first Australian selected to attend the Lenin School.
On returning to Australia, Tripp immediately came into conflict with Harry Wicks, the Comintern representative from the CPUSA, who used the party name Herbert Moore.
Wicks said he thought Tripp had mixed in bad company in Moscow and he would have to check with the Soviet authorities about him.
Tripp began a national speaking tour describing what he had seen in the Soviet Union and became a leading propagandist and educator for the CPA, taking classes for CPA and Young Communist League members in the major cities, addressing meetings and speaking in support of CPA candidates.
Meanwhile, Wicks was moving to exclude Tripp from the CPA leadership, and even tried to have him suspended from membership, but the charge was withdrawn when Tripp confronted Wicks at a political bureau meeting.
Wicks had already excluded former CPA general secretary Jack Kavanagh and was about to expel Bert Moxon, the then general secretary.
Tripp survived the 1931 CPA congress, at which he became the first central leader to criticise Comintern policy in Germany, although he had not at that time read Trotsky's writings on Germany, which didn't begin to reach Australia until a few weeks later.
In 1932 Tripp was assigned to the Friends of the Soviet Union and became its national secretary. Under his leadership the FOSU grew to about 7500 members and had a widely circulated magazine, Soviets Today. He continued travelling the country, addressing meetings on the Soviet Union and socialism.
Tripp was removed from his position in the FOSU in 1933 and expelled from the CPA in 1934. Before his expulsion he had been in contact with the Trotskyist organisation, formed two years earlier.
After joining the Trotskyists in the Workers Party, Tripp became one of its leaders, mainly involved in education and propaganda, and around 1937-38, publisher of the Workers Party newspaper, The Militant.
He became a regular Trotskyist speaker at Sydney's Domain, and spent much time trying to win over members of the CPA.
A few years later he left the Workers Party, and subsequently began to publish another Trotskyist magazine, Proletarian Review, based among Trotskyists at Sydney University.
During World War II he moved to Melbourne, became inactive in the Trotskyist movement, but was a militant shop steward in the Federated Ironworkers Association.
From 1945 Tripp was associated with the Victorian Labor College and was its secretary from about 1958 to 1978. The Labor College was founded in 1917 by Guido Baracchi, a founder of the CPA and later an editor of the Comintern's English-language Inprecor. For a time, Baracchi was sympathetic to the Trotskyist movement.
In 1978, at the age of 78, Ted Tripp joined the Socialist Workers Party.