Edmund Peter Samarakkody (19 April 1912 – 4 January 1992) was a Ceylonese lawyer, trade unionist, politician and Member of Parliament. Early life and family Samarakkody was born on 19 April 1912, the fifth of seven children to Charles Peter Augustus de Fonseka Tillekeratne Samarakkody, Muhandiram of the Governor Gate and planter; and Anne Catharine née Tillekeratne, daughter of Nicholas Tillekeratne, Mudaliyar of Matara. He was educated at S. Thomas' College, Mount Lavinia. After school he joined the Ceylon Law College, qualifying as a proctor. Stephen Samarakkody and Siripala Samarakkody were his brothers, while Panini Ilangakoon and Robert Edward Jayatilaka were his brother-in-laws. Samarakkody married his first cousin Dagmar Samarakkody. They had a daughter (Chulanganee) and a son (Nahil). Career Samarakkody became a proctor of the Supreme Court in 1936 and started practicing law in Badulla. He then worked at the Mount Lavinia bar for over four decades. Samarakkody became involved in anti-imperialist nationalistic politics in the early 1930s when he joined the Colombo South Youth League (CSYL), an affiliate of the All Ceylon Youth Congress. In 1933 Indian workers at the Wellawatte Spinning and Weaving Mills went on strike and were supported by the CSYL. The strike was undermined by A. Ekanayake Gunasinha and his Ceylon Labour Union which used Sinhalese blacklegs to break the strike. In the 1920s Gunasinha had been the first to organise labour in Ceylon. Colvin R. de Silva, Leslie Goonewardene, Philip Gunawardena, Samarakkody and S. A. Wickramasinghe established the Wellawatte Mill Workers Union with de Silva as its president. Samarakkody was one of the founding members of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) in December 1935 and was elected to its executive committee. He took a leading role in militant leftist action, including the strikes at Vavasseur Coconut Mill and the Colombo Commercial Company Fertiliser Works in 1937, the latter for which he and Goonewardene were arrested. The LSSP was beset with internal divisions - militants within the party (Colvin R. de Silva, William de Silva, Goonewardene, Vernon Gunasekera, Philip Gunawardena, Robert Gunawardena, N. M. Perera, Samarakkody etc.) formed the "T" group (Trotskyist) which sided with Leon Trotsky in the International Communist whilst Stalinists (P. Kandiah, M. G. Mendis, A. Vaidyalingam, Wickramasinghe etc.) formed another group. The Stalinists were expelled from the LSSP in 1940 and went on to form the United Socialist Party (later reconstituted as the Communist Party of Ceylon) in 1941.