Communism in Britain, 1920–39: From the cradle to the grave 9780719071409, 9781526130440

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Communism in Britain, 1920–39

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Communism in Britain 1920–39 From the cradle to the grave Thomas Linehan

Manchester University Press Manchester

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Copyright © Thomas Linehan 2007 The right of Thomas Linehan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA, UK

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 978 0 7190 7140 9 hardback First published 2007 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Helen Skelton, Brighton, UK

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Contents

Preface and acknowledgements List of abbreviations Introduction

page ix xi 1

P a rt I —The co mmunist life cycle: the early ye a rs 1 In the home: communist mothercraft and childrearing 2 Into the Party structure: the communist children’s movement 3 A bright and purposeful life: youth and the Young Communist League

11 27 45

P a r t I I —Th e communist life cycle: ad u l t ho od 4 A single communist personality? Communist couples and red families 5 Being in a familiar place: the life of the adult activist

67 92

P a r t I I I — T h e c o m m u n i s t l i f e c y c l e : s h a p in g c om m u n i s t s 6 Tending the communist body: the quest for physical fitness 7 Communist lifestyle: fostering correct habits, good behaviour and right ways of living 8 Communists at play 9 Culture from below: a culture for proletarians

115 128 146 160

P a rt I V—The communist life cycle: end of the cycle 10 In memoriam

185

Afterword

201

Select bibliography Index

202 209

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For Daniel Linehan John March Philip Newton and Raphael Samuel never afraid to swim against the tide

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Preface and acknowledgements

As a former Ruskin College student and tutee of Raphael Samuel this is the book I have long wanted to write. Another inspiration was my father, Daniel Linehan. He always interested himself in my work and was with me at the very start of this project but passed away soon after. Just before he left me, I made a promise to him that I would bring the book to completion. I should like to express my gratitude to the following individuals and members of staff at various institutions, who have helped in some way in the preparation and completion of this book.To begin with, may I express my sincere thanks to the commissioning and editorial staff at Manchester University Press who have supported and assisted this project. It is also a pleasure to acknowledge the support of the Leverhulme Trust which awarded me a two-year Research Fellowship to enable me to conduct the research on this book. Roger Griffin, Richard Griffiths and Stanley Payne supported my application for the Leverhulme Fellowship and I would like to thank them for this support. I would also like to thank the BBS Politics and History research group at Brunel University, particularly Ian Thatcher, for providing me with support and funding during the project’s final stages. I should like to thank, too, the various archivists and librarians who assisted me during my visits to their institutions. My thanks go to those at the Bodleian Library, British Library, British Library of Political and Economic Science, Brunel University Library, Marx Memorial Library, National Museum of Labour History, Public Record Office, Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History in Moscow, Tate Gallery Archive and the South Wales Miners’ Library. I should also like to express my thanks to the scholars, Kevin Morgan, Alan Campbell, Gidon Cohen, Andrew Flinn, Linda Lawton and John McIlroy, who painstakingly compiled the Communist Party Biographical Project Prosopographical Database, which helped provide valuable pieces of biographical detail on a number of individuals who feature in this study. In fact, there is a rich scholarship on British communism that takes in this database and extends beyond it in many fine publications. I have yet to make the acquaintance of many of the scholars working on

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British communism, though I am grateful to them and their writing for helping my understanding of important areas of the CPGB. I have had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of some who work in this field. Andrew Thorpe provided me with some very helpful background information on the regulations and holdings of the Russian State Archive in Moscow. Others working in this field, and outside it, expressed their encouragement for this project, including Matthew Worley, Keith Laybourn, Nigel Copsey, David Renton, Philip Coupland, Roger Griffin, Michael Dostal, Steven Woodbridge and Julie Gottlieb. If I have forgotten to mention any names, I do apologise to those individuals concerned. Finally, I would like to thank my friends and family both here and in Ireland, particularly my mother, for their encouragement. I would like to express my gratitude to my wife, Janet, above all. As always, she provided support and assistance throughout this project and was responsible for much of the final arrangement of the book manuscript. Her support and patience have been invaluable and greatly appreciated. Finally, I would like to thank my two lovely children, Ciara and Michael, for their patience during this project when I was not always around.

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Abbreviations

AIA BSP BWSF CI CLC CPGB CPSU CYI DLC DPC EC ECCI ECCYI EPA ILP ITS ICWPA IWW KPD NCLC NUWM RSI SDF SLP SWSI TUC UMS WEA WMA

Artists’ International Association British Socialist Party British Workers’ Sports Federation Communist International (Comintern) Central Labour College Communist Party of Great Britain Communist Party of the Soviet Union Communist Youth International District League Committee District Party Committee Executive Committee Executive Committee of the Communist International Executive Committee of the Communist Youth International Emergency Powers Act Independent Labour Party Industrial Transference Scheme International Class War Prisoners’ Aid Industrial Workers of the World Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands National Council of Labour Colleges National Unemployed Workers’ Movement Red Sport International Social Democratic Federation Socialist Labour Party Socialist Workers’ Sport International Trades Union Congress United Mineworkers of Scotland Workers’ Education Association Workers’ Music Association

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Workers’ Theatre Movement Young Communist League

Abbreviations used in the notes

BUL NMLH RGASPI SWML

Brunel University Library National Museum of Labour History, Manchester Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, Moscow South Wales Miners’ Library, Hendrefoelan House, Swansea

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Introduction

It is necessary, in the first instance, to explain this book’s focus. Firstly, this book is a study of the communist life and the communist experience of membership. The study will also place itself on the interface between the membership and the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) by considering the efforts of the latter to give shape to that experience. The CPGB was formed in July 1920, a product of a favourable revolutionary conjuncture, Comintern (CI) prompting, and an amalgamation of a number of small home-grown guild socialist, socialist and shop stewards’ groups, although the process of making communists did not begin in earnest until after 1923. From this date, following endorsements from the Party’s Fourth (St Pancras, 18–19 March 1922) and Fifth (Battersea, 7–8 October 1922) Congresses, a new conception of communist life and membership had been hammered out in accordance with CI instructions to the CPGB to overhaul its methods of work in line with Leninist principles. Out of this process of ‘Bolshevisation’ emerged the essential characteristics of the communist experience, with its particular flavour and preoccupations. As they sought to fashion this new experience, the advocates of Bolshevisation felt that they were breaking with a tradition of activism that had prevailed in the older pre-Bolshevik labour movement, particularly in the socialist ‘sects’ like the British Socialist Party (BSP) and the Socialist Labour Party (SLP) out of which the CPGB was made, which imposed little obligation on members save a general token of political support for movement goals. In its focus on the communist life and the communist experience of membership, this book makes a number of contentions. For those who opted to commit fully to the communist way of life it would offer a complete identity and reach into virtually all aspects of life and personal development. In regard to the latter, through participation in the communist life ‘joiners’ gained a positive role in life, self-esteem, intellectual development, skills in self-expression, and opportunities to acquire status and empowerment through activities like office-holding or public speaking. There was ample scope to forge new interpersonal bonds.

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Communism in Britain 1920–39

These relationships often had an emotional pull as recruits felt the warmth of deep comradeship and belonging that came from the collective, shared experience of political struggle. A communist life could also impart a sense of being a part of a wider historical pattern while, in another personal register, it could bestow on recruits that feeling of belonging to the wider community of the world communist diaspora. Communists found that they were fully engaged in a life which aimed to cater for their cultural improvement, physical well-being and recreation, as well as other areas of their personal and interpersonal development. There was always a political purpose behind this effort to provide for these other aspects of the life experience. The cultural, physical and recreational would become key sites of Party efforts to implant the communist way of life in the membership. Through participation in the more informal processes of social and leisure activities, recruits absorbed communist values, experienced communist ‘fraternity’, and were introduced to an alternative way of life and community outside the framework of the existing capitalist society. Similarly, in a cultural register, Party representatives set out to dislodge bourgeois cultural thoughts from the minds of its proletarian activists by offering them a glimpse of an alternative culture which spoke more directly to their life experience. The CPGB hoped that an orientation towards the new proletarian culture would ensure greater clarity of members’ thought and political purpose. As ‘ambassadors’ for the Party and the wider proletariat, members found that even their personal conduct, habits and appearance were not beyond Party reach and censure. Another contention of this aspect of the book is that interwar British communism functioned as a type of ‘political religion’ or ‘political sacralisation’ for many who entered the congregation of the devoted followers of the Party, in that the communist way of life contained moral, evangelical, sacrificial and penitential ingredients of a kind that characterised conventional movements of religious belief. This book claims that a communist life provided a positive life experience for those who embraced the Bolshevik ‘faith’, although it also recognises that it could bring pain and disillusionment to others. There are a few final points to make with regard to this aspect of the book. Although the book claims that for those who opted to commit fully to the communist way of life it could amount to a ‘total’ experience, it recognises that this experience was not static. Party and Young Communist League (YCL) affiliation during the interwar years unfolded within a shifting political and ideological time-frame which ensured that the experience of membership in 1921 was quite different to that in 1924, let alone 1929, 1933 and 1938.The most obvious time-frames were those imposed on members’ lives by the Comintern line periods.1 The first was 1920–22. This took in the so-called ‘First Period’ of perceived capitalist weakness and revolutionary opportunity, a strategic ‘moment’ which apparently soon passed to be superseded by the ‘Second Period’ of capitalist consolidation. This latter judgement encouraged the communist movement for a few years after 1922–23 to seek alliances of convenience with

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Introduction

‘reformist’ labour organisations in order to advance mutual goals and stave off capitalist attacks. The ‘objective situation’ was thought to have altered again by 1928. The previous ‘unity’ approach was ditched as the Comintern’s Sixth Congress (17 July–1 September 1928) formally announced the arrival of a new international conjuncture of impending capitalist crisis. This assessment that a capitalist ‘Third Period’ was underway launched the communist movement on the ultimately calamitous sectarian policy of ‘Class against Class’, whereby it confidently asserted its exclusive right to represent and lead the masses in the struggles to come against a capitalist state that was expected to become ever-more coercive as the crisis deepened. The masses did not flock to the communist banner, however. Instead, there was only self-imposed communist isolation from the ‘reformist’ labour movement, now maligned bizarrely as ‘social-fascist’, a process which saw the British Party, for example, carry a membership base of less than 3,000 for most of the duration of the ‘new line’. ‘Class against Class’ ran until 1934–35 at which point the Comintern’s Seventh Congress (25 July–21 August 1935) officially ushered in the more enlightened and successful ‘Popular Front against fascism and war’ policy. Thereafter, in the years up to 1939, ‘unity’ once again became the watchword.2 These Comintern line periods act as important signposts for an understanding of the various policy and ideological frameworks within which the various organs of the British Party and their memberships operated between the wars, whether children, youth or adults, and the following chapters have attempted to take account of them whenever possible or wherever pertinent. Nor were CPGB activists impervious to countervailing pressures and commitments such as could be found, for example, in the locality where they plied their communist propaganda or even in the family networks of which they were a part, pressures and commitments which could have the effect of ‘endangering’ Party loyalties.3 Finally, the communist experience could be defined by place or region as much as by other factors. In short, the experience of membership in a ‘Little Moscow’, those defiant townships and villages to be found mostly in north-east England, South Wales and Scotland where communists had managed to enter the mainstream of community life, culture and politics between the wars, could be vastly dissimilar to that encountered in a less numerous concentration of Leninism.4 As well as remaining mindful of the context of period, this book attempts to take account of these additional contexts of countervailing tendencies and regional differences. This book has a second feature. The British Communist Party had a strong and quite marked generational focus, in that it sought to address the experience of Party life and membership at the principal phases of the life cycle. The Party developed rites of passage to guide its ‘charges’ through the different stages of the life cycle.Thus its reach extended to take in children, youth, and the adult experience, including marriage and aspects of the marital and family relationship. The Party did not disengage even at the beginning and termination of the life cycle.

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Its spokespersons advised communist mothers on birth and mothercraft, ‘red’ parents on childrearing, and addressed the experience of death and mourning within the communist domain. It is a further contention of this book that it was this generational dimension, in conjunction with those aspects mentioned above, which helped give the communist life its quite particular flavour and helped confer an almost total character on the communist experience. To some extent, some of the elements of the communist life that feature in this book were pre-figured in certain of the activities of earlier organisations on the political Left. In a similar manner to communist parents, Chartist parents could be found presiding over ‘Chartist births’ and shaping their offspring in accordance with Chartist values.5 As with the CPGB, there was a vibrant recreational side to the Chartist experience, too, as there was with the early Independent Labour Party (ILP).6 Indeed some ILP branches seemed quite fond of ‘socials’, and alcohol.7 For their part, like many in the CPGB leadership, ILP leaders preferred responsible, temperate members and admonished wayward personal conduct, though in a more moderate key to their later Bolshevik ‘moral’ counterparts.8 The idealistic young Turks within the SLP leadership favoured ‘clean living’ also, contrasting their own brand of puritanical Marxism with that ‘inferior’ variety supposedly practised by the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), the body from which they had split in 1903. ‘In the SDF’, the SDF and later SLP activist Tom Bell tells us, ‘we had had specimens of drunkenness, from the leaders down to the local branches, that made the name of socialism stink’.9 The earlier Owenite effort to foster good habits and temperance in the utopian cooperative communities is well known, as is the attempt to impart knowledge and enlightenment through educational philanthropy.10 Fabian socialists, like the communists, also spread the message of enlightenment and intellectual improvement, though of a marked elitist temper.11 There were other points of overlap between the communist life and these earlier traditions. On the recreational front, we know that from the 1890s Clarion cyclists spread the ‘fellowship of socialism’ message far afield.12 Tom Bell, who made the transition from the SLP to the CPGB, thought this ‘combination of propaganda with pleasure’ had much to commend it and, by the 1930s, clusters of communist ‘Red Wheelers’ could be found gaily cycling along Britain’s roads and byways in the spirit of the Clarion tradition.13 Despite these evident lines of continuity and overlap, we should guard against looking at the communist life too closely through the lens of inherited or remembered traditions. Although it is important not to overlook the parallels and continuities with past behaviour and forms, we should not forget that the CPGB and the Left organisations that preceded it belonged to different historical conjunctures. The communist historical ‘moment’ and political project was quite specific, and displayed its own quite particular profile. There was much, therefore, about the communist life and the communist experience that was bound to strike a different note, not least, as we shall see in the book, the attempt

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Introduction

by the Party and its various organisations and representatives to promote a Bolshevik mothercraft, fashion ‘little Bolsheviks’, shape a new ‘proletcult’ aesthetic, and give form to new communist death rituals. Communists also recorded comparative success in developing model ‘mass’ organisations of a new type. Some of these organisations were successful in melding social and cultural activities with definite political objectives, whether this involved already existing bodies that were won over to communist goals like the British Workers’ Sports Federation (BWSF) or those that were formed by communist activists, such as the United Mineworkers of Scotland (UMS).14 More generally, the Communist Party also aimed at an integrated experience for those who entered the communist world. The Party endeavoured to go about its business here in a manner that was comprehensive and systematic, as well as authoritarian in a manner that was quite unlike anything that had gone before in regard to the earlier organisations of the Left. At this point it should be mentioned that I have tried to make a distinction during the writing of this book between the Party, with its inherently authoritarian structures and practices, and individual communists. The reader will see that whereas I have been justifiably critical of the not infrequent excesses of the former, I have shown more sympathy towards the latter. Many individual communists between 1920 and 1939 submitted to Party authority because they believed that the CPGB as part of the world communist diaspora was the only viable political organisation of the period with the resources and potential to mount an effective revolutionary challenge to the capitalist order of things. If the Communist Party stood for the revolution, particularly for 1920s communists, to many who enrolled in the mid-to-late 1930s it was the embodiment of the fight against fascism.To remain outside the confines of the Party, if was felt, was to risk excluding oneself from these fundamental struggles.15 In making the above points there is also the author’s respect for the activist, the one who made the moral decision to engage in a period of acute political and moral crisis because, as Eli Weisel recognised,‘silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented’. Mention also needs to be made of the CPGB members and member views used in presenting certain themes in this book. The book aims to give a qualitative sense of the experience of membership and activism as it was felt by different individuals in different ways. In so doing, the book has drawn on the experiences, recollections and commentary of long-serving members and those who remained in the communist framework for shorter periods. In a similar vein, the book draws on the experiences, recollections and commentary of committed cadre activists who retained a life-time fidelity to the communist ideal, and also what one might refer to as ‘dissident’ members who departed the communist life embittered and recriminatory. Having said this, a note of qualification is needed. Although the book is interested in all the above categories of member, in practice it has had to follow the available source material in tending towards longer duration members who, for obvious reasons, seemed more

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inclined to record their memories of membership than those who paid the communist world a more fleeting visit. In that sense, if there is an element of ‘typicality’, it is that the range of member views drawn upon during the research and writing for this book is more typical of those members who remained for longer spells in the communist network. The book eschews typicality in another respect because although it gives due consideration to the sometimes moving testimonies of life-time cadre activists, it has also listened to the ‘voices’ of dissident communists. It should be said that some of the latter testimonies, although less numerous than the former, provide insight into the communist experience in all its complexity, richness and anguish in a manner that is vivid and invaluable to this book’s attempt to draw a picture of membership experience that gives insight into the many facets of the communist life. Thus, in summary, the range of member views used in the book aims to illuminate and express in a qualitative manner the various and varied experiences of communist members during the period under consideration. It remains to state the final contention of this book. During the course of my travels through the autobiographical memories of communist activists and Party documents and literature, one is struck by the extent to which the British Communist Party displayed the characteristics of the extended family, albeit the ‘modern’, Western family form. Like this family form, the CPGB performed an important socialisation function for its members by initiating them into the norms and values of the institution. In that sense, the CPGB had a marked hierarchal structure. It performed a discernible parental role, in that it not only socialised members into the norms and values of the group but it served up role models and catered for their longer term personal, cultural, educational and even moral and physical development. The CPGB endeavoured to provide recreational support for its charges also. It was even on hand at the point of death, providing emotional support and consolation for dying Party members, as well as for bereaved family members following the passing. As well as a hierarchal structure, the CPGB displayed a developmental structure. As mentioned above, and like the family institution, it sought to nurture its charges through the various stages of the life cycle and developed organisational forms and rites of passage to ensure this. Again, like the family, the CPGB was an institution composed of a set of mutually dependent roles, which imposed obligations and duties on its members. Communists were also bound to each other and the group by bonds of loyalty, trust and emotion, as were members of a family. This is not to suggest that the CPGB always exhibited the positive characteristics of the family institution. If anything the CPGB, or more specifically the Party, was a patriarchal ‘family’ organisation which imposed firm codes of discipline, admonished perceived deviant behaviour, and curtailed personal freedoms. Finally, like all extended families, the British Communist Party was prone to be dysfunctional. In summary, it needs to be pointed out, that in all the respects cited above, the book will primarily be a social and cultural history of the interwar CPGB and

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Introduction

its membership rather than a study of the British Communist Party’s formation, its political ideology, policies and principal personnel, occupational characteristics, the development of its industrial strategies, the centre-periphery relationship with Moscow, or its attempt to combat home-grown and international fascism, although all these areas feature at some stage in the course of the book. These areas have been comprehensively covered in existing studies of the CPGB.16 As mentioned in the Acknowledgements, I am grateful to this scholarship. It has aided my understanding of important aspects of the CPGB, helped stimulate my thinking, and provides the essential backdrop to this book. Notes 1 On the Comintern, see Tim Rees and Andrew Thorpe, International Communism and the Communist International, 1919–1943 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), and Kevin McDermott and Jeremy Agnew, The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin (London: Macmillan, 1996). 2 See Helen Graham and Paul Preston (eds), The Popular Front in Europe (London: Macmillan, 1987). 3 These important methodological issues are aired in Kevin Morgan, John McIlroy, Alan Campbell, Andrew Flinn and Gidon Cohen, ‘The CPGB Biographical Project: an introduction’. Paper for ‘People of a Special Mould’ Conference, University of Manchester, 6–8 April 2001, p. 9. 4 See Stuart Macintyre, Little Moscows: Communism and Working-Class Militancy in Inter-War Britain (London: Croom Helm, 1980). 5 Eileen Yeo, ‘Culture and constraint in working class movements, 1830–1855’ in Eileen and Stephen Yeo, Popular Culture and Class Conflict 1590–1914: Explorations in the History of Labour and Leisure (Sussex: Harvester, 1981), p. 170. 6 Ibid., p. 168. 7 David Howell, British Workers and the Independent Labour Party 1888–1906 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), pp. 335–6. 8 Ibid. 9 Thomas Bell, Pioneering Days (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1941), p. 42. On the SDF, see Martin Crick, The History of the Social-Democratic Federation (Keele: Ryburn Publishing, 1994). 10 G. D. H. Cole, A Short History of the British Working Class Movement 1789–1947 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1948), pp. 75–81. 11 Ian Britain, Fabianism and Culture: A Study in British Socialism and the Arts, 1884–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 223–52. 12 Denis Pye, Fellowship is Life:The National Clarion Cycling Club, 1895–1995 (Bolton: Clarion, 1995). 13 Bell, Pioneering Days, p. 39. 14 The BWSF is discussed in Chapter 6. The UMS receives mention in Chapter 8. 15 This point has been made by Party activist (1922–53) Harry McShane. See Harry McShane and Joan Smith, Harry McShane: No Mean Fighter (London: Pluto Press, 1978), p. 251. 16 These works appear in the bibliography and at various points in the chapters of the book.

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PART I The communist life cycle: the early years

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1 In the home: communist mothercraft and childrearing

If only women could realize that children are works of art and that by giving them birth the mother has finished with all the creative part of her work and has now only to take care of the result – just in the same way that a picture must be kept warm and dry, suitably framed, hung in the right place, ‘given the right setting’.1

‘I think that the bearing and rearing of healthy children by the workers cannot be stressed too much. Such a strain will be put on them later, that only those with a good physical foundation will be able to stand it.’2 When the British communist midwife Madge Brown penned these words in early 1930 in the class-conscious days of ‘Class against Class’, she had in mind the strain that capitalism would inflict on the proletarian body as the child grew into maturity. Such comment stemmed from a genuine desire to insulate the proletarian, as he or she moved from infancy through the various stages of the life cycle, from capitalism’s urge to live, vampire-like, as Madge Brown saw it, ‘on the very life blood of the workers’.3 Although the Party’s writ did not run to the child’s early years in the home, it was eager to use its influence on communist parents, particularly mothers, to ensure that they raised their offspring in a manner that would encourage good health and cognitive development. It also sought to encourage a firm communist outlook. A 'correct' communist upbringing would not only help ‘red diaper’ babies withstand the future demands of capitalism but would also help prepare them physically and mentally to play a future role in the Party organisation as soon as they came of age. This opening chapter will consider this first stage of the communist life cycle as it unfolded in the context of the communist home. It will look at what influences ‘communist babies’ were exposed to in terms of how the Party and the communist mother attempted to shape the rearing of the infant in such areas as feeding, stimulation, and care routines. Beyond the rearing of the ‘communist baby’, this chapter will also look at how older children were raised in the communist home. The parents’ political socialisation role was particularly important during the formative childhood years, that is before the child became eligible to join the communist children’s

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organisation, when the socialisation effort would henceforth be shared by communist parents and an official organ of the Party. This attention paid to mothercraft and parenting was also a means of imbuing a central and important Party role in women, who usually found themselves tied to the home during these formative years.This chapter will further consider, therefore, the role of the Communist Party woman within this framework of communist mothering and parentcraft. If the mother and the Party woman loomed large in the narrative of mothercraft and parenting then so, too, did the home, another topic that will feature in this chapter. In this narrative of mothercraft, parenting and the home, the Soviet Union was held up as a model to emulate. CPGB writers eulogised over developments in Russia in the realms of social-feeding, mechanised launderettes, crèches, nursery schools and modern housing, improvements which they believed would eventually emancipate women from the drudgery of the home and many of the problems associated with childbearing and childcare. The emotive conflation of infancy and deprivation, with its suggestion of negligence and limited life chances, dominated interwar British communist comment on the life of a proletarian infant under conditions of contemporary capitalism. ‘Badly housed and under-nourished, growing up in conditions of grime and clamour and with the shadow of uncertainty hanging over their home, without opportunity to learn and play and think’: this was the lot of the proletarian child in post-war Britain, complained the CPGB press in early 1923.4 Party literature in the 1920s was replete with reports of savage cuts made in the provision of maternity welfare schemes or grants for milk to pregnant and nursing mothers in the name of ‘economy’, or harrowing accounts of the premature deaths of proletarian babies whether in childbirth or shortly after.5 The situation had not improved in the 1930s, particularly as the trade depression and structural unemployment began to bite. Owing to low wages and other economic pressures in the proletarian home, observed the Daily Worker in 1930, infants were being brought up in ‘cramped surroundings in sunless rooms’ by mothers on a diet lacking in the essentials of milk, butter and fresh fruit, a nurturing deficiency which cause ‘her nursling to be sickly and in need of doctor’s care’.6 High child mortality rates continued to plague working-class communities. With barely concealed disgust, Party activist Rose Smith pointed out that the maternal death rate in Wigan in 1931 was as high as 10.33 per 1,000 births, only marginally less at 9.26 and 8.04 per 1,000 births respectively in nearby Rochdale and Bolton.7 A year later the CPGB press cited figures in a report issued by the Chief Medical Officer to the Ministry of Health that 5,800 mothers died in childbirth that year, with 75 per cent of the mortalities being preventable.8 CPGB commentators of the 1930s were in no doubt that the accumulated privations and strains experienced by proletarian motherhood in conditions of capitalism in retrenchment and crisis was the principal cause of these depressing statistics. As Madge Brown put it: ‘Of most babies who die it would be true to say: “Capitalism caused this baby’s death”.’9 Childbearing in proletarian homes

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In the home

was borne under conditions of under-nourishment, poor hygiene, bad housing, insufficient outdoor exercise, acute anxiety, and scanty and inefficient medical support services. Omission or inadequacy of ante-natal examination and supervision by general practitioners and midwives was a major contributory factor in these mortalities. It was not uncommon for death to claim the poverty-afflicted mother as well as her child, as with the mother who died in childbirth along with both her twins, as reported in the CPGB press in March 1923 under the caption ‘The Penalty of Poverty’.10 This was a tragic scenario that was not unfamiliar to Party members. Party activist Alice Moffat née Brady of Fife, the wife of the communist coalminer Alex Moffat, died in childbirth in 1928 on the birth of their first child, as did the wife of the CPGB’s first General Secretary Arthur MacManus, Hetty MacManus née Wheeldon, along with her baby.11 If the image of an infant overwhelmed by poverty and premature death dominated CPGB representations of proletarian childhood in Party literature, then it jostled for space with an alternative image of the offspring of more privileged classes. As soon as they enter the world, stressed the Workers’Weekly in 1923, the newborn of the bourgeoisie ‘are given the best of everything – good air and nourishment, exercise and sleep, nursing and attention’ and the ‘encouragement of all their capacities’, a series of advantages which continue into adulthood by which time ‘the world is theirs to command’.12 Everywhere the picture was one of stark contrasts and differential treatment. While ‘disease and dirt’ featured in the proletarian environment, ‘evil and unsanitary’ conditions which stunted the child’s physique, observed another article, ‘the rich children play with the beautiful toys in airy nurseries under the care of their attendants’.13 British communists sought to address this discrepancy in provision in various ways. Local activists would agitate against child welfare cutbacks, or for suitable childcare facilities within proletarian communities. Communist mothers organised local women to protest against County Council spending cuts in child welfare provision in Uddington, Lanarkshire, in 1927. ‘“Milk for Babies” has become a revolutionary slogan in Uddington’, proclaimed the CPGB press.14 A protracted effort by Fife communists in the early 1930s impelled Fife County Council to build a new pre-natal clinic to cater for the needs of mothers in the Cowdenbeath area.15 Party organs at the centre pitched in. ‘Organise the men and women in your district to make a demand for suitable and sufficient baby creches’, urged a column in the Daily Worker, and then ‘wake up your local authorities and make them concede to your demands’.16 These local efforts were complemented by the dissemination in Party literature of advice to proletarian mothers on most aspects of childbearing, maternal nurturing and general mothercraft. Although it was slow in arriving, not appearing in the CPGB press as a regular feature until the 1930s, this advice was specific and detailed. The first of these weekly advice columns was that penned by the communist midwife and proletarian mother, Madge Brown, in the Daily Worker in 1930. A former practising District Nurse in the north of England, Brown

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was a qualified and certified midwife who determined to impart her knowledge of mothercraft exclusively to working-class mothers. There was advice during pregnancy. Mothers were urged to get plenty of exercise, fresh air and rest, ensure regular breaks during housework, have a daily bath or ‘wash-down’ to maintain healthy skin, and visit the doctor at the first sign of complications. There were ‘don’ts’ also. Expectant mothers should refrain from wearing garters, corsets and other tightly fitting clothing items, and avoid aspirins, smoking and drinking stout.17 Mothers were then counselled, after delivery, on feeding techniques, clothing, and even how to decode the full range of babies’ cries.18 With feeding, wrote Madge Brown, the newborn should be breast fed daily every four hours for twenty minutes at a time, given only boiled water in between, while nighttime feeding was to be avoided at all costs. The consequences of not following a regular, planned diet were spelled out. ‘Don’t be tempted to feed him up a bit’, warned Brown, because ‘a fat, overfed baby catches everything that’s going’.19 As for weaning, despite the received ‘wisdom’ which claimed that on the appearance of the first tooth at around six months ‘baby’s little tummy can cope with all sorts of starchy foods’, it was advised that this should only take place after nine months of feeding at the breast.20 With clothing, proletarian mothers were encouraged to use cheap butter muslin for nappies, to clad baby in vests made of ‘good pure wool’, and to knit as many of the child’s garments as possible.21 The caring Madge Brown even furnished patterns for a variety of baby clothes for the convenience of hard-pressed proletarian mothers, including frocks, petticoats, jackets, ‘feeders’ and nightgowns, informing her readership that she would ‘be pleased to send them to any comrade who will send a large stamp addressed envelope’.22 The benefit of a suitable nurturing environment for infant and mother was stressed. The infant’s room was meant to be as clean as possible and well ventilated. Mothers shouldn’t be afraid to place baby’s cot ‘in front of an open window’, went the advice, even a few day’s after the birth.23 Echoing the conventional ‘wisdom’ of the age, the sun was thought to be the infant’s best friend, signifying vitality and a healthy appearance. ‘Sun is vitally important to growing bodies, so let your kiddies get as much of it as you can’, urged Madge Brown, as she informed her readers with evident pride that her own baby boy was as ‘brown as a little berry’.24 Readers were also tutored on the accessories of good childcare, including how to build a playing pen, and how to avoid the pitfalls of the modern ‘pram’ which, being of such depth, had come to resemble a ‘deep pit with a wee hole at the very top for ventilation’.25 Madge Brown contributed another series of weekly articles to the Party press along similar lines in late 1932 and early 1933. From early 1936, and for the next few years, childrearing advice to communist mothers was being provided through the columns of the Daily Worker on a regular basis by ‘Nurse Jane Geddes’.26 On the face of it, there seemed little that was particularly Bolshevik about such well-meaning, and usually highly commonsensical advice, other than to indicate ways of bringing up the babies of Party members as healthily as

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possible so as better to withstand in later years the severity of capitalism and, one should say, the rigours of Party activism.These enlightenment articles for mothers served Party ends in additional ways, however. First, they aimed to politicise motherhood and impart political consciousness to proletarian mothers by illustrating the moral that childcare could not be disentangled from the questions of class and radical social change.This was particularly the case in the Madge Brown articles which appeared during the aggressively class-conscious phase of ‘Class against Class’. It was common for Brown to insert a pointed observation in her weekly column on the iniquities of childcare provision in Britain. ‘Have you noticed’, she wrote in January 1930, winding up some advice on babies’ clothes, cots and ‘prams’, ‘that the people who have big gardens for their babies have nurses also to take them out? When are WE going to claim the same privileges for ours? How long are we going to be content to give our babies second best?’27 The so-called ‘professional’ books on mothering then in circulation came in for similar criticism. Such books which, to Madge Brown, seemed to speak solely to the concerns of the middle-class suburban housewife and mother, do ‘bring home to us the distinction between OUR babies and the babies of the capitalists’.28 This rhetoric on class served another purpose. It aimed to facilitate political activism by drawing mothers into communist work or into the Party framework. ‘Surely no working class mother can read these books’ on childcare, continued Brown, with their evident bias and omissions, ‘without making up her mind to be in the fight and not just an onlooker.’29 The enlightenment articles on childcare would usually be signed off by a peroration to join the Party. ‘If only working mothers, who are readers of the Daily’, she added in a piece on babies nappies, ‘would realize how the capitalist system not only cheats their children but kills them, too, they would come into the Party at once. It is only by building a strong Communist Party that capitalism can be smashed. So don’t forget to fill in the membership form and help to smash it now.’30 Even expectant mothers were invited to enter the communist network. Alongside the detailed advice on pre-natal care there was the recommendation to seek ‘cheerful companionship’ in the CPGB branch in the locality: ‘… attend your local, get interested in some form of Party activity. If you’re not a member of the Communist Party already, come and join us.’31 Apparently, the entry into activism would have therapeutic effects that would offset the usual feelings of anxiety and isolation felt by the expectant mother: ‘You won’t be able to do much work, but the realization that you are not just an individual sufferer under capitalism but an actual participant in the fight against it will make a great difference.’32 Communist mothering and childcare rhetoric also sought to politicise motherhood and pull proletarian mothers into activism by linking mothercraft and the issue of childcare provision with the creation of the communist future. It did this, first, by challenging the conventional notion of mothering as a private, individual and family-centred matter and representing it, rather, as an undertaking that could be pursued more effectively in a social and communal

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setting. Second, and in a related sense, CPGB mothering rhetoric held up Soviet initiatives in the realm of mothercraft as emblematic of the most modern, efficient methods of childrearing and an ideal to which Britain’s working-class mothers should aspire. From an early date, women communists in the CPGB were expressing the hope that the communist future, as seemingly indicated by experiments in this direction in the Soviet Union, would transform the woman’s role in society by releasing her from many traditional household tasks, including the most onerous duties relating to the upbringing of the child. This meant the substitution of certain private, home-centred childcare functions for public ones, and the reconfiguring of the idea of mothering whereby it would be perceived as a communal responsibility rather than a private act that should be borne by the beleaguered mother in isolation. To Stella Browne writing in 1922, the inauguration of the ‘communist commonwealth’ would mean that there would be ‘adequate special protection of the child and the child-bearing mother by the community’, while for her Party comrade Cedar Paul the communist spirit would reinforce the teachings of modern biology that children ‘are socially what they already are biologically, i.e. the children of the community …’33 The attraction for the proletarian mother in this shift towards social upbringing was the prospect of a fuller participation in all the realms of social, cultural and political life. Thus, rather than as a woman primed to see her role purely as the guardian of infant, child and home, the idealised woman and mother in these British communist representations of proletarian motherhood was an emancipated individual able to engage in a range of pursuits both inside and outside the home. In a material way, more communally orientated care meant the increased provision of state or communal facilities, such as crèches, nurseries, kindergartens and maternity hospitals, to cater for many of the usual motherly functions. In this area, according to British communist women, it was the Soviet Union that led the way.‘Most of us now know’,Winifred Giles remarked in 1926, ‘how much better things are for the housewife of Russia – how maternity is respected and provided for in terms of rest and cash; how crèches, dining rooms, public laundries and electrication [sic] are making it unnecessary for all her time to be swallowed up in washing, cooking and planning for her family. And how she, like her husband, can enjoy the workers’ clubs, the libraries, wireless, cinemas, chess, music, sports, [and] swimming pools.’34 A visit to the Soviet motherland in the mid-1920s prompted Freda Utley to eulogise in print about the generous maternity benefits granted to Soviet mothers working in industry – two months’ leave on full pay either side of childbirth – the crèches attached to ‘all the factories’, and the ‘kindergarten on the factory premises’.35 Madge Brown, writing later during ‘Class against Class’, was equally impressed. ‘The only way WE can guard our children’, she exclaimed, ‘is to stand solid with our menfolk to overthrow this system and to follow the lead of our comrades in Russia where the children are the first call on the workers’ state, and not, as here, the last.’36

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Motherhood, it seems, was a craft that had to be learned rather than being purely a matter of intuition, and learned through the application of modern methods of childrearing, and it was in the new USSR that a modernised, rationalised mothercraft had made the most palpable advances. If a modernised, rationalised mothercraft held the potential to liberate proletarian mothers then so, too, did an efficiently-run, modernised home boasting up-to-date appliances and rationalised methods of housework. To Party women, the empowerment of mothers was always bound up with the question of effective home management beyond the quite specific functions of maternal nurturing. If supposedly outmoded childcare methods constrained proletarian mothers, then so did the ‘capitalist home’ which was equated with inefficiency and backwardness. The working-class housewife and mother in Britain, declared Rose Smith in 1930, ‘is a slave to slumdom, unscientific housing and the monotonous grind of petty household tasks’.37 She urged Britain’s proletarian housewives to look to their contemporaries in the Soviet Union where the state’s Five Year Plan was advancing ‘with giant strides along the pathway of women’s emancipation from the fetters of capitalist “homes”, which are really prisons’.38 ‘Individual upbringing of children and household drudgery’, she confidently assured her readers, ‘are the relics of the old order of society’.39 Modernity was also signified by the electrified home. In class-ridden Britain, opined the Party press, such a home was the preserve of middle-class suburbia and the ruling elite: Light and heat without smoke from electric lamps and radiators; vacuum cleaners, carpet sweepers, floor polishers, contrivances for cleaning brass and silver, sharpening knives and scissors and mixing cakes, and sewing machines, all driven by a small domestic motor; washing machines that will do the laundry of five or six people in an hour and a half; electric irons, cooking stoves, grillers, toasters and hotplates; electric kettles and immersion heaters; bed-warmers for the children when unwell; electric fans, tea-pots, coffee-pots – all these are known and enjoyed in the houses of the rich. But we have to look to the Workers’ Republic to see them brought to the homes of the workers, as naturally as water is brought.40

In a similar register, the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition was targeted for criticism. ‘Ideal homes – for whom?’, asked ‘Lydia Packman’ after visiting the Exhibition in 1926, where for the most part every household improvement and labour-saving device on show was designed to appeal to ‘that “backbone of the English nation”, the middle class’, and ‘is absolutely and completely beyond the reach of the working class woman’.41 Another Party activist, ‘Janet’, visited the Exhibition a few years later and told a similar story.The Daily Mail housewife, said ‘Janet’, once she has purchased a Hoover vacuum cleaner, Permutit water softener, washing-up machine, clothes washer and wringer, Easi-work cabinet, an electric cooker, an electric refrigerator, had her home electrified to run all the gadgets, and built an additional scullery to house them, will be faced with a bill

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of around £300.42 Clearly,‘Janet’ added, this sum was ‘more than the total income of most workers’ families for two years!’43 What remained for the proletarian housewife was an ‘inefficient’ home with a kitchen where the sink was too high, the gas oven too low, and a larder that was too cramped, in short a situation where ‘everything seems designed to make work as hard as possible for the unfortunate housewife’.44 ‘I could not help thinking as I walked round this Exhibition’, ‘Janet’ concluded, ‘of the labour-saving devices I have seen in communal kitchens in Soviet Russia, which are actually thought out by those who are going to use them, and therefore do really save labour!’45 For another Party woman, Bolshevik housekeeping, as well as demonstrating the wonders of scientific efficiency and electrification, signified health and cleanliness. On visiting a newly opened communal kitchen during a trip to Moscow, where everything was driven ‘by machinery’ and ‘fitted up in the most scientific manner’, she found that all was ‘light, bright and spotlessly clean’.46 With the later advice column of Nurse Jane Geddes we see much less emphasis on class-conscious mothercraft. Whereas the earlier advice of Madge Brown during the ultra-left years of ‘Class against Class’ was pitched primarily at proletarian mothers and interspersed with revolutionary morals, the Geddes articles eschewed overt class rhetoric and addressed motherhood in universal terms rather than as a category that was deeply inscribed in class relations. It was a shift in emphasis which seemed in keeping with the less sectarian stance of the Popular Front. Very occasionally these later articles sought to impart a revolutionary moral, as when Nurse Geddes returned from a five weeks’ tour of Soviet Russia in summer 1938 and proceeded to enlighten her British readers about ‘the country where women and children DO [sic] come first’. Citing the well equipped maternity hospitals,‘brightly decorated’ workplace crèches, and ‘sturdy toddlers’ she saw on her trip, she remarked that ‘if no other achievements could be recorded for the Soviet workers, their children alone would be ample proof of the soundness of their ideas’.47 The liberation message for communist mothers put out by the Party had its limitations though, at least within the context of the British Party and its perceived political needs. The emancipated woman and mother would not be directed by CPGB mothering and housecraft propaganda to overturn the sexual division of labour within the marital home, press for the sharing of household duties between wife and husband, nor even to pursue the right to control her fertility. At the start of the Party’s life, however, matters could have taken a different course. In this period, CPGB opinion tended to chime with early Russian Soviet attitudes on women’s issues which were more ‘feminist’ and egalitarian than the later Stalin years. In relation to fertility, British communist women at the start of the 1920s were forthright in their advocacy of birth control and a woman’s right to have control over reproduction. As the communist feminist Stella Browne wrote in 1922, it is ‘the entire individual responsibility of women in regard to the acceptance or refusal of motherhood, the fundamental human

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right of the mother to bear life gladly and proudly or not at all …’.48 ‘This human right of refusal’, Browne continued, is a crucial point of Socialist ethics’.49 This ‘right of refusal’ even extended to unwanted pregnancies. In a paper she gave to the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology on 23 February 1922, Browne argued that women should have ‘the right to refuse life to the child already conceived, should they so desire it, with the protection and resources of medical science and surgery’.50 With her final comment, Browne had in mind the example of Soviet Russia, which had issued a decree on 18 November 1920 legalising hospital-administered abortion. Abortion did become a reality for some communist women attached to the British Party. Isabel Brown opted for a legal abortion in Moscow in 1924, following much serious discussion on the matter with her Party husband Ernest, as did the Russian wife of Harry Young, a north London communist then attached to the Communist Youth International (CYI) in Moscow, around the same time. For the Browns and Youngs, Bolshevik duty over-rode all other considerations.The Browns felt ‘that at that stage of their political work and responsibilities they did not want to have another child’, while the Youngs ‘readily agreed to an abortion because’, as Harry Young remembered, ‘we were dedicated soldiers of the revolution, who could not afford the luxury of children’.51 Enlightened communist women of the early 1920s like Stella Browne tended to dismiss traditional representations of women that claimed that their ‘natural calling’ was childrearing.52 They were suspicious of the image of a ‘monolithic female nature’ and the notion of a woman’s innate biological and caring functions, as well as the related assumption that this supposed disposition fitted her to a life in the home. As the years progressed, however, radical ‘women’s issues’ of the kind that interested Stella Browne and other communist feminists were on the retreat in the CPGB as it came to embrace an agenda framed by the male-dominated Party elite. The issue of abortion, for example, and indeed the entire question of birth control, never became a priority for the CPGB during the later 1920s and 1930s and rarely featured in CPGB policy statements.53 To the CPGB of the period after the early 1920s, liberation for communist mothers had a narrower remit than the freedom to control one’s fertility or pursue sexual equality in the home. Rather, proletarian women’s liberation seen through the lens of the British Party’s ethos and political-strategic goals usually meant freedom to pursue the class struggle and the cause of communist revolution, preferably in the sphere of industrial work and alongside the husband. When a communist wife complained to the Party press that her coalminer husband’s ‘obsession’ with politics and Party work was damaging the marriage and meant that he was rarely at home, she was advised ‘to try to see her husband’s point of view’ and to make efforts to help him ‘in the work he is doing’.54 Even the efforts to promote the virtues and methods of ‘Bolshevik housekeeping’ usually found themselves framed within this rather narrow, instrumentalist framework. When the Party launched a new press feature for mothers and housewives in late 1931

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entitled ‘Household Corner’, its stated aim was merely to awaken political consciousness and help proletarian women readers better to cope with their household ‘difficulties’ and ‘so leave them more time and energy to carry on the struggle against capitalism’.55 Thus, the proletarian woman was invited to recast herself primarily as mother and loyal Party wife, rather than the liberated woman of the type envisaged by communist feminists such as Stella Browne. This did not mean that the issue of reproduction no longer featured in the deliberations of British communist women after the mid-1920s. Party women continued to debate the question of their reproductive role but the discussion tended to be framed within a discourse consonant with the Party’s wider political requirements rather than the particular, personal needs of the individual woman. Thus a lively discussion opened in the communist press in mid-1925 on the question of whether Party women ‘should go childless in the interests of the workers’ movement’. In one letter, ‘Mrs H. Prestwich’ told of her experience of a Party-run camping holiday where she discovered, to her surprise, that she was the only mother amongst the group of communist women campers. ‘All the women’, recounted ‘Mrs Prestwich’, ‘stated definitively, that although very fond of children, to have one of their own would curb their activities’ for the Party.56 ‘Mrs Prestwich’, for her part, disagreed with the notion that by forgoing motherhood Party women were better serving communist goals. To her thinking, the opposite was true. ‘A child born of communist parents’, she claimed, ‘has its eyes opened from the beginning (if trained rightly) [sic] to the wickedness and greed of the boss class, and as understanding grows each year, the child will no doubt develop into a first-rate communist.’57 ‘My own little son’, she proudly pointed out, accompanies his [communist] dad on every possible occasion’ and ‘is eagerly awaiting the time when he will be old enough to join the Communist Party’.58 A similar point was made by ‘Mrs H. M.’ of Aberdeen in another letter. ‘Women who are active in politics should certainly have children’, she wrote. To her mind, ‘the training of a child is an added responsibility to the revolutionary movement because it means another youthful fighter’.59 Nevertheless, we do know from other sources that the requirements of the class struggle came before family considerations in some communist households. Jessie Jenkins, for example, deferred starting a family because it did not fit with her husband Mick’s political work for the Manchester Communist Party.60 Rearing a healthy ‘red diaper’ baby was only one of the functions of the communist mother and parent. Communist parentcraft extended beyond the infant stage to the later childhood years. Communist parents, particularly mothers like ‘Mrs Prestwich’, were primed to see their role as the educators of a new generation of mentally alert, politically conscious young communist boys and girls who would eventually find a place in the ranks of the revolutionary movement. The parents’ political socialisation role became particularly critical during the phase of the life cycle to age ten, that is before the child became eligible to enter the first level of the Party structure, the communist children’s

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movement, when an official organ of the Party thereafter shared in the socialisation effort.61 The importance of a proper communist upbringing for the child and the mother’s role in that process was stressed by Cedar Paul in 1922. The communist mother, she urged, should ‘do her utmost to rear her children that they may, when the day comes, put their hands to the building of the communist commonwealth’.62 Beyond the rhetoric and statements of firm intent, how did communist parents seek to instill a ‘correct’ communist upbringing in their offspring? What means did they employ, and which methods did they favour? Some believed that the communist child would emerge through a sort of osmosis, that the mere presence of a communist mother would ensure politically conscious offspring. ‘The woman has the real part in the moulding of the future man and woman’, thought a Newcastle Party woman, ‘and once she is made class-conscious the children should fall into line as a matter of course’.63 Making the same point, another member believed that if the mother was ‘helped to keep up to date in her participation in working-class movements, the children can be safely left in her hands, and will unconsciously be drawn by her example to Leftwing activities’.64 In a similar vein, some parents felt that political socialisation would follow naturally from a ‘correct’ political environment in the home. ‘If our youth are to grow up class-conscious workers who will one day govern for themselves’, opined one communist mother, ‘it is up to us that they start right’. This meant that the child should be encouraged to listen to political discussions within the home, ask ‘intelligent questions’, and develop open-mindedness.65 Other communist parents preferred a more direct, interventionist approach. ‘I think right from the earliest age’, declared a Birmingham communist, the parent should ‘stress to the child the necessity and justice in working for all we have and lose no chance of showing up the inequalities of our present system and developing sympathy with the oppressed’.66 This more direct, didactic approach appealed to another communist mother. Repudiating the conventional wisdom that you should ‘keep your troubles from your children’, she urged parents to explain the class struggle to their children at every opportunity. Thus if a parent loses his or her job, ‘I say tell them and tell them why’ and tell them ‘that some day things will be better if they are prepared to struggle against the rotten conditions that now exist’.67 Some communist parents favoured turning themselves into surrogate teachers in order to ensure a ‘class conscious’ education for their children. To counteract ‘the usual dope [of] God, King, and Money’ taught to working-class children in schools, advised a south London comrade in 1924, ‘parents should interest themselves in their children’s lessons’ and aim ‘to continue their education at home’.68 Thus, for homework, the communist child should be encouraged to obtain their learning materials from Party bookshops. According to ‘Molly’ Murphy, it was not uncommon for communist parents in 1920s Britain to favour giving their children a ‘proletarian education’ at home.69 The Party weighed in with its own help to parents in their efforts to raise ‘proper’ offspring at home. In February 1927 a new illustrated monthly

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magazine, The Worker’s Child, was announced, aimed at proletarian parents who were ‘concerned with the training and development of their children in an atmosphere that will fit them to take their part in the ranks of the working class movement’.70 During the 1930s, child psychology articles written by ‘child experts’ appeared in the Party press urging communist parents to impart appropriate skills to the child, as well as the ‘correct’ moral values. One article stressed the importance of good communication skills to encourage independence of mind and a capacity for continued learning. ‘Notice and correct any defects’ it advised, ‘and enlarge your child’s vocabulary by amusing word-games and tongue-twisters, riddles and rhyming songs’.71 Independence of mind, in particular, offered greater security in a hostile world. The ‘too-easily guided child’, an article pointed out, is ‘a prey for the unscrupulous in work or politics’.72 The same writer urged progressive parents to instill moral values in the child and a collective spirit. The child ‘must be trained to travel with a knowledge of “right” and “wrong” – of rights and privileges dearly bought and of his duty to his fellows, irrespective of colour or race’.73 The CPGB’s child experts offered a full range of advice on child development, including how to deal with child discipline, the ‘naughty’ child, the ‘fussy child’, and the child who ‘shows off’.74 There was advice on children’s toys, too.75 CPGB parentcraft advice aimed at the development of the child who was independent-minded, resourceful and, above all, socially inclined and communally orientated.Thus, for some of the more zealous within the Party, children’s toys should fulfill a wider social and communal function. They were approving of the types of toys made available to children in the factory crèches and day nurseries of the Soviet Union, the ‘little tractors, buses, [and] electric trains’, which ensured that the child became ‘familiar with practical things’ and developed into a socially useful citizen.76 For another British Party admirer, the toy tractors, trains, and machines that the ‘little tots’ played with in Moscow’s day nurseries guaranteed that they were ‘taught right from earliest childhood to be helpful to civilisation’.77 The Party also had something to say on the subject of children’s books. This question was addressed from an early date. In March 1924, The Communist Review carried a plea from a Party member to the YCL for it to ‘issue reading matter for boys and girls calculated to produce a pro-working class outlook’.78 Nothing much moved on this front until the 1930s, however. In December 1931, with great fanfare, the Party announced the publication by Martin Lawrence of The Red Corner Book for children as an alternative to the standard Christmas period children’s annuals.79 The Red Corner Book boasted 110 pages, 22 stories, 85 illustrations, poems, photographs, much splashes of colour, and a cover design dominated by the blazing red star of Soviet communism. Included in its covers were historical sketches of Wat Tyler and the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, the boys of the Paris Commune, James Connolly, and ‘simple tales of Lenin’. A later tale of Lenin aimed at children published by Martin Lawrence, Our Lenin, co-written by Ruth Shaw and Harry Alan Potamkin in 1934, an illustrated and partly

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fictionalised biography of the Bolshevik Leader, received similar gushing praise.80 By late 1934 another children’s Christmas annual with a stirring revolutionary message, Martin’s Annual, said to be ‘a real treat for the kids’, had arrived on the market.81 The Red Corner Book, Our Lenin and Martin’s Annual were held up as a radical alternative to mainstream children’s literature, which was felt to be stocked with negative stereotypes of working-class characters and ‘foreigners’, glorified middle-class values, and contained messages designed to perpetuate the existing system. In ‘the vast majority of present-day children’s books’ complained a frustrated communist parent: one mostly has to choose between the adventure stories of the boys’ annuals and ‘comics’, in which the hero, a British boy of superhuman strength and intelligence … succeeds with the aid of a number of miraculous coincidences in outwitting the villain, who is always depicted as a wicked Chinaman, a ferocious Mexican, a crafty Red Indian, or a swarthy Spaniard; or the sentimental ‘nature’ story …; or the ‘instructive’ books which give our children a number of superficial bits of information …82

Others were just as dismissive. The school stories represented in standard children’s literature, a communist ‘teacher’ protested, ‘are of the type that idealise and caricature life at such places as Winchester and Roedean’. The aim of such stories, ‘written by panderers for nit-wits and snobs’, is to encourage amongst proletarian children ‘an acceptance of middle class thought habits, mannerisms and modes of expression’.83 To counter this, the Party and communist parents called for an alternative literature that spoke to radical ideals. The narratives in this alternative literature should aim to reflect working-class life in some form, bring an awareness of social injustice to the young reader, and seek to impart a revolutionary moral. Thus the adventure narrative so beloved by children, for example, should feature accounts of popular struggles against oppression and the role of children in that process. ‘We need books written in simple language about great working class leaders’, urged one parent, ‘stories of revolt and revolution, of barricades in the streets, of acts of heroism in the workers’ fight for freedom’.84 The output of one contemporary author of children’s books, Geoffrey Trease, seemed to satisfy the appropriate criteria for radical literature. In his Bows Against the Barons (1934) enthused one reviewer, a recasting of the Robin Hood legend along radical lines, the ‘outlaw’ is given a social meaning whereby he ‘is not just a romantic bandit but a centre of the revolt for the serfs who escape from the oppression of the barons’.85 Even Party General Secretary Harry Pollitt found Trease’s adaptation a model of revolutionary adventure literature ‘with a class purpose and a class aim’, a ‘splendid book’ which gave ‘instruction and value’.86 Trease’s Comrades for the Charter (1934), a historical novel about two boys drawn into Chartist activism in the 1830s, and Call to Arms (1935), a rousing yarn about imperialist intrigue and revolution in Latin America, drew similar praise.87 The CPGB and communist

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parents did not reject all mainstream children’s literature, however. For the edification of older children, the Party’s ‘Child Expert’ recommended some children’s classics, including Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Black Beauty.88 Although stories and novels with realist themes tended to find favour in communist circles, there was occasional approval for traditional children’s fantasy fables such as Hugh Lofting’s Dr Doolittle books, Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, Felix Salten’s Bambi, and the nature parables of Thornton Burgess.89 Harry Pollitt, for his part, felt himself enraptured by F. Le Gros’s and Ida Clarke’s The Three Little Pigs and The Enchanted Fishes (1936) on reading them to his five-year-old daughter Jean.90 Even the fantasy fables were meant to point up a moral that spoke to ‘progressive’ virtues.Thus, in The Three Little Pigs and The Enchanted Fishes volumes, where ‘each story tells its own moral in the most unobtrusive way’, there were the lessons of ‘unselfishness, love, helping each other, and standing together’ according to Pollitt. The Party General Secretary was convinced that such moral fables ‘cannot but have a helpful influence on the children who will read them’ and urged the Party to be as productive in the ‘all-important work’ of children’s story-writing as ‘our class enemies’.91 If it was left to communist parents and the home environment alone, the task of transmitting communist values to children may have proved an elusive goal to achieve, even for the most ardent of communist parents. When communist mother Nan Green looked back on the attempts of her and her Party husband to rear red children during the 1930s, she was left to reflect on ‘our overenthusiastic and almost totally ineffective efforts to bring up good little communists’.92 That said, for communist parents struggling to raise communist offspring in an environment in interwar Britain that was hardly conducive to such an effort, there was some help at hand as the child moved into later childhood. From age ten during the 1920s, and from age nine during the 1930s, the child at least became eligible to join the communist children’s movement, an official organ of the Party, ensuring that there was another agency to hand which could transmit the appropriate values and outlook to children apart from dutiful Party parents and children’s books with a class-conscious outlook. It is to this other body, which sought to cater for the next stage of the life cycle of a communist, that we shall now turn. Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Christina Walshe, CPGB activist, Sunday Worker, 5 April 1925, p. 7. Daily Worker, 5 February 1930, p. 9. Daily Worker, 21 January 1930, p. 9. Workers’ Weekly, 31 March 1923, p. 1. Workers’ Weekly, 31 March 1923, p. 1. Daily Worker, 10 January 1930, p. 9. Daily Worker, 3 September 1931, p. 3. Daily Worker, 8 October 1932, p. 4.

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9 Daily Worker, 17 May 1930, p. 4. 10 Workers’ Weekly, 3 March 1923, p. 4 11 Mary Docherty, A Miner’s Lass: Memoirs by Mary Docherty (Preston: M. Docherty, 1992), p. 57, on Alice Brady; The Plebs, XIX:4 (April 1927), p. 142, on Hetty Wheeldon. 12 Workers’ Weekly, 31 March 1923, p. 1. 13 Workers’ Weekly, 28 November 1924, p. 6. 14 Workers’ Life, 23 December 1927, p. 4. 15 Docherty, A Miner’s Lass, pp. 138-9. 16 Daily Worker, 19 February 1930, p. 9. 17 Daily Worker, 5 February 1930, p. 9. 18 Daily Worker, 26 June 1930, p. 4, on understanding babies’ cries. 19 Daily Worker, 21 January 1930, p. 9. 20 Daily Worker, 10 March 1930, p. 9. 21 Daily Worker, 28 March 1930, p. 9, and 28 January 1930, p. 9. 22 Daily Worker, 7 April 1930, p. 9, and 21 March 1930, p. 9. 23 Daily Worker, 6 June 1930, p. 4. 24 Daily Worker, 9 May 1930, p. 4. 25 Daily Worker, 12 February 1930, p. 9, and 17 May 1930, p. 4. 26 The first ‘Nurse Geddes’ article appeared on 13 February 1936. 27 Daily Worker, 28 January 1930, p. 9. 28 See Daily Worker, 14 January 1930, p. 9. 29 Ibid. 30 Daily Worker, 28 March 1930, p. 9. 31 Daily Worker, 5 February 1930, p. 9. 32 Ibid. 33 The Communist, 11 March 1922, p. 7. 34 Workers’Weekly, 16 April 1926, p. 2 35 The Plebs, XIX:11 (November 1927), pp. 352–3. 36 Daily Worker, 21 January 1930, p. 9. 37 The Communist Review, 2:10 (November 1930), p. 13. 38 Ibid., p. 14. 39 Ibid. 40 Workers’ Weekly, 5 March 1926, p. 4. 41 Workers’ Weekly, 12 March 1926, p. 4. 42 Daily Worker, 3 April 1930, p. 9. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 46 Daily Worker, 11 March 1930, p. 9. 47 Daily Worker, 7 June 1938, p. 7. 48 The Communist, 11 March 1922, p. 7. 49 Ibid. 50 Stella Browne, ‘Women, birth control and the social order’, Medical Critic and Guide (June 1922), p. 212. I am grateful to Lesley Hall for bringing the published proceedings of this February 1922 symposium to my attention. 51 May Hill, Red Roses for Isabel (London: May Hill, 1982), p. 14, and BUL. 2-858. MS. Harry Young, Harry’s Biography. Chapter entitled ‘Women’, p. 4. Harry Young was a British Youth delegate to the CYI between 1922 and 1929. 52 See Lesley Hall, ‘“I have never met the normal woman”: Stella Browne and the politics of womanhood’, Women’s History Review, 6:2 (1997), 157–82.

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53 In relation to the 1920s, see Karen Hunt and Matthew Worley, ‘Rethinking British Communist Party women in the 1920s’, Twentieth Century British History, 15:1 (2004), 14–16. In fact, Stella Browne departed the CPGB in 1923 because of its reluctance to engage with the birth control issue. 54 Daily Worker, 14 April 1938, p. 7. 55 Daily Worker, 19 December 1931, p. 4. 56 Daily Worker, 31 August 1935, p. 6. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 Daily Worker, 7 September 1935, p. 6. 60 NMLH. CP/IND/MISC/1/1. MS. Mick Jenkins, Prelude to Better Days. Autobiography, n.d., p. 167. 61 The age threshold was lowered to age nine in the early 1930s. 62 The Communist, 11 March 1922, p. 7. 63 Workers’ Weekly, 4 April 1924, p. 4. 64 Daily Worker, 24 March 1936, p. 7. 65 Daily Worker, 5 March 1936, p. 7. 66 Daily Worker, 5 March 1936, p. 7. 67 Daily Worker, 18 July 1930, p. 4. 68 Workers’ Weekly, 19 December 1924, p. 8. 69 NMLH. CP/IND/MURP/01/02. MS. Molly Murphy, Nurse Molly. Autobiography, n.d., pp. 108–9. 70 Workers’ Life, 25 February 1927, p. 4. 71 Daily Worker, 25 May 1937, p. 7. 72 Daily Worker, 17 November 1936, p. 7. 73 Ibid. 74 See Daily Worker, 29 January 1938, p. 7, 20 April 1937, p. 7, 28 October 1935, p. 7, and 11 June 1936, p. 4. 75 Daily Worker, 11 May 1937, p. 7. 76 Daily Worker, 13 January 1934, p. 6. 77 Daily Worker, 12 July 1932, p. 4. 78 The Communist Review, 4:11 (March 1924), p. 504. 79 Daily Worker, 12 December 1931, p. 4. See also Communist Review (January 1932), pp. 61–2. 80 See Daily Worker, 9 May 1934, p. 4. 81 Daily Worker, 8 December 1934, p. 5. 82 Daily Worker, 9 May 1934, p. 4. 83 Daily Worker, 11 June 1936, p. 7. 84 Daily Worker, 9 May 1934, p. 4. 85 Daily Worker, 4 April 1934, p. 4. Bows Against the Barons was published by Martin Lawrence. 86 Daily Worker, 23 May 1934, p. 4. 87 See Daily Worker, 18 December 1935, p. 7, and 2 June 1936, p. 7. Both books were published by Martin Lawrence. 88 Daily Worker, 2 June 1936, p. 7. 89 Daily Worker, 9 July 1936, p. 7. 90 Daily Worker, 16 December 1936, p. 7. The stories were published by Lawrence & Wishart. 91 Daily Worker, 16 December 1936, p. 7. 92 Nan Green, A Chronicle of Small Beer:The Memoirs of Nan Green (Nottingham: Trent Books, 2004), p. 57.

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2 Into the Party structure: the communist children’s movement

We Young Pioneers are gay, In the day of struggle; For the foe is up today; But he’ll be down tomorrow. Chorus: The way to freedom is our goal, The struggle is our brother; The world is like a sailing boat, And we are at its rudder.1

The task of grooming the communist child extended beyond the confines of the communist home. From age ten during the 1920s and age nine from the early 1930s, children became eligible to join the communist children’s organisation, the first stratum of official Communist Party membership. By encouraging children to enter the Party structure, the CPGB sought to complement efforts made by communist parents to foster a firm communist outlook in their offspring. Like the communist home, the Party’s children’s wing aimed to provide the child with a sanctuary that would counter the damaging influences of the wider class-structured society and its institutions, including the formal school system. Indeed, the Party’s children’s organisation would function as a surrogate parent for the communist child in that it would concern itself with important areas of social and intellectual development that were not catered for in the more restricted spaces of the home environment. To remain outside the Party’s children’s organisation and beyond the reach of its socialisation efforts was to risk contamination. This chapter will consider how the communist children’s organisation evolved and was organised, its relationship to the wider parent Party and the Young Communist League (YCL), as well as the ways the ‘little comrades’ were educated to take their place in these next levels of the Party structure. The chapter will also look at the mission, ethos and inner world of the children’s organisation, and the Party’s attempts during the interwar years to capture and retain the loyalty and enthusiasm of its youngest members.2

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The British Communist Party first began to turn its attention to organised work amongst children in a systematic way in 1924. In an effort to bring together the few existing, scattered ‘Communist Children’s Sections’ as they were then called under more centralised direction, the first National Conference of Leaders of Communist Children’s Sections met during the weekend of 1–2 March 1924. In attendance at the Conference were Children’s Section delegates representing Shipley, Barrow, Castleford, Manchester, Bethnal Green, Stepney, Southwark, Edinburgh, Dundee and the Gorbals in Glasgow.3 By the end of 1924 additional Children’s Sections had sprung up in Tottenham and Wood Green, Middlesborough, Greenock, Leeds, and Holytown in Lanarkshire, while yet others were in the process of formation at Rotherham, Richmond and in areas covered by the South Wales District Party Committee.4 From April 1924 the nascent children’s movement was bolstered by a monthly newspaper, The Young Comrade, which featured illustrations of communist children engaging in political activity, cartoons, a children’s letter page, and a painting competition.5 Responsibility for directing the work of the Children’s Sections fell not to the parent Communist Party, but to the Executive Committee (EC) of the YCL.6 To those seeking to build the children’s movement, the YCL seemed better suited to this guardianship role than the Party. At the Conference, speaker after speaker claimed that efforts to develop the children’s movement were being hampered by the apathy of their older comrades in the Party locals.7 This would be a recurring issue. In December 1925 the YCL’s newspaper, the Young Worker, reported that the progress of the children’s movement continued to be badly hampered ‘by the lack of understanding and therefore interest and support’ from the bulk of Party activists.8 In a similar vein, the YCL’s Fourth National Conference in Sheffield in December 1926 observed that the full support of the Party for the children had been ‘hitherto greatly lacking’ and resolved to overcome this lingering ‘opposition’ in Party ranks.9 In 1930, critics could still write of the need to end ‘the disgusting passivity’ on the Party’s part with regard to children’s work.10 The YCL seemed the more obvious choice to guide the development of the children’s organisation, not least because it was held to be ‘the stepping stone to the YCL’, or the ‘reserve of the YCL’ as the head of the children’s movement,‘Dave’ F. Springhall, put it in 1925.11 Having been discharged from the Royal Navy ‘with ignominy’ in November 1920 for participating in ‘certain propagandist activities’ in HM barracks, the twenty-two-year-old Londoner Springhall was put in charge of the communist children in October 1923.12 This followed an earlier stint as Thames Valley Organiser of the National Unemployed Workers’ Committee movement. The YCL’s guardianship role was confirmed at the Third National Conference of the YCL in Manchester in July 1925, when the Congress delegates further resolved to create a communist Children’s Section alongside every YCL branch and Party local.13 By the time of the Manchester Congress, and evidently influenced by the Pioneer movement in the Soviet Union, the Children’s Sections had received a new name, the Young Pioneers’ League.14 The title ‘Pioneers’

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resonated with all the appropriate qualities, signifying courage, imagination, initiative, and dynamic movement into exciting, uncharted spaces. In an effort to tighten the organisational structure of the children’s movement, the Manchester Conference also resolved that District Committees of the Pioneers’ League should be formed to coordinate the scattered children’s groups in the localities.15 In mid-1925, there were eighteen children’s groups in existence with an approximate membership of 500.16 There was certainly room for improvement, however, with the Young Worker admitting in September that the process of stimulating Pioneer activities in the localities was ‘painfully slow’.17 That same September there was a further name change when, by a decision of the Young Communist International, the Young Pioneers’ League received the new title of Young Comrades’ League.18 The Young Comrades’ League held its first National Conference in Manchester during the weekend of 13–14 February 1926, where it adopted a Constitution and decided to confine membership to children aged between ten and fourteen years.19 Activity seemed to have picked up by this stage, the Conference claiming that there were children’s branches in ‘all the principal industrial areas’ and that District structures operated in London, Manchester and Glasgow.20 The communist children’s movement offered its child members a quite distinct experience. Its principles and guiding ethos marked it out as a body radically different from all other contemporary children’s organisations. Membership of a communist children’s group offered a means of awakening the class-conscious sense of the proletarian child through militant activism.Through movement activism, communist children were to immerse themselves totally in the class struggle, or, as the March 1924 Conference explained it,‘the importance of never for a single moment alienating our [Children’s] Sections from the actual class struggle’ must be realised.21 Additionally, communist children, in true Leninist fashion, by taking up the fight on behalf of proletarian children around a range of issues, were expected to give a ‘lead’ to others. As one activist defined it, ‘the fundamental task of the children’s movement is to play the leading role in all the daily struggles of proletarian children’.22 The object of always being at the head of the fight, as Dave Springhall made clear, was ‘to enroll the children of the working class in the class struggle and to give them a communist outlook’.23 Encouraging independence in the child was another of the guiding principles of the children’s movement. Overt adult or parental involvement in communist children’s work was not encouraged therefore, lest it should interfere with the overriding objective of ‘the development of the independent aspirations of the children’.24 In terms of the movement’s internal life, the communist child was encouraged to think out, plan and organise his or her own activities independent of overt adult input or supervision. Group leaders drawn from the children’s ranks would head up the political work within the Section, while other children would be responsible for conducting the organisational and administrative business.25

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The opportunity to develop skills in self-expression and public speaking was also available through participation in the children’s movement. The Young Pioneer and later Young Comrades’ League Sections boasted their own speakers and it was not uncommon for these budding young orators to take the platform at conferences and demonstrations of both the Party and the YCL.26 At their own conferences and gatherings, communist children would give detailed progress reports on their local organisations, move resolutions, debate policy, and chair the proceedings.27 In a similar way, the movement’s newspaper, The Young Comrade, in as far as it was possible, was written and run by the children themselves.28 In time, the children would also become responsible for electing their own leaders.29 The impulse to encourage and hone the child’s organisational, administrative and oratorical skills stemmed from the Party’s belief that the child was capable of self-motivation, or ‘organised self-activity’ as it was described, as well as political understanding and political activity. It was further believed that these ‘little proletarians’ were adult communists-in-waiting or the militants of tomorrow. Once trained and developed in the ‘correct’ atmosphere in the children’s organisation, they would be equipped eventually to take their place as the lead elements in the adult working-class movement. Such was the case with one young comrade from Fife, Jimmy Miller. In her autobiography, Mary Docherty, the organiser of the Fife communist children’s group, recalled that Miller, a member of the Cowdenbeath Children’s Section, eventually ‘became a miner and the miners in his pit elected him as their delegate’.30 For Docherty, who nurtured him to political maturity, Miller ‘never forgot his training as a child’.31 The CPGB’s children’s movement claimed that it was providing the child with an alternative experience to that which could be found in the so-called bourgeois children’s organisations, such as the Wolf Cubs, Church Lads’ Brigades, Girl Guides and Boy Scouts. Regarding the latter, and in no uncertain terms, communists stated that ‘the object of the Scout and Girl Guide movement is to prevent the growth of class consciousness among the young workers, to train blacklegs and fascists, to propagate militaristic ideas, and to provide an imperialistic education’.32 It was stridently proclaimed, too, that the ethos and forms of work of the communist children’s movement set it apart from other anticapitalist children’s organisations, although in the spirit of ‘unity’ there was some collaboration between communists and the Woodcraft Folk, which served as the cooperative movement’s children’s organisation, at stages between the wars.33 Communists, at least those occupying leadership roles, seemed less well-disposed towards another of the contemporary socialist children’s organisations, the Socialist Sunday School. The Socialist Sunday School made its first appearance in Battersea, London, in 1892. By 1912, against the backdrop of rising industrial militancy and a blossoming interest in socialist ideals and politics, the number of Socialist Sunday Schools had risen dramatically to 108. This number included twenty-one Sunday Schools in Lancashire, twenty in Yorkshire, eighteen in

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London, fifteen in Glasgow and four in Tyneside. Besides the 6,328 adults and 1,788 youths (those aged between seventeen and twenty-one years), the number of children aged below seventeen years estimated to be attending the Socialist Sunday Schools in 1912 was 4,540.34 The Socialist Sunday School movement has been described as a ‘labour sect’, a congregation of devoted believers who held that socialism was a secular religion whose ideals should be conveyed to children in the phraseology of tradition Christian ethics.35 According to this idealist take on socialism, the socialist commonwealth could be attainable through the cultivation of proper ethical behaviour in the child, in which love of others, truth and justice were held up as the supreme virtues.The Socialist Sunday School movement’s genuine, heartfelt objections to capitalism were usually expressed in these abstract moral terms and the language of traditional Christian principles of love and justice. Children were thought to be particularly susceptible to such moral teaching. By partaking in the various forms of communal activity on offer during the Sunday gatherings, whether singing labour hymns from the Socialist Sunday School Hymn Book (published in 1911), reading extracts from the Socialist Ten Commandments (published in 1901), or being entreated to a ‘Lesson’ on an ‘ethical’ topic such as ‘Companionship’, it was hoped that the cooperative and altruistic side of the child’s nature would be developed. From 1911 the Socialist Sunday Schools had to compete for children’s souls with the more militant Proletarian Sunday Schools. In these more irreverent gatherings, children sang anti-clerical songs, recited verses from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) Song Book, and after 1917 were encouraged to feel solidarity with Soviet Russia.36 Communist leadership elements were critical of the Socialist Sunday Schools, at least from 1922 when the CPGB formally dissociated itself from them. They claimed that there was a vast difference between the aims and methods of work of the Socialist Sunday Schools and their own children’s organisation, not least in communist efforts to foster in proletarian children a militant class perspective, instill in them the confidence to express themselves through oratory at mass gatherings, and undertake responsible office-holding relatively independent of adult input. In contrast, the Socialist Sunday Schools were accused of being ‘apart from and outside the class struggle’ and limiting their activities to Sunday afternoon sessions where the child passively listened to lectures or learnt socialist songs.37 Dave Springhall derided the ‘abstract teaching of “Love and Justice”’ in the Socialist Sunday Schools, adding that communists ‘reject entirely the conception of teaching children socialism by blackboard lectures given by grey-beards’.38 Rather, proletarian children were to comprehend the meaning of social change in a radical direction, not by listening to moralistic utterances and absorbing abstract concepts of ‘Love, Justice and Truth’, but through militant, direct action on a range of demands around which they could mobilise and fight. The principal site of this activism was to be the school. The school would be to the communist children what the factory was to the

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Party’s adult activists, namely the locale where the class struggle was deemed to be at its fiercest and where lay the greatest scope for the building of a mass communist movement. Even the rhetoric followed that of the adult communist work in the factories. Whereas the Party’s adult activists were instructed to form factory nuclei, the little comrades were set the task of building up ‘nuclei in the schools’.39 Dave Springhall and his young comrades subscribed to an instrumentalist view of the state school system ‘under capitalism’. One of a school’s chief functions, through its pedagogy, rituals and the cultural values embodied in the curriculum, was to impart patriotic, imperialist and anti-working-class propaganda ‘under the guise of education’ so as to instill in the working-class child conformity to tradition and respect for the status quo.40 Because the school ultimately served the needs of industry by recycling the existing social division of labour, these were the hallmarks of a tamed and compliant workforce in later life. Through the ‘observance of patriotic festivals’ like Empire Day, or the teaching of ‘drum and trumpet history’ with its fixation on ‘the doings of Sir Francis Drake and of Clive of India’ and the ‘silly nonsense about dates and Kings and Queens’ as one little comrade put it, the school aimed at the cultivation of a willing wage-slave mentality.41 The school also passed on middle-class mores. Thus the headmistress of an infant school, according to a Daily Worker article in 1930, gave the new intake a lecture on the importance of obedience to their teacher ‘and then told them that if they learnt to be very good children and always did their lessons well they would have nice houses and motor cars and lots of money when they grew up’.42 The culture of obedience in the school also helped stabilise the wider social order in other ways.The school ensured that ‘the worker’s child is given a slave class mentality’ by virtue of being subjected to the teacher’s absolute authority enforced through the medium of the cane, ‘which results in the mass production of thousands of submissive young workers who acquiesce in their exploitation in the factories’.43 The communist press carried disturbing accounts of schoolmasters and mistresses inflicting corporal punishment on working-class children, as with the September 1927 piece in the Young Worker of the master fined £2 for beating a seven-year-old-schoolgirl so ‘unmercifully with a strap’ that the medical report concluded that ‘mentally she would probably be terrified for some time’.44 Abolition of the strap, the cane, and other forms of corporal punishment in schools was one of the key demands of communist children during their schools’ agitation of the interwar years. Other campaign issues were the introduction of free school meals for working-class children, smaller classes, increased access to playgrounds, and better school buildings.45 The red school children also demanded the curtailment of ‘religious and patriotic teaching’, an end to all ‘useless teaching’, and the supervision of the school curriculum by representatives of the ‘workers’ organisations’ which included Trades’ Councils, proletarian Parents’ Councils and proletarian Pupils’ Councils.46 By 1933, as Britain’s

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economic depression started to bite, communist literature spoke of closing schools and increasingly overcrowded classes, greater ‘economies’ in school feeding and a steady curtailment of school facilities for developing the child’s physical fitness.47 The consequence of this contraction of basic amenities and needs was ‘the production of a new generation, undeveloped in mind and body for facing the struggles of life’.48 As well as campaigning around specific demands and slogans, the school nuclei were expected to engage in vigorous ‘shop-floor’ activities in the schools, including recruitment, agitating for the formation of Parents’ Councils, and combating the work in the schools of ‘opponent organisations’ such as the Wolf Cubs, Boy Scouts and Girl Guides. The ‘little reds’ were also expected to sell their newspaper, The Young Comrade, to their school chums, and organise school strikes, boycotts or protests against caning, Empire Day celebrations and militaristic propaganda in the schools.49 In Chopwell in 1927, for example, a mining village and centre of communist strength in the north-east, around 200 communist and other sympathetic children boycotted the official Empire Day celebration at the local school and replaced it with their own ‘Red Empire Day’ celebration complete with stirring speeches, banners, red flags and heartily rendered revolutionary songs.50 The effects of these school protests could sometimes go beyond the symbolic, particularly when undertaken in conjunction with adult support. In early 1924 in the Port Glasgow area of Glasgow, local adult communists in alliance with communist children and the Port Glasgow Unemployed Organisation organised a school strike around the demand that the Parish Council should supply local children with boots during the winter months.51 In the county of Fife in 1928, a coalmining area where the Communist Party wielded some influence in local affairs, a left-wing bloc of ten candidates that included two CPGB members, used their dominant electoral position on Fife Education Authority to secure free school meals of higher quality for many local children.52 Similar pressure was brought to bear to restrict the use of the strap in Fife schools.53 Communist Party members were also elected to school management committees in the Fife area in this period.54 Additionally, 1928 saw a strike hit schools in the Fife area organised by the local Young Comrades’ League in conjunction with the YCL, which forced the granting of an annual holiday on May Day for schools in Cowdenbeath, Bowhill, Lochore, Lochgelly and Lumphinnans.55 On a final note, it should be said that not all Party members, including senior figures, felt that children should have the responsibility of carrying communist propaganda into the schools.T. A. ‘Tommy’ Jackson, a senior Party figure, writing in 1933, thought ‘that we have no right to impose upon children (who cannot possibly be old enough to have opinions of their own) [sic] the task of doing, and possibly suffering for, our propaganda work’.56 Although the school was to the little comrades what the factory was to the Party’s adult activists, the communist children’s movement sought to involve the child in wider matters by extending its reach beyond the school to take in issues

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affecting both children and adults in the wider community.The ongoing scourge of child labour and employers’ infringement of child labour laws became a campaign issue. The then YCL Secretary William Rust pointed out in early 1927 that approximately 550,000 boys and girls left elementary schools yearly at age fourteen, from which point they were converted into a ‘constant source of cheap labour eagerly accepted by the employers’.57 Establishing a minimum wage for all such young workers as well as the elimination of night work for those under eighteen became an immediate policy concern for communist children, in conjunction with the longer term goal of pressing for the raising of the school leaving age to sixteen.The need to establish kindergartens, children’s play centres, playgrounds and holiday camps, and to introduce free medical care for proletarian children, also featured in the little comrades’ campaigns. On other fronts, the little comrades assisted the adults by protesting against reductions in parish and unemployment relief and assisted striking workers during industrial disputes by engaging in activities such as fundraising and demonstrations.58 The 1926 General Strike and miners’ lock-out furnished many opportunities for the latter. Young Comrades’ League members joined their older comrades in pressing for relief, clothing, and free boots for the miners’ children.59 In areas of communist strength more militant forms of action would be undertaken. During the lockout in Denbeath in the Fife coalfield, communist children would gather in numbers in the near vicinity of a ‘scab’s’ house and, by ‘bawling and howling as only they can’, alert all and sundry to the presence of the miscreant.60 The Young Comrades’ League would retain a fondness for disadvantaged miners’ children long after the lock-out. During Christmas periods, it organised parties for children in mining communities and arranged for miners’ children to stay with communist families in other parts of Britain, the latter arranged through the offices of the Miners’ Children’s Christmas Fund which it had helped to set up.61 As with the YCL and the parent Party, the General Strike and the miners’ lockout brought a rich harvest to the Young Comrades’ League in terms of membership and organisational growth. In February 1927, the Party boasted that it had a membership of 800 children organised in twenty-seven local Sections, as against 300 members in seventeen Sections just before the General Strike.62 A similar rate of progress was reported in the schools. It was claimed that there were now thirty-nine school groups in existence, as opposed to twenty-three prior to the General Strike.63 The bulk of this new membership was gained in the mining communities.64 Membership of the Young Comrades’ League in the Fife mining areas, for example, climbed to over 100 children organised in six school groups in December 1926.65 February 1927, probably on the back of the recent gains, saw the introduction of a new illustrated monthly magazine, The Worker’s Child, which sought to encourage proletarian parents to cultivate a communist spirit in their offspring.66 Nevertheless, it was admitted in this same period that there was still much to be done, particularly on an organisational level. Apparently, post-miners’ strike, there was very little planned work taking place in

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the local Sections, a shortage of trained group leaders, no functioning Districtbased organisations and, most damningly, a serious neglect of children’s work by the YCL.67 Communist women, too, were accused of showing a lack of interest in children’s work.68 There seemed to be another slight forward lurch by the time of the Second National Congress of the Young Comrades’ League which met in London on 11–12 June 1927, when it was reported that the League had ‘approximately 1,000 members’ and thirty-four Sections, but this could not be sustained.69 By October, membership had dropped to 600 and the number of locals, operating under the umbrella of five District Committees, to thirty-two.70 Along with the usual charge of neglect by the YCL and the Party, blame for the League’s spluttering progress was attributed to the shortage of trained group leaders, those in post being maligned for their ‘theoretical backwardness’.71 Some Districts did claim to be making major progress, such as Tyneside, which held its first District Congress at the start of 1928.The claim made by Tyneside that it had 200 members, however, seems exaggerated given that the national figure for Young Comrades’ League membership by this date was probably no more than 500 to 600.72 Certainly, by March, the YCL was complaining about the Young Comrades’ League’s fluctuating membership and inability to retain recruits.73 In an effort to boost membership an innovation was introduced at this point, whereby the age limit of children permitted to join the Young Comrades’ League was raised from fourteen years to fifteen years.74 Additionally, those in that age bracket were granted dual membership of the Young Comrades’ League and the YCL in an effort to ease the transition to the next rung of the CPGB’s membership structure. It is not surprising that the children’s movement was a small affair, as it tended to draw its recruits from the small pool of communist parents, hardly numerous at any point during the interwar years given that the CPGB was itself a small membership party. Prior to 1936, for example, only on one occasion, towards the end of 1926, did the adult membership manage to climb above ten thousand members. The next few years were even worse for the children’s movement as it became a victim, along with the YCL and Party membership, of the Party leadership’s decision in 1928 to embark on the disastrous Third Period of ‘Class against Class’. The consequences of adopting the ‘new line’, the sectarian, self-imposed isolation from the rest of the labour movement, were not immediately felt. At the YCL’s Sixth National Congress in Manchester in 1929 it was reported that there were 500 communist children in eighteen Sections.75 By January 1931, however, the communist children’s movement had virtually ceased to exist. The 500 members and eighteen Sections had melted away and there was no longer a children’s newspaper. In a plea to the YCL to take steps to stop the rot, one ‘Kathleen Taylor’ bemoaned the fact that ‘the reserve forces’ of British communism, the next generation of activists,‘are being neglected and allowed to disintegrate’.76 Unfortunately for the cause of children’s communism, her plea fell on deaf ears because we now know that the YCL itself barely functioned

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having been ‘liquidated’ at one point during the period of ‘Class against Class’, around April–May 1930.77 With its total membership hovering around the ridiculously low mark of 2,800 between May 1930 and May 1931 there was hardly likely to be much help forthcoming from the Party either. Some ‘green shoots’ of growth did start to appear during the Spring of 1931 and subsequent months. By May 1931, communist children’s groups had started up in Birmingham, Clydebank, Liverpool, and Openshaw in Manchester.78 A Rhondda Valley group joined them soon after.79 In October it was announced that additional groups had sprung up in London, in Hammersmith, St Pancras, and Hackney, in South Wales at Caerphilly and Porth, and Blaydon and Shipley in the north-east and Yorkshire respectively.80 In total, the report claimed, there were now fifteen communist children’s groups functioning. By the end of the year, further activity was being reported in Bolton, Maryport, and Dundee.81 London appeared to be showing the way, witnessing the arrival of groups over the next year in Tottenham, Battersea, Stepney, Bermondsey, Hendon, Clapham and Chelsea.82 This attempted rekindling of the children’s movement was assisted by some organisational initiatives. A National Children’s Bureau was set up in Spring 1931 to exchange information between the local groups and link their work to a common purpose to offset feelings of isolation and drift.83 Additionally, the London area was given its own London Council to coordinate activity, pull up the ‘weaker’ groups, and ‘assist lone comrades to build squads’ around them.84 Capable organisers were assigned, notably Effie Geddes at the national level and Max Cohen initially in the north-west and then in London, bringing leadership, discipline and Bolshevik ardour to the situation. The new crop of red children were even provided with a new monthly newspaper to replace the defunct The Young Comrade, a sixteen-page effort entitled The Drum complete with drawings and punchy articles under the heading ‘Drum taps from the Editor’.85 The regular Party press also helped bring communist enlightenment to the child. In its early years, a few columns of the Daily Worker were usually given over to a ‘children’s corner’ featuring letters from Pioneers and a daily cartoon series dealing with the antics of 'Micky Mongrel' the ‘class-conscious dog’ as one caption described him.86 Child communist readers were treated to seeing ‘Micky’ in a variety of activist roles, whether ‘whitewashing’ communist political slogans, leafleting, picketing outside the dog biscuit factory, or fighting a range of class enemies that included the boss ‘Bertram the bulldog’, the reformist Labour leader ‘Lionel lapdog’, or the headmaster ‘Mr Mastiff’, who just happened to be very fond of wielding the cane.87 Not all readers of the Daily were impressed. ‘Cut out the “Micky Mongrel” rubbish’ and ‘send “Micky” back to his kennel’, urged one reader.88 At the start of 1392, ‘Micky Mongrel’ departed the canine class struggle and was replaced by a new children’s cartoon series featuring the adventures of two proletarian Pioneer children, ‘Mike’ and ‘Mary’.89

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There was another name change, brought in around July 1930, or, more accurately, a reversion to an earlier name. The title of Young Comrades’ League was dropped and, henceforth, the children’s organisation was called the Young Pioneers and organised according to Pioneer ‘Troops’ in the localities. In July 1933 another extension was made to the age profile when it became permissible for children between the ages of nine and sixteen to enroll in the Pioneers.90 The hope was expressed, too, that children below nine could be enrolled into separate younger children’s groups, which would be newly created solely for that purpose.91 Nevertheless, despite the structural readjustments and injections of revolutionary enthusiasm from organisers like Effie Geddes, the communist children’s movement remained a somewhat uneven, fragmented affair. Its geographical profile, as always, and as one would expect given that the Pioneers and the little comrades of the earlier 1920s as already mentioned were usually the children of communist parents, tended to mirror that of the adult Party in these years.Thus it was an organisation confined to a small number of urban and industrial spots where the adult parents were also active, most notably in London and Dundee. The Young Pioneers had to cope with a heavy setback in September 1933 when its National Organiser Effie Geddes, at just twenty-two, died following a brief illness while leading a delegation of British Pioneers to the Soviet Union.92 The efforts of Effie Geddes and others had at least placed the children’s movement in a reasonably stable position as ‘Class against Class’ tapered off during 1934 and passed into the new strategic era of the ‘Popular Front’. There were visible signs of activity. Around 150 London-based Pioneers attended a ‘Pioneer Sports Day’ at Epping Forest in September 1934, while at the CPGB’s Thirteenth Party Congress in Manchester in February 1935, General Secretary Harry Pollitt reported that there were thriving Pioneer Troops in London, Glasgow, Dundee and Maryport, though he admitted that there was little sign of activity elsewhere.93 During the Popular Front years, the communist children’s movement was obliged to adopt a new ethos and rhetoric. As it came out of selfimposed isolation, the sectarian stance was abandoned, the more aggressive class rhetoric was downplayed and, like its older counterparts in the Party and YCL, it held out the warm hand of friendship and unity to ‘rival’ non-communist organisations that it had once maligned. The ‘Pioneer Camps’, for example, annual summer gatherings at idyllic spots where the children played games and sports, were organised ‘to further the spirit of unity’. Thus the Pioneer Camp held from 26 July to 9 August 1936 at the Isle of Sheppey, Kent, was to be ‘a real United Front of children by inviting all working class children’s organizations to participate’.94 It is difficult to estimate the success of the new line.To take one example, it seems that only 150 children attended the Isle of Sheppey Pioneer Camp. The veteran trade unionist and communist Tom Mann, the Pioneers’ ‘guest of honour’, although pronouncing the Camp an organisational success, did add that ‘the Pioneer movement should be twenty times stronger than it is now’.95

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Nevertheless, the Popular Front policy did at least allow the communist children’s movement to end the culture of separation imposed during ‘Class against Class’ and replace it with a more inclusive culture that enabled greater interaction with non-communist children and the outside world. So what type of life could the child expect in the communist children’s movement? As with their older comrades in the YCL and the Party, a communist life for a child was usually a very full and frenetic one. Activities ranged beyond those we have already looked at, the immersing of oneself in the class struggle as it manifested itself in the schools and the local communities, or acquiring life skills in independent office-holding, self-expression and oratory. The following eventful and busy schedule of the Southend Young Comrades in 1930, as described by its group leader, was probably not untypical of the average day in the life of a communist child: We usually have some drill, the comrades usually taking turns to give us drill each week. Then we have minutes and business. The group then has a discussion on the topics of the day (Meerut Trial, Naval Conference) and we explain any words that the comrades do not know (bourgeois, etc). We have started a small library. We sometimes have signaling of first aid.The rest of the time is occupied with handwork. This we sell and give the profits to the Daily [Daily Worker] … We also edit our wall newspapers which consists of newspaper cuttings, complaints, and suggestions and articles by the comrades.96

Where resources would allow, local Party offices would usually have a ‘Pioneer Corner’ or ‘Pioneer Room’ where the little comrades would meet, discuss business, receive communist education, and busy themselves with activities designed to build political awareness or further the class struggle.The Openshaw Pioneers in Manchester decorated their Pioneer Corner with photographs and pictures of communist Pioneers in other lands, which gave them ‘a very effective idea of the world-wide extent of the Pioneer Movement’.97 In a similar spirit of fostering an internationalist perspective, the Troop leader of the Rhondda Pioneers would read his young charges letters from Pioneers from other lands.98 Others made Pioneer calendars for the ‘Micky Mongrel’ Calendar Competition, while others performed sketches in Hyde Park to raise funds for their Troop.99 In December 1932 a Party spokesman offered suggestions for indoor Pioneer work. Activity in the inner sanctum of the Pioneer Room, he outlined, should include: (1) A political talk by your leader and a discussion; (2) Singing and writing revolutionary songs; (3) Acting and writing revolutionary plays; (4) Mastering first aid, flag (semaphore) signaling, morse code, Troops drill, fencing, [and] wrestling; (5) Making posters, banners and flags for demonstrations, making street maps showing the important factory gates, railways and mines, police stations, public halls and meeting places, military barracks and depots; (6) Publishing a wall newspaper, reporting for the wall newspaper, for the Pioneer Magazine Drum …100

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Besides assisting striking workers and helping ‘other children to understand what the workers are fighting for’, wrote Effie Geddes, Britain’s Pioneers ‘meet and play games, learn sketches which they perform at workers’ meetings, learn Bolshie songs and read books’, while many Troops have ‘swimming, boxing and first aid classes’. Pioneer activities imparted a sense of an alternative life and set of values. ‘In all these things’, stressed Effie Geddes, ‘we work in co-operation with each other and learn what comradeship means’.101 Although the activities that the children engaged in usually had a serious revolutionary focus, the communist life had a lighter side as well. The children were encouraged to partake in a range of communist-run outdoor leisure activities such as outings and excursions, camping, country rambles, sports and holiday camps. A stimulus for such activities was a desire to emulate ‘the Russian Pioneer methods of outdoor activities’, which included ‘games, camps, street processions and excursions’, an approach which held out the prospect of stemming the wearisome leakage of members.102 Another stimulus was the urge to compete with the Boy Scouts who, it was thought, had long excelled in the business of outdoor work as a means of attracting recruits.103 The Manchester communist Mick Jenkins, who joined the YCL in 1923, remembered the excursions that he and his YCL comrades organised for the children during the warm summer months, the most popular being the outing to a woodland spot between Burnley and Nelson. ‘On a nice summer day, sixty to one hundred children’, recalled Jenkins, ‘in the care of eight or ten Party and non-Party women comrades, and armed with balls, bats, and all sorts of other equipment, plus bottles of pop and water and bags of sweets, could be seen trailing along the main road and then down the path into the fields and along to the spot where two or three happy hours would be spent by the children.’104 The children’s organiser in Fife, Mary Docherty, also organised summer rambles for her young charges, events which were enlivened with the ‘usual outdoor games’, tea and ‘eatables’ and games of football and cricket involving mixed-gender teams.105 There were football teams such as the ‘Stepney Pioneers’.106 Even in these more soothing moments of play there was to be no respite from the imperatives of the class struggle, however. Communist children, proclaimed the DailyWorker in 1931, ‘set out to make themselves strong fighters for the working class. To do this they play games and drill and go out in the country tracking and camping’.107 Moves in the direction of pleasurable outdoor activity and a ‘brighter’ image had certainly increased after 1927 in response to Party efforts to foster a more stimulating environment for child recruits. The aim was to counteract the apparent ‘dryness and barrenness’ of many of the children’s groups and their activities, a road that the YCL was being pushed to go down also.108 It was the Second National Conference of the Young Comrades’ League in June 1927 that announced the adoption of these ‘new methods of work’ and ‘brighter features’ which included ‘games, songs, camps and rambles’, as well as a uniform.109 There was no standard uniform for communist children until the early 1930s, though

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the wearing of red scarves, red ties, red ribbons fixed on jackets or jerseys, or red ‘kneckerchiefs’ embroidered with a hammer and sickle served as visible signs of allegiance.110 It took some time for the ‘brighter’ appearance to eventually emerge in the form of a standard uniform. In July 1933 the YCL’s Seventh National Congress resolved that the children’s movement adopt a similar uniform consisting of red neck scarf and grey shirt. The Congress also proposed blue shorts for boys and blue skirts for girls, but added that these should not be obligatory.111 From early 1928 we can see that the new ‘brightening’ policy, covering a range of children’s activities, was in full swing. ‘We must do away with boring speeches’, announced the YCL’s Fifth National Congress, ‘and put in their place songs, collective sports and exercises’ as well as tableaux, recitals and collective songs in ‘our mass work’ and propaganda.112 The children of the Tyneside Young Comrades’ League gave an example of the new, enlivened approach at their first District Conference in January when they emblazoned their Congress hall with banners, posters and slogans and rounded off the whole event with ‘a great tea party and social’ at which all present ‘enjoyed themselves enormously’.113 It was not uncommon for communist socials and leisure pursuits to aim at the cultural improvement of the children. Mary Docherty encouraged the little Fife comrades to recite poetry with a progressive message and perform plays with a strong proletarian theme.114 The Eisteddfod, or competitive concert, and social that South Wales District YCL put on in the ‘Little Moscow’ of Mardy in January 1928 attended by 400 communist children and YCL and Party members served the same goal of cultural uplift. Groups of local Young Comrades launched the proceedings with a well-received competitive choir followed by renderings of a ‘revolutionary solo, quartette, choral item or recitation’ by the various choirs and individuals present.115 In the same spirit of cultural improvement, the Pioneer Troop of the Workers’ Theatre Movement toured Party districts and locals and performed sketches with an uncompromising revolutionary message, such as ‘Meerut’ and ‘Murder in the Coalfields’.116 Some Pioneer Troops put on concerts. Local Pioneers staged a concert at the Cooperative Hall, Tooting, in February 1933. Amongst the performers were three violinists from the Clapham Troop.117 In a similar spirit of bringing enlightenment to proletarian children, members of the Young Comrades’ League were occasionally given the opportunity to visit the ‘first workers’ republic’ and meet their counterparts in the Russian Pioneers. A delegation of children from the British Left, which included aYoung Comrades’ League representative, visited Russia in June 1927 in response to an invitation from the Moscow Pioneers.118 A further official trip followed in August 1929 when a party of eleven British communist children sailed to Moscow on board the Soviet ship A. Rykoff as guests of the Russian Pioneers at their International Pioneers’ Summer Camp.119 Summer camps were a part of the total communist experience. As Paul Mishler has pointed out, they allowed children to temporarily leave the world of capitalism to live in an institutional

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setting that reflected the values of the alternative communist political culture.120 The Soviet motherland, ‘the light from the east’, provided an ‘imaginary vision’ to sustain beleaguered communists in Europe’s capitalist heartlands during the 1920s and 1930s.121 The authority and example of the Soviet Union was frequently asserted to maintain the enthusiasm of the young comrades in Britain. This adulation could be taken to ridiculous lengths, as in the piece in the Young Worker in March 1929 on ‘Children’s Town in Odessa’. The ‘laboratory of a new social order and new laws of living’, ‘children’s town’ was depicted as a communal idyll of ‘dainty cottages scattered in gardens and along shady alleys and streets planted with chestnut trees and acacia’ which was kept in ‘model order and spotless cleanliness’ by the young inhabitants themselves.122 The communist children’s organisation during the interwar years aimed to complement and further develop parental efforts in the home to foster a communist and militant class perspective in the child. Participation in the Party’s children’s wing also offered the child the opportunity to acquire organisational and administrative skills, cultivate skills in self-expression, and develop aspirations relatively independent of overt adult input. Communist activism, therefore, sought to raise the self-esteem of the child. It also offered the child a quite distinct role in life and an opportunity to gain a measure of independence and status outside the formal parental framework. Communist children were usually fully engaged in a life which aimed to cater for their play and cultural improvement, as well as their political development. Through participation in these diverse political, social and cultural activities, the child was introduced to an alternative world and set of values and was able to establish interpersonal bonds with like-minded ‘little comrades’. One of the principal aims of the Party’s children’s organisation was to shape the child into the adult Bolshevik militant of tomorrow, equipped with the appropriate skills and independence of mind to serve as a lead element in the adult labour class movement. Before this transition took place, however, the child would have to pass through the next rung of the Party structure, the Young Communist League, and it is to this organisation that we shall now turn. Notes 1 A Song for British Communist Pioneers, Daily Worker, 24 November 1931, p. 5. 2 There has been no previous study of the communist children’s movement in interwar Britain. Paul Mishler, Raising Reds: The Young Pioneers, Radical Summer Camps, and Communist Political Culture in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) is a valuable account of the children’s movement in the United States, as is Judy Kaplan and Linn Shapiro, Red Diapers: Growing Up in the Communist Left (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998). 3 Workers’ Weekly, 7 March 1924, p. 6. 4 Workers’ Weekly, 19 December 1924, p. 7. Tottenham and Wood Green is mentioned in Workers’ Weekly, 9 May 1924, p. 6. 5 See Workers’ Weekly, 14 March 1924, p. 6, and 16 May 1924, p. 4.

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6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34

35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

Speeches and Documents of the Sixth (Manchester) Conference of the CPGB, 17–19 May 1924, p. 44. Workers’ Weekly, 7 March 1924, p. 6. Young Worker, 21 December 1925, p. 4. NMLH. CP/YCL/01/01. A Congress of Young Fighters: A Report of the Fourth Congress of the YCL, Sheffield AEU Institute, 18 – 20 December 1926, p. 28. Communist Review, 2:4 (February 1930), p. 75. Workers’ Weekly, 21 November 1924, p. 6, and 17 July 1925, p. 6. Workers’ Weekly, 17 October 1924, p. 4. Workers’ Weekly, 17 July 1925, p. 6. Ibid. Young Worker, 5 August 1925, p. 4. Report of the Seventh (Glasgow) National Congress of the CPGB, 30 May–1 June 1925, p. 162. Young Worker, 2 September 1925, p. 4. Young Worker, 16 September 1925, p. 4. Workers’ Weekly, 26 February 1926, p. 4. Ibid. Workers’ Weekly, 7 March 1924, p. 6. Daily Worker, 9 January 1931, p. 4. Workers’ Weekly, 21 November 1924, p. 6. A Congress of Young Fighters, p. 29. Workers’ Weekly, 21 November 1924, p. 6. See, for example, Workers’ Weekly, 17 July 1925, p. 6. See Workers’ Weekly, 7 March 1924, p. 6, and 26 February 1926, p. 4. Workers’ Weekly, 7 March 1924, p. 6. Workers’ Life, 1 April 1927, p. 2. Mary Docherty, A Miner’s Lass: Memoirs by Mary Docherty (Preston: M. Docherty, 1992), p. 58. Ibid. NMLH. CP/YCL/01/02. Report of the Fifth National Congress of the YCL, Bethnal Green Town Hall, 24–26 March 1928, p. 16. On communist-Woodcraft Folk collaboration, see Gerald Porter, ‘“The World’s IllDivided”: The Communist Party and progressive song’, in Andy Croft (ed.), A Weapon in the Struggle (London: Pluto, 1998), pp. 173–4. The Woodcraft Folk was founded in 1925 and sought to instill self-confidence and cooperative values in children and young people in the hope that this would help build a world based on equality, friendship and peace. See Fred Reid, ‘Socialist Sunday Schools in Britain, 1892-1939’, in International Review of Social History, 2 (1966), pp. 18–47. The Socialist Sunday Schools movement had gone into decline by the mid-1930s as more militant and secular forms of political activity took centre stage. Ibid., p. 22. Ibid., p. 33, and Docherty, A Miner’s Lass, pp. 27–9. Workers’ Weekly, 21 November 1924, p. 6. Workers’ Life, 1 April 1927, p. 2. Young Worker, 15 December 1925, p. 4. Workers’ Weekly, 21 November 1924, p. 6. Workers’ Weekly, 17 July 1925, p. 6, and Daily Worker, 10 January 1930, p. 10. Daily Worker, 5 March 1930, p. 9. Workers’ Weekly, 21 November 1924, p. 6. Young Worker, 24 September 1927, p. 2. Workers’ Weekly, 26 February 1926, p. 4, and Daily Worker, 29 December 1932, p. 2.

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46 Ibid., and Workers’ Weekly, 23 June 1923, p. 4. 47 NMLH. CP/YCL/01/04. ‘Resolution on Children’s Work’, The Seventh National Congress of the YCL, London, 7–9 July 1933. 48 Ibid. 49 Young Worker, 15 December 1925, p. 4. 50 Workers’ Life, 3 June 1927, p. 4. 51 Workers’ Weekly, 4 January 1924, p. 4. 52 Mary Docherty (ed.), Auld Bob Selkirk: A Man in a Million (Cowdenbeath: M. Docherty, 1996), p. 108. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Docherty, A Miner’s Lass, p. 60. 56 T. A. Jackson, Letter to a Jewish Comrade, 1933. Cited in ‘The lost world of British Communism: Two texts’, New Left Review, 155 (January–February, 1986), pp. 119–20. 57 The Communist, 1:2 (March 1927), p. 75. 58 On the former, see Workers’ Life, 17 June 1927, p. 5. 59 A Congress of Young Fighters, p. 27. 60 Ian MacDougall (ed.), Militant Miners. Recollections of John McArthur, Buckhaven; and Letters, 1924–26, of David Proudfoot, Methil, to G. Allen Hutt (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1981), p. 310. 61 Young Worker, 10 November 1928, p. 1, and The New Line: Documents of the Tenth Congress of the CPGB, Bermondsey, London, 19–22 January 1929, p. 34. 62 Workers’ Life, 18 February 1927, p. 4. 63 Ibid. 64 For a comment on this, see The Communist, 2:7 (August 1927), p. 37. 65 MacDougall (ed.), Militant Miners, p. 319. 66 Workers’ Life, 25 February 1927, p. 4. It is likely that there were only a few editions of The Worker’s Child because I have seen no further references to it in communist literature. 67 A Congress of Young Fighters, p. 28. 68 Ibid. 69 Workers’ Life, 17 June 1927, p. 5. 70 ‘Young Comrades’ League’, The Ninth Congress of the CPGB: Reports, Theses and Resolutions, Caxton Hall, Salford, October 1927, p. 34. 71 Ibid., p. 104. See also Young Worker, 28 January 1928, p. 2. 72 Young Worker, 14 January 1928, p. 2. 73 Report of the Fifth National Congress of the YCL, p. 14. 74 See the debate on this, in Young Worker, 21 January 1928, p. 3. 75 Mentioned in Daily Worker, 9 January 1931, p. 4. 76 Ibid. 77 On the ‘liquidation’, see RGASPI. RC495/38/18, fos. 99–107. English Commission. 13 August 1930. 78 Daily Worker, 23 April 1931, p. 2, and 28 May 1931, p. 4. 79 Daily Worker, 21 September 1931, p. 3. 80 Daily Worker, 29 October 1931, p. 4. 81 Daily Worker, 10 December 1931, p. 6. 82 See Daily Worker, 10 December 1931, p. 6, 15 November 1932, p. 2, and 15 December 1932, p. 6. 83 Daily Worker, 23 April 1931, p. 2. 84 Daily Worker, 10 December 1931, p. 6. 85 Daily Worker, 9 April 1932, p. 5. 86 Daily Worker, 6 January 1930, p. 9.

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87 Daily Worker, 3 January 1930, p. 9, 11 January 1930, p. 9, 18 January 1930, p. 9, 27 February 1930, p. 9, and 26 February 1930, p. 9. 88 Daily Worker, 5 May 1931, p. 4. 89 Daily Worker, 1 January 1932, p. 5. 90 ‘Resolution on Children’s Work’, The Seventh National Congress of the YCL. 91 Ibid. 92 Daily Worker, 8 September 1933, p. 3. 93 Daily Worker, 4 September 1934, p. 4, and 4 February 1935, p. 5. 94 Daily Worker, 2 June 1936, p. 6. 95 Daily Worker, 11 August 1936, p. 3. 96 Daily Worker, 25 February 1930, p. 9. 97 Daily Worker, 9 June 1931, p. 3. 98 Daily Worker, 21 September 1931, p. 3. 99 Daily Worker, 1 December 1931, p. 5, and 5 April 1934, p. 4. 100 Daily Worker, 30 December 1932, p. 6. 101 Daily Worker, 29 December 1932, p. 2. 102 Workers’ Life, 18 February 1927, p. 4, and The Communist, 2:7 (August 1927), p. 37. 103 Ibid. 104 NMLH. CP/IND/MISC/1/1. MS. Mick Jenkins, Prelude to Better Days. Autobiography, n.d., p. 114. 105 Docherty, A Miner’s Lass, pp. 57, 53. 106 Daily Worker, 15 November 1932, p. 2. 107 Daily Worker, 23 November 1931, p. 5. 108 Young Worker, 9 July 1927, p. 2. See below, Chapter 3, on the YCL. 109 Workers’ Life, 17 June 1927, p. 5. 110 MacDougall (ed.), Militant Miners, p. 295. Daily Worker, 28 May 1931, p. 4 on the embroidered ‘kneckerchiefs’. 111 ‘Resolution on Children’s Work’, The Seventh National Congress of the YCL. 112 Report of the Fifth National Congress of the YCL, p. 15. 113 Young Worker, 14 January 1928, p. 2. 114 Docherty, A Miner’s Lass, p. 53. 115 Young Worker, 21 January 1928, p. 2. 116 Daily Worker, 30 January 1932, p. 8. 117 Daily Worker, 9 February 1933, p. 4. 118 Workers’ Life, 13 May 1927, p. 3, and 24 June 1927, p. 1. 119 Workers’ Life, 16 August 1929, p. 2. 120 Mishler, Raising Reds, p. 108. 121 Eric Weitz, Creating German Communism: From Popular Protests to Socialist State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 234–43. 122 Young Worker, 16 March 1929, p. 4.

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3 A bright and purposeful life: youth and the Young Communist League

I was, at the same time, very impressed by the young Communists themselves, who were like no other young people I had ever known … They even quoted poetry …1

Like a responsible parent body, the CPGB took steps to cater for the next generational cohort of communist activists, the youth. As with the CPGB, the Party’s youth organisation, the YCL, came into being following a Unity Conference when representatives of the Young Workers’ League and the International Communist School Movement met at a special delegate Conference in Birmingham in August 1921 and decided on formal unity.2 Once this decision had been ratified by a referendum of branches, the YCL was formed in October 1921. The League would have its own Constitution and rules, an Executive Committee and its own newspaper, the Young Communist. In one of its first statements, in November 1921, the newly-formed League called on young workers to ‘Rouse’ and ‘get into the YCL and line up with the advance guard of the working-class against your oppressors’.3 But what type of organisation were young workers being invited to join? Further, what type of life and experience would they find on entering this new youth movement? As with the adult Party, it was decisions that were taken outside Britain which would mainly determine the form of organisation of the YCL. These decisions arrived at by the international communist movement, invariably at Moscow’s behest, would define the YCL’s standing and role, the nature of its activities, which body or bodies would exercise authority over it, the degree of independence it had, and its relationship with the Party. As to the type of life and experience that recruits found on joining the YCL, there was the inevitable regimentation and discipline that one was bound to find in a body that would be designed on the Russian Leninist model. Particularly in its early years, League life and activity tended towards the ascetic, self-abnegating, austere and instrumental. In this early phase the YCL in many ways resembled the adult Party, in that it functioned as a younger version of it. Because the YCL was seen as a vital

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recruiting school for future adult activists, the Party’s revolutionary reserve, its ethos, methods of work and practices came to mirror those of the Party. Another factor contributing to the austere atmosphere surrounding the early YCL was the Comintern and British Party obsession with workplace agitation over all other forms of activity. Although some responded positively to the circumstances they found in this early League and discovered therein a world of fulfilment and excitement, many other recruits, actual and potential, were put off. Indeed, part of the YCL story, which did at least improve as the 1930s unfolded, is one of a strenuous, though often unsuccessful, effort to attract and retain recruits. By the late 1920s, in a trend which was carried forward to the 1930s, the YCL was responding creatively to this recruitment and ‘image’ problem. At this point, it was actively endeavouring to de-emphasise the more austere and overly instrumentalist nature of its approach. In conjunction with this, it sought to improve and develop its social, cultural and aesthetic practices by way of heightening its general appeal to young people. This effort to aestheticise communism by ‘Brightening League life’ was also intended to make the experience of YCL membership more positive, fulfilling and attractive. Certainly, by the mid-1930s this social and cultural reorientation, alongside the more politically and tactically astute Popular Front policy, was bearing fruit in terms of the YCL’s appeal, recruitment figures, and the quality of social and cultural life it offered its members. By the time the first recruits started to enter the YCL on its foundation in October 1921, some of the most important decisions regarding its status, organisational structure and role within Britain’s communist movement had already been made. The origins of these decisions can be traced to the moment the Communist Youth International (CYI) convened its founding conference in Berlin in November 1919. From that point, the Russian Bolsheviks sought to exercise control over the organisation and direction of the youth international and its constituent national youth organisations and eliminate the inclination towards independence and federalism that had been a feature of the international youth movement in the period prior to the 1917 Revolution.4 By the time of CYI’s Second Congress, which convened in Moscow in July 1921 after an abortive attempt to stage the proceedings at Jena in Germany the previous April, the CYI and the national youth bodies had been effectively shaped in the image of the Russian Bolshevik party. It was the Third World Congress of the Comintern which met in Moscow in June 1921, just prior to the CYI’s Second Congress, and particularly the ‘theses on the youth question’ as adopted by the Congress, that formally set the seal on this process.5 The outcome of this near two-year Russian effort to configure the youth organisations along Leninist lines was a youth international tightly bound to the Comintern as a constituent member. This effectively meant the subordination of the youth international, the respective national youth bodies and, ultimately, the young people aligning themselves with the communist project, to Moscow and its imperatives. Institutional ties to the Comintern also obliged the CYI, its national youth organs, and young

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communists everywhere, to give unstinting support to the goals of the Soviet Union, as the centre of world communism, at all times. Another feature of this effort to shape the youth movement along Leninist lines was that the youth organisations were obliged to abandon their traditional urge towards political independence, federalism, and autonomy of decision making. Henceforth, national youth organisations attached to the CYI, including the soon-to-be-formed British YCL, were assigned a more circumscribed, auxiliary role supporting their respective communist parties. This reduced role would see the political subordination of communist youth organisations to the adult communist parties. For example, young communists would be bound to adopt the political programme of their adult communist party as their own programme and were only enjoined to mobilise youth behind party policies and party-inspired initiatives. They were also required to defer to their adult parties on questions of political tactics. All these processes would take place within a framework of centralisation and strict discipline. There were some concessions to autonomy. Although they were under the political direction of the adult parties, the Comintern did grant organisational independence to the youth organisations. This would give the British YCL some degree of autonomy in relation to the Party, or at least the perception of autonomy if not the reality. In addition, because the YCL was a section of the CYI, it was ultimately responsible to this body rather than the British Party.6 This meant that in the event of a dispute or differences with the adult Party, the YCL could defer to the CYI. This measure of autonomy in principle did at least confer on young communists the feeling that they had some discretion in their dealings with their older comrades. Because it was organisationally bound to the CYI, and had been informed that ‘the YCL “places international discipline above national Party discipline”’, recalled the 1920s YCL activist Margaret McCarthy, ‘we felt ourselves intellectually, emotionally, and in activity superior to the Party members. We felt ourselves not only leading the youth of the world, but we believed ourselves even leading the Party.’7 The Comintern’s Fifth Congress which convened in Moscow in July 1924 would represent the final stage in the application of Bolshevisation to international communism and its constituent elements. At this Congress it was decided to apply comprehensively the principles of Bolshevisation to the national communist parties.The Fourth CYI Congress which met in Moscow immediately following the CI Congress dutifully resolved to do likewise with the youth organisations.8 Besides imposing a greater degree of ideological uniformity, centralisation and discipline on the various organs of world communism, Bolshevisation also charged communist youth bodies, in imitation of the adult parties, to organise themselves more effectively on the basis of factory cells or nuclei as a condition for developing into ‘mass organisations’.9 The move towards reorganising on the basis of nuclei occurred earlier, with the July 1921 Conferences, but progress had been too slow for the Comintern’s liking.

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As the British YCL attempted to ‘take off’ in the first half of the 1920s this, then, was the operational setting within which it would operate. When it was formed, and in line with Comintern and CYI requirements, the YCL became politically subordinate to the adult Party, effectively assuming a subaltern role in the British communist movement, at least on the more fundamental political issues such as those relating to policy and tactics. On 5–6 August 1922 the YCL held its First National Conference, at the Brotherhood Church Hall in London. At this initial stage of its development, branches had been established in London, Sheffield, Liverpool, Manchester, Barrow, Porth, Leith ‘and a number of other industrial centres’.10 Formal relations with the international communist youth movement were also being put in place. The British YCL had representation on the Executive Committee of the CYI (ECCYI) at the its Third Congress in December 1922.11 With expectations of growth high in these formative years, the age stipulation for membership was set out, with those under twenty-one years required to join the YCL where they would remain until age twenty-four, whereby they were then required to enter the CPGB’s adult wing.12 There was great expectation in the Party that young people would bring to the communist project their unique brand of energy and exuberance and an unfettered idealism that would serve as a moral exemplar to older members. As the Party press told it, ‘the YCL participates in all the activities of the adult Party, giving to the movement the fire and enthusiasm which youth alone can supply’.13 Despite this initial excitement, there was to be no spectacular early ‘take off’ for the YCL. The CYI was evidently unimpressed by the YCL’s early development, calling the League tactically naïve and romantic.14 The Party, too, admitted that, at least up to mid-1923, the YCL was in a ‘bad condition’ and suffered from a ‘weak’ leadership.15 When the YCL’s Second National Conference gathered at the Brotherhood Church Hall on 27–28 October 1923, although thirty-one branches were represented, the League remained hamstrung by a ‘small membership’.16 At this Conference, in an effort to inject drive into the faltering League, a new EC was elected and William Rust, an ardent Leninist and Comintern loyalist, was confirmed as the YCL’s new Secretary.17 In the same vein, the Conference also moved the YCL further along the road of shaping itself in accordance with Comintern instructions when it discussed ways of implementing the goal of restructuring the League on the basis of ‘workshop nuclei’, or factory groups.18 The existing form of area YCL branch was to remain, with a remit to oversee this apparently more essential work being undertaken by the communist cells in the industrial sphere.19 During the next phase of the YCL’s development, at least up to 1927, this stress on ‘mass work’, that is augmenting the young communist presence in the factories, workshops and trade unions, a process that accelerated after the July 1924 instruction to Bolshevise the parties and youth bodies, became the principal means by which the League sought to draw young workers into its ranks.This over-emphasis on agitation and propaganda at the point of production

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would lead to a serious neglect of other areas of work, however, including activities in the social and cultural sphere, ensuring that the YCL’s activites were narrowly cast. In terms of this chapter’s main concern, this obsession with the workplace also rendered the experience of membership quite specific and somewhat one-dimensional. Like the children who entered the communist children’s movement, young people who joined the YCL were offered a quite distinct experience which marked it out from that which could be found in other youth organisations of the period. There were a number of such organisations. There were the so-called ‘bourgeois’ youth organisations, namely the Boys’ and Girls’ Brigades, the Church Lads’ Brigade, the YMCA and the YWCA, the Girl Guides and the Boy Scouts. The experience proletarian boys found on entering the latter organisation, for example, could not have been more different to that of the life of mainly workplace agitation they encountered in the communist youth movement. In the Scouts, on the other hand, working-class boys were encouraged to play sports and partake of a carefully staged, communally organised outdoor life that included rambling and camping excursions enlivened by games, campfire stories and songs. There was attractive Scout paraphernalia on offer, such as the awarding of merit badges. There was also the allure of martial music and display in the form of bugles and bands, and the ritual saluting of flags to build group loyalty. Communists recognised that the Scout experience had a definite aim. These pastimes, paraphernalia and rituals were profoundly ideological in their seduction and in the messages that they aimed to instil in the impressionable minds of young working-class boys. As well as acting to initiate recruits into the social norms and culture of the ‘reactionary’ Boy Scouts, they served to transmit ideals that the established order in 1920s Britain held dear. These were loyalty to King, Country and Empire, Christian values and respect for authority and traditional British virtues, the latter assumed to correspond to the values of the middle class. The Scouts was also a potential strike-breaking instrument and promoted militarist and chauvinist propaganda, while the professed Scout aim of developing ‘good citizenship’, charged one CPGB critic, was code for encouraging ‘submission to the laws of property and obedience to employers’.20 If the Boy Scouts experience had a definite aim in that it sought to ‘pacify’ working-class boys by exposing them to bourgeois influences and propaganda, it appeared that the youth organisations of the contemporary labour movement performed a similar pacifying function. Apparently, these alternative labour youth bodies, specifically the Labour League of Youth and the Independent Labour Party’s (ILP) Guild of Youth represented ‘reserves of reformism’ which diverted young workers from class struggle and their natural home in the YCL.21 Moreover, the ‘reformist’ youth bodies apparently indulged in frivolous social and leisure activities. As one YCL activist contemptuously commented, ‘their [the reformist youth organisations] main activities consist of rambles and dances with very little political discussion’.22 The point was put more forcefully by an article

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in the Party press in July 1925.When young workers ‘look around them for some explanation of the mess they are in, some leadership towards a better life’, the article stressed, they discover on reading the ILP press the sorts of activities engaged in by the Guild of Youth. For example, in the Gloucester Guild, writes the New Leader: ‘“Rambles are held every Sunday, and a cycling club has been started”. The Hackney comrades have adopted an open-air policy for summer: “Some very successful rambles have been held, and a rowing club has been formed. A garden party is being held next month”. The Sheffield comrades “still continue to do magnificent work. A sports ground has been hired for the summer months … A midnight ramble was found to be enjoyable and amusing”…’ This frivolity was just too much for the indignant columnist: ‘Is any comment necessary? Or is it sufficient to contrast with these rambles, garden parties, and athletics, the work of the YCL – forming factory groups of young workers, leading them in fights for better wages and conditions …’23 The experience of communist youth, then, at least during this stage of the YCL’s history, was to be quite specific, focused, and radically different from that which young people found on entering alternative youth organisations of the period. This is not to suggest that the YCL’s concerns stopped completely at the workplace. Taking its cue from the anti-war legacy bequeathed to communist youth by Karl Liebknecht, the early YCL was fiercely anti-militaristic.24 It also championed the rights of unemployed British youth, found common cause with anti-colonial movements, and was unstinting in its condemnation of British imperialism. The history of the British Empire, stated William Rust in a characteristically uncompromising rhetorical flourish, ‘is a history of robbery, slavetrading, pillage, oppression, plunder, buccaneering and terror’.25 Also, as we observed in the previous chapter, the YCL officially oversaw the work of the communist children’s movement and took up the cause of proletarian children, such as calling for the provision of free meals for school children and an end to caning in the classroom. Nevertheless, Comintern and CPGB strategy at this stage dictated that the industrial sector should witness the YCL’s main effort.There was much in this agitation that had merit, such as the upholding of young workers' economic rights at work. In a policy statement of this period, the League called for a minimum wage for young workers, as well as a six-hour day, vocational training, two weeks’ annual holiday with pay, and the abolition of night work, overtime, piece work systems and all forms of child labour.26 The Workers’Weekly, as well as the YCL’s newspaper the Young Worker, which replaced the Young Communist in 1924, frequently took up the cause of young engineering workers, metal workers, railway workers and, of course, miners.27 But there were always going to be obstacles to workplace agitation which limited its potential to excite the imagination of young proletarians or yield substantial numbers of joiners, not least ‘employer terrorism’ against communist activists and a reluctance on the part of many young workers to allow their workplace discontents to be channelled along communist lines. Unsurprisingly,

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by May 1924, there was precious little in the way of positive news to report, with only eighteen workshop nuclei in existence, the majority concentrated in coalfield areas.28 At this point, membership stood at 500 in thirty-one branches.29 The drive towards developing ‘mass work’ was still faltering the following year. During the first few months of 1925 the total YCL membership was still only 500.30 To compound the problem of low membership, it was reported in May that only 40 per cent of recruits were drawn from the working proletariat, with very few of these employed in the large industrial units.31 At this juncture, the only League District organisations were in London, Glasgow, Manchester, and Yorkshire.32 There appeared to be signs of an upturn by the time of the YCL’s Third National Conference which met at the Socialist Hall, Manchester, on 11–12 July 1925, when membership registered at around 600, but this hardly amounted to the longed-for ‘mass’ communist youth movement.33 Undaunted by the reality of poor membership returns and dutifully complying with CYI directives, the communist leadership continued in its efforts to push the YCL down the path of Bolshevisation and so-called ‘mass work’. Speaking to the CPGB’s Seventh National Congress, which met in Glasgow a few weeks before the YCL Conference, the League’s fraternal delegate William Rust impressed on Party delegates that the forthcoming Third Conference of the League would 'be a Congress of bolshevisation’, a Congress of mass work.34 It would be inappropriate to assign responsibility for this preoccupation with industrial work to CYI directives alone. YCL leaders like William Rust were imbued with a millenarian optimism that history had arrived at the stage of the breakdown of capitalism in Britain and that, like a young Gulliver, British proletarian youth was at the point of awakening or rising up. There were frequent references in YCL and Party literature to ‘the awakening young workers’, ‘the awakening political consciousness’ of proletarian youth, or the ‘new generation that is awakening’.35 Rust’s peroration to the YCL’s Fifth National Congress in 1928 provides a good example of the unquenchable revolutionary optimism that underpinned YCL workplace agitation during these years. ‘We march forward united and determined, with no doubts or hesitations. The enemy is strongly entrenched in the citadel of capitalism and reformism, but we are undismayed, for history is on our side and Leninism is our guide. The final victory of the revolutionary working class is assured’.36 To Rust, it seemed logical and imperative that battle with the ‘capitalist enemy’ had to be joined at the point where the class struggle was most acute, in the workplace. By organising ‘right inside the [work]shop’ where the young communists are employed, in the mines, mills and factories, he wrote in 1925, we are taking the daily battle into the very ‘strongholds of capitalism’.37 The simmering discontent in Britain’s coalfields as 1926 approached, the ensuing General Strike and miners’ lock-out, seemed to herald the onset of a genuine revolutionary opportunity and vindicate these assumptions regarding the merits of industrial agitation. Young communists threw themselves into the

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fray with typical enthusiasm and commendable courage. Many were arrested, some receiving prison terms, including William Rust and Dave Springhall who became Acting Secretary in Rust’s involuntary absence. A strike bulletin, The Young Striker, was produced and League members worked tirelessly on behalf of the miners. Grateful young miners flocked to their local League branches to sign enrolment forms and when the dust of industrial combat settled at the end of 1926 the YCL, if not the labour movement and the miners, appeared in a healthy state. At the League’s Fourth National Conference at Sheffield on 18–20 December, Rust reported that the League’s membership had trebled since 1925 which, compared with the figure of 600 recorded at the Third National Congress in July 1925, put it at a more presentable 1,800.38 The League’s organisational framework had expanded accordingly. It now had eight District organisations, some of which oversaw a mushrooming of branches, as with the twenty-six branches in the South Wales District.39 The sharp influx of young miners into the League was reflected at the Sheffield Conference when 50 per cent of the eightyone delegates present were miners.40 The welcome presence of proletarian miners also meant that the social-class profile of the YCL’s membership was now at last weighted towards the much coveted industrial workers which, again, appeared to justify the overly industrial approach. But early 1927 would show that these signs of ‘improvement’ were an aberration, a parenthesis in the YCL’s development up to this point. By midMarch 1927 between 75 and 90 per cent of the new recruits won during the previous year had melted away.41 In the previous month there had even been talk of the League’s complete collapse due to unresolved financial problems.42 Clearly, the communist youth movement needed to rethink its approach and develop other means of persuasion beyond the narrow, instrumentalist nature of mass work if it hoped to retain members, attract new ones, and render its image and activities more pleasing to both. By now, the rather austere nature of the YCL’s political work, as well as its inner life, was becoming apparent to Party and YCL strategists with adjectives like ‘barren’, ‘dry’ and ‘uninteresting’ being applied to it.43 In relation to the YCL’s inner life, there was concern about the overly formal manner in which organisational business in the branches was conducted. To some extent, the ‘barren’ nature of branch life up to this point emanated from the way the youth movement was perceived by the parent Party.To a large extent, the League performed the role of Communist Party surrogate and thus came to resemble the latter in many ways. As the Party’s ‘revolutionary reserve’, ‘the natural recruiting and training ground of the CP’, as the Workers’ Weekly described it in 1923, the early YCL was moulded very much in the adult Party’s image.44 In its practices, duties and methods of work, and the atmosphere and business of its inner branch life, it appeared as a Communist Party in miniature. In these formative years, the YCL had not established a sufficiently separate identity for itself, least of all an ethos and set of activities that was likely to excite the imagination of young people, communist or otherwise. Accordingly, other forms of

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activity that may have appealed to youth, including social activities, were to be found on the margins of League life. Nevertheless, there had been some efforts to introduce lighter features into League life in these earlier years by way of seeking to bring more colour into the communist experience.We know that by June 1923,YCL members had organised cycling, rambling and cricket sessions in Manchester, rambling and football in Barrow, camping in Sheffield, a gymnastics class in Shipley, and cycling and cricket in Fife.45 Further south, in the London area, young communists were going cycling in Croydon, playing football in Peckham, cricket in Stepney and Bethnal Green and participating in all these three activities in Kentish Town. The YCL group in Tooting, with forty members of both sexes in total, enjoyed similar pastimes to which they added boxing, swimming, tennis and netball.46 In the same period, Dundee YCL boasted a ‘sports organiser’, Frank Tennant, who wrote of his plans to develop YCL football, swimming and cycling clubs in the Dundee area.47 Nevertheless, these early examples of ‘lighter’ League activity rarely emanated from Party or YCL policy efforts, usually springing instead from the initiatives of enthusiastic young communists in the local branches. There were some examples of enlightened thought from Party figures in these early years but evidently not enough to galvanise thinking in other leadership quarters. As early as January 1921, William McLaine, a CPGB foundation member, called on the Party to provide indoor and outdoor games for the recreation and entertainment of its younger members, in order to develop ‘the fraternal spirit’ but more importantly to bring ‘a little colour’ in the lives of young workers.48 ‘We must alter our methods’, McLaine warned the CPGB, ‘or we cannot hope to get that regular flow of young people into our movement that we have to get if we wish to be anything other than a collection of branch meeting oracles.’49 Unfortunately for McLaine, the determined effort to ‘brighten’ communist youth work that he pressed for would not occur until much later.That the League was so sluggish in developing the recreational side of its work had quite a bit to do with its leadership during the early to mid-1920s. William Rust went out of his way to emphasise that the communist youth organisation had authentic revolutionary credentials and was engaged in ‘serious’ revolutionary work in the place where it really mattered, in the workshop. He decried any suggestion that the YCL was a ‘social club’ organisation. Like the Party, Rust told the delegates to the CPGB’s Seventh Congress in late May 1925, the YCL concentrates ‘its work in the mines, mills, and factories. It certainly is not merely a social club movement.’50 In his What the Young Communist League Stands For, which came out a month after the CPGB Congress, he reiterated the point in an even more forceful fashion: ‘The YCL is not an organisation of cultural faddists and intellectual idlers who spend their time building castles in the air. It is a mass organisation aiming at enrolling every young worker in its ranks … a League of young workers from the mines, mills and factories ….’ This stress on the workshop and the building of YCL factory nuclei ‘means that the YCL is not a social and cultural club, but is

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a real young workers’ organisation which can lead the fight against the boss because it is organised where the struggle takes place’.51 Furthermore, Rust continued, this orientation and seriousness of intent meant that the League was not ‘a mere social, cultural and pleasant Sunday afternoon amusement organisation’ along the lines of the other labour youth organisations.52 By late 1927, the Party and YCL leadership experienced a quite dramatic change of heart. From this point, they began to go down the road of their rivals in the other youth organisations in seeing the relevance of social, leisure and cultural activities for youth. These activities were no longer viewed as a peripheral factor in League life, a pleasurable though largely inconsequential side-show to the more fundamental work carried on by communist youth ‘nuclei’ in the workshops. What prompted this change of heart? To a large extent it was motivated by an urge to plug the leakage of new recruits that followed from the high-point recorded at the League’s Fourth Congress in December 1926. In a related sense, the Party and YCL leadership at last began to realise that the communist youth movement required a more appealing image, and that the communist experience for young people needed to be rendered more exciting and varied. In this respect, there was by now a grudging acceptance that the more varied and colourful methods of their rivals for the hearts and minds of youth spoke more eloquently to the youth experience.There had previously been a few lone voices pointing out the obvious to the communist leadership. When, in 1921, William McLaine urged the Party to put on recreation and entertainment for its youngest members so as to enhance communism’s appeal to youth, he was mindful of the fact that the ‘bourgeois’ youth organisations had been using ‘colourful’ methods to attract and retain recruits for a number of years, with some success. ‘Young boys in particular’, he pointed out to his comrades, ‘will gravitate towards those organisations that can provide some relief to the dullness of life. It is because of this that the Boy Scouts and the Church Lads' Brigade movement are so successful.’53 Two years later another enlightened communist, himself an ex-Patrol Leader of a Boy Scout Troop, said that Baden Powell ‘would give to the boys of the working class bugle bands, camps, proficiency badges [and] country rambles … in order to seize hold of them in their red-hot stage of enthusiasm, and thus be able to mould them into useful tools of the capitalist class. We of the Revolutionary Movement must give them the same things in order to mould their outlook along working class and revolutionary lines.’54 Another activist expressed a similar sentiment. The Scouts and the other bourgeois youth bodies will continue to flourish, he wrote,‘until the YCL formulates and carries into action a programme as attractive and effective’.55 The Marxian theory of surplus value, he added drolly, ‘will not appeal to a young boy as much as the opportunity for a football match, a Sunday ramble, an evening cycle run or a swimming competition’.56 Mick Jenkins, who joined the Manchester YCL in 1923 aged sixteen after a sojourn in the Boy Scouts, admitted that during his spell in the latter he ‘enjoyed the open air activities, the rambles,

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the annual camp, the social evenings’ and even ‘the service to fellow man ideals and the cleanliness’.57 From late 1927, then, the British communist leadership was set on the new course. ‘Why must we brighten League life?’, asked the Young Worker rhetorically in January 1928. ‘Because we are out to become a mass youth organisation, and not to remain a small sect’, came the reply.58 This intention to ‘Brighten League life’ was accompanied by the ringing declaration at the YCL’s Fifth National Congress, which met at Bethnal Green Town Hall in March 1928, that ‘the practical solution of this problem is one of our most important immediate tasks, which assumes a role of both political and organisational importance’.59 This new orientation was to reach into all aspects of League life, from the eradication of the more austere aspects of organisational work at branch meetings, to improving the overall quality of social and cultural life offered to young communists. The new course would provide a template for the communist youth movement during the next phase of its growth and development during the remainder of the 1920s and through the 1930s. It also signalled a desire to formulate a separate and distinct identity for the youth movement and break with the position of the past whereby the YCL merely resembled, in its culture and methods of propaganda, the adult Communist Party. One of the first targets of the new approach was branch business. ‘Brightening League life does not mean merely social activity; it means we must liven up and render more attractive all our activities’, announced the Young Worker in January 1928.60 This meant, for example, ‘more interesting’ branch meetings. ‘In many branches, meetings consist only of reading long correspondence’ the article went on to explain, leaving little time for political discussions, while the ‘new member finds himself often overwhelmed by a mass of details to which he is not yet accustomed’.61 The YCL’s Fifth National Congress two months later pressed the point home when it urged that special efforts should be made to ‘ensure a brighter League life in each branch’. ‘The dull and barren inner life’, the Congress concluded, ‘has driven away new members and left closed to us an important avenue of recruitment’.62 Accordingly, it was decided that the quality of branch life would be enhanced ‘with the elimination of useless detail’ in meetings, ‘the elimination of all spirit of “back-biting” and the conduct of all discussions in a friendly and comradely spirit’, and ‘the abolition of the superior and patronising attitude of older members towards recruits’.63 The business of the branch would be enlivened further if the example of South Wales was emulated. The Welsh comrades, the Congress informed the rest of the youth movement, open ‘each branch meeting with songs’ or assign ‘an interval for that purpose’. Another suggestion was that ‘mass and individual recitations could also be used to effect’.64 The attempt to foster a stimulating environment for young communists did not end there. By 1929 the YCL was being pushed to enliven its meetings ‘with short sketches, orchestras, mass singing, lantern slides, and films’.65

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Reshaping branch business was only one feature of the new atmosphere.The Fifth Congress pressed the YCL to develop ‘in all directions’, to include ‘the organisation of political games, plays, choirs, libraries, socials [and] rambles’, while ‘during the summer each district should organise a camp’.66 The latter activities of rambling and camping were to be one of the mainstays of the new approach. Inclement weather seems to have been no obstacle to the new spirit as when, on Boxing Day 1927, YCL members from branches in the Manchester area braved falling snow by setting out on a sixteen-mile ramble.67 Communist youngsters were often exposed to a rich and varied social experience on these ‘brighter’ rambling and camping excursions. Take the District Camp organised by Tyneside YCL at Finchale Abbey in County Durham over the Whitsun holiday period in June 1928. During the ‘three wonderful days’ of the Camp, ‘which were packed to excess with fun, happiness and above all with “grub”’, the young male and female members went on walks, had ‘dips in the river’, staged ‘an impromptu concert round the camp fire’, and had ‘sing-songs complete with violins and banjos’.68 The Finchale Abbey Camp was ‘the first large-scale experiment made by the [Tyneside] DLC (District League Committee) to operate “brighter League life”’ and was pronounced ‘a rollicking success’.69 These rambling and camping occasions helped develop a sense of peer camaraderie, as well as improving interbranch relations within a YCL District by bringing members together where hitherto there had been limited scope for social contact. Contact with the calming influence of rural England also reinvigorated spirits dulled by grimy towns, industrial toil, and the pace of capitalist modernity. Although there was none of the sinister ‘blood and soil’ romanticism that characterised fascist and Nazi meditations on nature and the rural landscape, these excursions to pleasurable rural destinations could inspire impressive flights of imaginative poetic fantasy, even in normally hard-boiled pragmatic, materialistic-minded young British Bolsheviks. Thus, experience of life ‘under canvas’ inspired the following lines from one YCL member: A field of golden buttercups gently rising to meet the tall trees and cool glades of the forest. Midst this, the tents, white in the morning sunshine. The Red Flag flutters from its improvised staff, a dead branch, driven into the ground.70

Sport also figured in the new line. The YCL leadership had expressed an interest in the goal of workers’ sport even before they embraced the ‘brightening’ initiative.71 By the time of its Fifth National Congress, the League was playing a leading role in building the British Workers’ Sports Federation (BWSF) and steering it towards communist goals.72 At this point, the drive to develop workers’ sport became entwined in the effort to brighten the YCL’s life.The workers’ sports clubs that were being created with the help of the YCL, for example, were held up as an example of ‘an organisational form of brighter League life’.73 Alongside

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organised sport in the shape of the BWSF, local YCL groups brightened their activities by running soccer and cricket teams which competed in local leagues. Mick Jenkins and his Manchester YCL comrades ran two such football teams ‘fully equipped with footballs, shorts and jerseys’ which ‘had quite a following’, as well as a cricket team during the summer months.74 Fife YCL, too, had a soccer team which played in competitive tournaments.75 The League also increased its general provision of ‘socials’ and dances in the wake of the new line. ‘The Sheffield YCL is making a move to brighten League life’, announced a Sheffield comrade in March 1928 and, accordingly, we have ‘held a highly entertaining social’ complete with ‘dancing and revolutionary songs’ and a charade ‘which baffled all present’.76 East End young communists, too, were treated to socials and dances every Sunday evening courtesy of Stepney YCL, who laid on a band and ‘good varieties by first-class artistes’.77 One gets a sense of the effort and enthusiasm that went into this ‘brighter life’ project from the recollection of the Manchester communist Mick Jenkins. On one occasion in this period, Jenkins recalled, he and the YCL group in the Burnley and Nelson area ‘worked and slaved’ for ‘days on end’ so that they could convert an old mill into a regular dance venue for members and local youngsters.78 With the help of ‘an improvised band that could swing it to the joy of the youngsters’, these dances, or ‘Penny hops’ because the entrance charge was one penny, apparently proved quite an attraction for local youngsters. ‘Brighter life’ YCL socials were not exclusively light-hearted affairs where hard-working activists could recuperate, or find brief respite from communist political work or Party discipline.There was a strong element of cultural uplift to many socials, such as the one organised by Manchester YCL at the start of 1929. For the edification of the audience, there was a violinist, a pianist and a gypsy ballet dance by Madame Chalmers of the Workers’ Theatre Movement.79 This was followed by Manchester YCL’s ‘first attempt at mass recitation’ when a group of comrades recited Charles Ashleigh’s ‘Liebknecht’, for which they were ‘greatly applauded’.These moments of cultural uplift were interspersed with other forms of entertainment, such as ‘fun competitions’ and the by now customary ‘mass singing of revolutionary songs’.80 In a similar spirit of seeking enlightenment, Ashington YCL members were acting short sketches by April 1928.81 A particularly imaginative attempt to raise young communists’ cultural level and enrich the membership experience, was the Eisteddfod that South Wales District YCL held in the ‘Little Moscow’ of Mardy in January 1928. This was the first British communist Eisteddfod, or competitive concert, of its kind and attracted a large host of local YCL activists, communist children and Party members, some 400 in total. The quality of each solo, quartette, choral item and recitation rendered by the choirs and individuals on display demonstrated to the League that ‘amongst the working class we have comrades who are gifted with a musical talent’.82 With the imaginative turn towards aetheticising YCL life, the experience of membership certainly became more attractive, exciting and fulfilling for young

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communists compared with that which was on offer in the previous period. Although this attempt to ‘brighten League life’ would be pursued with suitable communist ardour over the next few years, it did not lead immediately to the desired influx of new recruits.This was not because the approach was flawed but that it was being applied at a time when the British communist movement was labouring under the handicap of the new Comintern-inspired political line of 'Class against Class'. It should be said though, that influential elements in the YCL leadership, including William Rust, Dave Springhall and Walter Tapsell, were enthusiastic advocates of the new ultra-left policy. Indeed it is a paradox of the British communist movement that the turn towards ‘brightening’YCL life should come about when the political line being embraced by the League leadership at this point was so lacking in strategic insight. One of the problems, of course, was that League leaders from the YCL’s inception, such as Rust and Tapsell, performed dual roles in that they were simultaneously YCL leadership figures and active participants in internal Party and high Comintern politics. Far too often they viewed matters through the prism of the latter and did not focus closely enough on the experience of being young communists. Aping the rhetoric that came out of the Sixth Congress of the CI in Moscow (17 July–1 September 1928) when the new line received clear formulation, the British YCL leadership declared confidently in 1929 that ‘we are witnessing the stage of the breakdown of the domination of capitalism in Great Britain and the beginning of the era when the working class enters the path for the struggle for power’.83 The moral, of course, was unmistakeable. The communist youth movement should follow the lead of the parent Party in the adult sphere by asserting its exclusive right to lead the masses of working youth and severing all links with ‘reformist’ labour bodies, now stigmatised as ‘social-fascist’. By the time of the YCL’s Sixth National Congress in Manchester in 1929 the League leadership was announcing ‘the necessity for a decisive change in the whole work and method of the League’ consistent with the new line.84 Even more than it was for the Party, the new political line of ‘Class against Class’ was a disaster for the YCL. Within two years of embracing the new policy, the League had virtually ceased to exist. Around April–May 1930, without ceremony or fanfare, the Party ‘liquidated’ it and its ‘inefficient leadership’ in an effort to inject some drive into its performance.85 It is likely that the inefficient YCL leadership that was axed was that of a ‘comrade Douglas’ who presided over the League for a period during ‘Class against Class’ before being eventually ‘expelled’ from its ranks ‘for gross indiscipline and political irresponsibility’, whereupon he was dispatched to South Wales against his will to carry out Party work.86 In June 1930 a Party report stated that the reconfigured League had around 150 members in total.87 This figure mainly comprised pre-liquidation members and a small influx of recruits gained during a recent woollen textiles dispute in the north-west.88 Another official Party report shortly after, over which Harry Pollitt presided, described the condition of the YCL as one of ‘complete

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disorganisation’.89 At this point the YCL’s total membership was given as 300. Additionally, there was said to be no YCL organisation or presence outside of London, Manchester, South Wales and Scotland.90 Like the communist children’s movement in this period, it was clear that the Party’s youth organisation had to be painstakingly rebuilt almost from the ground up. There were signs of improvement by 1932 and 1933. The League acquired a new Secretary, one ‘comrade Spence’.91 Membership levels began to rise, albeit slowly. In May 1932 there were reported to be 882 YCL members.92 A year later the figure had risen to ‘just over a thousand’, mainly distributed throughout the usual centres of Manchester, South Wales, Scotland, and London, with perhaps as high as 40 per cent of the total coming from the latter conurbation.93 It seems that the YCL leadership at this stage, probably during 1933, passed to the Edinburgh communist John Gollan, an effective organiser and charismatic leader. The overall picture remained depressing, though. The YCL’s Seventh National Congress at Canning Town, 7–9 July 1933, admitted that ‘less than 35% of the membership are actually organised on a functioning factory and street cell basis’.94 The YCL’s message was not getting through either. The Young Worker was said to be experiencing a ‘very bad crisis’ with a circulation of just 3,500.95 Major recovery was just around the corner though, courtesy of another shift in Comintern policy to the Popular Front. The turn in policy was brought about by a combination of events and circumstances. To the fore was the catastrophic, wholesale loss of the German Communist Party, the KPD, to Hitlerism and subsequent pressure from rank-and-file activists in the national communist parties who saw clearly that fascism posed a ‘clear and present danger’ rather than socialdemocracy. To this we should add the internal dynamics of the Comintern hierarchy which would see the pro-Popular Front Georgi Dimitrov appointed as CI General Secretary in around May 1934. The new line can thus be dated from May 1934, although the official break with the sectarian inflexibility of ‘Class against Class’ had to wait until the Comintern’s Seventh Congress at Moscow the following year (25 July to 21 August).96 From 1934, then, under John Gollan’s effective leadership, and acting on the requirements of the new line, the YCL reached out to those labour youth organisations it had hitherto maligned as reformist or ‘social-fascist’.The League now invited them to participate in a broad united front of youth in the fight for socialism, social justice for youth on the basis of a ‘Charter of Youth Rights’, and ‘against fascism and war’.97 Efforts were also made to draw Cooperative Youth and youth in the trade union movement into the united front.98 Although the controlling bodies of the Guild of Youth and the Labour League of Youth, the ILP and Labour Party respectively, welcomed the overture they resisted co-option or affiliation of their youth wings by a resurgent YCL. Nevertheless, the YCL’s message of cooperation and unity did resonate with many in the labour youth bodies, particularly at the rank-and-file level, as well as others in the youth and student generation including the University Labour Federation, and its membership profile experienced a welcome lift along with its

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status.99 By 1935 the League’s membership had risen to 2,000.100 By 1938 it had over doubled to 4,600.101 Also, the YCL’s weekly journal, Challenge, had by 1938 a circulation of 20,000.102 Although the League’s main focus during the Popular Front phase was on ‘fascism and war’, which included dispatching YCL volunteers to help defend the Spanish Republic, and the impact of the economic depression on youth, efforts were still made to render the communist experience for youth ‘colourful’ and varied.103 The attempt, which began in 1927, to provide recruits with a positive social and cultural experience as a complement to the political experience, continued into the Popular Front years. In mid-1937 the YCL could boast that ‘we have in our ranks active footballers, dancers, billiard players and physical culture enthusiasts; swimmers, musicians and singers; hikers, campers, rock-climbers, cyclists and marksmen that we will match with anyone’.104 YCL events also acquired an air of pageantry in this period whereby young communists were treated to the aesthetic delights of carefully choreographed display and communist ritual. At the Eighth National YCL Conference in early 1936 (8–9 February) the venue, Bermondsey Town Hall, presented ‘a panorama of youth life’, a ‘cavalcade of the youth movement’, in art, decoration and bold slogans ‘in letters of red and gold’ to the assembled delegates. The hall staged an exhibition, too, which explained through word, pictures, charts and maps ‘the every day life of youth’ and the ‘steady growth’ of the communist youth movement.105 To launch the proceedings, there occurred a review of the members as a preliminary to a march of the members into the Hall behind a band and banners amidst the roll of drums and fanfare of trumpets, a display which concluded with all assembled partaking in the mass singing of the YCL ‘Song of Youth’.106 The following year, and in a similar spirit, Sheffield YCL staged a grand recruitment rally in Sheffield City Hall under the slogan of ‘Health and Happiness of Sheffield’s Youth’ to announce the forthcoming Ninth National YCL Conference at Battersea (25–27 June). As part of the entertainment, alongside the political messages, aspiring communists were treated to physical culture displays, music, and many similar ‘bright items’.107 The YCL-sponsored ‘Festival for Fitness’ at Herne Hill on 11 September 1937, a counter to the Wembley Festival of Youth sponsored by the King George V Jubilee Trust which communists saw as an effort to improve youth fitness in preparation for war, was even more ‘colourful’. Braving adverse weather, around 2,500 spectators witnessed a carefully staged festival of alternative proletarian sport, culture and communist ritual. On show were mass physical training and gymnastics displays, folk dancing, community singing, and a grand ‘Pageant of Youth’ composed of 500 young athletes, ‘a magnificent collection of strong, sturdy young Londoners’ according to the account, displaying banners and flags depicting the struggle of working-class youth for physical fitness and increased access to sports facilities.108 Even more colourful, and the highlight of the Festival, to the delight of the spectators, was the parade of eighty London-based communist girls in coloured

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dresses which formed into a replica of the flag of the Spanish Republican government. As indicated by this colourful parade,YCL activists felt the sense of belonging to a world movement of struggle, of being part of a world pattern, a grand collective enterprise which imparted a deep sense of belonging and emotional attachment to an ideal which transcended the self. Britain’s young communists between the wars felt, in YCL rhetoric of the period, that they were ‘living a life with purpose’, a life of meaning and significance, and that they had found in communist activism fulfilment and companionship which saw bonds forged across the wider ‘family’ network of the world communist diaspora.109 The Lancashire YCL activist Margaret McCarthy, in her powerful autobiography, has given eloquent expression to this dimension to the communist youth experience when she recalled the feeling that enveloped her on hearing Nikolai Bukharin address an international audience of young communist delegates, of which she was one, at a CYI Congress in Moscow in the late 1920s: It was in those moments that we young people, dedicated to hatred, destruction of the old capitalist regime, sanguinary class war and apocalyptic revolution, drew nearer to human love. It was the love and spiritual sympathy of comrade for comrade, united in deep brotherhood, cemented by blood in the fight against atrocious wrong, of day against night, of supreme, absolute good against ancient and pervading evil. We sang our favourite communist hymns: ‘Whirlwinds of danger are raging around us; o’erwhelming forces of darkness assail’; ‘We are the Young Red Guardsmen of the proletariat’; ‘Blood, blood, blood – blood must flow’; ‘Arise, ye starvelings’ – and we meant every word we breathed.110

Notes 1 Margaret McCarthy, YCL joiner. Margaret McCarthy, Generation in Revolt (London: Heinemann, 1953), p. 78. 2 Draft Constitution and Rules: As Adopted by a Special Delegate Conference, Birmingham, 20-26 August 1921. 3 The Communist, 26 November 1921, p. 2. 4 See Richard Cornell, Revolutionary Vanguard:The Early Years of The Communist Youth International, 1914–1924 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982). 5 Ibid. pp. 218–20, 227. 6 See NMLH. CP/YCL/01/01. Statutes and Rules of the YCLGB: Adopted at the Fourth National Congress, Sheffield, 18–20 December 1926. 7 McCarthy, Generation, pp. 134–5. 8 By the time of the Fourth Congress, CYI conferences were mere rubber stamping exercises. By this stage, elements opposed to Russian control of the CYI had been removed from the leadership, leaving an Executive Committee of pro-Comintern functionaries. 9 Cornell, Revolutionary Vanguard, p. 285.

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10 James Klugmann, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain,Volume 1: Formation and Early Years 1919–1924 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1969), p. 224. 11 Cornell, Revolutionary Vanguard, pp. 283–4. 12 Workers’ Weekly, 3 March 1923, p. 4. 13 Workers’ Weekly, 3 March 1923, p. 4. 14 Cited in Andrew Flinn, ‘William Rust: the Comintern’s blue eyed boy?’, in John McIlroy, Kevin Morgan and Alan Campbell (eds), Party People, Communist Lives: Explorations in Biography (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2001), p. 83. 15 Speeches and Documents of the Sixth (Manchester) Conference of the CPGB, 17–19 May 1924, p. 58. 16 See ibid., pp. 58–9, for a report of the YCL Conference. 17 It was a nine-member EC. See Workers’ Weekly, 2 November 1923, p. 4. 18 Speeches and Documents of the Sixth (Manchester) Conference, p. 59. 19 In addition, local YCL groupings were to function within the framework of District organisations. 20 Workers’ Weekly, 2 June 1923, p.6. 21 The Labour League of Youth had started life as the Labour Party’s Young People’s Section in 1924. The Guild of Youth was formed 20–22 April 1924. Despite the communists’ ‘United Front’ rhetoric stressing unity and conciliation within the labour movement, the YCL’s attitude towards these labour youth bodies in this period was elitist and antagonistic.There were some joint ventures undertaken as part of the YCL’s United Front effort, as when all three bodies participated in the visit of a youth delegation to Russia in 1926, but such initiatives were piecemeal and the relationship remained one of mutual suspicion. 22 C. M. Roebuck, Report of the Seventh (Glasgow) National Congress of the CPGB, 30 May–1 June 1925, p. 102. 23 Workers’ Weekly, 10 July 1925, p. 4. 24 See, for example, ‘Young Communists preparing for Liebknecht-Lenin week’, Workers’ Weekly, 12 December 1924, p. 6. 25 William Rust, What the Young Communist League Stands For (London: CPGB, June 1925), p. 7. 26 Ibid., pp. 12–13. 27 See, for example, ‘Young metal workers’, Workers’ Weekly, 26 December 1924, p. 6; ‘For the young miner’, Workers’ Weekly, 9 May 1924, p. 5. 28 Speeches and Documents of the Sixth (Manchester) Conference, p. 59. 29 Ibid. 30 James Klugmann, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1925–1927,Volume 2: The General Strike (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1969), p. 352. 31 Report of the Seventh (Glasgow) National Congress, p. 162. 32 Ibid. 33 Figure estimated by Klugmann, History,Vol. 2, p. 354. 34 Report of the Seventh (Glasgow) National Congress, pp. 102, 100. 35 For examples of the ‘youth awakening’ motif, see The Communist Review, 6:3 (July 1925), p. 133, and Workers’ Weekly, 10 July 1925, p. 4. 36 NMLH. CP/YCL/01/02. Report of the Fifth National Congress of the YCL, Bethnal Green Town Hall, 24–26 March 1928, p. 5. 37 Rust, What the Young Communist League Stands For, pp. 11–12. 38 NMLH. CP/YCL/01/01.William Rust, A Call to the Youth, Opening Speech at the Fourth National Congress of the YCL. 18 December 1926, p. 3. 39 Klugmann, History.Vol. 2, p. 357. Under the YCL’s statutes and rules, upwards of six individuals within the prescribed age range could form a branch. See Statutes and Rules of the YCLGB, p. 5.

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40 ‘The Young Communist League’, The Ninth Congress of the CPGB: Reports,Theses and Resolutions, Caxton Hall, Salford, October 1927, p. 64. 41 Andrew Thorpe, The British Communist Party and Moscow, 1920–43 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 105. 42 Ibid., p. 104. 43 See, for example, NMLH. CP/YCL/01/01. Report of Executive Committee to Fourth National Congress of the YCLGB, AEU Institute, Sheffield. 18–20 December 1926, p. 8. 44 Workers’ Weekly, 3 March 1923, p. 4. 45 Workers’ Weekly, 9 June 1923, p. 4. 46 Ibid. 47 Workers’ Weekly, 14 April 1923, p. 4. 48 The Communist, 13 January 1921, p. 7. 49 Ibid. 50 W. Rust, ‘Fraternal delegate from the YCL’, Report of the Seventh (Glasgow) National Congress, p. 15. 51 Rust, What the Young Communist League Stands For, p. 11–12. 52 Ibid., p. 22. 53 The Communist, 13 January 1921, p. 7. 54 Workers’ Weekly, 21 July 1923, p. 4. 55 Workers’ Weekly, 9 June 1923, p. 4. 56 Ibid. 57 NMLH. CP/IND/MISC/1/1. MS. Mick Jenkins, Prelude to Better Days. Autobiography, n.d., p. 15. 58 Young Worker, 7 January 1928, p. 4. 59 NMLH. CP/YCL/01/02. Report of the Fifth National Congress of the YCL, p. 24. 60 Young Worker, 7 January 1928, p. 4. 61 Ibid. 62 NMLH. CP/YCL/01/02. Report of the Fifth National Congress of the YCL, p. 24. 63 Ibid., p. 25. 64 Ibid. 65 The New Line: Documents of the Tenth Congress of the CPGB, Bermondsey, London, 19–22 January 1929, p. 126. 66 Ibid., p. 11. 67 Young Worker, 7 January 1928, p. 2. 68 Young Worker, 9 June 1928, p. 3. 69 Ibid. 70 Young Worker, 9 June 1928, p. 4. 71 See ‘The Fight For the Mass Workers’ Sports Movement’, in NMLH. CP/YCL/01/01. A Congress of Young Fighters: A Report of the Fourth Congress of the YCL, AEU Institute, Sheffield, 18–20 December 1926, pp. 26–7. 72 NMLH. CP/YCL/01/02. Report of the Fifth National Congress, pp. 11–14. On the BWSF and communist workers’ sport, see Chapter 6. 73 NMLH. CP/YCL/01/02. Report of the Fifth National Congress, p. 25. 74 Mick Jenkins, Prelude, p. 114. 75 Mary Docherty (ed.), Auld Bob Selkirk: A Man in a Million (Cowdenbeath: M. Docherty, 1996), p. 65. 76 Young Worker, 17 March 1928, p. 4. 77 Young Worker, 25 February 1928, p. 3. 78 Jenkins, Prelude, p. 114. 79 Young Worker, 12 January 1929, p. 5. 80 Ibid.

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81 Young Worker, 28 April 1928, p. 4. 82 Young Worker, 21 January 1928, p. 2. 83 NMLH. CP/YCL/01/03. Untitled MS. The Bolshevisation of the Young Communist League of Great Britain, c.1929, p. 1. 84 See report in Communist Review, 1:9 (September 1929), pp. 510–11. 85 On the ‘liquidation’, see RGASPI. RC495/38/18, fos. 99–107. English Commission, 13 August 1930. 86 J. R. Brown, ‘Winning the working youth’, Communist Review, 5:3 (March 1933), pp. 152–3.The ‘culprit’ was probably John L. Douglas who was involved in the youth movement at various points in the 1930s. 87 RGASPI. RC 495/38/24. fos. 6–16. Report on Party Organisation. 17 June 1930. 88 Thorpe, The British Communist Party and Moscow, p. 164. 89 RGASPI. RC 495/38/25, fos. 49–61. The Situation in the CPGB According to the Materials of the British Commission of the Political Secretariat, (August 1930), 8 October 1930. 90 Ibid. 91 RGASPI. RC 495/38/30, fos. 1–72. English Commission. Report by Harry Pollitt, 31 August 1932. 92 Ibid. 93 Brown, ‘Winning’, p. 149. 94 NMLH CP/YCL/01/04. Report of the Central Committee of the Seventh National Congress of the YCL, Canning Town, 7–9 July 1933, p. 6. 95 NMLH. CP/YCL/01/ 04. John Gollan, ‘The Young Worker’. Report to the Seventh National Congress, pp. 2–3. 96 See Kevin McDermott and Jeremy Agnew, The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin (London: Macmillan, 1996). 97 See, for example, Daily Worker, 4 February 1935, p. 5, and John Gollan, ‘We ask for life’. Based on the Report of John Gollan to the Eighth National Conference of the Communist Youth Movement, 1936. 98 See Daily Worker, 17 December 1935, p. 5. 99 See Willie Thompson, The Good Old Cause: British Communism 1920–1991 (London: Pluto, 1992), p. 57. 100 K. Newton, The Sociology of British Communism (London: Allen Lane, 1969), p. 161. 101 Ibid. 102 Noreen Branson, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1927–1941 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1985), p. 182. Originating as a monthly, Challenge was launched as a weekly in January 1937. 103 150 YCL members had joined the International Brigade by mid-1937. See DailyWorker, 15 June 1937, p. 4. 104 NMLH. 329.241. ‘We March To Victory’, Report of the National Council to the Ninth National Conference of the YCL, covering the period February 1936–April 1937, p. 21. 105 Daily Worker, 23 January 1936, p. 2. 106 Ibid. 107 Daily Worker, 24 June 1937, p. 7. 108 Daily Worker, 13 September 1937, p. 5. 109 The Stepney YCL activist Frieda Brown, for example, has written that ‘until I did join the YCL and became involved I just didn’t understand what it meant to be alive’. NMLH. CP/IND/KETT/01. Margot Kettle Papers MS, Memoirs of Frieda Brown (January 1984), p. 8. 110 McCarthy, Generation, p. 135.

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PART II The communist life cycle: adulthood

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4 A single communist personality? Communist couples and red families

Because my brother John was a communist I was half-way toward joining the Party.1

The communist marriage represented the next stage of the life cycle of Party membership. Communist couples were much in evidence in the CPGB. This chapter will consider why this was so. It will also focus on the contexts and circumstances in which communist marriages occurred, as well as the institution of the communist marriage, including its conventions and defining characteristics. Additionally, the chapter will consider the extent to which roles were gendered within these marital arrangements. The communist marriage was only one of the family ties evident within the British communist movement. A strong and widespread communist family network prevailed in the 1920s and 1930s which incorporated the marriage tie and extended beyond it. This chapter will look at this wider family network and consider the factors that spawned it. In one sense, family ties precipitate political activism. As one of the principal political socialisation agencies the family also helps shape political attitudes, values and beliefs. Additionally, family ties help to sustain activist commitment during the period of membership. In relation to the latter, a strong family network can shield individual members against sanctions from mainstream society against so-called ‘deviant’ political behaviour. All of these points apply with particular relevance to the CPGB with its strong activist orientation. Family ties precipitated recruitment into the Party, YCL, or communist children’s movement and performed an important political socialisation role by helping shape communist political attitudes, values and beliefs. A sturdy, supportive family network also sustained activism for many recruits and bolstered individuals when faced with the scornful reproaches of the wider society, or victimisation from employers or the state. This chapter will consider the family’s role in facilitating recruitment and sustaining communist political engagement. Finally, it should be observed that marriages and family units that were pulled into the communist orbit could be marked by division and dissension as well as solidarity and mutual support, a factor that will also be discussed in the chapter.

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The marriage knot was probably the most salient family tie within the communist family network.There were certainly communist couples to be found at all levels of the Party structure, and at all stages of the CPGB’s development through the 1920s and 1930s. In terms of high-profile national or local figures alone, many of whom we have met at some stage in this book, we find Harry and Marjorie Pollitt, Rajani Palme Dutt and his Estonian wife Salme Murrik, Arthur MacManus and Hetty MacManus née Wheeldon, Jack and Molly Murphy,Tom and Lizzie Bell, Isobel and Ernest Brown, Winifred and Frank Horrabin, Eden and Cedar Paul, Jock and Betty Kane, Jimmie and Susie Ord, Emile and Elinor Burns, and Peter and Rose Kerrigan.2 Others were Marjory and John Turner Walton Newbold, William and Kathleen Rust, Johnnie and Elsie Gollan, Charlotte and Professor J. B. S. Haldane, Elsie and Jim Borders, and the Commander of the International Brigade’s British Battalion Fred Copeman and his wife Kitty. To this list we should add Annie and J. R. ‘Johnnie’ Campbell, Bob and Margaret Stewart, David and Edna Ainley, Alick West and Claire Endrich, and George Alan and Martha Hutt. Maurice Dobb, Harry Young and Robin Page Arnot were also married to Party members. We shall meet other communist couples below. How should we account for the prevalence of communist marriages? Firstly, there was a strong assumption in the CPGB that members should bring their partners into the Party framework, a conviction less evident in previous organisations of the British Left. Harry McShane recalled that ‘seldom did the socialists involve their wives in the movement.When I married, my wife came to meetings and joined the Communist Party’.3 Like her husband, Jeannie McShane became a Party activist in Glasgow. The 1930s south-west Essex communist Ralph Russell has written: ‘I thought your intended wife must be a fellow-communist, or likely to become one. When therefore I entered into a sexual relationship for the first time, with a married woman who was nearly twice my age and had two children … my first concern was to make her a communist and recruit her to the Party (which I did): and would gladly have married her had she thought this practicable’.4 The intention was expressed in forthright manner by one Party member in the communist press at the time: ‘Let us have a new slogan: “Every communist’s wife in the Party!”’5 Another member thought he had devised an effective way to bring this about. ‘Novels’, he exclaimed, are ‘just the thing for a communist to bring his wife round to his way of thinking. Buy “Barricades in Berlin” for the missus, or perhaps “Storm over the Ruhr”.’6 It was thought to be particularly incumbent on those in leadership roles to turn their partners into communists. As Bob Stewart of the Party’s Executive Committee, who was married to a Party wife, remarked in 1925, ‘it is bad to see that leading Party members have not been able to induce the women-folk in their households to get into the Party’.7 This urge to recruit a partner was not just about the need to drive up membership figures, although this undoubtedly helped. A communist marriage facilitated greater activism and commitment. A marriage consummated in this

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way, with both partners in the Party, promised a singularity of outlook and purpose and thus greater efficiency of performance in terms of political activity. The communist life brought unusually heavy pressures, not least the seemingly insatiable demands of Party work and the ever-present threat of censure from a hostile employer or a reproachful neighbour.8 A politically homogeneous marriage constructed on the basis of husband and wife having a shared communist outlook offered comradeship and mutual help within the relationship which helped offset such pressures. As a contributor to the Party press put it: ‘It is unwise for a Party comrade to marry a woman who is not at least sympathetic. That he should try to draw her into Party activity – mutual interests and work shared can be a great bond’.9 ‘The Party argues that the solution to marriage’, the Hackney Party activist Bob Darke has written, ‘is that it should consist of two of the same mind and outlook, a communist outlook’.10 ‘Many times’, Darke recounts,‘I have heard communists pleading consideration for their family as an excuse for neglecting Party duties. They were told “If your wife objects, get her into the Party”.’11 That faithful communist wife Cedar Paul gave the following advice to women married to Party activists: ‘… she can help her mate who is “studying the problems of society” by studying at his side; she can at least not hinder him in his struggle with the common enemy.’12 Because having husband and wife as communists represented the ideal of marriage according to the CPGB, spouses found themselves inexorably drawn into the Party orbit. As mentioned, Jeannie McShane followed her partner Harry into the Party, as did Charlotte Haldane’s partner J. B. S. Haldane. So, too, did Harry Pollitt’s wife, the former teacher Marjorie Brewer, and Jack Murphy’s wife, the nurse and former suffragette Ethel ‘Molly’ Morris.13 Kate Fletcher was also drawn into Sheffield communism a few months after husband George Henry’s enrolment.14 We know also that Elsie Medland was pulled into the Edinburgh Party one year after her marriage to YCL Secretary Jonnie Gollan in 1936.15 It was a somewhat different pattern with the wife of Charles Goodfellow of Bellshill, Lanarkshire. When she learned, in 1937, that her husband had been killed at Brunete fighting with the International Brigade, she promptly joined the CPGB so she could ‘continue his good work’.16 The much desired homogeneity of mind, outlook and purpose within a marital setting could be achieved just as well if both partners joined simultaneously. Joint enrolments were a boon to Party strategists and beleaguered locals constantly in search of willing hands to undertake Party work. Emile and Elinor Burns joined as a couple in 1923 when they swapped their ILP membership cards for Communist Party cards.17 The Welsh miners’ leader Arthur Horner and his wife Ethel enrolled together as well, joining the fledgling Mardy Local in 1920.18 Beyond the specific points made above, a more generic explanation for the prevalence of the marriage tie within the British Communist Party was that, as one of the most salient family links, it acted as a crucial precipitator of political activism. Scholars of activism have traditionally claimed that an individual’s

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enrolment into a political movement was motivated either by personal-psychological characteristics, or a strong attitudinal disposition on the part of the joiner towards the movement’s ideology and goals. According to the former explanation, activism stemmed from feelings of alienation, frustration, anomie which then predisposed the individual to seek an outlet for his or her dissatisfactions by participating in movements which promised redress or relief from the grievance. In such models, there is a suggestion that it was the atomised individuals of modern ‘mass society’ that were most prone to seek redress for their anxieties by engaging in political activism. Moreover, it was claimed, these disaffected ‘atomised’ types tended to gravitate towards authoritarian political movements. Certainly, early models of recruitment into communist parties drew on this explanation of political mobilisation.19 The ideological-appeal explanation tended towards a similar person-centred approach. This explanation posited the notion that an individual experiencing deprivation inclined towards activism in response to a movement’s ideological message in the belief that participation would ease the deprivation and further the mutual ideological goals of joiner and movement. In this latter model, there is assumed to be a strong convergence or affinity between the individual joiner’s ideology and that of the movement. Unease with these earlier person-orientated models led in later scholarship to a search for other explanations which may help account for why joiners are pulled into movement activism. It is now claimed that interpersonal and social networks are crucial factors in recruitment to social movements and political organisations, particularly in recruitment to movements which tend to operate outside the political mainstream and which can involve members in high-risk activism, such as the CPGB.20 Family ties, which include marital and kinship networks within the family unit, represent one of the most important of the interpersonal bonds which draw the individual into engagement with political activity. According to this later model, family and social networks where they involve individuals who were already involved in a movement or propounded movement ideas play a vital role in reaching and shaping the outlook of potential recruits. In many instances, it is claimed, new members come from the ‘extramovement’ kin or friends of existing members, and that recruitment tends to spread along these well-established interpersonal bonds. In the case of the family network, there is an increased likelihood of political engagement along a similar path for individuals if their partners, parents, siblings, or other relatives within the network are members of the movement, or advocate its ideas. It is not only the literature on movement activism which has stressed the crucial role of the family in influencing an individual’s political behaviour. It should be mentioned, too, that the scholarship on political socialisation has long regarded the family as one of the most important socialising agencies, recognising its role as a key transmitter of political attitudes, values and belief to the individual.21 Having a husband and wife as communists, then, represented the ideal of marriage according to the CPGB. Drawing on the above family network

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explanation of activism, such a relationship precipitated communist activism and aided political socialisation. This ‘ideal’ of marriage also brought comradeship and mutual help to the relationship as well as enhanced performance on the basis of a shared outlook and purpose. A marital relationship where one partner remained outside the Party framework, however, was less agreeable to Party strategists. A relationship of this type carried the risk of a dilution of commitment on the part of the spouse who was a Party member, or even a weakening of the membership tie which could eventually trigger a defection from the CPGB. This was the case with the Hackney communist Bob Darke whose wife, Anne, remained outside the Party to the evident consternation of his comrades. ‘Both the Borough Secretariat of Hackney and the London District Committee could never understand why Ann was not a Party member’, explained Darke. ‘They knew that many ordinary comrades found it difficult to recruit their wives, but few Party leaders were married to non-communist women. It was a paradox to them.’22 Darke joined the CPGB in 1932, whence followed a hectic life of political activism and strained relations with his non-communist wife. He recounts the time in his memoirs when his wife, driven to distraction by his communist life, said to him bitterly: ‘You’re never at home with us, you never go out with us … All you think of is the Party, nothing else counts with you, Bob; not your family, not your home, not me.’23 The strain of a loyalty divided between Party and partner would eventually tell on Bob Darke leading to a growing estrangement from the former which culminated in his resignation and metamorphosis into an embittered anti-communist.24 Summing up the experience, Darke observed wryly that: ‘I was not unique. There are many communists who suffer their greatest defeats at their own hearthsides, and have the same battle of loyalties that I experienced … It [the Party] is astute enough to realise that its greatest weakness lies not in the power of counter-propaganda, but in the spirit and conscience of the Party member himself. It knows that he can be seduced more easily by his wife’s tears than by capitalist temptation.’25 It was his conscience and wife’s tears that brought about a similar estrangement between the CPGB and another Party activist, the Welsh miner Jack Jones. Jones joined the CPGB on its foundation in 1920, whereupon he threw himself enthusiastically into the work of building a Party local in his South Wales mining community.This frenetic activism continued unabated until 1924 at which point he became aware of the damaging effect it was having on his marriage, five children and particularly the health of his wife Laura, a non-communist. In some penitential and moving passages in his memoirs Jones tells of the moment, after observing his wife endure a particularly painful dental operation, that he became aware of the effect his activism was having on his wife and marriage: For ten years, from the outbreak of the War in 1914 up to that moment, it was little of me she had seen. I hadn’t watched my children grow, hadn’t had much time for them … That night I did not reach for the book [Pater’s Marius the Epicurean], but sat looking at Laura, who was seated in a low armchair, staring into the fire. Her now so

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hollow cheeks – where the hell have I been to all these years? ‘Mr. Chairman …’ Night after night, revelling in wordy warfare with hecklers; lapping up applause whilst she, after the children had gone up to bed, sat staring into the fire … I fell on my knees before her, my head in her lap, crying the bitter tears … I kissed her hands – politics be damned! After years of stumping the country I reserved myself for Laura and the children.26

Not surprisingly, Jones promptly resigned his Party membership. Not all such marriages where one partner remained outside the Party framework followed this course. If the ideology and commitment of the partner in the Party was particularly strong, this could prevent a weakening of the membership tie and forestall a possible resignation. In such cases, it was more likely that the marriage bond, rather than the membership tie, would be weakened. The fierce commitment of the Leeds communist Ernie Benson to the class struggle certainly strained relations with his non-communist, Roman Catholic wife Eileen: ‘The [communist] movement also was demanding more of my time, consequently the few extra shillings I used to give Eileen dwindled to practically nothing and this didn’t sweeten home life. She thought I placed the Party before herself and the children and would rather have had me take a job at scab rates or engage in “fiddling” my way through. Because I recognised her limitations I tried hard to be understanding.’27 In time, frustrated by the tensions within the marriage, Benson resorted to the favoured solution of the over-zealous Party loyalist when he endeavoured to pull Eileen into the communist framework: ‘In order to make things easier at home I endeavoured to interest my wife in the Party and give her an opportunity to go out while I looked after the children, but it was no go.’28 Unlike Jack Jones and Bob Darke, Benson remained a Party loyalist. He justified his decision to put the Party before his wife and marriage in terms of the necessity of the political struggle and the enticing prospect of a future proletarian victory: ‘I neither wanted to impose suffering upon Eileen or the children, but I know I could not be deflected from the class struggle, the path I had chosen to take and which I thought, if we were successful, would lay the basis for a better life for my children, and later for theirs too.’29 The Brighton communist Ernie Trory’s solution to strained relations with a non-communist partner was to terminate the relationship. ‘I had become engaged to a girl who was not at all interested in the Party’, he tells us.30 Initially Trory’s behaviour during the courtship drifted towards self-indulgent hedonism, a ‘vice’ which his contemporaries in the Party saw as frivolous, decadent and bourgeois. ‘I began to spend more time dancing and taking her to the pictures than was consistent with efficient and practical Party work’, he confessed.31 This perceived personal failing was eventually overcome when Trory resumed vigorous Party work which, as the Party tie tightened, brought in tow a serious weakening of the personal bond with his fiancé: ‘As my Party work increased, my relations with the girl to whom I was engaged became more and more

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strained.’32 In a spirit of self-sacrifice,Trory resolved this dilemma by deciding to ‘make a complete break from family and female ties’ and giving his life unreservedly over to the Party. Most young communists were spared the task of expunging a seemingly floundering relationship with an intended partner who did not share their devotion to the cause, or the awkward undertaking of seeking to draw a reluctant spouse into the movement, by establishing a romantic bond with a fellow devotee drawn from the same communist political and social milieu. Very often a romantic liaison forged in the impassioned world of British communism led to a communist marriage, as the Lancashire YCL activist Margaret McCarthy observed of her milieu in the late 1920s: ‘Of those whom I knew in those days, most young communists married among themselves, and are still living together and rearing families in the normal, petty bourgeois fashion.’33 Some liaisons which led to marriage were intra-branch affairs. Bas Barker met his wife-to-be Beryl in 1938 when she walked into the office of the Sheffield CPGB ‘to ask about joining the Party’, while Jock and Betty Kane met through the Sheffield Party two years previously.34 Bas and Beryl were married within the year. One of the communist Moffat brothers, Alex, met his future wife Alice Brady whilst both active in the Lumphinnans YCL. This communist marriage would have a tragic outcome, with Alice Moffat dying in childbirth in August 1928 on the birth of her first child.35 Other intra-branch marriages were that of Elizabeth ‘Bessie’ Bamber and Jack Braddock of the CPGB’s Liverpool Central Local in 1922, and Bert and Marie Teller of Stepney Local.36 The Tellers met initially when they were collecting food for Republican Spain during the Aid for Spain campaign. A communist marriage soon followed, in 1938.37 It was the intimate environment of Deptford communism that brought Fred and Kitty Copeman together culminating in a ‘Red Wedding’ in May 1938, while the CPGB’s large Cambridge University branch of the 1930s provided a similar context for the romance and eventual marriage of Maurice Cornforth and Kitty Klugmann.38 It was a similar story of romance and courtship in an intimate communist environment for the Manchester Party activists David Ainley and Edna Roberts, who would eventually tie the marriage knot in late 1931.39 The close-knit communist political and social milieu spawned inter-branch marriages as well, such as that of the International Brigader ‘Nobby’ Clark of Edinburgh’s Portobello Branch to an activist attached to the neighbouring Leith Branch.40 The Party’s national offices and gatherings provided other contexts for communist match-making. Idris Cox met his wife-to-be Dora, a graduate of the Lenin School in Moscow, at Party Headquarters at King Street in 1930.41 It was the Party Congress in Manchester in 1921 that brought Isabel and Ernest Brown together. A lightning romance followed, ending in marriage in January 1922.42 Party stalwarts throughout the interwar period, the Browns were emblematic of the ideal communist couple. Less emblematic of this ideal were Carol and Douglas Hyde. A ‘bourgeois communist’ who joined the Party during the Spanish

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Civil War, Carol first met fellow activist Douglas Hyde at a May Day rally whence followed another lightning romance and communist marriage.43 Unlike the Browns, however, the Hydes would eventually swap their communist ‘religion’ for another belief system when they took up the Catholic faith in earnest after World War Two. The less formal environment of the communist social milieu also acted to pull young communists together. In the intimate, almost cloistered world of the communist life there was very little demarcation between political activity and the social world of leisure and recreation, and the latter spawned many a romantic liaison and communist marriage.The Stepney activist Joe Jacobs has left us with a vivid explanation of one such social milieu in London’s East End: After a hard day’s work and a full evening engaged in dealing with the ‘class enemy’, we usually finished up in some café or other. The first one I remember clearly was ‘Andy’s’ in Great Garden Street [Whitechapel] and it was here that we continued to argue until late into the night. This is where we met our closest comrades who had been engaged in some activity different from ourselves during the evening. ‘Andy’s’ was a very important place … Andy, the owner, was himself a communist … Not least of the functions of these cafés was that boys and girls could be boys and girls and not just revolutionaries. People would pair off for the stroll home and as you can imagine they did not always end up discussing politics. Homecoming therefore was always late. Many of these pairs got married eventually and I can count many such cases among my friends and acquaintances.44

Andy Davidson, the proprietor of ‘Andy’s Café’, was indeed a Party member, as was his wife Lily, while Jacobs himself would meet his wife-to-be Pearl in this East End communist social milieu.45 What then were the characteristics of the communist marriage in interwar Britain, as well as its related domestic life? What were the features which defined it when compared with a more ‘conventional’ marriage? In the classical communist narrative on the marriage institution in bourgeois society, marriage was usually cast in a negative role. Following Engels, British communists thought that ‘monogamy arose with private property’ and that the bourgeois institution of marriage exploited sexual love to maintain and pass on private property.46 The ‘bourgeois’ marriage also featured as a form of chattel slavery for women, with bourgeois morality and law casting the wife as something akin to the husband’s private property.47 Here the woman is entrapped by the marriage contract, both economically and in terms of society’s codes of morality. A ‘dependent’ of the husband, marriage for the woman thus ‘becomes a fetter instead of a human partnership of equals’.48 At other times, marriage was depicted as a ‘bourgeois trap’. To Party stalwart Tom Bell, once married ‘the worker was entirely at the mercy of the bourgeois class for the remainder of his life, doomed to provide children for exploitation and war’.49 That said and despite these protestations, few communists were prepared to abstain from the marriage institution. As we have seen above, the British

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Communist Party was saturated with married couples. Even the free-thinking puritan radical Tom Bell, who had ‘set out to lead a bachelor life devoted to the workers’ movement’ when a young militant with the CPGB’s forerunner the Socialist Labour Party (SLP), succumbed when he decided to wed fellow SLP activist Lizzie Aitken.50 At times, Party attitudes to the marital relationship could be a model of conservatism and propriety. When Charlotte Haldane informed Party official William Rust that she was considering divorcing her communist husband J. B. S. Haldane, she was promptly disabused of the notion: ‘I was firmly informed by him that the Party would not for one moment tolerate a divorce between two comrades whose partnership, in addition to the usefulness of their individual services, was of immense propaganda to it.’51 However, it would be quite wrong to read these signs of conservatism and propriety on the part of the Party, and even those members who tied the marriage knot, as complete communist capitulation to the bourgeois marriage tradition. There were exceptions to the general pattern. As we will see in Chapter 7, there seems to have been some amongst the membership who were quite prepared to flout formal conventions on marriage and partnerships and pursue a more bohemian attitude towards personal relationships which, ironically, put them more at risk of falling foul of Party censors than bourgeois ones on matters of sexual propriety. Regarding the marriage tie and personal relationships, maybe not quite bohemian but certainly ironic given his haughty disapproval of Charlotte Haldane’s request for Party approval for her proposed divorce, is William Rust’s second marriage to a Russian modern languages teacher following his break-up with Kathleen Rust. Kathleen and William Rust broke the marriagetie at the end of the 1920s. William wed Tamara Kravets soon after.52 Still other communists would register their dissent towards the ‘bourgeois’ marriage institution by eschewing the usual conventions and rites associated with it and reconfiguring it along less traditional lines. Most would avoid the formality and display of elaborate ritual and ceremony that characterised the customary, time-honoured Church wedding, opting instead for a civil marriage in the more modest setting of a local registry office. An extreme example of this inclination, and an exercise in studied irreverence, was the 1935 marriage of the young Willesden communists Amy ‘Billie’Yates and Harold Horne, as recalled by the latter: ‘On the 28 September 1935 we took a couple of hours off from the revolution to get married at Willesden Registry Office and, to the disgust of our respective mothers, (the only guests) went straight out to sell The Young Worker in Kilburn High Road.’53 There were other shows of irreverence towards custom. When Lizzie Bell married husband Tom in a Glasgow registry office she abstained from adopting and wearing a wedding ring, while prior to tying the marriage knot Alick West and Claire Endrich spoke of having a deed drawn up whereby each would be free to leave the other.54 Alick and Claire married in 1934 and went their separate ways in 1942. Symbolic acts of dissent usually continued on the arrival of a child into a

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communist marriage. Many British communist couples eschewed the rites of the Church baptism, opting instead for a simple, secular ceremony and naming service in a Socialist Sunday School where the parents and witnesses would give a verbal promise to raise the child in the communist faith. Thus the communist baker George Henry Fletcher conducted a ‘red baptism’ for Jack and ‘Molly’ Murphy’s new-born son at the Sheffield Socialist Sunday School, where witness and parents ‘all joined in expressing the fervent hope that he would grow up a good socialist’.55 At times, the red baptism would be the occasion for naming the child after a revolutionary heroine or hero, as if to symbolise an even deeper attachment to the new faith. Rosa for baby girls, after the Polish revolutionary feminist Rosa Luxemburg, seemed a popular choice. Arthur and Ethel Horner named their new-born daughter Rosa, as did William and Kathleen Rust.56 A Southampton communist couple, May and Harry Burnstone, went the whole way, naming their new-born ‘bonny revolutionary’ daughter Rosa Luxemburg Burnstone.57 There were babies named after Karl Marx, as with the little ‘soldier of the revolution’ thus described, born to the Leicester communists Wolfe and Anne Winnick.58 Cissy and Tubby Goldman named their little boy Karl also, giving him Ernst as a middle name for good measure, in deference to the German communist leader Ernst Thälmann, then incarcerated in a Nazi prison.59 There were even Lenin baptisms. A communist couple in Long Eaton, the Rootes, named their new-born son Colin Lenin, while a couple in Leeds went further when they chose Lenin as the forename for their baby son.60 Little wonder that, as this Leeds ‘red diaper’ baby grew into adulthood, he expressed a strong preference to be called Len or Leonard.61 Vladimir Ilyich basked in iconic status within the marital home. A picture of Lenin could be purchased as a wedding gift for communist newlyweds.62 In many a communist home a framed picture of the Bolshevik leader, sometimes flanked by pictures of Marx and Stalin, would look down on a communist family ‘uncompromisingly while they ate, slept, and cleaned their teeth’ according to Bob Darke.63 Lenin calendars also featured in the homes of the Party faithful, as did Stalin calendars.64 The communist marriage displayed quite distinct features in other respects. Once wed, there was an urge to vacate the home in order to engage in the supposedly genuine work of a political nature that lay outside its confines. Communists spurned the contrived respectability of conventional home-life with its seductions and quiet pleasures, the sentimental notion of home as private space or refuge from the trials of modern life, an ideal which found particular favour in the residential suburbs that were enveloping England’s older towns at an increasing rate during the interwar years.65 Communist activists, on the other hand, preferred to inhabit the public spaces of workplace and street. Metaphorically, the political struggle in the workshops and streets became ‘home’ for many activists, as Edward Upward’s aptly named third volume in his trilogy of British Communist Party life, No Home but the Struggle, testifies.66 Party loyalists exhibited a great capacity to forgo homely pleasures. In 1934, Idris Cox, then the

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CPGB’s District Secretary in South Wales, and his communist wife Dora gave up their home in Pontyclun, a picturesque village location on the edge of the Vale of Glamorgan, for less pleasurable urban surroundings in the interests of the political struggle. ‘From a personal standpoint this was a great disappointment’, Idris Cox informs us, ‘because we had been living in a lovely modern house in really beautiful country surroundings. But it had been politically wrong to have the District Centre in the Rhondda and so when we managed to get offices in the main street in Cardiff we gave up our house and moved into a flat in Cardiff.’67 British communists also railed against the accumulated deprivations of the traditional proletarian home, particularly as it affected the working-class housewife. As we have seen in Chapter 1, British communist representations of the proletarian housewife and mother in the home entailed images of domestic drudgery and grinding poverty. Home-life was also equated with spiritual and intellectual privation. Shut off from any communal life, the proletarian housewife, according to the Party press, spends year after year ‘with no other human intercourse than that of husband and children – a terrible isolation, conducive to the retention of ancient superstition’.68 This is proletarian home as reactionary space which perpetuated ignorance and threatened to impede women’s ability to engage in the genuine political work that was thought to lie exclusively outside the household’s boundaries. A sub-text of this narrative, of course, was housewife as threat, a harmful presence which threatened to dissipate male revolutionary resolve and thus impede effective Party work. ‘We must get rid of the idea that our place is eternally at home’, complained Annie Campbell. ‘It’s bad for us and bad for our class. We are told that the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world … This is to keep us from entering the fight. We want to be seeing that the trade unions are open to us; we ought to be forming women’s councils of action, factory committees, street committees, moving forward with our men, not dragging them back …’69 Writing later, ‘Kate Collett’ sought to impart a similar message to wives of Party men: ‘If a man neglects his wife’s company for political meetings, many women ask for it by not making an effort to be interested in the world outside their four walls.’70 The pressures felt by communist wives to vacate the home in order to engage in ‘genuine’ political work outside its parameters was often bound up with the question of effective home management. In a typical reaction, one communist wife complained bitterly in a letter to the Party press in 1930 that she was ‘fed up with washing, cleaning, cooking and housekeeping! What a colossal waste of energy! Everyone of us worn out, with scarcely any time for the movement due to the senseless drudgery of individual housekeeping’.71 There was nearly always a gendered dimension to this impulse to vacate the domestic home so as to inhabit the external ‘home’ of the political struggle in street and workplace. Indeed, what we see, in many cases, is that communist wives and communist husbands performed quite different roles within the Party framework. Usually, it was the communist wife who found herself left in the

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home to cope with the obligations of housekeeping or childrearing while the husband went missing for long spells in his role as full-time professional revolutionary. During his first six years of marriage to ‘Molly’ Murphy, husband Jack was rarely domicile in the marital home owing to repeated clandestine trips to Soviet Russia, countless Party meetings he was obliged to address in all parts of Britain, and a spell in Wandsworth prison brought about by his political work.72 The absent husband factor was a common motif. When Party activist Ernie Pountney went to Moscow in 1933 as a representative of the National Minority Movement, and did not return until nearly a year later, this extended stint away from the family home left his wife ‘on the verge of a breakdown’.73 Wal Hannington of National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM) fame has left us with a vivid description of the male professional revolutionary’s attitude to the home and its responsibilities when weighed against the requirements of the class struggle. In the early years of the Bolshevik takeover in Russia, saving the revolution from defeat assumed paramount importance for Hannington: ‘I had little time for domestic considerations. Most evenings I would rush home from work, say “Hello” to my wife, gulp down some food, and then dash away to address a street-corner meeting in the North London area.’74 One Party wife from Hull complained that ‘the outlook of the average CP member to his wife is this. If she has his meals ready in time for Party and trade union meetings, and never asks for such a “bourgeois” thing as a new hat or a party frock, she is a good wife.’75 If contending with a missing husband and father was not enough, a communist wife could find her home turned into a public space for the convenience of revolutionaries, or for the performing of duties which furthered communist goals. We can get a sense of the turbulence of this arrangement from Ewan MacColl’s memory of his childhood home in early 1920s Salford. With both parents in the Party, young Ewan’s home was transformed into an open house for a string of political actors and ‘desperados’ linked to the revolutionary movement: ‘Our house in Salford was always filled with political people. It was a two-up and a two-down and it didn’t take much to fill it, but there were always people staying there – IRA blokes on the run, fellows who had been distributing leaflets among the armed forces, and the Soldier’s Voice, this kind of thing’.76 In a similar vein, Helen Moffat’s modest council house in the Fife mining village of Lumphinnans became a regular meeting place for her husband Abe’s comrades during the mid-1920s. ‘Many people stayed with us at 5 Viewfield Terrace’, Abe Moffat recounted in his memoirs, ‘including Tom Mann, Tommy Jackson, Harry Pollitt, Isabel Brown, Peter and Rosie Kerrigan, Aitken Ferguson and, of course … comrade Willie Gallacher.’77 ‘During strikes and election campaigns’, he added nostalgically, ‘our comrades were always assured of a cup of tea and toast if we had nothing else to give.’78 When the newly married ‘Molly’ Murphy secured unfurnished rooms in ‘a pleasant neighbourhood’ in Ealing in 1922 and began home building with her communist husband Jack, she found that her home ‘at

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once became a centre of political activity’ where she acted ‘as hostess’ to a parade of communist visitors.79 In time, she grew ‘quite accustomed to the invasion of our home by the politics of the Communist Party’.80 It was not uncommon for the homes of communist wives to serve as the official premises of the local branch, particularly during formative or lean years, as with the home of Kate Fletcher which, in the early 1920s, doubled as the offices of Sheffield CPGB.81 Not all wives of active communist husbands were as accommodating as Helen Moffat, Molly Murphy and Kate Fletcher. When Anne Darke’s Hackney home was converted into a Party office ‘open day and night’ for Party business and the convenience of her husband’s comrades, it merely exacerbated the Darkes’ matrimonial woes: ‘There must be many communist wives like Ann’, lamented Bob Darke, ‘watching their homes being turned into Party offices, waiting hand and foot on strange men who walk in and out as if they own the place.’82 In a similar vein, it could not have helped Jack Jones’s strained relations with his wife Laura on the many occasions that they felt obliged to ‘give up their bed’ for a night or two for a string of ‘comrades’ visiting South Wales on Party duty.83 A communist household displayed specific characteristics in other respects. Living with a professional revolutionary for a husband brought economic and personal privations. We have already looked at the plight of Jack Jones’s wife. When the employment ‘bar’ went up against the Fife communist miner John McArthur after the General Strike and miners’ lock-out in late 1926, which kept him out of work until February 1928, his financial plight became so desperate that his wife ‘went without teeth as she could not afford a set of false ones’ during the long period of unemployment.84 There were other characteristics that were quite distinct to a communist household. As we saw in Chapter 1, communist women were quite prepared to defer having children ‘in the interests of the workers’ movement’. In this regard, at the extreme end of the spectrum, Isabel Brown and HarryYoung’s Russian wife opted to have abortions in Moscow because as ‘dedicated soldiers of the revolution’, as Harry Young put it, they felt they could not afford the ‘luxury’ of children.85 The marriage tie was only one link in the chain of family ties binding individual members within the Communist Party network. Communist family ties spread further along the family network than the marital relationship, although it was not uncommon for such ties to touch one or more partners in a communist marriage at some point, as we shall see below. The point has already been made that the family played an important role in facilitating recruitment into the communist movement and precipitating political activism. It has also been mentioned above that the family performed an important political socialisation role by helping shape communist political attitudes, values and beliefs. As with the marriage relationship, we can see all these factors at work within this wider family and kinship network.

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For many British communists between the Wars, the family acted as an important agency of initial political socialisation as well as recruitment into the various organisations of the Party. There were many, like Party General Secretary Harry Pollitt, who were embedded in families in which there was a high level of political interest and discussion, or had a long-standing family tradition of involvement in radical politics. Pollitt hailed from a family of proletarian Lancashire activists. His great grandfather was a Chartist, his grandfather a trade union pioneer, while his mother, Mary Louisa Pollitt, had sojourns in both the cooperative movement and the ILP and was one the CPGB’s earliest members.86 Mary Pollitt was son Harry’s inspiration, his guiding light. ‘My mother was my pal’, he informs us in his autobiography. ‘I confided to her all my hopes and my ambitions. She it was who guided me every step in the working-class movement.’87 Bessie Braddock’s outlook on life and politics was largely inspired by a militant mother, the Scottish-born socialist Mary Bamber. Mary Bamber and daughter Bessie were two of the most ardent members of the CPGB’s Liverpool Central Local between 1920 and 1924.88 Another communist mother-daughter link was that of the Walkers of Poplar Local.89 It was a militant mother who socialised the Edinburgh activist Murdoch Taylor into communist ways. He remembered that his first political activity was when, as a ten-year-old in 1927, he helped his communist mother deliver the Sunday Worker to Edinburgh households.90 Murdoch would eventually follow his mother into the Party, joining in the mid-1930s. The importance of the mother-link in the process of nurturing ‘cradle communists’ and socialising them into communist ways has been emphasised by scholars.91 While strong, the intergenerational influence was not confined to the radical mother link. For others it was the socialising influence of the father that was pivotal.The Irish father of an Islington-born communist, Peggy Aprahamian, was a man of strong socialist convictions, while Stepney activist Marie Teller’s father was an ILP member.92 Freda Utley came to communism via Greek history, French revolutionary literature, English radical poetry, a happy childhood, and ‘a socialist father’ whom she claimed had been an acquaintance of Karl Marx’s son-in-law Edward Aveling.93 In Scotland, there was Peter McOmish Dott and his daughter Jean, both early members of the CPGB. Tragedy befell this communist father in 1923 when his then twenty-six-year-old daughter Jean died of gunshot wounds in an accident whilst honeymooning in Canada with her communist husband, Percy Sefton.94 Another Scottish communist father and daughter pairing marked by personal tragedy was that of Alec and Effie Geddes. Daughter Effie, then only twenty-two and an accomplished leader of the communist children’s movement, unexpectedly fell ill and died in Kharkov in September 1933 whilst heading a delegation of British Pioneers to the Soviet Union.95 The intergenerational influence extended to the father-son connection also. One such well-known pairing was that of Theodore Rothstein and his son Andrew. A Lithuanian-born Jewish revolutionary, Theodore settled in Britain in 1891, became an ardent

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Bolshevik with links to Lenin, and served as the Comintern’s representative at the CPGB’s founding conference in July 1920. Son Andrew followed the same militant path. He served the CPGB well throughout the 1920s and 1930s both as an organiser and polemicist writing under the pseudonym of C. M. Roebuck.96 The father-son tie had a long reach in the Brighton household of the de Lacy family. The de Lacy brothers, Gus, Oscar and Tom, all followed their father, a second-hand furniture dealer and one of the founder members of communism in the seaside town, into the CPGB’s Brighton branch.97 Sometimes keenly political fathers lined-up alongside their sons and daughters in the communist movement, as with the fathers of Scottish communists Hamish MacKinven and Hugh D’Arcy.98 Another communist father-son pairing was that of the itinerant revolutionary George Hardy and his son George Hardy Junior. Like the Dott and Geddes families, this relationship was marked by personal loss when George Junior was killed in an Italian Fascist tank ambush at Calaceite in March 1938 while fighting with the International Brigade in Spain.99 Sometimes both parents would be the source of political socialisation. The father of the Fife communist John McArthur had ties with local SDF activists, while his mother had been active in the cooperative movement. Saturday evening in the McArthur family home before the Great War was always enlivened by animated political debate. ‘There was generally political discussion and as a youngster I was all ears and would not go to bed so long as the discussion lasted’, McArthur recalled.100 With a mother and father in the CPGB, politics permeated the Salford home of Ewan MacColl as well. Son Ewan would eventually follow his parents’ route, joining the Cheetham YCL as a fourteen-year-old in 1929.101 As with Ewan MacColl, George Fletcher junior followed his father and mother, George Henry and Kate Fletcher, into communism. The Fletcher parents were founder members of the Sheffield Communist Party. George Junior would emulate their pioneering efforts when he became a founder member of the Sheffield YCL on joining in late 1921.102 With both parents, Emile and Elinor Burns, active in the Party it seemed inevitable that daughter Marca would be drawn into communist activity. A contemporary of Marca Burns, however, felt that her ‘eager commitment to the Communist Party and to Marxism owed more to her affection and sense of duty towards her parents … than to her own political instincts’.103 An uncharitable judgement on Marca Burns’ political conviction perhaps, but it says much about the importance of family ties as a precipitator of activism. Very occasionally the family recruitment process went into reverse. Charlotte Haldane joined the CPGB soon after being informed by her sixteen-year-old-son Ronnie, a YCL member, that he had volunteered to fight for the Spanish Republic, a self-sacrificing act which later saw him being shot and wounded.104 Charlotte’s initial reaction to her son’s display of adolescent gallantry was less than charitable, however, as she recalled in her memoirs: ‘“You single little fool”, I barked at him. “What use would you be? Why you can’t even shoot”.’105 Charlotte’s

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husband, the geneticist Professor J. B. S. Haldane, plunged ‘into the fray’ alongside his wife, becoming a CPGB fellow-traveller, a path that would eventually take him into the Party in 1942.106 Kevin Morgan has identified some others, including Eric Godfrey’s father who followed son Eric into the Party in 1931 after visiting the Soviet Union, and the mother of Aberdeen communist Jimmy Oates who on hearing that Jimmy had joined the CPGB ‘quickly followed suit’.107 On occasions, it was a sibling who was the principal agent of political socialisation and the facilitator of recruitment into the communist world. It was the influence of her older brother Johnnie, the prominent Edinburgh and YCL activist of the 1930s, who pulled Jessie Gollan into communism.108 The Gollans evidently had an instinct for proselytising within the family circle because Jessie’s older sister, Peggy, served as Treasurer for the Party in Edinburgh.109 When Jessie Gollan eventually married another Edinburgh Marxist Murdoch Taylor, whom we met above, she was by this stage moving in a family circle which was almost totally communist.110 As with Jessie Gollan, it was an older communist sibling who facilitated Meg Wintringham’s entry into the CPGB in 1937, in this case Tom Wintringham, a legal adviser to the Daily Worker who fought in Spain with the International Brigade.111 Party worker and one-time coalminer Frank Watters took a similar route, following his two older brothers, John and Mick, both colliers, into communism.112 We can discern a similar pattern with the then twenty-fiveyear-old Hackney paint shop worker Bob Darke when, ‘hot for the cause’ of communism having ‘felt the rough edge of capitalism’, he followed his brother John into the Party in 1932.113 So, too, with the middle-class Oxford intellectual Gabriel Carritt who followed his brother Noel into the CPGB in the early 1930s.114 Noel would later serve with the International Brigade, while another of the Carritt brothers was killed in the same Spanish conflict whilst driving an ambulance.115 There were other communist brothers. The most well-known, at the top end of the Party structure, were the Party intellectuals Rajani Palme and Clemens Dutt, and Harry and Albert Inkpin, the latter preceding Harry Pollitt as Party General Secretary. At the local level could be found the communist Moffat brothers, Abe, Alex and Jim, of Lumphinnans in Fife.116 There were also the Ainley brothers of Lancashire,Teddy, David and Ben, sons of an Anglo-Jewish communist father.117 We know that sibling influence was at work here because David Ainley was drawn to communism by the Marxist views of brother Ben ‘and by the Party literature that he brought into the house’.118 We have already met the Brighton communist brothers, Gus, Oscar and Tom de Lacy.119 The Williams brothers, Bill and Bert, were active communists as well, recruiting Idris Cox, whom we met above, to the Party during a lunchtime break at the Labour College in 1924.120 Other notable communist siblings were the school teachers Kath and Sandy Duncan, who sat on the Party’s London District Committee in the mid-1930s.121 Margaret McCarthy’s brother was a CPGB activist, too, though less ardent than his sister.122 Communist sisters were evident also, such as the Tellers from Stepney, and the Span sisters.123 Sarah Span, a bookkeeper, and sister Bessie, a tailoress,

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were both arrested during the General Strike for possessing ‘seditious’ strike literature at their flat at Gray’s Inn, London.124 Other red sisters were Nell and Daisy Dowdall of Balham, both tailoresses, who enrolled in 1926.125 As well as precipitating political activism and facilitating recruitment into communism, the wider communist family network beyond the husband and wife pairing performed an important political socialisation role by helping shape communist attitudes, values, and beliefs. This could happen either laterally via sibling relationship patterns or via intergenerational influences emanating from communist parents. Additionally, as Kevin Morgan has pointed out, the forum of the communist family could serve as an important conduit through which longer, pre-communist ‘inherited’ traditions of left-wing activism found outlet and expression.126 A communist-orientated family network also served to build and sustain communist allegiance and enthusiasm not least because the family network provided mutual support on the basis of a shared perspective and attachment to a common set of goals. A Party-orientated family network also helped foster and maintain communist political engagement. Because families are built on bonds of loyalty, trust and support, binding the individual members of the unit to each other, a communist family helped facilitate the process of building the bonds of loyalty, trust and support needed to sustain movement activism. Families also generate emotional attachments. Family members identify with each other on the basis of an emotional attachment which, if the family members were orientated towards communism, could and did carry over into an emotional attachment to the Party. If a wider communist family network facilitated recruitment into communism it also aided membership retention, particularly in cases where the communist connection spread throughout the nuclear family or even beyond into the wider kinship network. Indeed these latter family units ensured that some ‘Party people’ moved in a world that was almost ‘totally’ communist. One such nuclear family was the Silvers in London’s East End of the 1930s. Joe Jacobs remembered that: ‘Most of the Silvers were either YCL or CP members. There were a lot of them.’127 When Mrs Silvers passed away in December 1934, the Party press described her as the ‘mother of revolutionary sons and daughters’.128 London’s East End had also spawned the Lansbury siblings a decade earlier. In a fascinating historical detail, Kevin Morgan tells us that during the 1920s five of the veteran socialist George Lansbury’s six children were CPGB members.129 It should not come as a surprise that George Lansbury himself harboured an affection for Soviet communism.130 The Browns of Yorkshire were another red family. At the apex of the family structure was the redoubtable communist ‘rebel’ Martha Brown who had three grown-up children prominent in the national and local Party.131 In certain localities the communist connection seemed to run even further, spreading beyond the nuclear family through the wider kinship network. ‘Beatrice’s family were all committed to the Party’, recalled Ernie Benson of a comrade he had met during Party work in the South

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Wales mining village of Nantymoel in 1935. ‘Her uncle Fred was one of the first, if not the first communist County Councillor for Glamorgan.’132 Benson may have been referring to the Llewellyns of Nantymoel. Mavis Llewellyn, a local school teacher and miner’s daughter, was a prominent Party figure in 1930s Nantymoel. In 1936, standing as a communist, she successfully contested a seat on the Council in the Ogmore Valley election. Mavis Llewellyn’s uncle, Fred Llewellyn, was a communist Councillor on the Glamorgan County Council.133 When considering interwar communism, one should always be mindful of particular local or regional characteristics. Even the communist family was subject to regional variation. The extended communist family, for example, as with the Llewellyns of Nantymoel, seemed to be a feature of Party life in the Welsh coalfields. Take the remarkable communist family profile of the Tudors of Mardy, the ‘Little Moscow’ mining community at the upper reaches of the Rhondda Fach settlement.134 Ellen Tudor, who had a shop in Oxford Street, Mardy, selling sweets ‘and tins’ was a Party member, as was her husband, a collier who worked at a Mardy pit, and her sister. Further down the age scale, Ellen Tudor’s daughter was a member of the Mardy Young Comrades’ League. Moving along the family kinship network we find that alongside Ellen Tudor’s daughter in the Mardy Young Comrades’ League was no less than four of her cousins, two of whom were sisters. Even this did not conclude the family connection because Ellen Tudor’s daughter also had three uncles in the Party, all of whom were brothers.135 In fact, in regard to the three brothers mentioned, one did not need to look hard to find clusters of communist brothers in the Welsh coalfields in this period. In the small, isolated village of Bedlinog in the Dowlais District there was John Thomas, a collier who worked at the Nantwen pit, who in 1924 decided to follow his brother into the CPGB Local at Bedlinog.The Thomases’ uncle on their ‘mother’s side’, Morgan Williams, was one of the ‘pioneers’ of communism in the area.136 Working alongside John Thomas for the Party in this part of the Welsh coalfield were the Gittens brothers, Dai, Idris and John.137 Will Paynter of Porth, a Party organiser in the South Wales coalfield in the 1930s, also had a brother in the Party.138 There was also Harold and Clarence Lloyd of Abertillery, at the northern end of Monmouthshire’s Ebbw Fach Valley, who later went to fight in Spain.139 It is not difficult to find communist husband and wife partnerships in the Welsh coalfield either, as with the Eadies and Tanners of Caerau, the Prossers of Neath, the Lundregans of Llwynypia, and the Paynters of Porth.140 Family units sometimes kept the Party afloat in certain areas of the Welsh coalfield. The YCL branch in Pentre in the difficult days of ‘Class against Class’ comprised Tom Adlam, an unemployed miner, his cousin, his brother-in-law, and another ‘young boy’ from the locality. When the tiny Pentre young communist group needed more experienced counsel, it could draw on the support of Tom Adlam’s communist mother-in-law, Abigail Evans.141 In the Welsh mining communities it appeared that communism was very much a family affair.

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This is not to say that the extended communist family was unique to Welsh mining communities, only that with their close-knit families and strong kinship networks, particularly when set in an area of communist strength such as Mardy, it was more likely to flourish. In other areas of relative communist strength, although not to the same degree as in the Welsh coalfield, we can see evidence of similar extended Party families. There was the Dundee family of Bob Stewart, for example. Four of Stewart’s eleven siblings established, like him, strong bonds with the CPGB. These links then filtered through subsequent stages of the family chain, illustrating again the potency of family associations as facilitators of activism. Stewart’s sister Maggie, for example, on marrying, proceeded to bring a number of individuals in her new marital family network into the Party.142 Bob Stewart’s wife Margaret was a Party activist as we know, while their young daughter, Nan, was a communist Pioneer.143 Also coming out of Scotland was the McNulty family of Blantyre, Lanarkshire, who ‘were all active in the Communist Party’, particularly the father and son pairing of Andrew and Charles McNulty.144 There were striking exceptions to the general pattern. Some individuals came to communism quite independent of the socialising influence of parents, siblings, sons or daughters, or others in the kinship network, a decision which could often have the effect of seriously weakening the existing family bond. In some cases, as well as weakening this bond, the existence of internal conflict could further act to diminish the level of communist involvement on the part of the activist. Ernie Trory’s decision to join the Brighton Communist Party in June 1931 seriously strained relations with his politically Conservative father. Son Ernie’s communist activities brought frequent threats from his father to turn him out of the family home and dispense with his services as a book-keeper and barman in the family-owned fully licensed hotel on Brighton sea front. Trory remembered that in an attempt to alleviate this pressure, ‘I began to appease my father by dropping some of my Party work’.145 Margaret McCarthy faced a similar ultimatum from an unsympathetic parent to rein in her communist work or face being turned out on to the streets. ‘In the end’, leaving the family home, recalled McCarthy, ‘I had to do in order to fulfil my communist faith.’146 Sarah Burl, too, made the decision to vacate her family home in Notting Hill, London, in 1926 after receiving an ultimatum from her parents to desist from her communist activity or face being turned out.147 Sarah would eventually forge a communist marriage when she wed fellow London communist Bob Lovell, who from 192633 served as Secretary of the British Section of the International Class War Prisoners’ Aid (ICWPA).148 Other communist joiners faced stiff opposition from hostile family members.When he joined the Party in June 1929,Will Paynter was ‘facing strong family opposition’, while another communist collier, Willie Allan, faced similar hostility from his Catholic parents in Lanarkshire.149 Jack Gaster’s orthodox Jewish parents were hardly enamoured when their son became a communist in 1935, but his decision three years later to marry an Irish Catholic communist, Maire Lynd, led to a more serious weakening of the family bond.150

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Clearly, then, communist allegiance on the part of a family member could generate sharp internal conflict within the family framework in situations where other family members harboured alternative political or philosophical views. It is important not to overstate these dysfunctional elements, however. The evidence, both impressionistic and statistical, seems to suggest that the dominant form was that of a family which consisted of two or more family members sharing communist allegiance, whether inter-generational through a parent-child tie or lateral via a sibling connection or husband and wife tie, which served to offset the type of internal family conflict seen in some of the cases cited above.151 In many cases, as discussed in this chapter, the communist connection even extended beyond the household space and immediate nuclear family into the wider kinship network. For the CPGB, the ideal was to create a single identity, a single communist personality, within the family framework, particularly within the confines of the home. As ‘Kate Collett’ explained it in the Party press: ‘If we are good comrades we shall be good politicians, because comradeship inside and outside the home, is the basis of sound politics!’152 If the properly-ordered ‘bourgeois family’ was a microcosm of the bourgeois state, its cell form or stem organisation, in that the bourgeois family’s values and internal government reflected and complemented the wider institutions of capitalist society, then the communist family bore a similar relation to the Party. The properly-ordered communist family was the stem organisation of the wider institution of the Party, providing the appropriate mental framework, emotional bonds, value system and training to facilitate the entry of those within the ‘red family’, particularly the younger elements, into Party roles and service. Notes 1 Bob Darke, CPGB member 1932–35. Bob Darke, The Communist Technique in Britain (London: Penguin, 1952), p. 34. 2 Many of the sources for the information on communist couples are cited below when we renew our acquaintance with some of these couples. Additional, crucial details regarding marital status or the forename of a spouse were provided by the Communist Party Biographical Project Prosopographical Database. 3 Harry McShane and Joan Smith, Harry McShane: No Mean Fighter (London: Pluto Press, 1978), p. 34. 4 NMLH. CP/HIST/06/02. MS. Ralph Russell, They Think I Lost: Conclusions From a Communist Life. Autobiography, 1995, p. 31. 5 Daily Worker, 7 August 1930, p. 4. 6 Daily Worker, 20 October 1933, p. 6. 7 Cited in Karen Hunt and Matthew Worley, ‘Rethinking British Communist Party women in the 1920s’, Twentieth Century British History, 15:1 (2004), p. 8. 8 On an activist’s life, see Chapter 5. 9 Daily Worker, 12 May 1938, p. 7. 10 Darke, The Communist Technique, p. 110. 11 Ibid., p. 11.

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12 The Communist, 11 March 1922, p. 7. 13 John Mahon, Harry Pollitt:A Biography (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976), pp. 121–2. NMLH. CP/IND/MURP/01/02. MS. Molly Murphy, Nurse Molly. Autobiography, n.d., p. 82. 14 Nellie Connole, Leaven of Life: The Story of George Henry Fletcher (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1961), pp. 119–20. 15 NMLH. CP/IND/KETT/01. Margot Kettle Papers MS, Memoirs of Elsie Gollan (December 1982), p. 5. 16 Daily Worker, 3 September 1937, p. 4. 17 May Hill, Red Roses for Isabel (London: May Hill,1982), p. 10. 18 Arthur Horner, Incorrigible Rebel (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1960), p. 50. 19 See H. Brown, ‘The appeal of Communist ideology’, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 2 (1943), 161–74; Gabriel Almond, The Appeals of Communism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954); and Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridan, 1958). 20 Much of the most constructive conceptual work in this area has been done in fields outside History, particularly Sociology. See, for example, Doug McAdam and Ronnelle Paulsen, ‘Specifying the relationship between social ties and activism’, American Journal of Sociology, 99:3 (November 1993), 640–67; Doug McAdam, ‘Recruitment to high-risk activism: the case of freedom summer’, American Journal of Sociology, 92:1 (July 1986), 64–90; David Snow, Louis Zurcher Jnr. and Sheldon Ekland-Olson, ‘Social networks and social movements: a microstructural approach to differential recruitment’, American Sociological Review, 45:5 (October 1980), 787–801; Roger Gould, ‘Multiple networks and mobilisation in the Paris Commune, 1871’, American Sociological Review, 56:6 (December 1991), 716–29. 21 See, for example, Richard Dawson and Kenneth Prewitt, Political Socialisation (Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1969), p. 107. 22 Darke, The Communist Technique, p. 106. 23 Ibid., p. 111. 24 Darke resigned in 1951. Part confessional, part polemic, Darke’s 1952 autobiography, The Communist Technique in Britain, is a classic of post-war anti-communist literature. 25 Ibid., p. 102. 26 Jack Jones, Unfinished Journey (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1937), pp. 210–12. 27 Ernie Benson, To Struggle is to Live: A Working Class Autobiography, Volume 2: 1927–1971: Starve or Rebel (Newcastle: People’s Publications, 1980), pp. 72–3. 28 Ibid., p. 134. 29 Ibid., p. 135. 30 Ernie Trory, Between the Wars: Recollections of a Communist Organiser (London: Crabtree Press, 1974), p. 67. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., p. 68. 33 Margaret McCarthy, Generation in Revolt (London: Heinemann, 1953), p. 105. 34 Bas Barker and Lynda Straker, Free But Not Easy (Matlock: Derbyshire County Council, 1989), p. 66. Jock and Betty Kane, No Wonder We Were Rebels:The Kane Story (Doncaster: Askew, n.d.), p. 76. 35 Workers’ Life, 31 August 1928, p. 4. 36 Jack Braddock and Bessie Braddock, The Braddocks (London: MacDonald, 1963), pp. 32–63. 37 NMLH. CP/IND/KETT/01. Margot Kettle Papers MS, Recollections of Marie Teller (December 1983), p.6.

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38 Fred Copeman, Reason in Revolt (London: Blandford Press, 1948), pp. 141, 152; and Neal Wood, Communism and British Intellectuals (London:Victor Gollancz, 1959), p. 86, on Maurice Cornforth and Kitty Klugmann. 39 NMLH. CP/CENT/PERS/1/1. David Ainley. Party Individuals. 1950, p. 3. 40 Ian MacDougall (ed.), Voices From Work and Home: Personal Recollections of Working Life and Labour Struggles in the Twentieth Century by Scots Men and Women (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 2000), p. 423. 41 NMLH. CP/IND/MISC/2/3. MS. Idris Cox. Autobiography (c.1960), p. 41. 42 Hill, Red Roses, pp. 10–11. 43 Douglas Hyde, I Believed: The Autobiography of a British Communist (London: Heinmann, 1952), pp. 87–8. 44 Joe Jacobs, Out of the Ghetto: My Youth in the East End: Communism and Fascism 1913–1939 (London: Janet Simon, 1978), pp. 46–7. 45 The Davidsons are mentioned in Daily Worker, 17 April 1935, p. 4. 46 Alick West, One Man in His Time:A Personal Story of this Revolutionary Century (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969), pp. 124–5. 47 Rose Smith, ‘The Proletarian revolution and the emancipation of women’, The Communist Review, 2:10 (November 1930), pp. 11–15. 48 Ibid., p. 13. 49 Thomas Bell, Pioneering Days (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1941), pp. 86–7. 50 Ibid., pp. 88–92. The couple married in 1910. The Bells would become a model communist family. One of their sons, Oliver, served as an ardent Komsomol (Young Communist) in the Soviet Union. 51 Charlotte Haldane, Truth Will Out (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1949), p. 176. 52 See Andrew Flinn, ‘William Rust: the Comintern’s blue-eyed boy?’, in John McIlroy, Kevin Morgan and Alan Campbell (eds), Party People, Communist Lives: Explorations in Biography (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2001), pp. 95–6. 53 Harold Horne, All the Trees Were Bread and Cheese:The Making of a Rebel (Bedfordshire: Owen Hardisty, 1998), p. 55. 54 Bell, Pioneering Days, p. 91; and West, One Man, p. 159. 55 MS. Nurse Molly, p. 83. 56 Horner, Incorrigible Rebel, p. 91; and Flinn, ‘William Rust’, p. 95. 57 Daily Worker, 19 January 1935, p. 8. 58 Daily Worker, 15 January 1935, p. 4. 59 Daily Worker, 21 January 1935, p. 4. 60 Daily Worker, 7 April 1930, p. 3, on the Rootes. 61 Benson, To Struggle, p. 3. 62 See Workers’ Weekly, 26 March 1926, p. 3. 63 Darke, The Communist Technique, p. 104. 64 These calendars were advertised as Christmas gifts. See Daily Worker, 15 December 1933, p. 4. 65 On home-life, see Deirdre Beddoe, Back to Home and Duty: Women Between the Wars (London: Pandora, 1989). On suburbia and its growth, see Roger Silverstone (ed.), Visions of Surburbia (London: Routledge, 1997). 66 Edward Upward, The Spiral Ascent: Vol. Three: No Home but the Struggle (London: Quartet Books, 1977). 67 Cox, Autobiography, p. 48. 68 Leonora Thomas, ‘Women and communism’, The Communist, 9 July 1921, p. 6. 69 Workers’ Weekly, 2 April 1926, p. 1. 70 Daily Worker, 9 February 1937, p. 7. 71 Daily Worker, 20 February 1930, p. 9.

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72 Jack Murphy, New Horizons (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1941), p. 237. 73 Ernie Pountney, For the Socialist Cause:The Class Struggle in the Time of My Forebears and Myself (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1973), p. 60. 74 Wal Hannington, Never On Our Knees (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1967), p. 59. 75 Daily Worker, 5 May 1937, p. 7. 76 Ewan MacColl, ‘Theatre of action, Manchester’, in Raphael Samuel, Ewan MacColl and Stewart Cosgrove (eds), Theatres of the Left 1880–1935: Workers’ Theatre Movements in Britain and America (London: Routledge, 1985), p. 206. 77 Abe Moffat, My Life With the Miners (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1965), pp. 47–8. 78 Ibid., p. 48. 79 MS. Nurse Molly, pp. 84–5. 80 Ibid., p. 86. By this stage, 1925, the Murphys had moved home to Golders Green. 81 Connole, Leaven, p. 119. 82 Darke, The Communist Technique, p. 107. 83 Jones, Unfinished Journey, p. 201. 84 Ian MacDougall (ed.), Militant Miners: Recollections of John McArthur, Buckhaven; and Letters, 1924–26, of David Proudfoot, Methil, to G. Allen Hutt (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1981), p. 116. 85 See Chapter 1. 86 Harry Pollitt, Serving My Time: An Apprenticeship to Politics (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1940), pp. 9, 15. See also, Kevin Morgan, Harry Pollitt (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993). 87 Ibid., p. 9. 88 Braddock, The Braddocks, pp. 3–6, 63. 89 Workers’ Weekly, 13 July 1928, p. 4. 90 NMLH. CP/IND/KETT/01. Margot Kettle Papers MS, Recollections of Murdoch Taylor (March 1983), pp. 55–6. 91 Kevin Morgan, ‘A Family party? Some genealogical reflections on the CPGB’, in Kevin Morgan, Gidon Cohen and Andrew Flinn (eds), Agents of The Revolution. New Biographical Approaches to the History of International Communism in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005), p. 184. 92 NMLH. CP/IND/KETT/01. Margot Kettle Papers MS, Recollections of Peggy Aprahamian (February 1983), p. 160; Recollections of Marie Teller, pp. 1–2. 93 Freda Utley, Lost Illusion (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1972), p. 2. 94 NMLH. CP/IND/MISC/10/1. MS. Helen Crawfurd. Untitled autobiography (c.1950s), pp. 270–1; and Workers’ Weekly, 28 September 1923, p. 4. 95 Daily Worker, 8 September 1933, p. 3. 96 Francis Beckett, The Enemy Within:The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party (London: Merlin Press, 1998), pp. 16–17. 97 Trory, Between the Wars, pp. 21, 23. 98 MacDougall (ed.), Voices, p. 477 on MacKinven; and p. 449 on D’Arcy. 99 George Hardy, Those Stormy Years: Memoirs of the Fight for Freedom on Five Continents (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1956), pp. 236–9. 100 MacDougall (ed.), Militant Miners, p. 10. 101 MacColl et al., ‘Theatre of action’, p. 206, 217. 102 Connole, Leaven, pp. 119–20. 103 Malcolm MacEwan, The Greening of a Red (London: Pluto Press, 1991), p. 19. 104 Haldane, Truth, pp. 92–101. 105 Ibid., p. 93. 106 Wood, Communism, pp. 54–5. 107 Morgan, ‘A family party?’, p.179.

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108 NMLH. CP/IND/KETT/01. Margot Kettle Papers MS, Recollections of Jessie Taylor (Jessie Gollan). (March 1983), p. 42. 109 Ibid., p. 45. 110 Ibid., p. 44. 111 NMLH. CP/IND/KETT/01. Margot Kettle Papers MS, Recollections of Meg Wintringham (August 1983), pp. 1–3. 112 Frank Watters, Being Frank:The Memoirs of Frank Watters (Doncaster: Frank Watters, 1992), p. 8. 113 Darke, The Communist Technique, pp. 34–5. 114 NMLH. CP/IND/KETT/01. Margot Kettle Papers MS, Memoirs of Gabriel ‘Bill’ Carritt (May 1983), p. 32. 115 NMLH. CP/IND/KETT/01. Margot Kettle Papers MS, Recollections of Margot Kettle (June 1984), p. 13. 116 Alan Campbell and John McIlroy, ‘Miner heroes: three communist trade union leaders’, in McIlroy et al. (eds), Party People, pp. 146–9. 117 McCarthy, Generation, pp. 73–4. 118 David Ainley, p.1. 119 Trory, Between the Wars, p. 23. 120 Cox, Autobiography, p. 18. 121 Copeman, Reason, pp. 59, 71–2. 122 McCarthy, Generation, p. 90. 123 Recollections of Marie Teller, pp. 1–2. 124 Workers’ Weekly, 28 May 1926, p. 4. 125 Reg Groves, The Balham Group: How British Trotskyism Began (London: Pluto Press, 1974), p. 19. 126 Morgan, ‘A family party?’, pp. 173, 189–90. 127 Jacobs, Out of the Ghetto, p. 79. 128 Daily Worker, 10 December 1934, p. 4. 129 Morgan, ‘A family party?’, pp. 186–9. 130 Ibid. 131 Daily Worker, 15 March 1932, p. 5. 132 Benson, To Struggle, p. 145. 133 SWML. AUD/98. Interview of Mavis Llewellyn, interviewed by Hywel Francis, 20 May 1974. Councillor Fred Llewellyn is also mentioned in Daily Worker, 1 July 1935, p. 3. 134 Mardy features in Stuart Macintyre, Little Moscows: Communism and Working-class Militancy in Inter-War Britain (London: Croom Helm, 1980), pp. 23–47. 135 Details on the Tudor family in SWML. AUD/172. Interview of Mrs John Morgan Evans, interviewed by Hywel Francis, 11 June 1973. 136 SWML. AUD/235. Interview of Norman and J.B. Thomas, interviewed by Hywel Francis, June 1973. 137 Ibid. 138 SWML. AUD/446. Interview of Will Paynter, interviewed by Hywel Francis, 6 March 1973. 139 SWML. AUD/329. Interview of Phil Abrahams, interviewed by Hywel Francis, 14 January 1974. 140 See Daily Worker, 29 September 1932, p. 2; 8 July 1932, p. 5; 1 March 1933, p. 4; and Will Paynter, My Generation (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1972), p. 119. 141 SWML. AUD/176. Interview of Tom Adlam, interviewed by Hywel Francis, 18 July 1974.

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142 Bob Stewart, Breaking the Fetters:The Memoirs of Bob Stewart (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1967), pp. 8–10. 143 Sunday Worker, 7 June 1925, p. 11, regarding Nan Stewart. In regard to the extended communist family in Dundee, it is worth mentioning a study of post-1945 CPGB activists in Dundee. See D. Denver and J. Bochel,‘The Political Socialisation of Activists in the British Communist Party’, British Journal of Political Science, 3:1 (January 1973), 53–71. Notwithstanding the small size of the sample, Denver and Bochel found that 25.5 per cent of their sample of 43 Dundee communists had a parent who was a CPGB member, and as many as 51 per cent had a parent, sibling or uncle or aunt in the Party. 144 Daily Worker, 2 February 1933, p. 4. 145 Trory, Between the Wars, p. 68. 146 McCarthy, Generation, p. 90. 147 Edith and Ruth Frow, Bob and Sarah Lovell: Crusaders for a Better Society (Salford: Working Class Movement Library, 1983), p. 6. 148 Ibid., p. 4. The ICWPA was founded in 1922, and its British Section two years later. The ICWPA was formed to raise funds for political prisoners and striking workers and was supported by the CPGB, as well as the ILP. 149 Paynter, My Generation, p. 34; MacDougall (ed.), Militant Miners, p. 36, on Allan. 150 McIlroy et al. (eds), Party People, p. 202. 151 The statistical findings of the Manchester CPGB Biographical Project bear out the more impressionistic analysis of this chapter. For example, considering the parentchild tie alone, it has been suggested that during the periods 1924–28, 1928–35 and 1935–45 the percentages ‘of the CPGB members who had at least one parent who was at some time in the CPGB’ may have been 22.2 per cent, 11.3 per cent and 14.1 per cent respectively, even climbing to 30.3 per cent in the period after 1945. See, Morgan, ‘A family party?’, p. 194. 152 Daily Worker, 9 February 1937, p. 7.

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5 Being in a familiar place: the life of the adult activist

Communists exist to overcome difficulties.1

‘The old socialist sects out of which the Party is made, have simply the idea of getting on to the streets and preaching communism, and the rest of the time they meet together and chat … and if you go and talk with the ordinary members of the Party, they have not the faintest conception of anything except the instinct of revolution.’2 So stated the CPGB’s leading intellectual, Rajani Palme Dutt, at a session of the British Conference on 19 June 1923. Called by the Presidium of the Comintern to consider the health of the British arm of world communism, and held partly in conjunction with the meeting of the Enlarged Executive of the CI, the British Conference ran for almost a month during mid-summer 1923. It was attended by the majority of the CPGB Executive Committee, an assortment of other British Party leading lights, and representatives of the CPSU, including then Comintern President Grigorii Zinoviev, Karl Radek and Nikolai Bukharin. The usually frank views that were exchanged at the British Conference on the CPGB and its members, such as that expressed by Dutt above, were part of a much longer process of inquiry into the state of the British Party which began in late 1921. The initial external impetus for this inquiry, which would ultimately lead to a quite drastic re-configuring of not only the British Party’s administrative structure, methods of work and strategic emphases, but the definition of membership as well, was the Third Congress of the CI of 12 July 1921. This Conference voted to adopt Lenin’s thesis on The Organisational Structure of the Communist Parties, a strict code of procedure for member parties of the Comintern to follow when developing their organisations and tactics. This development obliged the CPGB, as the loyal British section of the Third International, to move to translate Lenin’s instructions into concrete recommendations for overhauling its practices, organisational machinery and tactical approach. Another, more internal, pressure necessitating a scrutiny of the infant CPGB by late 1921 was its stubborn refusal to ‘take off’. By mid-1921, the CPGB’s membership, at a

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generous estimate given that many in this number were members on paper only, was almost 5,000, a figure that had altered little since the Party’s Foundation Congress in August 1920.3 By December 1921, however, membership had fallen to 3,900.4 It was this stagnation that would later prompt Zinoviev at the British Conference to describe the CPGB as the ‘Achilles heel in international politics’ and Radek to refer to it, during the same session and in equally unflattering language, as ‘a graveyard’.5 This chapter will look at the experience of Communist Party membership within this framework of international communism and its imperatives, the strict Leninist code of practice for recruits, and the British Party’s fluctuating recruitment performance. CPGB membership could become a ‘total’ way of life for some recruits, an all-consuming enterprise of personal devotion to the Party and its mission. In some respects, communism functioned as a type of political religion or ‘political sacralisation’ for those who subscribed to its political agenda.This chapter will, therefore, also scrutinise the unique,‘totalising’ experience of Party membership and the related pleasures and pitfalls of Party life. In regard to the latter, entry into the Party represented a serious and solemn undertaking for ‘joiners’, often bringing in tow vilification, persecution, victimisation, unemployment and imprisonment. In addition, the chapter will delve into the inner world of the Party ‘local’ or branch by illuminating some of its characteristics and idiosyncrasies, explore the meaning of communism for Party activists, and consider the experience of expulsion for those who parted company from the Party and the communist world. By the time of its Fourth Congress at St Pancras on 18–19 March 1922, the CPGB had formally approved the principles on organisation adopted at the Third Congress of the CI and appointed an Organisation Commission to investigate the Party’s workings. The Commission consisted of Dutt, Harry Pollitt, and Harry Inkpin, brother of the then Party Secretary (1920–29) Albert Inkpin. The Commission proceeded faithfully to apply Lenin’s organisational theses to the British context and went on to pinpoint what it believed to be the defects in the British Party. An Interim Report highlighted the disproportion between the low volume of dues-paying members and the hugely inflated number of salaried staff and officials: fifty-five in total, which meant that for every thirty-three members paying subscriptions, there was one paid official.6 The Party was not paying its way either and had been heavily reliant on Comintern subsidies since its formation. A second Final Report, which was unanimously accepted by the Fifth Party Congress at Battersea (7–8 October 1922), went further. Apparently, the CPGB’s potential had been constrained by the federal or geographical structure for electing the leadership which encouraged local loyalties and ensured that the ‘best comrades’ would not always find a place on the Party Executive. Moreover, the Party’s federal, rather than Bolshevik, nature prevented the King Street headquarters becoming a strong, responsive and effective coordinating and leading centre for members and local branches. The Party’s methods also carried

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the trace of precursor parties such as the British Socialist Party, a more ‘propagandist’ phase of leftist agitation which favoured platform propaganda over the detailed work in the trade unions advocated by the Commission. The Party press was under-performing, too, in that it was failing to reflect or link up with the everyday concerns of workers, particularly as experienced in the workplace. The Party’s branch structure was viewed as a further hangover from the days of the older pre-CPGB socialist ‘sects’, as they were disparagingly described. Partly as a consequence of the early CPGB’s federal character, branches lacked a coordinating centre, being too autonomous and detached from Party headquarters. Also, most branches were tiny, many having fewer than ten members. The branches were also periodically inactive, resembled loose associations of propagandists operating in a nebulous territorial space, and had a propensity to get mired in un-coordinated, ad-hoc local work. Much of the Commission’s invective, in a theme which particularly speaks to this chapter, was aimed at the pre-Bolshevisation membership structure and ethos. For the Commission, there was no obligation on Party members to be active, save for ‘occasionally turning up at a meeting’. This institutionalised inertia was compounded by a membership that had a very poor grasp of Marxist-Leninist principles, a deficiency not helped by the dearth of regular Party training. The end result was a Party judged to be too detached from the masses and the class struggle, and an inactive membership lacking in Bolshevik awareness. What emerged from this process of ‘Bolshevisation’, the essentials of which were in place by the end of 1923, was a more centralised, disciplined and responsive Party, organised as envisaged by the Leninist model of democratic centralism.7 In a sense, the CPGB was constructed, as John Callaghan has pointed out, as a war party, as were all communist member parties to the Comintern, a militarised machine designed to wage class war against a powerfully entrenched capitalist enemy.8 Certainly, military metaphors are everywhere to be found in CPGB discourse. At a funeral for a communist miner from Fife in 1923 the deceased was honoured as a ‘soldier in the Communist army’, contributors to the Party press were referred to as ‘War Correspondents’ reporting from the ‘classwar battle front’, while the CPGB leadership exhorted the members to build a mass Party with ‘large battalions’.9 The federal nature of the CPGB’s leadership structure gave way to a smaller, more centralised EC which was comprised of an Organisation Bureau and a Political Bureau.10 Local work was to be made more efficient through the establishment of new, non-federal, District Party Committees (DPCs), functioning in district organisations delineated on the basis of perceived communist strength and potential.11 Local Party Committees, or ‘locals’, also replaced the existing loose association area branches, with a remit to bring members into active work. The general thrust of the restructuring effort was towards enhancing the presence and activity of Party members, or communist ‘nuclei’, in the trade unions, factories, workshops and other such places of proletarian toil and struggle. Greater attention was to be given to

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women’s work and recruitment also, the Party admitting that this area had suffered from neglect in the early years.12 As mentioned, one of the principal targets of the restructuring exercise was the membership. ‘Bolshevisation’ meant that the definition, meaning and role of membership altered immeasurably. Gone would be the ‘Social Democratic’ ethos that was thought to have permeated the branches of the early CPGB. Henceforth, because ‘Bolshevisation’ transformed the CPGB’s organisational profile, methods and strategic priorities, members would be operating in a framework and atmosphere that was more centralised, disciplined, and austere. Furthermore, every member would be obliged to carry out a task for the Party. Along with the injunction that the DPCs and locals were to bring all members into activity, the Commission’s Report enjoined that every member was required to be a ‘working member’. This was not all. As well as insisting that all recruits should engage in active work for the Party, it was decreed that they should have their political consciousness raised simultaneously with this. This was to be achieved by systematic training in Marxist principles. As Jack Murphy admitted, then on the Political Bureau, there were few in the Party in its first few years of life ‘who had more than a nodding acquaintance with the writings of Marx’ and that ‘it would take time to transform parliamentary Socialists, guild Socialists, syndicalists, antiparliamentarians and the like into fully developed communists of the standard set by the new Leninist conceptions’.13 Murphy’s comrade on the EC, Bob Stewart, put it another way. It was ‘the sieve of struggle’ that eventually sifted out the true fighters from the rest in this early phase of the Party’s life.14 A further aspect of this reformulation of the conditions and meaning of membership required that new recruits underwent a period of probation prior to becoming full members. Out of the fundamental reshaping of the Party and the definition and rules of membership that had taken place by the end of 1923 would emerge the communist life, with its unique characteristics and flavour.This would be a ‘total’ way of life for those who subscribed to abide by the new membership ethos. It was an experience that could bring immense pleasures and feelings of personal satisfaction for communist ‘joiners’, including intellectual stimulation, a sense of purposefulness and direction, and feelings of comradeship that often developed into deep and enduring friendships. Equally, though, the communist life, with its demands, exhausting schedules and centrally imposed disciplines, to which we should add the ever-present hazard of persecution and victimisation, alienated others. During the interwar period, for reasons that often stemmed from these factors, the CPGB haemorrhaged members at a rate which troubled Party strategists. ‘Bolshevisation’, therefore, apart from the high-points of the 1926 miners’ strike and the ‘Popular Front’ period of the mid-to-late 1930s, inadvertently contributed to the Party’s generally sluggish recruitment performance between the Wars which thwarted its cherished aspiration to build a mass-based communist movement.

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CPGB membership following ‘Bolshevisation’ became an all-consuming enterprise, often of such intensity that it invariably became the preserve of the devoted only. Jack Murphy, who left the CPGB in 1932 along with his communist wife Molly, described his feelings on leaving: ‘It was as if we had been released from a condition of continuous tension, common to the life of communists, wherein all one’s thoughts are concentrated on the Party and its work, its associations, its people, its doctrine, to the exclusion of the larger world around us.’15 Douglas Hyde, a Party member since 1928 who, like Murphy, left after a period of active engagement, was equally struck by the totalising, self-referential nature of the communist life: ‘The Party is so organised as to make communism the whole life of its members …; it takes the whole of their waking time, at work, in their leisure, wherever they go. It controls their whole thought life.They spend their days thinking of how best to “apply the Party line” to their own milieu.’16 William Holt, a communist councillor in Todmorden, Yorkshire, in the 1930s found that ‘the tension of Party life was unnatural’.17 The line between Party work and leisure time was always blurred for the devoted. Loyal Arsenal supporters, Molly and Jack Murphy combined their regular Saturday afternoon excursion to Highbury with ‘missionary work’ for the Party, where they would ‘sell a bundle of Daily Workers to the assembling crowd before the match began’.18 ‘Conscience thus satisfied by duty done’, the Murphys then joined the happy throng of the Arsenal faithful on the terraces.19 The ‘unnatural’ life of a Party member was characterised by frenetic, exhausting schedules that devoured time and physical energy. A subtext of ‘Bolshevisation’, as we have seen, was the expectation to work, which could be taken to ridiculous lengths. We can get some sense of the problem for often beleaguered local activists from the letters that David Proudfoot, from the Fife mining village of Methil, sent to fellow Party loyalist Allen Hutt during the 1920s. In one letter, written in January 1925, Proudfoot informed Hutt that he was a Group leader and Representative on the CPGB’s Fife DPC, Group Trainer, chief distributor of Party literature, delegate for his union branch to the local Trades and Labour council, delegate for the Trades and Labour council to the Divisional Executive, collector of subscriptions for the Communist Book Club, checkweighman, and ‘doormat’ for local industrial disputes. ‘How in hell’s name’, groaned an exasperated Proudfoot, ‘can any one man do all of those jobs right?’20 Proudfoot’s situation had evidently not improved by April of the following year. ‘I am getting fed up, George’, he informed Hutt. ‘It is getting absolute hell, with no promise of any assistance to ever increasing work.’21 Nocturnal commitments for the Party were commonplace. Party activities usually kept the Brighton communist Ernie Trory ‘up until one or sometimes two o’clock’ in the morning.Trory felt so tired that he often ‘used to fall asleep at area committee meetings’.22 On many occasions during the 1932 strike of the Lancashire weavers to resist the imposition of the ‘more looms’ system, the Manchester communist Mick Jenkins and his comrades ‘were still at it’ leafleting

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the mills at two o’clock in the morning. This was usually followed by further bouts of leafleting that same morning in time for the six-thirty ‘pre-breakfast start’.23 Or take the plight of Frankie Woods, the Party’s Daily Worker agent for a period during the 1930s with responsibility ‘for the whole of the Rhondda’, who was up at four o’clock every morning in order to lift the papers from the London train prior to arranging for their distribution to the villages of the Rhondda coalfields.24 Communist women, too, felt the pressure of punishing schedules. Like Mick Jenkins, Margaret McCarthy, herself a textile worker, lost sleep working for the Party during the 1932 Lancashire weavers’ strike. ‘We stayed out to the early hours’, she recalled, ‘fly-posting and street-chalking; we spent every day and evening preparing leaflets, organising, speaking at meetings, and so on.’25 In 1933, after a period of twelve years as a communist activist during which time she had sat on the Party’s EC (1923–25), Helen Crawfurd confessed that ‘I was beginning to feel the strain of the arduous life I had been living – travelling throughout the country, changing beds and generally leading the life of one who has no abiding city. I had reached my fifty-sixth year and was a bit battered and tired …’26 Such a mode of life was not conducive to attracting or retaining women as members, particularly housewives and mothers. Little allowance would be made in the CPGB’s ideal of membership, with its rigidly unsympathetic Leninist injunction to work, for the multiple demands imposed on the housewife and mother saddled with the upkeep of home and family, and sometimes a paid job to hold down. Clearly, women would experience communist membership quite differently to that of their male counterparts. It was a situation compounded by the Party’s image of labour. To the British Communist Party, particularly during the 1920s, with its strong bias towards an exclusively proletarian communism, labour was suggestive of masculinity, bulging biceps and heavy industry, usually mining, engineering or shipbuilding. Specifically gender issues, or the politics of consumption, would rarely be found at the top of the CPGB’s overly masculine agenda and, if they did, as Karen Hunt and Matthew Worley tell us, they were invariably ‘presented in the broader context of the class struggle’.27 Little surprise then that, given the countervailing domestic responsibilities and ingrained male bias, the proportion of women members in the CPGB very rarely climbed above 14 and 16 per cent of the overall membership during the interwar period. The sole exception to this pattern was the 1926 miners’ strike when the proportion rose to around 21 per cent, courtesy of an influx of wives of locked out miners.28 Besides the strain on one’s time and body arising from exhausting schedules, there was the ever-present pressure of persecution, victimisation and vilification that communist women and men had to endure. Entry into the Party represented a serious undertaking, often bringing in tow unemployment, an appearance in court, or even imprisonment. One gets a sense of the pressure through considering the experience of Party activists during the General Strike and miners’

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lock-out of 1926. Over 1,000 communists were arrested under various sections of the Emergency Powers Act (EPA), an extraordinary figure which accounted for around one-fifth of the CPGB’s total pre-Strike membership.29 An arrest could contain the seeds of additional hazards. Harry Pollitt’s wife, Marjorie, wound up in court for publishing the CPGB’s strike newspaper, the Workers’ Bulletin, which led to the London County Council’s Education Committee terminating her employment as Assistant Mistress.30 Marjorie Pollitt’s comrade, Isabel Brown, suffered a similar fate. She received a three-month prison sentence early in the General Strike for a ‘seditious speech’ at Castleford, Yorkshire, where she was alleged to have appealed to the troops not to act against the strikers. For this ‘indiscretion’, the Board of Education withdrew her qualifying certificate as a teacher, ‘thus victimising her for life’.31 The persecution of Isabel Brown did not stop there. Whilst in prison her mother fell seriously ill. Despite strenuous outside efforts to secure an early release on compassionate grounds in order that she might see her ailing mother before she died, the then Home Secretary William Joynson-Hicks refused to comply. By the time a release was eventually granted, her mother had passed away. The vituperation and punishments heaped upon the heads of communists by the authorities during the 1926 dispute appeared boundless. One risked a heavy prison term or stiff fine for being found with CPGB-produced strike literature, which was the dual fate of a Salford communist, Jack Forshaw, who received one month in prison and a £100 fine for being in possession of a so-called ‘dangerous’ leaflet.32 This had a tragic outcome. Whilst in prison, Forshaw contracted pneumonia and died.33 Communist miners faced acute dangers also during the 1926 dispute, as indicated by a few examples from the Fife coalfield. David Proudfoot of Methil lost his position as checkweighman at the Wemyss Coal Company’s Wellesley colliery because of his militant activities during the lock-out. Only the ‘dole’ remained for Proudfoot.34 The Moffat brothers, Abe and Alex, communist militants from the ‘Little Moscow’ of Lumphinnans, experienced ongoing victimisation by their pre-Strike employer, the Fife Coal Company, for their activities during the dispute. The Company was victimising the brothers as late as 1929, when it secured an injunction removing them from their elected posts as checkweighmen at Lumphinnans No.11 pit.35 In addition, Alex Moffat suffered a twomonth jail sentence for a speech made during the 1926 events. The employment ‘bar’ also went up against the Methil communist miner, John McArthur, following the end of the lock-out in November 1926. McArthur did not obtain work again until February 1928 when he secured a position as a full-time agent with the Fife miners’ union.36 The victimisation could take in other family members. John McArthur’s father and brother were barred from working in the local pit, as were the entire Moffat family. Even McArthur’s children, in later years, would find it difficult to obtain employment. ‘When the name McArthur was mentioned’, he later recalled, ‘that was sufficient – the bar was put up … This was a general experience for leading Communist Party lads when their

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families came to get employment.’37 There are moving accounts of victimised communists trying to eke out a precarious living after being barred from returning to the Fife pits after the 1926 lock-out, such as Jimmy Ord of Gallatown who sold clothes made by his wife, and Jimmy Stewart of Lochgelly who ‘built a small wooden hut to sell sweets and cigarettes to assist his wife and family’.38 We should bear in mind, too, when considering the dangers inherent in Party membership, that in the case of communist miners, because many miners’ homes were the property of the privately owned collieries, a loss of employment could trigger an eviction.This was the fate of Joe Swan, whose fight for the right to appoint Workmen’s Inspectors at the Newcraighall colliery in the Lothians incurred the wrath of the Lothian Coal Company which sent in the police and bailiffs to remove him from his ‘Company home’.39 Communists also had to endure the scornful reproaches of neighbours and friends. Unless fortunate enough to live in a community where the Party’s profile was high, as in the ‘Little Moscow’ mining village of Elphinstone in East Lothian where every family in the village bar one regularly bought a copy of the Daily Worker, an activist’s life could be very lonely one.40 In isolated pockets of British communism where the Party had a miniscule presence, a local communist could quickly acquire pariah status, as William Holt discovered when he attempted to convert the citizens of Todmorden to communism by making passionate speeches on the iniquities of capitalism in the town’s market square. ‘So intense was the fury of the campaign of vilification launched against me from all quarters in my native town’, remembered Holt, ‘that I could only stand and marvel at the forces I had let loose.’41 CPGB joiners also risked being forsaken by non-Party relatives and friends. Party membership, Margaret McCarthy has written, invited ‘the certainty of alienation from near and dear relatives and the misunderstanding of friends’.42 Because they invariably ‘lose all their old friends’, Douglas Hyde has informed us, ‘communists always make their friendships within the movement’.43 How should we explain the willingness of Communist Party members to bear these various trials and tribulations – the grueling schedules, the ubiquitous threat of arrest, persecution, victimisation and unemployment, the vilification of neighbours, relatives and friends – with such apparent stoicism? Part of the explanation lies in a self-sacrificing spirit that came from a deep inner belief in communism or the Party, and the viability of the communist mission to fashion a society of a new type. Before joining the CPGB ‘I had been a completely futile, purposeless, untrained and useless young factory girl, unimportant to anyone except my mother’, declared the Lancashire weaver Margaret McCarthy.44 All this would change with admittance into the Party. The Party would impart a feeling of elevation and worth, bestow a new personal and collective identity, in short, transform her self-image. She was raised to a new standing whereby she became a symbol, a ‘worker’ of the classic factory type, with an unimpeachable proletarian origin, who ‘belonged to the working class, the toiling, exploited,

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anonymous ones; the creators of all the wealth and marvels of the world’.45 If belief in revolutionary change embraced the vision of dismantling the old order and bringing about equality and social justice, it also opened up new spaces for self-discovery, seemingly endless vistas for emotional and intellectual expansion. Although at one level communism offered Margaret McCarthy ‘nothing except the necessity to work very hard, at utterly mean, labouring and distasteful tasks’, she felt that after entering the CPGB her ‘life had become suddenly full, suddenly rich; the world and my own place and purpose in it had suddenly expanded’.46 But even more than this, membership of the Party had placed the previously ‘insignificant’ young textile worker ‘in the revolutionary vanguard of the toiling masses’. ‘I was out there in front’, exclaimed McCarthy.47 The sense of personal worth and satisfaction that Party membership engendered did not end there, because this higher revolutionary goal was also a metaphor of belonging. McCarthy felt that she had transcended her present isolated, individual state and melded into ‘a world movement, of knowing one’s heart to beat in unison with workers throughout the whole wide world. Words cannot convey the sense of belonging, of being an integral part of a world pattern, of marching in a mighty procession of workers, multitudes of enduring, and ultimately prevailing creative beings’.48 Besides this process of dissolution of self and transcendence into the whole that is characteristic of many mass-based political movements, there was the added emotional charge of feeling that ‘one marched forward with history’. McCarthy and her comrades were not scheming to stem history’s ‘onward, surging tide, but swelling forward with it, one with the movement across the centuries, forward into an unimaginably magnificent future of human brotherhood’. In this thrillingly exhilarating eschatological moment, ‘History and we were one’, McCarthy concluded.49 Margaret McCarthy’s feelings were widely shared in the Party.The idea of the ‘working class’ as a subject transcending its individual elements, the proletariat as a distinct discursive entity, was a characteristic feature of communist belief. As Raphael Samuel so brilliantly put it, although notionally abstractions, communists saw classes as ‘living sentient beings’ with instincts, appetites and drives ‘as compulsive as those of the Fruedian id’.The working class, like other classes, had physical and personality characteristics where communists would credit a class with ‘behavioural attributes’ and ‘unconscious motivations and drives’.50 The related dialectical notion of the working class as the ‘coming class’ entrusted by a providential history to move society to higher stages of development was another motif of communist belief. Like Margaret McCarthy, Arnold Kettle, who joined the Communist Party in 1936 in response to events in Spain, felt the thrill of being part of this world project, an integral part of a ‘world pattern’. Involvement in the Party and the class struggle, ‘made me part of a great movement which I accepted and which accepted me’, he reflected.51 Jean MacGibbon, who joined the CP’s branch in Barnes, Surrey, in February 1937, experienced similar feelings.When MacGibbon attended a communist rally at the

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Albert Hall a few months after entering the Party she ‘felt the heady inspiration of belonging to a great concourse of people, all going one way, all with the same aims’.52 Besides the feeling of transcendence, the memoirs of interwar British communists contain similar motifs of self-discovery, purposefulness and belonging that one finds in Margaret McCarthy’s writings. Joining the Communist Party, recalled Arnold Kettle, ‘shook the whole foundation of things for me’.53 Kettle became part of the CPGB’s Cambridge University group, where he discovered ‘an entirely new spirit’ which matured into a feeling ‘of comradeship, a deep sense of being a part of something vital, that I’d never felt before’.54 New friendships forged with fellow communists in the heat of political struggle would compensate for the disapprobation of former non-Party friends. Joining the CPGB represented ‘a total change of life’ for another 1930s Cambridge University recruit, a new existence where ‘one suddenly found a whole world of people that one could take to and feel friendly to’.55 Even Douglas Hyde, one of the interwar CPGB’s most disgruntled ex-members and vitriolic critics, grudgingly conceded that, despite the strain, the communist life was ‘one also of sustained excitement when idealism, willingness to sacrifice, love of battle and adventure blended into a satisfying sense of purpose and fulfilment’.56 The Welsh communist Will Paynter, too, felt that a ‘strong feeling of adventure enlivened our activities during the early 1930s’, as well as ‘excitement and a certain element of danger’.57 It was this idealistic cast of thinking, an outlook informed by intense feeling and passion, which empowered many communist joiners to meet every challenge with apparently boundless enthusiasm. When a Party member ‘I was ready for anything’, William Holt tells us. ‘I flung myself into the work of the Party reckless of consequences to myself.’58 During the wholesalers’ boycott of the Daily Worker, Holt recounts that it was ‘with joy I got up to meet the 5.15 train each morning before starting out on my journey as a commercial traveller’.59 This same spirit animated another activist, Jack Brent, who held a regular pitch at Belsize Park tube station selling the Daily Worker between 1937 and January 1941. Despite being severely disabled and constantly on drugs as a result of being wounded during the battle for Madrid whilst fighting in the International Brigade in Spain, Brent would be found at his Belsize Park post daily from seven o’clock in the morning, often remaining there until the last passenger had gone home.60 The dogged Brent would remain at his pitch in all weathers. ‘I’ve known him come home three times to change his clothes’, a contemporary of Brent remembered.61 Foul weather and personal discomfort did not discourage David Proudfoot either, as is made clear in a letter he wrote to Allen Hutt in the winter of 1925: ‘Collecting box hung round my neck for Defence Fund – 17/3d last Friday and 12/- today.Weather hellish, soaked to the skin with rain last night and snow and sleet today. Collected almost £6 today. No lull in Class War due to rotten weather.’62 The communist effort in 1920s Dundee was just as unstinting. ‘Nothing was a handicap to them’, Bob Stewart recalled of his Dundee comrades.

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‘They were out on [paper] sales late and early, in snow, sleet and rain, nothing deterred them.’63 Such activism seemed less gruelling when cast as an aspect of nature visualised through metaphor: ‘Never at any time’, Stewart added, ‘did we admit the hill was too steep or the mountain too high to climb.’64 Mountain metaphors were often called upon to explain communist belief. ‘I now saw myself’, said the Salford communist Ewan MacColl on acquiring a Marxist political consciousness, ‘as part of an historical force which would one day dismantle the shoddy and dilapidated capitalist system and, in its place, create a world where every day would be like the conquest of an unclimbed mountain peak.’65 It is beyond question that communist activism had its basis in a seemingly unshakeable belief system that inspired a deep sense of belonging and feeling of transcendence.To Willie Gallacher,‘only a belief in the cause, a belief that nothing can shake’, could explain communist devotion.66 It is also true to say that this belief system and devotion had much of its basis in concrete material considerations, such as a desire to extirpate exploitation and class inequalities and achieve social justice.To confine our understanding of the roots of communist belief and devotion to material or political considerations, however, would be to know it partially and one-dimensionally. There is another component to consider also, for, in other respects, communist motivation contained moral, evangelical, sacrificial and penitential ingredients of a kind that characterised conventional movements of religious belief. While we can discern antecedents for such ingredients in an earlier period of evangelical and ethical socialism as espoused by the Socialist Sunday Schools and the Labour Church Movement of the fin de siècle, it is more than this, for it is difficult to escape the conclusion that that the CPGB functioned as a form of ‘political religion’, or ‘political sacralisation’, for those who subscribed to its political mission.67 Certainly, we can observe classic characteristics of a political religion in Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, and the CPGB. As with organised religion, the CPGB provided its followers with certainty in place of doubt, and the promise of salvation rather than a fall into sin, perdition or apocalyptic catastrophe, the latter signified to 1930s communists by crisisafflicted capitalism’s spawning of its hideous progeny, fascism. There was also, as we have seen above, the promise in the Marxist-Leninist dialectical project of a final, liberating eschatological moment, the imminence of the final communist goal which brought reassurance and sustained activism during the all-too frequent times of difficulty and political defeat. This perfected state would be arrived at courtesy of a providential history moving society through the evolutionary stages, in much the same way as the eschatological stages of the Christian cycle. Additionally, as with some strands of fundamentalist religious belief, the Party would, in its most imperious moments, claim to posses the absolute, inviolable truth. In a similar vein, when conceit got the better of other instincts, some Party functionaries could resemble a priestly aristocracy, an Elect or those Chosen. Indeed, the Lenin School in Moscow, where the Comintern trained its

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overseas cadres, had the feel of a seminary for some.68 The Edinburgh communist Fred Douglas, a Lenin School student in the 1930s, thought ‘the atmosphere was like a confessional’ with everyone on the look-out ‘for deviations’, for in the one true Bolshevik church, schism was read as heresy.69 In a similar vein, when the authoress Naomi Mitchison’s communist son was sent by Party Headquarters at King Street in 1939 to process an enrolment application from a fellow Scot, the potential convert felt that ‘he came literally to catechise me on my knowledge’.70 Some of the utterances of certain Party elders, in particular, had the aura of ‘pontifical infallibility’ about them. Even a usually self-deprecating Party member like Margaret McCarthy was not immune. For McCarthy, joining the Party meant that ‘I had been, as it were, chosen, and my life suddenly began to have some sense’.71 The Calvinist undertone was unmistakable. Jack Murphy, too, confessed that on initial entry into the congregation of the communist devoted, ‘my Marxism assumed the same role in my thoughts as the Bible plays in the role of the Christian’. Similarly, on the question of the need to transform Britain’s workers into a revolutionary body in line with Party doctrine, Murphy admits that ‘I judged people by their acceptance or rejection of it much as the evangelical Christians had divided the people in terms of the blessed and the damned’.72 Helen Crawfurd, too, has written in her memoirs that: ‘In looking back, I see myself as a sort of Evangelist. My job was that of awakening interest.’73 In a related sense, the Party ‘priesthood’ hunted heretics, particularly Trotskyites, and threatened culprits with ex-communication from the one true Leninist or Stalinist church. Marxism and the Party also furnished meaning and grand ordered explanation to counter the confusion of contemporary life and modernity, as did religion. For the International Brigade hero Jack Brent, with communist ideas came the ‘thrill of discovery as the jigsaw of the life he knew, the life of privation and the underdog, sorted itself into an ordered pattern in his mind’.74 The jigsaw metaphor surfaced in the memoirs of Ewan MacColl. ‘It really wasn’t until I was twenty-five or twenty-six’, MacColl has written,‘that everything fell into position like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Then I really began to think as a Marxist’.75 A garden metaphor could just as easily explain communist belief. After reading Engels as an aspiring activist, prior to the final conversion in his mid-twenties, MacColl felt that ‘the world had suddenly kind of become a great flower, everything began to co-relate – not completely, but it began to co-relate’.76 In an era of unrelenting modernity and materialism, communism, for some joiners, also filled a psychological and emotional gap left by receding religious creeds. For another interwar member, Freda Utley, communism was a ‘substitute for religion’, and ‘the instinctive desire for a religion was the compelling force leading me, step by step, into the communist trap’.77 ‘The Communist Party gave me a faith’, stated Margaret McCarthy, and although it preached materialism and encouraged atheism, ‘it contradictorily replaced this by filling my life with a tremendous emotional force’.78 For some joiners like McCarthy, a communist

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faith served up the gods, martyrs and immortal heroes that she yearned to have in her life. ‘Since my childhood’, she pointed out, ‘I had lived a sort of secret life with ancient heroes, immortals and gods. The Party replaced them by living heroes, sacrificing their all that the Party might triumph …’79 Other religious motifs can be discerned. Like earlier Christianity or fundamentalist Islam, Bolshevik communism was a proselytising faith in that it aggressively sought converts. In another sense, as with some faiths, the Bolshevik version of communism was a monotheism in that it refused to countenance rival deities. In Karl Marx, of course, the new communist faith had its charismatic founder. Later on, the Party, too, would have its charismatic founder in Lenin, whom Stalin’s propaganda machine would deify as a cult object of veneration and dedication for the communist faithful. ‘At one stage’ during the 1930s, the Glasgow communist Harry McShane informs us, ‘some [CPGB] branches had “little Lenin corners”, like secular shrines’.80 In time, sacred status would be conferred on Stalin as well. Similarly, Marx’s Capital and The Communist Manifesto, with their blistering diagnosis of sinful capitalism, served as sacred texts and a source of inspiration for Party devotees, while their intrinsic message was a call to faith around a redemptive, regenerative mission to bring into being the new communist ‘Jerusalem’. These sacred texts could also trigger sudden, startling ‘road to Damascus’ conversions, such as Henry Fern’s epiphany on reading the classic texts of the movement in 1936. Reading Marx’s Manifesto and Lenin’s State and Revolution ‘had an electric effect on my thinking’, recalled the Canadian-born Fern, who went on to become the CPGB’s organiser of ‘colonial work’ at Cambridge University in 1937. To Fern, ‘It was a conversion, like Paul’s on the Road to Damascus’.81 Communist platform speakers could have the same startling effect on potential converts. On hearing Party orator ‘Tommy’ Jackson’s clear enunciation of the Marxist gospel from his pulpit at a miners’ lodge in South Shields shortly after the Great War, the listening Isabel Brown, like St Paul, ‘saw a great light!’, which triggered an immediate conversion to the faith.82 Harry Pollitt’s platform oratory had the same electrifying effect on Mick Jenkins, whom we met above.‘And how the audience rose when Harry [Pollitt] lifted the curtain of the future and gave us a gleam of what these [Russian] revolutionary workers were fighting for … That night Pollitt became my hero,’ Jenkins recalled of a speech the communist leader had given at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1924.83 For potential converts, like the prophets of Christianity, the communist prophets showed the way, the truth and the light, emitting radiance into dark and, as yet, undefined and uncertain places. Again, as with all religious movements, the communist movement created its own liturgy and developed its own form of public ceremonial. Communists would participate in solemn private and collective rituals, some of which functioned to confirm Party unity, while others acted to transmit cherished Party myths, such as that of the immortal spirit of the founder of the faith. Thus it was that the CPSU staged the exhibition of Lenin’s preserved, embalmed body in the

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Kremlin sarcophagus as a shrine and site of mourning and pilgrimage for Party devotees. These commemorative pilgrimages to this most revered site of communist mourning in the Kremlin were deliberately solemn affairs that seemed to be staged so as to evoke a religious sense of feeling in those who participated in them. Party member Fred Copeman, the Invergordon mutineer and International Brigade volunteer, visited Lenin’s Mausoleum in the 1930s and was struck by the contrived, religious connotations surrounding the occasion.84 The latter was one of the most revered myths of the communist movement, which aimed to preserve in communist rituals, symbolism and political discourse the spirit of revolutionary sacrifice generated by the Party’s heroes. Not all communist recruits were prepared to answer the Party’s evangelical calling. For them, struggle and self-sacrifice did not impart a sacramental strength. They did not feel communism’s spiritual pull, experience an epiphany on reading its sacred texts, nor were they keen to seek martyrdom. The total nature of the communist life and experience, with its injunctions to unsparing work and self-sacrifice, its ever-present threats of persecution and victimisation, which invigorated and ennobled some, repelled and alienated others. During the interwar period the CPGB regularly shed members, while many other potential recruits balked at the prospect of committing to the communist way of life. If we take the 1920s, apart from period of the 1926 General Strike and miners’ strike when the membership hit 10,430 in October 1926, membership levels were depressingly low. In 1925, one year into Bolshevisation, the membership was still only 5,000, rising to 6,000 in April 1926. Following the recruitment highpoint of October 1926, the membership steadily fell away before eventually sinking to somewhere near its pre-General Strike level. Thus the membership registered at 9,000 in January 1927, 5,556 in March 1928, 3,500 in July 1929, and 2,899 in November 1929.85 For a time during the ‘Third Period’, a communist on Britain’s streets was a rare sight. Between May 1930 and May 1931, Party membership stubbornly refused to climb beyond the 2,860 mark. Granted, the situation started to improve after that, particularly once ‘Class against Class’ had been jettisoned. By the middle to late 1930s, when the Popular Front line was being followed, the membership climbed to 6,500 in February 1935, 11,500 in December 1936, 12,500 in May 1937 and 18,000 in December 1938, before dipping slightly to 17,756 in July 1939.86 Many of the new intake were drawn in by the CPGB’s principled fight both against unemployment and ‘against fascism and war’. These included white-collar workers injured by the trade depression, and idealistic ‘middle-class’ students and writers from the universities. In relation to the latter, Andrew Thorpe has said that this oftcited ‘entry of the intellectuals’ was not numerically significant enough to alter the CPGB’s traditional sociological profile, which remained overwhelmingly proletarian.87 Despite the parenthesis of the influx of miners in 1926 and the marked improvement during the Popular Front years, the CPGB hardly achieved the goal

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of becoming a ‘mass party’. We can gain some perspective on this, even taking account of the different demographic and political context of Weimar Germany, if we consider that during 1930 alone the KPD pulled in 143,000 recruits, this during a year when the high-water mark of the British Party’s membership was 2,860.88 It was just a year and a half into Bolshevisation that the problems of recruitment began to become apparent to British Party strategists.Why is it, asked Albert Inkpin at the Party’s Seventh Congress in May–June 1925, that 50,000 copies of the Workers’Weekly are sold, including 25,000 to regular purchasers, ‘and yet in spite of that the total membership of the Party five years after its formation is only 5,000’.89 The EC of the Party conceded that even this ‘lamentably small’ membership was ‘very fluid’. This situation, where ‘a constant stream of workers are coming into the Party and a constant stream going out’, constituted ‘one of the Party’s most formidable problems’ the EC concluded.90 Reports on the Districts told a bleak story. The Manchester delegate informed the Congress that his District made 150 new members during a recent propaganda drive ‘but not two of them remained in the Party’.91 Tyneside received a ticking off for being ‘one of the weakest of the Party districts’ despite its great potential, so did Liverpool and Sheffield.92 Tyneside District thought it knew why there was such a malaise in Party recruitment. A month before the Seventh Congress, Tyneside District Organiser John Tearney went into print to blame the heavy Party dues, fear of victimisation, the excessive Party discipline, and the Party’s idealised, heroic self-image for this apparent impasse. ‘The Party is responsible itself for creating in the minds of the workers the bogey of victimisation and tremendous sacrifice’, declared Tearney. ‘They are told at public meetings and through the Party press that we are a Party of fighters who are continually watched and followed by the Police, and the average worker is not prepared to be a hero – at least not in cold blood’.93 Moreover, he continued, ‘the worker gets the impression that we are a special brand of human beings, a band of hard, untiring, and unfaltering intellectual giants, always active, alert, and under very strict discipline’.94 Unfortunately for Tearney, this was indeed the Party’s preferred image of itself and its worker recruits. Consistent with the Marxist-Leninist aim of building a strong, iron Bolshevik Party, ‘of hammering out a Party which must be of steel and all of one piece’ as a Party circular on Leninism explained it, the CPGB sought to bring into being a worker activist of a new type. In the Party’s reckoning, its worker recruits represented the elite of the class and its local organisers were ever vigilant to enlist, retain and nurture what David Proudfoot of Methil, in a memorable metaphorical flourish, called ‘the real meat’ as opposed to ‘what is really tripe’, or ‘the grain’ instead of ‘the chaff’.95 While Proudfoot was ‘real meat’ rather than ‘tripe’, ‘an instinctive proletarian Bolshevik of the best type’ as Allen Hutt described him, many other recruits, aspiring and actual, were not.96 Proudfoot’s letters to Hutt tell a story of frustration and expectations dashed as he attempted, at great risk to his own health, to enroll and

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mould worker recruits in his own image, namely instinctive proletarian Bolsheviks of the best type. Initial attempts to found a communist group in Methil led to early frustration. In September 1924 he told Hutt that, despite his best efforts, ‘our group is about as dead as the “dodo”’.97 There were signs of stirring in Methil by the following month but not of a manner to encourage Proudfoot.‘Those who attend are all sympathetic, read the [Workers’] Weekly and the Labour Monthly, assist financially, and when a crisis arises are to be depended upon’, Proudfoot wrote, ‘but seem to think it a joke when I ask them to join up’.98 A year later, Proudfoot’s efforts in Methil continued to flounder. He wrote to Hutt that: ‘We are assured we have tons of sympathy (“Come to us when you are handing out the guns”, “We’ll be ready when the time comes”, etc.) but not a bloody one of them will join the Party.’99 Even those who were persuaded to join were some distance from matching the preferred Bolshevik profile. In the same letter he wrote: ‘What in hell’s name induced some of them to come into the Party beats me. Can’t even give a word of information re happenings at the Pit to go in “The Spark” … It is the same when asking some of the old as well as the new members to do anything, sell papers, write reports, etc. – “Am no’ cut oot for that”, or “Ah hivna time”.’100 He signed off on a gloomy note, informing Hutt that in the Methil Group there were ‘5 out of 25 active’.101 Others felt sympathetic towards recruits, particularly new ones, seeing the exhortations to work as a constant trial for them. ‘New members enter the Party full of enthusiasm’, said the Tyneside District Organiser in his veiled attack on the Bolshevik ethos in April 1925, ‘work is immediately piled upon them, their enthusiasm is killed off … and they go out on to the scrap-heap’.102 Even Harry Pollitt, on the cusp of the shift to Bolshevisation in late 1924, admitted that individuals enter the Party ‘expecting to find an exciting and somewhat romantic time in front of them, instead of which they find they are immediately expected to undertake a mass of detailed work which quickly destroys their early enthusiasm’.103 Robin Page Arnot could still remark in November 1930 that because they are ‘hastily loaded with tasks’ on entering the Party, ‘new Party members are treated rather as capitalist army recruits’.104 Other recruits melted away having been put off ‘by an assumption of intellectual superiority’ on the part of existing activists.105 Still others were alienated by the conspiratorial atmosphere that often hung around Party gatherings and events. The Todmorden communist William Holt attended a communist meeting in Halifax and was ‘revolted’ by its ‘conspiratorial atmosphere’ and advocacy of ‘underground’ methods.106 The Party leadership made efforts to redress this issue. ‘We get a rather grim atmosphere in some of the Branches which tends to frighten off new members’, stated William Rust in 1937. ‘The new member does not get the feeling that this is a big popular Party connected with the workers. He gets the impression that it is some conspiratorial, hole-in-the corner affair. And that also applies to those Branches which are always meeting in somebody’s

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house ….’107 Clearly, the peculiarities of the communist life contributed to that haemorrhaging of members which had dogged Party strategists since Bolshevisation. ‘The more I have thought about the way in which we lived previously’, wrote Jack Murphy after he and the Party had parted company in 1932, ‘the less surprised I am that the Communist Party made so little headway.’108 Disenchanted recruits did not always exit the Party voluntary. Those who failed to develop into ‘real meat’, in David Proudfoot’s lexicon, or who transgressed in terms of Party codes and procedures, usually found that they were helped on their way out of the Party. To an ‘instinctive Bolshevik’ like David Proudfoot, a generous purging was required to rid the movement of those who fell short of the required standard. A purge, if initiated, signified purification. It admonished the indolent, and punished the transgressors by casting them out into the political ‘darkness’. ‘It is about time they [the inactive members] were drawn up’, he told Hutt in May 1925, ‘and it might mean a few expulsions but that will do us some good as the inaction of those chaps has caused dissatisfaction amongst the active comrades.’109 Later, referring to the influx of recruits into the Methil Party Local during the miners’ lock-out, he complained that ‘some of them who have started work “haven’t time to do anything” (“Strike Communists”), but they will either do something or get out. No room for passengers as they cause a “rot” to set in.’110 There was usually little fanfare or ceremony attached to the Party’s formal ritual of expulsion. When Margaret McCarthy decided that she and the Party should part, she received her official notification of expulsion on ‘a slip of torn-off blue paper, filthy dirty, with several spelling errors, unsigned, and dateless’.111 For those activists who had embraced the communist life, and had felt enriched at some level by the experience, parting company with that life could be a traumatic event. Margaret McCarthy felt that she was ‘going out into the darkness and the blankness alone, an outcast, an untouchable, with neither hope, nor belief, nor comradeship, nor understanding … For the first time in my life I was utterly alone.’112 Such was the initial trauma of the severance that McCarthy contemplated ‘real self-destruction’ through suicide to release herself from the ‘loneliness and hopelessness’ that seemed to stretch out before her.113 This motif of leaving a familiar place and being transported to a strange, unknown, even threatening place is there in other testimonies. The act of leaving his familiar communist world produced in Jack Murphy ‘a most profound psychological shock’, greater even than when he departed the Church to embrace the communist faith. ‘It was like falling by parachute from an aeroplane into a strange country and wandering around to find one’s bearings’, he recalled.114 Most would adjust, or readjust, to this ‘strange’, non-communist world, though as all communist memoirs reveal, the experience of inhabiting that earlier communist place, so reassuringly familiar at the time, would leave a trace, usually an indelible one.

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Notes 1 Ernie Benson, To Struggle is to Live: A Working Class Autobiography, Volume 2: 1927–1971: Starve or Rebel (Newcastle: People’s Publications, 1980), p. 95. 2 RGASPI. RC 495/38/1, fos. 1–22. English Conference. 19 June 1923. 3 James Klugmann, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Volume 1: Formation and Early Years 1919–1924 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1969), p. 197. 4 Andrew Thorpe, The British Communist Party and Moscow, 1920–43 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 45. 5 RGASPI. RC 495/38/1, fos. 1–22. English Conference. 19 June 1923. 6 Thorpe, The British Communist Party, p. 50. 7 In October 1922, a temporary Organising Committee under Albert Inkpin’s chairmanship was appointed to oversee the CPGB’s re-organisation along the lines of the proposals described in the Commission’s Report. Its work continued up to September 1923. 8 John Callaghan, Rajani Palme Dutt:A Study in British Stalinism (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1993), pp. 48–9. 9 Workers’ Weekly, 10 February 1923, p.1, on the Fife miner. Workers’Weekly, 4 June 1926, p.4, on ‘War Correspondents’. Speeches and Documents of the Sixth (Manchester) Conference of the CPGB, 17–19 May 1924, p. 48, on ‘large battalions’. 10 As part of the restructuring process, Rajani Palme Dutt and Harry Pollitt moved to the forefront of the Party leadership. 11 Klugmann, History, Vol. 1, p. 205. By the end of January 1923, ten district organisations had been established. They were: London, Manchester, South Wales, Liverpool, Sheffield, Glasgow, Bradford, Birmingham, Edinburgh, and Tyneside. By 1925, Fife had become a District organisation. 12 Speeches and Documents of the Sixth (Manchester) Conference of the CPGB, pp. 76–7. 13 Jack Murphy, New Horizons (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1941), pp. 181–2. 14 Bob Stewart, Breaking the Fetters:The Memoirs of Bob Stewart (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1967), p. 104. 15 Murphy, New Horizons, pp. 307–8. 16 Douglas Hyde, I Believed: The Autobiography of a British Communist (London: Heinemann, 1952), pp. 271–2. 17 William Holt, I Haven’t Unpacked: An Autobiography (London: George G. Harrap, 1949), p. 212. 18 NMLH. CP/IND/MURP/01/02. MS. Molly Murphy, Nurse Molly. Autobiography, n.d., p. 108. 19 Ibid. 20 Ian MacDougall (ed.), Militant Miners: Recollections of John McArthur, Buckhaven; and Letters, 1924–26, of David Proudfoot, Methil, to G. Allen Hutt (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1981), p. 200. 21 Ibid., p. 275. Letter of 15 April 1926. 22 Ernie Trory, Between the Wars: Recollections of a Communist Organiser (London: Crabtree Press, 1974), p. 107. 23 NMLH. CP/IND/MISC/1/1. MS. Mick Jenkins, Prelude to Better Days. Autobiography, n.d., p. 115. The Master Manufactures had, since 1930, been pursuing the abandonment of the traditional four-looms per weaver system for a six or eight looms system. 24 SWML. AUD/446. Interview of Will Paynter, interviewed by Hywel Francis, 6 March 1973. 25 Margaret McCarthy, Generation in Revolt (London: Heinemann, 1953), p. 56. 26 NMLH. CP/IND/MISC/10/1. MS. Helen Crawfurd. Untitled autobiography, c.1950s, p. 302.

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27 Karen Hunt and Matthew Worley, ‘Rethinking British Communist Party women in the 1920s’, Twentieth Century British History, 15:1 (2004), 18. 28 Andrew Thorpe, ‘The membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1920–1945’, The Historical Journal, 43:3 (2000), 784–5. 29 James Klugmann, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain,Volume 2: The General Strike 1925–1926 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1969), pp. 163–4. 30 Workers’ Weekly, 23 July 1926, p. 5. 31 Workers’ Weekly, 23 July 1926, p. 1. 32 Klugmann, History, Vol. 2, p. 166. 33 Jim Arnison, Decades (Salford: Arnison, 1991), p. 4. 34 MacDougall (ed.), Militant Miners, pp. 317–18. 35 Alan Campbell and John McIlroy, ‘Miner heroes: three Communist trade union leaders’, in John McIlroy, Kevin Morgan and Alan Campbell (eds), Party People, Communist Lives: Explorations in Biography (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2001), pp. 147–8. 36 MacDougall (ed.), Militant Miners, p. 116. 37 Ibid., p. 165. 38 Ibid., p. 115, on Ord. Abe Moffat, My Life With the Miners (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1965), p. 32, on Stewart. 39 Moffat, My Life, p. 51. 40 On Elphinstone, see recollections of ‘Tommy’ Kerr, in Ian MacDougall (ed.), Voices From Work and Home: Personal Recollections of Working Life and Labour Struggles in the Twentieth Century by Scots Men and Women (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 2000), p. 99. 41 Holt, I Haven’t Unpacked, p. 206. 42 McCarthy, Generation, p. 101. 43 Hyde, I Believed, pp. 271, 147. 44 McCarthy, Generation, p. 93. 45 Ibid., pp. 93–4. 46 Ibid., p. 101. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid., p. 95. 49 Ibid. 50 Raphael Samuel,‘Class politics: the lost world of British Communism: Part three’, New Left Review, 165 (September–October, 1987), 64. 51 NMLH. CP/IND/KETT/01. Margot Kettle Papers MS, Memoirs of Arnold Kettle (October 1983), p. 6. 52 NMLH. CP/IND/KETT/01. Margot Kettle Papers MS, Memoirs of Jean MacGibbon (July 1984), p. 9. 53 Memoirs of Arnold Kettle, p. 6. 54 Ibid., p. 8. 55 NMLH. CP/IND/KETT/01. Margot Kettle Papers MS, Memoirs of John Maynard Smith (January 1984), pp. 5–6. 56 Hyde, I Believed, p. 87. 57 Will Paynter, My Generation (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1972), p. 104. 58 Holt, I Haven’t Unpacked, p. 219. 59 Ibid., p. 202. 60 Stanley Harrison, Good to be Alive: The Story of Jack Brent (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1954), pp. 21–2. 61 Ibid., p. 22. 62 MacDougall (ed.), Militant Miners, p. 256. 63 Stewart, Breaking, p. 101.

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64 Ibid., p. 194. 65 Ewan MacColl, Journeyman (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1990), p. 180. 66 William Gallacher, The Rolling of the Thunder (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1947), p. 125. 67 On the latter, see Mark Bevir, ‘The Labour Church Movement, 1891–1902’, Journal of British Studies, 38:2 (April 1999), 217–45. 68 The Lenin School project was initiated by the Comintern in 1925 to raise the theoretical awareness of its cadres. See Report of the Seventh (Glasgow) National Congress of the CPGB. 30 May – 1 June 1925, pp. 124–9. 69 Recalled by Harry McShane. Harry McShane and Joan Smith, Harry McShane: No Mean Fighter (London: Pluto Press, 1978), p. 212. 70 Recollections of Hamish MacKinven, in MacDougall (ed.), Voices, p. 478. 71 McCarthy, Generation, p. 94. 72 Murphy, New Horizons, p. 159. 73 MS. Crawfurd. Untitled autobiography, p. 134. 74 Harrison, Good, p. 21. 75 Ewan MacColl, ‘Theatre of action, Manchester’, in Raphael Samuel, Ewan MacColl and Stewart Cosgrove (eds), Theatres of the Left 1880–1935: Workers’ Theatre Movements in Britain and America (London: Routledge, 1985), p. 210. 76 Ibid. 77 Freda Utley, Lost Illusion (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1972), p. 4. 78 McCarthy, Generation, p. 267. 79 Ibid. 80 McShane and Smith, Harry McShane, p. 213. 81 NMLH. CP/IND/KETT/01. Margot Kettle Papers MS, Memoirs of Henry Fern (January 1984), p. 3. 82 May Hill, Red Roses for Isabel (London: May Hill, 1982), p. 6. 83 Cited in John Mahon, Harry Pollitt: A Biography (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976), p. 94. 84 Fred Copeman, Reason in Revolt (London: Blandford Press, 1948), p. 175. 85 These 1920s membership figures are from, RGASPI. RC 495/ 38/ 22, fos. 208–22. The Political Situation and the Main Tasks of the CPGB. Report by J. R. Campbell. 16 July 1930. Andrew Thorpe suggests that the October 1926 membership figure was higher, at 12,000. See Thorpe, ‘The membership’, p. 781. 86 Figures from Thorpe, ‘The membership’, p. 781. 87 Ibid., p. 786. 88 Ibid., p. 796. We should qualify this by pointing out that the KPD shed 95,000 other members in the same period. 89 Report of the Seventh (Glasgow) National Congress, p. 9. 90 Ibid., p. 148. 91 Ibid., p. 40. 92 Ibid., pp. 147, 35. 93 Workers’ Weekly, 24 April 1925, p. 6. 94 Ibid. 95 MacDougall (ed.), Militant Miners, pp. 186, 237. 96 Ibid., p. 273, on Hutt’s description of Proudfoot. 97 Ibid. p. 188. Letter of 9 September 1924. 98 Ibid. p. 189. Letter of 12 October 1924. 99 Ibid., p. 237. Letter of 24 September 1925. 100 Ibid., p. 239. The Spark was a communist pit paper. 101 Ibid.

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102 Workers’ Weekly, 24 April 1925, p. 6. 103 RGASPI. RC495/38/7, fos. 62–4. Aspects and Tasks of the Party, Report by H. P. C. November–December 1924. 104 RGASPI. RC495/38/16, fos. 1–30. Meeting. Political Situation, 16 November 1930. 105 Workers’ Weekly, 9 April 1926, p. 4. 106 Holt, I Haven’t Unpacked, p. 202. 107 William Rust,‘Building the Party’, It Can Be Done: Report of the Fourteenth Congress of the CPGB, Battersea, 29–31 May 1937, pp. 171–2. 108 Murphy, New Horizons, p. 308. 109 Ibid., p. 214. Letter of 8 May 1925. 110 Ibid., p. 323. Letter of 28 December 1926. 111 McCarthy, Generation, p. 226. McCarthy turned her back on the Party after witnessing an errant member being ritually humiliated by his ‘comrades’ in a Party room, ‘full of filth and ignorance’, in Glasgow. 112 Ibid., pp. 253–4. 113 She was dissuaded from this course by the actions of a sympathetic comrade. Ibid., p. 254. 114 Murphy, New Horizons, p. 305.

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PART III The communist life cycle: shaping communists

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6 Tending the communist body: the quest for physical fitness

Springiness, elasticity, always implies strength, and is much more preferable to

sheer bulging over-muscledness.1 The body would function as an important site of British Communist Party (CPGB) efforts to implant the communist spirit and way of life in its members. During the interwar years the CPGB was keen to ensure the physical well-being and fitness of its activists. For the Party, healthy bodies enabled members to withstand better the attacks of rapacious capitalism and cope with the rigours of Party work. On entering the communist world, recruits would partake of a wide range of Young Communist League and Party-sponsored activities that would reinvigorate limbs fatigued by industrial toil and build proletarian stamina for the battles ahead. Sport would play an important role in this process, acting as a vital restorative of the physical and mental energy that the activist needed to participate effectively in the revolutionary struggle. There were other aspects to the communist fitness project beyond laying on sports activities. Through its literature, the Party provided ‘Medical Advice’ from the communist doctor to ward off workers’ ailments, and instruction on the benefits of regular exercise and a healthy diet.There is another aspect to consider also. In communist physical fitness rhetoric, healthy bodies indicated more than just physical well-being and the striving for optimum health. Healthy bodies were political signifiers, connoting inner resolve, strength of will and ideological purpose. The healthy bodily form was also a moral signifier which conveyed a message of personal pride and pride in class and political mission. What the Party hoped would emerge from its instruction on health, physical fitness and diet, was the lean, fit, erect, composed, resolute figure traditionally represented in communist iconography.This chapter, by way of providing a comparative context, will look at representations of the ‘vile’ bodies of communism’s principal political opponents, the ‘fascist body’ and the ‘bourgeois body’. The CPGB’s interest in physical culture during the interwar years was partly motivated by the perception that capitalism’s innate, insatiable thirst for

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accumulation through profit made it a predator which preyed on the worker’s body and energies. Accordingly, the worker needed to cultivate a healthy physical constitution to fend off the attacks. Britain’s workers, explained the Daily Worker in 1931, ‘need more and more physical and mental efficiency to face, by organisation, the daily attacks on wages, hours and conditions made by the employers’.2 The feeling that capitalism posed a daily threat to the proletarian body was deeply ingrained in Marxist and communist thought. If we return to Marx, there are heart-rending accounts in Capital of the pathologies and sicknesses that afflicted England’s proletarians, women and children as well as men, as their bodily rhythms were subordinated to the exigencies of capitalist production.‘In its blind unrestrainable passion, its were-wolf hunger for surplus-labour,’ commented Marx, capital savages the worker’s body.3 Marx identified the contemporary capitalist mode of production, with its torture of over-work, physical and mental degradation, and extended working-day, unambiguously, with proletarian illness and disfigurement. Thus, capitalist manufacture: converts the labourer into a crippled monstrosity by furthering his particular skill as in a forcing house, through the suppression of a whole world of productive drives and inclinations, just as in the States of La Plata they butcher a whole beast for the sake of his hide or his tallow.4

When it was not deforming proletarian limbs, capitalist production was either dismembering the proletarian body or liquidating it altogether by divesting it of all vestiges of humanity. Its efforts to suck surplus-value out of labour, railed Marx, ‘mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, [and] degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine …’.5 This latter notion of the worker becoming an extension of the machine, an ‘appendage of flesh on a machine of iron’, or coming to resemble the machine or its functions, would feature in later British communist observations on capitalist production. The ‘young workers forced to perform one humdrum operation, day in and day out, become mere cogs in the machine with grave consequences to their mental and physical development’, complained YCL Secretary William Rust in 1925.6 At times, capitalist production was itself imagined as a living demonic monster. ‘A mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories’, declared Marx, ‘and whose demon power, at first veiled under the slow and measured motions of his giant limbs, at length breaks out into the fast and furious whirl of his countless working organs.’7 This encoding of capitalist technology as demonic beast was present in British Communist writing. ‘The furnaces belch fire and steel, [and] Insatiate still is Moloch’s maw’, stated the lines in a poem in the Party press in remembrance of the passing of YCL activist Albert Pearce. It was a passage which recalled the memorable image in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis of the machine, in the form of Moloch, literally devouring proletarian bodies.8 The perception of capitalism as bestial was a recurring motif. In Capital, for example, in a memorable instance of anthropomorphic defining in relation

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to capitalism, Marx described capital as coming into the world ‘dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt’.9 There was another reason why the CPGB interested itself in physical culture during the interwar years. To engage in the class struggle and steer history towards a communist destination required energy and stamina, which could only come from a healthy physical constitution. A truly class-conscious worker, according to the Daily Worker, ‘knows that unless he is fit he cannot carry on with an eight-hour day at work, and then another eight hours at meetings, distributing the Daily, studying, etc.’.10 The Herculean task of bending history to one’s will was invariably punishing on communist bodies. ‘The sacrifice was great’, recalled the Derbyshire coalminer Bas Barker, ‘you just worked for as long as your health and strength held together.’11 For Barker, Party Organiser for Sheffield in 1937, there was ‘no let up from the moment you got in the office at about nine in the morning until ten or eleven o’clock at night’.12 Margaret McCarthy, whom we have met in other chapters, remembered ‘the strain of the endless meetings, studies, late nights, shouting at street corners and excitement’ of the communist life which ‘produced its inevitable effect of reduced resistance’ and exhaustion.13 Communist bodies, weighed down by gruelling schedules and racked by fatigue, would often give out. Douglas Hyde, a member of the Daily Worker’s editorial staff in the late 1930s, wrote of his colleagues on the Daily ‘who worked sometimes until they collapsed’.14 Bas Baker eventually broke out in boils, while Margaret McCarthy developed nodes on the vocal cords arising from ‘addressing too many outdoor meetings’ which had to be surgically removed, along with her tonsils.15 In some cases, communist activism could prove even more hazardous. ‘Comrades who devote their lives to the communist movement do not find life a bed of roses’, commented William Rust on the death of the twenty-four-year-old YCL member Albert Pearce in 1927.‘Strenuous work, late hours, and hurried irregular meals had an ill effect on our comrade’, admitted Rust, aggravating his ‘chronic kidney trouble’, when he ‘should have had special treatment and regular diet’.16 The CPGB put measures in place to build healthy communist bodies during the interwar period to ensure that its members could better cope with the daily demands of capital, and the strains of political activism. On entering the communist world, recruits had the opportunity to partake of a wide range of activities which aimed to improve their physical make-up and build stamina. Sport would play a vital role in this process. British communists aspired to the idea and goal of workers’ sport, but this was an ideal not confined to communists alone. A pace setter in this area was the British Workers’ Sports Federation. When it was formed in April 1923 by a group of Labour Party activists, the BWSF was part of an alternative tradition of workers’ sport that preceded the formation of the CPGB, ran parallel to its subsequent development, and which adhered to a distinctly socialist or social-democratic perspective on sport.17 Founded in 1894, the Clarion Cycling Club, one of the clubs which grew up around Robert Blatchford’s newspaper The Clarion, best exemplified this tradition prior to the

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CPGB’s foundation.18 By the time the CPGB was formed the idea of workers’ sport along social-democratic lines had taken hold in the various political, trade union and cooperative branches of the British labour movement and was reflected in the formation of bodies such as the Kings Lynn Labour Sports Club, the Southampton Transport Workers’ Social and Athletic Club, the Guildford Cooperative Society’s Ladies’ Football Team, and the ‘Workers’ Wimbledon’ championship in the 1930s.19 The social-democratic tradition of workers’ sport was envisioned as a democratic and humanistic alternative to ‘bourgeois’ sport. In place of the muscular competition and endemic commercialism of bourgeois sport, socialist workers’ sport offered fellowship, cooperation and fraternity. While there was a collectivist dimension to this socialist project, it was primarily framed from the perspective of seeking to broaden the individual personality through participation in sports and leisure. There were political goals, too. Not only would participation in cooperative, fraternal socialist sport bring dignity, joy and a creative expansion of the personality, but it would educate the worker in the socialist ideal in preparation for the arrival of the coveted Cooperative Commonwealth. These political goals had an international reach for the social-democratic tradition of workers’ sport also aspired to promote international labour fraternity and a spirit of pacifism through sport to counter the perceived national chauvinism, mistrust and implicit militarism fostered by capitalist sport.20 Through workers’ sport, sport and physical culture would translate into a new international language of cooperation and ‘brotherhood’ capable of breaching all barriers.21 This internationalist aspect of socialist workers’ sport took impressive organisational form through the convocation of the first international conference of workers’ sport in Ghent in 1913, the foundation of the Lucerne Sport International in 1920 which later evolved into the Socialist Workers’ Sport International (SWSI) and the staging of the first ‘unofficial’ Workers’ Olympiad at Prague in 1921. Conceived as a substitute for the ‘chauvinistic’ modern Olympic Games, three further ‘official’ Workers’ Olympiads followed between the wars, at Frankfurt (1925), Vienna (1931) and Antwerp (1937), before socialist workers’ sport was dismembered by the advance of Nazism, that supreme embodiment of national chauvinism and militarism.22 The CPGB became interested in the potential of workers’ sport from an early date. In its Report to the Fifth Party Congress at Battersea (7–8 October 1922), the Organisation Commission whose brief it was to recommend changes to the CPGB’s working methods made a point of emphasising the political importance of sport.23 During 1923 and 1924 some moves were made to form links with the newly formed BWSF. In the spirit of the ‘united front’ approach of this period, there was cooperation between the YCL and the BWSF, and the Walthamstow Communist Party and the BWSF.24 Despite the positive statements emanating from the Party hierarchy and the early signs of communist sports activity, not everyone in the CPGB was happy about the pace and extent of developments in

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these areas. ‘Where is the workers’ sports movement in this country?’, asked one member in the Party press in February 1923, while citing the impressive advance of workers’ sport clubs in Germany and France.25 Hampered by the BWSF’s then right-wing leadership and its links with the moderate-leaning TUC and Labour Party, ‘workers’ sport’ in the period between 1923 and 1927 was criticised for its slow development and lack of dynamism which prevented it from functioning as a viable instrument of a radical, communist-orientated politics.26 After 1927 we can see signs of greater progress in the realm of developing communist workers’ sport. Driven by the BWSF’s militant London Group, a breakthrough had been achieved by 1927 when two Party members, Walter Tapsell and George Sinfield, gained positions on the BWSF’s National Committee and helped steer it in a communist direction.27 During the 1927–28 season the BWSF’s London Group of some 800 ‘red’ sportsmen and women had set up a football league on both sides of the Thames, and arranged a Challenge Cup competition.28 By April 1928 the BWSF had moved firmly into the communist camp when it acquired a communist leadership, giving impetus to a further phase of growth. By 1930 the now communist-orientated BWSF had expanded beyond its London base to form branches in all Britain’s major urban and regional locations. The BWSF claimed 6,000 members by 1931, and fought energetically for increased facilities and outlets for working people to participate in sports as in the leadership role it played during the campaign for Sunday League Football in 1933.29 Through its various local branches, BWSF workers’ sport ranged across the entire gamut of sport from soccer, cricket and boxing to netball, ju-jitsu, rambling and cycling.30 BWSF workers’ sport also tended towards a spirit of international cooperation and fraternity. The militant London Group sent a football team in a spirit of ‘friendship’ to Soviet Russia in August 1927, and another soccer team to Paris the following Easter to play the French section of the Red Sport International (RSI).31 The RSI was Moscow’s equivalent on the sports front to the Comintern. It was founded at the Communist International’s Third Congress in Moscow in July 1921, as an ideological counter to both capitalist commercial sport and the idea of sport as defined by the ‘Menshevik’ social-democratic Lucerne Sport International tradition.32 The RSI, like the BWSF and the CPGB, spread the message that sport was an intrinsic part of the ‘proletarian class struggle’. The BWSF also dispatched sports teams to the RSI’s alternative proletarian Olympics, the international Spartakiadas in Moscow in 1928, Berlin in 1931 and Moscow again in 1932. In some respects, communists shared principles with ‘social-democrats’ where sport was concerned. Both favoured providing working people with greater scope to play sports, which implied increased facilities. Additionally, both viewed workers’ participation in sports as a palliative to combat the fatigue and stress brought on by capitalist working conditions. Both communists and socialdemocrats preferred workers to pursue sports in a positive atmosphere which stressed cooperation and fraternity and which fostered group cohesion. Like

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social-democrats, communists mistrusted many bourgeois and capitalist sports and sought to insulate workers from their influences. It was held that certain amateur sports fostered militarism and jingoism, while professional sports elevated commercial gain, trophy attainment and record-breaking over other values. Invariably, the communist criticism went much further. Besides fostering militarism and jingoism, according to one Party member, amateur rugby, tennis and cricket were the ‘home of snobbery’ and fascist sentiments and were controlled by ‘ex-public school’ types, ex-military men or businessmen, for the purpose of ‘fooling’ workers into becoming compliant upholders of the ‘natural order’.33 In a similar tone, the London BWSF Secretary Michael Condon thought cricket an anachronism ‘reminiscent of mid-Victorianism’ that was riddled by class hatred and played by ‘flannelled fools’ and strike-breakers such as some of England’s leading cricketers, whom he charged with ‘scabbing’ during the General Strike.34 Professional sports performed a similar role as the amateur game in defusing class tensions. By turning out the ‘sports fan’ obsessed with following his team ‘to the exclusion of all else’, spectator sports like soccer paralysed the class struggle by diverting the workers down harmless channels.35 Further, communists believed that capitalist sports encouraged ‘financial wrangling’ and corruption and were thus emblematic of capitalist ‘decadence’.36 Despite the shared principles on certain aspects of workers’ sport and capitalist sport, communists opposed the social-democratic take on sport on other accounts. For communists, the social-democratic idea that sport was essentially a personal matter, that the worker could achieve personal fulfilment and an enlargement of the personality through partaking of such ‘leisure’ activities, seemed narrow, naïve and ignorant of the realities of class society. Additionally, although socialists saw links between sport and politics, in the Lucerne socialdemocratic tradition workers’ sports organisations were intended to be robust, independent, even neutral, movements within capitalist society rather than auxiliaries of active revolutionary political movements.37 For communists, on the other hand, sports organisations were to be adjuncts of the communist political movement and subordinate to it and communist goals. During the antagonistic phase of ‘Class against Class’ communist criticism of social-democratic sports organisations became particularly shrill, accusing them of being ‘reformist’ bodies that strove for class reconciliation and labour-capitalist cooperation, a sort of sports equivalent of ‘Mondism’ in the industrial arena. If anything marked out communist sport and gave it its quite distinctive character during the interwar years, it was this uncompromising emphasis on the link between sport and revolutionary politics. In the communist mindset, sport did not fall into a sphere separate to that of the Party’s political work. Even as a lighter note was introduced into British communist activity after 1927 when the landscape of ‘leisure’ provision for younger members was extended, the more serious business of the class struggle was never far away. Sport was always regarded as an aspect of the wider communist political struggle, and communist-

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influenced or controlled sports bodies functioned as important auxiliaries of the Party or the YCL. Unlike the Lucerne social-democratic ‘neutralist’ take on sport, communists rejected the assumption of ‘sport-for-sport’s-sake’ and, instead, repeatedly reiterated the theme that sport could not remain aloof from revolutionary struggle. Communist polemics continually emphasised the class dimension to sport, while the workers’ sports movement was understood as an intrinsic part of the broader proletarian struggle. The aim, according to the Party press in August 1928, was to turn workers’ sport into a ‘definite political weapon in the hands of the working class’.38 Similarly, the BWSF, declared ‘Red Sport’ in the Party press in February 1930, was not populated by ‘pot-hunters’ in search of trophies but worker sportsmen and women who ‘wish to build up a strong movement that will play its part in the workers’ struggle’.39 From the late 1920s communist faith was stridently proclaimed by workers’ sport, as with the BWSF displaying the hammer and sickle as its formal emblem.40 If communist sport was charged with political significance, one of its principal political functions was the cultivation of the healthy body. ‘Our sport, workers’ sport, is pure sport’, proclaimed ‘Red Sport’ in the Party press in 1932, and, besides seeking to weld ‘[us] into a comradely, united body of young men and women’, ‘has nothing but the clean intention of improving physique and morale’.41 Participation in sport had physical benefits in enabling workers to build their strength so as better to resist the encroachments on their energies by rapacious capitalism, though this was not the sole reason for building a healthy body through workers’ sport. For communists, there was a vital connection between sport, physical fitness, and revolutionary labour. A genuine workers’ sports movement shorn of capitalist influences YCL Secretary William Rust argued in mid-1925, would ‘be splendid for developing the physique of the young workers and making them strong and sturdy fighters against capitalism’.42 These muscular proletarian sportsmen could then, Rust went on, ‘guard processions’ and ‘give displays to assist striking workers’ and victims of ‘White’ reaction.43 A similar instrumentalist perspective informed the way that BWSF National Secretary George Sinfield viewed his organisation. The BWSF, he explained in 1930, ‘must foster the healthy instinct for sport and physical recreation amongst the workers, not as an end in itself, but as a means of fitting the workers with the necessary energy and stamina to face up to the class struggle of to-day, and the greater ones of the future’.44 ‘Red Sport’, writing in the Daily Worker the same year, struck the same note: ‘We want workers’ sports clubs, with athletes who carry on not for sham honours but for the zest of physical fitness to give them confidence in the class struggle.’45 Communists of the period took the injunctions to improve their bodies to help the revolutionary struggle seriously. We know from accounts in the communist press that YCL branches put on physical training classes for activists.46 The Battersea communist Harry Wicks remembered that ‘the Battersea YCL used to run weightlifting classes’ for the purpose of ‘building ourselves up for the

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revolution’.47 Others, like the Stepney communist Jack Dash, were keen weightlifting enthusiasts in this period, and we know that many BWSF branches had gymnasia where members did weightlifting, as well as boxing, skipping and jujitsu.48 Even on ‘lighter’ recreational hikes or camping excursions, alongside the frivolity of games and sing-songs, the more serious business of building healthy bodies was not neglected. Take the example of Tyneside YCL’s District Camp at Finchale Abbey in County Durham over the Whitsun holiday period in June 1928. At seven-thirty on each morning of the camp, we are informed, ‘the comrades were awakened, in no unceremonious fashion in the case of the lazy ones, and until 8.00 a.m. engaged in mass “physical jerks”’.49 In a similar vein to organised communist sport, camping and rambling outings rejuvenated fatigued communist bodies in a more general sense. Members were encouraged to draw on the restorative and medicinal properties thought to dwell in the countryside. In a message aimed at older readers, the Daily Worker asserted that, ‘heart disease is often caused by lack of fresh air and exercise, and rambling is the least violent exercise, although being sufficient for all the organs of the body’.50 Not surprisingly, the Soviet Union provided the model of the proper relationship between sport, the healthy body and revolutionary labour. All members of the new workers’ state, enthused one CPGB member, whatever their ethnic or national origin, are workers and comrades ‘whose duty (and pleasure) is to keep physically fit in order that the last ounce may be given to the Revolution.’51 To Britain’s communists, the Bolshevik state’s strong emphasis on sport, the surfeit of technical equipment, the specialised instructors and grand sports stadia, were bringing noticeable improvements to the Soviet body. Even as early as 1923, a CPGB writer felt moved to comment on the ‘hundreds of young, magnificently developed athletes’, members of the Young Communist Sports Movement, giving demonstrations of symmetrical drilling, pyramid building and graceful exercises to ‘the strains of beautiful music’ in a grand display in Moscow.52 Communists equated the healthy body with stirring revolutionary exertions. ‘The young workers of Soviet Russia’, proclaimed the Daily Worker, ‘realize that the carrying through of the Five Year Plan demands fit bodies and active minds, which can be achieved through various forms of recreation.’53 The communist physical fitness agenda had a wide focus. There would be informal ‘Medical Advice’ and ‘Health Hints’ from communist doctors and other health practitioners in the communist press to combat common ‘Plebeian’ ailments, such as eczema, headaches and asthma.54 Communist health advice even extended to the care of feet. Readers were advised on suitable footwear, urged to wash feet and socks regularly, and told how to cut toe nails and treat blisters, chafed skin and corns.55 Enlightenment articles on the benefits of physical culture would also feature regularly in the Party press.56 ‘The first step in Physical Culture’, according to one such article, ‘is a regulated life.’57 Efforts were made to influence and improve members’ diets, too. The communist press advised proletarian communist ‘housewives’ on methods of food preservation in

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the absence of the domestic refrigerator that was becoming a standard item in the ‘bourgeois’ kitchen, while Party members gave lectures on such topics as ‘Food and its relation to physical fitness’.58 The issues of diet, bodily improvement, and revolutionary labour were always connected in the communist mindset. Besides ‘building ourselves up for the revolution’ by weightlifting, recalled the London activist Harry Wicks, ‘my close mates’ in the Battersea YCL ‘and I also tried to improve ourselves at about this time, by taking up vegetarianism’.59 Others were similarly inclined. Party official Tom Bell and his communist wife ‘were ardent physical culturists and vegetarians, students of Bernarr Macfadden’. Moreover, communist health and dietary wisdom would be imparted to the next generation of activists. ‘Our son’, Oliver, as Tom Bell recalled, ‘was to be brought up in the socialist faith’ and ‘was to be the personification of all our ideas on a good physique and clean living’.60 Communist health, physical culture, and dietary rhetoric aimed to raise body consciousness within Party and YCL ranks, offering the prospect of self-transformation and greater efficiency of Party work through bodily improvement. What emerged from this narrative of advice and instruction, and the engagement with the world of communist sport, was the lithe, fit, erect, composed, resolute proletarian figure, usually displaying a noble countenance, represented in much communist iconography and art. A drawing in a 1921 edition of The Communist showed a tall, proud-looking, muscular proletarian, over the caption ‘The power to be’, putting Lloyd George, Churchill, Ramsay MacDonald and the right-leaning trade union leader J. H.Thomas to flight.61 Although the self-representations in communist graphics tended towards an idealised stereotype, life could often imitate art. YCL Secretary John Gollan was an accomplished mountaineer who was remembered as ‘a lean wiry man … without an ounce of surplus flesh’ who, in repose, represented a concentrated expression of communist will.62 Lenin was held up as the epitome of the health-conscious communist, one who recognised the importance of physical exercise to revolutionary labour. The communist and BWSF activist Michael Condon, whom we met above, himself a former Leyton Orient soccer player, commented approvingly that Lenin swam, did daily gymnastics, and followed a strict regime to regulate his periods of rest, work and eating.63 Apparently comrade Lenin opted for this course ‘following severe taxation of the nervous system by reason of intensified revolutionary labour’.64 The Bolshevik Leader was also fond of ‘hiking away into the solitude of nature’ and embarking on long cycling tours when in political exile in Switzerland prior to the Bolshevik Revolution. Condon urged Britain’s communists to draw the ‘correct’ lessons. ‘All revolutionary workers can gain much by following these simple principles which guided the organisation of Lenin’s life. To relax in simple forms of sport and recreation, to work energetically, but also to see that one’s rest and exercise are organised along correct lines.’65 Condon stressed, too, Lenin’s belief in physical culture as a restorative of mental as well

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as physical efficiency. This equating of physical fitness with mental agility was a commonly held conviction. ‘To have a mind fit to combat the evils of capitalism we must take part in the workers’ sports movement’, declared the Workers’ Weekly in February 1923, ‘for without physical fitness we cannot expect to stand mental strain’.66 There are various ways to read the communist body beyond that of being a model of physical well-being and good health. In another register, proletarian communist bodies were meant to convey the inner resolve, strength of political will and ideological purpose of an authentic ruling-class-in-waiting. Like all bodies, the proletarian communist body was an expressive sign, a semiotic site. For the Party, the proletarian communist body should express the best attributes of the class, the virtuous body as against the vile body of its political enemies. Thus, the communist body as emblematic of the class differed from the fascist idea of the body as the expression of the supposed purity of the ‘race’. Although the CPGB deemed the body worthy of official attention, this should not be confused with the more pernicious narrative of ‘body fascism’. Britain’s communists had no obsessive desire to cultivate the supposedly physically ‘beautiful’ body of fascist body aesthetics, with its strong hint of eroticism and pornography, as with the male bodies tirelessly recycled by fascist art.67 This sexually charged male fascist body, with its muscular excesses, ‘perfect’ proportions and exaggerated athletic postures, was a stereotypical image which drew much of its inspiration from the classical Greco-Roman model of the perfect form. This fascist aesthetic of the ‘beautiful’ form would merge into the sinister, genocidal realm of eugenics, as we know only too well, with some strands of the far right eventually seeking the eugenic elimination of perceived ‘ugliness’ in human life. The British Communist Party, with its bodily ideal of physical well-being rather than perfection, harboured no such eugenically inspired inclination. There was an absence of ‘eroticism’ in communist bodies as well. Unlike the aesthetic, narcissistic body of body fascism, with its immodest poses and exposed flesh suggesting immanent sexuality, the less scantily clad communist body, a model of the ascetic and the disciplined, symbolised the containment of sexuality or even the asexual. Even the supple, firm, well-toned bodies of the female Soviet athletes that frequently adorned the pages of the Party’s newspapers, despite the implied sensuous enjoyment of physical display and movement, was less suggestive of ‘ultra-feminine’ sexuality, than of restraint and prudence in matters of the flesh.68 The communist body as the ‘virtuous body’ supposedly expressing the best attributes of the class also differed from the body of the other class enemy, the bourgeoisie. British communist graphics nearly always depicted the bourgeois type, normally depicted as male, in unflattering postures and poses, usually housed in a body grown obese from luxury and self-indulgence, the epitome of besmirched decadent corporeality. Living lives of excess, their opulent existence and corrupt inner souls were apparently mirrored in the excessive corpulence of

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their bodies. In the communist lexicon, corpulence and obesity would become the paradigmatic signifiers of bourgeois excess and corruption. Bourgeois figures, symbols of capital, were invariably rotund in the drawings of Espoir and others in The Communist during the early 1920s. One such cartoon featured a very stout capitalist at mealtime, his table laden with food, speaking to his butler about the appearance of an emaciated miner at his doorway. ‘FAT: I can’t bear to see this poor fellow starving. Please tell him to go away’, ran the caption.69 British communists found corpulence offensive, even repulsive. A Party member who strayed into the Empire Baths’ steam rooms in London’s West End felt suitably repelled by the experience to vent his displeasure via the pages of the Daily Worker. ‘Through the dense clouds’ of this Turkish bath, he wrote, ‘I see the fat bodies of office plutocrats, who, through lack of physical exercise, have come here to work some fat off. They fill me with nausea, as they disport in attitudes of lassitude. They are podgy, They sit on couches. They loll. They puff. They snort.’70 Unflattering caricatures of overweight bourgeois bodies were much in evidence in the bitingly satirical illustrations and cartoons that featured in Left Review between 1934 and 1938, with their favoured style of stippled and scratched markings reminiscent of the engaged political art of George Grosz.The communist artist James Fitton’s illustration, For Charity, in a 1935 edition of Left Review, in a striking example of this satire, shows a collection of corpulent, gluttonous bourgeois figures feasting on a lavish spread of champagne, cigars and other delicacies.71 Another in this genre, in a 1934 Left Review edition, was Hatton Garden Luncheon by the New Zealand-born CPGB member, James Boswell, showing an array of similar bourgeois types eagerly dispatching platefuls of evidently sumptuous food.72 Whereas the communist body’s lithe, taut, firm physique was a sign of self-discipline, pride in self and political mission, as well as inner purity, the unflatteringly corpulent bourgeois body signified the decadence of an apparently bankrupt and dying class. Notes 1 Communist physical culture adviser writing in the Daily Worker, 10 October 1930, p. 4. 2 Daily Worker, 8 January 1931, p. 4. 3 Karl Marx, Capital,Volume 1. www.eserver.org/marx/1867-capital. Last accessed April 2003. 4 Marx, Capital, p. 481. The ‘States of La Plata’ referred to by Marx were, of course, Argentina, Paraguay and Uraguay. 5 Marx, Capital. 6 William Rust, What the Young Communist League Stands For (London: Communist Party of Great Britain, 1925), p. 3. 7 Marx, Capital. 8 The Communist, 2:10 (Nov. 1927), p. 148. 9 Marx, ‘The genesis of the industrial capitalist’, Capital, p. 926. 10 Daily Worker, 12 August 1930, p. 6.

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11 Bas Barker and Lynda Straker, Free But Not Easy (Matlock: Derbyshire County Council, 1989), p. 54. 12 Ibid. 13 Margaret McCarthy, Generation in Revolt (London: Heinemann, 1953), p. 186. 14 Douglas Hyde, I Believed: The Autobiography of a British Communist (London: Heinemann 1952), p. 147. 15 McCarthy, Generation, p. 186, and Barker and Straker, Free, p. 54. 16 Workers’ Life, 14 October 1927, p. 4. 17 The new body was initially called the British Workers’ Federation for Sport before it acquired its formal title of BSWF. 18 On the Clarion Clubs, see David Prynn,‘The Clarion Clubs, rambling and the Holiday Associations in Britain since the 1890s’, Journal of Contemporary History, 11:2 and 11:3 (July 1976), 65–77. 19 Stephen Jones, ‘Sport, politics and the Labour movement: the British Workers’ Sports Federation, 1923–1935’, British Journal of Sports History, 2:2 (1985), 155–6; Robert Wheeler, ‘Organized sport and organized labour: the Workers’ Sports Movement’, Journal of Contemporary History, 13 (April 1978), 196, on the ‘Workers’ Wimbledon’ championship. 20 Wheeler, ibid., and Stephen Jones, Workers at Play: A Social and Economic History of Leisure (London: Routledge, 1986), pp. 133–63. 21 Arnd Krüger and James Riordan, The Story of Worker Sport (Leeds: Human Kinetics, 1996), p. vii. 22 Wheeler,‘Organized sport’, pp. 200–2. It should be noted that communist sportsmen and women were excluded from participating in the Frankfurt and Vienna Olympiads. 23 Report on Organisation Presented by the Party Commission to the Annual Conference of the CPGB (Battersea, 7–8 October 1922), p. 62. 24 Jones, ‘Sport’, p. 158. 25 Workers’ Weekly, 10 February 1923, p. 4. 26 See the assessment in George Sinfield, The Workers’ Sports Movement (London: CPGB, c.1927), p. 3. 27 Jones, ‘Sport’, p. 159. 28 Sinfield, The Workers’, p. 4. 29 Jones, ‘Sport’, pp. 165–6. 30 Ibid. 31 ’Workers’ Sport’, The Communist, August 1928, p. 462. 32 See David Steinberg, ‘The Workers’ Sport Internationals 1920–28’, Journal of Contemporary History, 13:2 (April 1978), 233–51. 33 Daily Worker, 19 February 1930, p. 10. 34 Daily Worker, 4 February 1930, p. 11. 35 See Rajani Palme Dutt’s piece on this theme in Daily Worker, 25 January 1930, p. 4. 36 See Daily Worker, 2 October 1930, p. 4. 37 On ‘neutrality’ and the Lucerne tradition, see Steinberg, ‘The Workers’ Sport’, pp. 239–40. 38 The Communist, August 1928, p. 462. 39 Daily Worker, 18 February 1930, p. 11. 40 Jones, ‘Sport’, p. 168. 41 Daily Worker, 6 May 1932, p. 6. 42 Rust, pp. 20–1. 43 Ibid. 44 Daily Worker, 13 November 1930, p. 4.

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45 Daily Worker, 18 February 1930, p. 11. 46 See Workers’ Weekly, 9 June 1923, p. 4, for example, on the Tooting YCL group. 47 Harry Wicks, Keeping My Head:The Memoirs of a British Bolshevik (London: Socialist Platform, 1992), pp. 39–40. 48 Jack Dash, Good Morning Brothers! (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1969), p. 97. See Jones, ‘Sport’, p. 166, on the BWSF and weightlifting. 49 Young Worker, 9 June 1928, p. 3. 50 Daily Worker, 30 July 1936, p. 6. 51 Daily Worker, 1 January 1930, p. 7. 52 Workers’ Weekly, 10 February 1923, p. 4. 53 Daily Worker, 10 October 1931, p. 5. 54 See Workers’ Weekly, 24 February 1923, p. 4, and 10 March 1923, p. 4; and Daily Worker, 14 February 1930, p. 9. 55 Daily Worker, 5 August 1930, p. 4. 56 On the historical roots of the modern fascination with physical culture, see Michael Anton Budd, The Sculpture Machine: Physical Culture and Body Politics in the Age of Empire (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997). 57 Daily Worker, 16 September 1936, p. 8. 58 Daily Worker, 2 April 1930, p. 9, and 5 February 1931, p. 4. 59 Wicks, Keeping, p. 40. 60 Thomas Bell, Pioneering Days (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1941), p. 92. 61 The Communist, 5 February 1921, p. 8. 62 Raphael Samuel,‘Class politics: the lost world of British Communism, part three’, New Left Review, 165 (September/October 1987), pp. 71–2. 63 Daily Worker, 11 February 1930, p. 11. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid. 66 Workers’ Weekly, 10 February 1923, p. 4. 67 On body fascism, see J. A. Mangan (ed.), Shaping the Superman: Fascist Body as Political Icon – Aryan Fascism (London: Frank Cass, 1999). 68 The DailyWorker regularly carried pictures of healthy, suntanned female Soviet athletes, which were meant to be suggestive of the ‘new Soviet woman’ that the new Soviet state were bringing in to being. See, for example, Daily Worker, 30 July 1937, p. 7 and 31 July 1937, p. 8. 69 The Communist, 18 June 1921, p. 7. 70 Daily Worker, 21 May 1930, p. 6. 71 James Fitton, ‘For charity’, Left Review, 1:5 (February 1935), 163. 72 James Boswell, ‘Hatton Garden luncheon’, Left Review, 1:2 (November 1934), 127.

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7 Communist lifestyle: fostering correct habits, good behaviour and right ways of living

I remember the look on Hymie’s face as he questioned me, hiking one Sunday afternoon along the lovely road to Whalley. ‘What would you do’, he asked, ‘if you were given the opportunity to return to America at once, and the Party forbade you to go?’ I stared at him incredulously … ‘What has the Party to do with my private life?’ I had still a great deal to learn.1

As we saw in the previous chapter, the body became an important site of Party efforts to implant the communist spirit in the membership. The CPGB endeavoured to achieve political advancement through fostering bodily awareness among its membership and encouraging habits of bodily improvement. The British communist body was not just meant to be an icon of physical well-being, radiating health and fitness, however. In a way parallel to the Christian notion of the body as the Tabernacle of the Holy Ghost, it was to serve as the temple of the ‘soul’ also, that is the soul purified, the soul purged of corruption and degeneracy.The communist aspiration in the years between the Wars was towards clean living, respectability, and a state of moral propriety. The CPGB thus endeavoured to shape members’ personal behaviour, attitudes, habits and deportment, as well as define the code by which they were meant to live. In this complementary narrative, the CPGB instructed on perceived ethical issues and pronounced on matters of preferred personal behaviour that even extended to questions of sexual propriety. Like a dutiful, conscientious parent, the Party even sought to socialise its charges in habits of good personal hygiene. As with bodily fitness, correct habits, morals and ways of living were political signifiers connoting pride in self, class and political mission, as well as strength of political conviction. The CPGB was by no means the first organisation of the Left to seek the personal and moral improvement of its members, of course. Nevertheless, because of the Leninist notion of Party as vanguard, the Party as guiding the proletariat in its struggles with Capital, communist efforts in this direction tended to be more authoritarian and dogmatic than those that had gone before. Communist official Jack Murphy gave vivid expression to this idea of the Party’s leadership role. Our Party is for

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the army of the working class, he said, ‘the eyes which see clearly’.2 It was certainly a fitting metaphor because there were very few aspects of members’ habits and behaviour that would escape the gaze of an all-seeing Party and its selfrighteous functionaries during the interwar period. This is not to say that all members’ behaviour conformed to the Party leadership’s carefully fostered public image of respectability and propriety. As we shall see below, there were some ‘libertarian’ types amongst the membership who were quite prepared to flout Party conventions, if not openly, and pursue a more bohemian attitude towards personal relationships and questions of sexual propriety. The Party ‘insists upon the subordination of all other interests to those of the Communist Party. It expects of its members that they will impose a self-discipline and that they will respond to the Party’s demands and needs.’3 So stated the CPGB’s first Constitution, which was adopted at the Third Congress of the Party at Manchester in April 1921. Few recruits would realise on entering the CPGB’s orbit of influence that the ‘subordination of all other interests’ to the Party would extend to their personal behaviour and daily habits, or provide the Party with a mandate to police their private lives. Correct behaviour, habits and ways of living were charged with political significance for the CPGB. ‘The worker who is to be of real value to his class’, declared the Party press in August 1930, ‘will give just that little extra attention to himself and his habits.’4 A worker of this type, the article continued, would then be able to emulate the example of the German comrades and be converted into ‘a potential soldier of the revolution’.5 For the British Party, the KPD, which by the end of 1932 boasted a membership of c.360,000, provided the model in regard to training members in right habits and ways of living.6 Not only did the KPD cater for workers’ culture and recreation, the CPGB informed its members, but it ‘has room even for the development of ideals of personal improvement’.7 It seemed that there were very few aspects of members’ habits and behaviour that would escape Party scrutiny. At one level, communists were expected to be reputable, morally upstanding types who would not only function as ambassadors for the Party but serve as moral exemplars for the wider working-class movement. Though this moral code for members was usually implicit, a custom taken for granted over time, it was not uncommon for some recruits to be made aware of it through quite overt forms of instruction. In the confines of some CPGB locals, new recruits could be on the receiving end of morality lectures given by Party representatives. John MacArthur, an activist in the Fife coalfield, undertook such ‘educational’ work at the behest of the Party. Recruits were lectured, he recalled, ‘as to what we expected from people who joined the Communist Party and how Communist Party members should conduct themselves’.8 This was much more than a question of adopting a code of morality in political or public life.The code of conduct was meant to reach into members’ private lives with the aim of ensuring that, once schooled in Party norms, recruits would set a standard of behaviour for workers outside the Party to emulate. ‘We

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were not free to conduct ourselves as communists in exactly the same manner as ordinary workers’, MacArthur tells us, who ‘could get away with bad behaviour, excessive drunkenness, kicking up rows, in some cases beating up the wife or womanising.’9 The lesson that MacArthur and other Party moralists sought to impart was that ‘the Party’s prestige was all-important, and how they [the members] conducted themselves in their private life had its reflection in the support or otherwise for the Communist Party.Therefore we should, like Caesar’s wife, be above suspicion.’10 It was a sentiment reiterated by MacArthur’s comrade in the Scottish coalfield, Jimmy Stewart. Apparently, Stewart’s maxim, MacArthur tells us, was that ‘if you can’t be clean in your private life, you can’t be clean in public life’.11 It was an attitude that Stewart, MacArthur and other communists of a like-mind were keen to impress on Party comrades. A sense of personal propriety was all important to Ralph Russell, too. A 1930s south-west Essex communist, Russell believed that ‘the standards a true communist observes in his directly political work and those he observes in his personal relationships are one and the same’.12 Russell was appalled at the philandering bouts of some of his fellow communists in south-west Essex, believing that such promiscuous behaviour was not ‘consistent with being a true communist’.13 The CPGB leadership, disapproved of philandering, overindulgence in the ‘sins of the flesh’, and members faced the threat of expulsion if it was thought to interfere with their political duties. Douglas Hyde who joined the Communist Party in 1928 has written of a contemporary, whose promiscuous behaviour ‘had seriously interfered with his work as a communist’, receiving a warning from the Party to the effect ‘that if he continued to let his personal life interfere with his Party responsibilities he would be expelled’.14 A ‘correct’ personal life was expected of all Party recruits which did not allow for ‘sexually deviant’ behaviour, or at least that was the image the Party leadership preferred the outside world to see. The Lancashire communist Margaret McCarthy, whom we have met in previous chapters, recalled that a communist ‘had to be restrained and self-disciplined in his private life’.15 Even though communist theory defined marriage in bourgeois society as a negative arrangement which disadvantaged women and exploited sexual love to maintain and pass on private property, individual communists, according to McCarthy, were encouraged not to alienate potential proletarian recruits by openly flouting the marriage convention and indulging in sexually irresponsible behaviour.16 Account should be taken of regional variations. In areas with a strong tradition of church-going and religious worship the Party code on sexual behaviour seemed to carry even greater weight, as in some of the Welsh coalfield communities with their history of Non-Conformism and Chapel worship. According to Will Paynter, a communist activist in South Wales from 1929, there were frequent discussions in the South Wales DPC during his early years in the Party ‘over personal relationships, especially with the opposite sex. The Party was puritanical and, you know, it was a sort of Jesuit existence.’17 Communist

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philanderers in the South Wales coalfield, including some high-profile local activists, found themselves facing heavy censure by the DPC, as another Welsh activist, Will Picton of Mardy, informs us. Picton remembered that ‘the people from outside the Party would point at you, you see. In the same way that the Chapel used to point to a girl being pregnant … You had to maintain standards.’18 Will Paynter, for his part, who later became a Party organiser in the coalfield, found himself trying to re-establish the Party’s presence in Nantyglo and Blaina in the Gwent area in 1934 after it had collapsed due to a combination of political issues and ‘moral’ problems relating to extra-marital affairs and similar indiscretions.19 Paynter remembered that these ‘moral’ problems ‘took up more bloody time on an argument than important political questions very often’.20 Apparently, two years previously in 1932, there was ‘a bad situation with the women’, as a Party report put it, and ‘quarrels’ over ‘moral’ issues in the South Wales Party locals which helped contribute to a fall in communist fortunes in the Rhondda in this period.21 The subtext in this moral discourse is that for some Party functionaries in the South Wales coalfield, at least for those seeking to uphold the Party’s puritan code as they saw it, particularly those who hailed from a devout Chapel-going background, communism functioned as a ‘political religion’ or a substitute for traditional forms of religious devotion. Arthur Horner was one such figure. A key Party representative in the coalfield and a product of a Chapel background, Horner was said to be ‘very puritanical’ where family matters were concerned.22 Another in the same mould was the communist County Councillor for Monmouthshire Phil Abrahams, part of a devout Chapel-going family before he took up the communist faith. Indeed ‘his style of communism was that of a preacher’, remembered Will Paynter. ‘He approached everything from a moral standpoint you know’, Paynter explained. ‘It was a marriage then of politics and morality always with Phil.’23 Abrahams’ philosophy when vetting recruits for the Nantyglo CP, as he himself described it, was that they ‘had to be honest, sober, industrious, a good citizen … these were the qualities we were looking for’.24 Not surprisingly, the Party remained ever-vigilant in its ‘duty’ to vet and weed out what it called ‘demoralising’ elements, and there were frequent expulsions. Take the following Party Report on the CPGB’s Manchester District in 1932 relating to the state of the Party in Burnley and north-east Lancashire. ‘For a long period in Burnley’, the Report began, the composition of our Party has been very bad. Most of the comrades are unemployed of long-standing, and have bad records among the workers prior to joining the Party (petty thefts, etc.). While several of these members spasmodically carry out Party activity, they have become semi-lumpenised and are a barrier to the growth of the Party, which must be cut out. Petty thefts in the Party rooms (the bursting open of the electricity meter and the theft of its contents etc.) and a string of debts left by organizers in the past along with the above, gives our Party anything but a good name.25

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Beyond frowning on sexual misconduct and ‘lumpen’ behaviour, it seemed that there was no area of a member’s private life that was beyond the reach of official Party censure. Communist discipline even extended to romantic affairs of the heart, particularly when they were thought to infringe on Party work. As Margaret McCarthy informs us, ‘the Party was sublimely unconcerned with the question of human love’.26 McCarthy’s memoirs recount how two separate romantic liaisons that she was involved in became the subject of Party interference. On the first occasion, through subtle persuasion and implied threat, Party functionaries took steps to dissuade McCarthy from returning to America to become re-acquainted with her childhood sweetheart. On the other occasion, an amorous relationship that she had entered into with a Greek communist whom she had met in Moscow was wound up because it conflicted with Comintern goals. ‘Our personal preference to be together’, McCarthy recollected, ‘was not a matter the Party could consider seriously, and our first duty was to the Party. Therefore, we could not appeal to the Party, but just separate and wait and hope for the future to provide an opportunity for us.’27 Marxist-Leninism’s ‘aversion to and denial of the emotional’, as McCarthy saw it, came as a profound shock to her. ‘Personal matters, to the Party, were weak, frivolous and superficial’, she concluded, while the sensuous and the amorous were always deemed secondary to the class struggle and communist political goals.28 The extent to which the members adhered to the Party’s code on love, sex and marriage, however, is a matter of contention. While Margaret McCarthy rejected the charge levelled at it by its opponents that the interwar British Communist Party, because of its theoretical opposition to the ‘bourgeois’ marriage institution, was a ‘free-love institution’ or ‘hot-bed of unrestricted sensuality’, others saw things differently. According to Douglas Hyde, many of his Party comrades ‘had been able to love as irresponsibly and indiscriminately as barnyard fowls’.29 Hyde has claimed, too, that in the London offices of the Daily Worker, where he worked on its editorial staff in the late 1930s, there existed a ‘great network of amorous entanglements’ and a loose, amoral and neurotic atmosphere that ‘was supercharged with sex’.30 While we should treat Hyde’s account, who found a new faith in Catholicism and ideological anti-communism in 1948, with some caution, this is not the case with Nan Green’s testimony. Unlike Hyde, Green remained a lifelong communist and in her autobiography she tells us that in the communist ‘cell’ she was attached when resident in London in the 1930s ‘there was much changing of partners in the name of sexual freedom’.31 One could venture to suggest that there were regional variations in play here also and that London communism was a hot-bed of sexual passions, although this interpretation may be going too far. More likely though, is that some Party members were ‘bohemian’ in the way they lived and conducted their private lives and that this lifestyle was more in evidence in the metropolis. Even if this was the case, the extent to which a subculture of communist bohemianism had been implanted in other areas is difficult to gauge.We do know though, from

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Party accounts and the recollections of Will Paynter and Will Picton mentioned above, that even communists in the more puritan atmosphere of the South Wales coalfield in the 1930s were not averse to having extra-marital affairs. What we can say with certainty is that some British communists did indeed ‘sleep around’. ‘A few British Communists I knew’, the late 1930s Party activist Charlotte Haldane informs us, ‘were “living in sin”, or else they quietly obtained divorces without other Party members or the public at large being any wiser.’32 Even Harry Young, the British Youth delegate to the CYI between 1922 and 1929, who professed to never being ‘a womaniser or “chaser”’ because he ‘was in love with the World Revolution’ instead, confessed to an extra-marital transgression which cost him his marriage to his Russian communist wife. When back in London after his domicile in Moscow, he recounts: ‘I was guilty of a most stupidly irresponsible escapade with the pretty feather-brained wife of a local Communist Party member. The result of this was that my wife, quite correctly, immediately walked out to reveal a secret admirer who eagerly accepted her.’33 What also seems certain from the above accounts is that there was a contradiction between the Party leadership’s wish to show a ‘respectable’ face to the outside world and the philandering behaviour of some of its activists. There was a similar contradiction between the Party’s puritan self-image and the bohemian attitude towards sexual relationships favoured by some amongst the membership. Nevertheless, there were others who strenuously resisted the temptation to succumb to the ‘sins of the flesh’, though this could involve considerable personal sacrifices of a kind that bordered on self-repression. To Margaret McCarthy, the parent Party’s attempts to inculcate habits of self-restraint and discipline in one’s private life were particularly hard on a young communist, who ‘by the very nature and intensity of his activities sublimated so many urges and frustrations’.34 The cultivation of this chaste outlook meant that young communists tended to eschew the forms of play and recreation engaged in by their non-communist contemporaries. Communist youth, remembered McCarthy, were insulated from the temptations and pleasurable distractions of the mass culture industry, the dance halls and other forms of mass amusement, ‘where excitement was artificially stimulated’.35 Because ‘undue frivolity was frowned upon’ by Party puritans, and regular hours, sound sleep and fresh air were considered vital to physical and mental agility and thus productive political work, dance halls, night clubs and other such places were deemed unsuitable venues for communists. ‘Dancing is good for young and old’, pontificated a Daily Worker health writer, ‘but not when indulged in very late at night and in stuffy, overheated rooms.’36 Nocturnal habits of this kind also impinged on Party work and time. In a candid, confessional passage in his memoirs, the Brighton Party member Ernie Trory described an amorous liaison with a politically apathetic, non-communist and the fall from grace that resulted from it. ‘I began to spend more time dancing and taking her to the pictures than was consistent with efficient and practical Party work’, Trory confessed.37 One of the transgressions

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included ‘not turning up to do my share of Daily Worker selling’. More seriously, he admitted, ‘I frequented the Empire Club, a real sink of iniquity … spending my time gambling and playing cards, when I was needed by the Party in a critical period’.38 Racked by self-loathing at having let the Party down, Trory described himself during this deviant phase as ‘an erratic and vacillating appendage of the great [communist] movement’.39 Consumed by rising levels of guilt Trory then proceeded to propose his own expulsion from the CPGB. Although his clement comrades in the Brighton Local Party Committee declined to accept his expulsion, one of the conditions they put down for Trory remaining in the Party was that he ceased frequenting the Empire Club.40 In some respects, the Party’s behavioural code was a self-regulating mechanism, at least for most members, as Trory’s confessional account shows. Members tended to internalise the code and regulate their behaviour and habits to conform to it. Joiners recognised the obligations that Party membership brought and shaped their personal life accordingly. Party activist Ivor Montagu found that with membership came obligations that subordinated the private to the political. Whenever the opportunity came to advance the communist agenda, he has written, this invariably took ‘precedence over private interest or personal pleasure’.41 Bob Darke, too, gave up his ‘pleasures’ on becoming a Party activist in Hackney in the 1930s, including going to the cinema, attending boxing exhibitions at ‘Premierland’ in the East End, and watching his beloved soccer team Clapton Orient. ‘After a time’, Darke recalled, when he became aware that he was unable to reconcile communist commitment with his pleasures, ‘I found I had lost the taste for them.’42 Gambling was evidently a vice on par with frequenting clubs.Trory’s autobiography contains another confessional section where he writes that ‘I used to have occasional lapses during which I would visit gambling joints and play cards. I also used to back horses.’43 Trory recognised that ‘backing the horses’ represented a ‘lapse’, a deviation from the Party’s accepted code of conduct. Some aspects of contemporary proletarian taste, gambling on the horses being one, bothered the Party leadership. In late January 1930, during the sectarian phase of the Third Period when the Party claimed that it alone spoke for the proletariat and understood its aspirations, it moved to dispense with horse racing coverage in the Party press in an effort to wean its working-class readers off the habit.44 This decision was rationalised to disgruntled pro-racing readers on the grounds that horse racing was a capitalist stunt to ‘dope and divert the workers from the real bread-and-butter questions that concern them’.45 Lest there be any who doubted the wisdom of the new line, Rajani Palme Dutt himself hammered home the message in a lengthy piece in the Daily a few days later on the wider subject of ‘bourgeois sport’. To Dutt, horse racing was a dismal substitute for true sport. It either reduced workers to passive spectators or, the final irony, not even spectators but followers of mere ‘printed symbols on scraps of paper to bet upon’.46 Gambling and the pseudo-sport offered by capitalism, continued Dutt, distracted

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workers’ minds from their poor living conditions, made them passive, paralysed thinking, and choked off struggle. Further, gambling functioned as a subtle alternative to the class struggle by seducing workers to believe that they could supplement their low wages through betting. ‘So long as the workers hope to remedy low wages and bad conditions by putting sixpence on a horse … they will not only lose their sixpence, but will never remedy their low wages and bad conditions, let alone advance the revolution.’47 Reiterating this purist line, a Daily Worker article in late February commented that the modern dope of horse-racing saw low-waged proletarian punters follow ‘the will-o’-the-wisp of fairy racing stories in which the hero lays a shilling and wins a fortune’.48 In the same piece, the proletarian addictions of horse racing and greyhound racing were cast as the ‘modern counter-parts to the Roman circus’, which Rome’s ruling class used to pacify and dope the restless Roman mob.49 In its reservations about British workers’ penchant for ‘backing the horses’, the CPGB leadership recognised that horse racing reinforced the status quo of rank, hierarchy and status, and promoted conservative values.50 Thus the Party’s task, explained Dutt, should be to contest the ‘reactionary tendencies, survivals and moods’ epitomised by this unabashed enjoyment of betting, by providing a lead which reflected the outlook of only the most class-conscious, awakened workers, who clearly did not want capitalist ‘sport’, including racing tips.51 Not everyone agreed with the leadership’s stance on this issue. One pro-racing advocate argued that it was a mistake to ‘take up a dignified attitude towards the old and fixed foibles of the workers; if we do we merely freeze him off before improving his political outlook’.52 Another asked the purist opponents of racing, ‘are you going to give them [the workers] nothing but propaganda and economics after a hard day’s graft? If so they will not read it … If you want to bring the workers to communism, let the racing column come back and they will read the paper’.53 The puritan elements in the Party refused to be persuaded, however, and the ban on racing coverage remained in place. The CPGB was also disinclined towards alcohol. It was perceived to be another proletarian vice which distracted workers, paralysed their perceptions and thus inhibited the class struggle. Additionally, in terms of the communist ideal of the healthy body, alcohol was a pollutant that caused physical and mental harm, particularly when consumed in excessive quantities. Similarly, with regard to the Party’s desire to foster correct habits, insobriety suggested moral weakness, a personal failing that interfered with the aim of personal improvement. In its dislike of alcohol abuse, the CPGB inherited some of the sentiments of the precommunist labour movement on the drink question. A tradition of abhorrence towards working-class drunkenness and advocacy of temperance could be found from Owenism through Chartism and the trade unions to the Labour Party and the ILP.54 The fringe parties of the pre-CPGB Marxist Left, the SDF and the BSP, also sought to ‘improve’ working-class drinking habits.55 For these early socialist and trade union teetotalers, drunkenness contributed to working-class

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immiseration and was an ally of the capitalist because it ‘addled’ the worker’s brain and turned him from Left causes. The CPGB elite tended to favour temperance, though it did not become official Party policy. At the CPGB’s founding conference, the Unity Convention, which opened on 31 July 1920, a motion in favour of prohibition was referred to the Party’s provisional executive for decision, but no action was taken on it then or through the interwar years.56 Senior Party figures like Tom Bell, Jack Murphy, Bob Stewart, John Mahon and Willie Gallacher all practised total abstinence, as did prominent local communists like Phil Abrahams whom we met above. Tom Bell could barely contain his displeasure when thinking of the ‘fou’ booze’, calling drunkenness a ‘disgusting bourgeois method of corruption [which] ought to be crushed wherever it shows itself’.57 To Bob Stewart, the public houses he encountered in his native Dundee ‘were evil smelly places’ befouled with ‘the stench of beer, the sawdust on the floor, the spittoons and the salt fish the publican kept on the counter because it gave the customers a thirst when they chewed it’.58 Some leading Party and YCL figures hailed from social and personal backgrounds where a father’s drinking habits brought sorrow to their family life which invariably conditioned their later response to alcohol. Willie Gallacher, Jack Murphy and John Gollan fell into this category.59 Some socialist teetotalers in the pre-CPGB period would join temperance organisations in a bid to hit back at the evils of excessive drinking. Tom Murray, a member of the CPGB’s Stockbridge Local in Edinburgh, was active in the Campaign for No Licence and the Scottish Temperance Alliance. It was during his time with the latter body that he met his future wife, Janet Alston, who, like Murray, would later become a devout communist teetotaller.60 Bob Stewart, too, formed the Prohibition and Reform Party prior to joining the CPGB, which later metamorphosed into the Socialist Prohibition Fellowship, one of the CPGB’s founder groups.61 Not every Party official abstained, particularly in the British Party’s heady, less conformist early days before the grip of Bolshevisation had tightened around it. The CPGB’s first ‘Chairman’, Arthur McManus, was an accomplished drinker who gained a deserved reputation for being able to drink even hard-drinking Russians, schooled on drinking vodka and strong Georgian brandy, ‘under the table’. The normally unimpeachable McManus, the model of the self-sacrificing Bolshevik in many ways, seemed to have an expensive taste where drink was concerned. Not only was this communist bon viveur, not alone in this regard amongst British Party apparatchiks, a ‘very heavy smoker of expensive cigarettes’ according to a contemporary, but he was fond of ‘quaffing Benedictine liquors at half-a-crown-a-go’ at a time ‘when the typical working-class “tipple” was “Fourale” at Fourpence the pint’.62 By the more repressive Stalinist 1930s, the heavy drinking bouts enjoyed in Russian hotels by those like McManus were more likely to invite Party censure. One such bout in this period, indulged in by Will Paynter and two un-named English Party members in a Leningrad hotel, led to

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them being hauled before a special meeting of the British Party the following morning where they ‘were condemned and classified as “petty bourgeois degenerates”’.63 In a rush of retrospective self-loathing similar to that of Ernie Trory described above, Paynter concluded in his memoirs that his drinking lapse ‘was a pretty disgusting performance from any standpoint and poor thanks to our hosts who were doing their best to care for us’.64 The Glaswegian communist Harry McShane disapproved of intemperate proletarians, too. Workers who neglected their personal cleanliness caused him equal offence. ‘When human beings don’t care about their own health or personal cleanliness and think of nothing but drink’, commented McShane when passing judgement on so-called ‘lumpen’ elements in the interwar British proletariat, ‘they are no good to the movement or to anybody else’.65 Like any good parent body performing a ‘responsible’ guardianship role, the CPGB prided itself on its efforts to improve the personal hygiene of those in its charge.The membership card of the Pioneers, the communist children’s organisation, for example, contained the proud assertion that: ‘A Pioneer is clean’.66 Soon after its launch, the Daily Worker put out a list of commandments for hygienic living designed to perfect the workings of a proletarian communist’s body, so that it was better able to endure the rigours of work-place and Party work. ‘Your first-class, classconscious worker will first wash thoroughly, feet, nails and teeth as special items. He will then open his bowels’, the latter to ward off consumption, cancer and any such diseases.67 In this anatomical union of well-tuned metabolism and utility, the closest analogue was that of a motor car engine. The communist worker was encouraged to try to think regularly about opening his bowels ‘as you would about an engine’, for one ‘wouldn’t put fresh oil in the crank case of your engine if it were already full of dirty, filthy grit, waste and used oil’, continued the article.68 Machine analogies and industry-related metaphors came readily to communists when they discoursed on such matters. According to one DailyWorker writer, continuing his weekly advice to members on physical culture, the body’s digestive system was a ‘wonderfully contrived chemical factory’.69 The blood stream was imagined in a similar way. It was: the non-stop transport organisation of the body, which not only carries the finished repairing material to whatever site it is required, but also on its return journey to the factory carries away from that site broken-down and useless material to points where such rubbish can be shot out of the body.70

The proletarian communist, then, was encouraged to ensure that his person was regularly tended and cleansed, and that his body should behave, if analogies were sought, like a well-performing motor car engine or a well-organised factory complex. The machine, rational and efficient, seemed to be the perfect emblem for the Party, as well as the well-functioning Party activist. ‘A Communist Party can be well likened to a steam engine’, stated a writer in the Party press in 1922, ‘in that it is a machine constructed to utilize energy to produce results.’71

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Moreover, the machine was ‘beautifully built’, though it perhaps needed ‘certain modifications in the fuelling arrangements’ to harness most effectively the ‘illimitable’ supply of steam in contemporary Britain ‘in the shape of the smouldering sense of social injustice and social robbery’.72 The class struggle came in many forms and attention to personal hygiene was an intrinsic, though less obvious, part of it. CPGB physical culture specialists believed that neglect of personal cleanliness perpetuated feelings of class and status inferiority on the part of many workers. ‘Why have many workers an unconscious dread of the power and superiority that the boss exudes?’, asked the Daily Worker rhetorically in August 1930.73 Because, came the reply, ‘his teeth are white and his hands neat and fresh’, while the worker’s ‘teeth are stained’ and his fingernails are clogged with dirt.74 Eliminating unpleasant mouth and body odors, stains on teeth and dirty fingernails, then, melded into the serious business of class reality and politics. ‘Let us learn, and discuss through our BWSF groups, hygiene, sex, physical culture’, urged another DailyWorker column on this same theme, ‘and the more we learn, the more we shall find their economic significance.’75 The ruling class in Ancient Greece, continued the piece, maintained mastery over a numerically much larger slave population because they ‘practised physical and mental culture so much as to create a god-like atmosphere of superiority’.76 The nexus between personal hygiene and feelings of class and status inferiority in contemporary Britain was forged from an early age the article concluded, whereby ‘working-class children invariably receive such an inadequate training in personal matters that they leave school stamped with “working-class inferiority complex”’.77 In the drive towards fostering correct personal habits, some of the more zealous advocates of personal hygiene even recommended cold water baths for communist workers. These cold water enthusiasts conflated such baths with much more than personal cleanliness and a well-turned-out appearance. Cold water baths, additionally, were thought to be a generative of moral energy. An article in the YCL press recommended ‘frequent cold bathing’ in a ‘tub as near as cold as you can bear’ for the aspiring young worker-sportsman, not solely for the practical value of being clean but for ‘the moral value of feeling fresh’.78 It was a message repeated by another advocate of cold baths a couple of years later. ‘The moral effect of cold bathing alone’, the writer stated, ‘is sufficient basis for building up exemplary habits.’79 In the Daily Worker the following week, the same point was made. A cold bath had value ‘as a moral tonic; it tunes one up to feel efficient, clean and even confident’.80 If the removal of teeth stains and body dirt, the latter preferably undertaken with the aid of a cold bath, helped in the goal of moulding the model communist man and woman, then so did the manner in which CPGB activists attended to other aspects of their personal appearance. The East End communist Joe Jacobs informs us that many young communist East Enders in the 1930s ‘were fond of dressing in an outlandish way. Khaki or red shirts were common. They also liked

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to wear sandals.’81 Jacobs confessed that he, too, when he could afford it, enjoyed wearing ‘good clothes’ that bordered on the ‘extravagant’. For much of the time, though, Jacobs found himself identifying with the Party’s code regarding correct appearance, which tended towards the conservative and standard. In particular, the Party’s dress code showed a strong inhibition against flamboyance of dress, which impressed itself on activists like Jacobs. He remembered that ‘there were frequent arguments in the YCL and the CP because some of us felt that these outlandish dressers were behaving in a “sectarian” manner’.82 The way members presented themselves at official Communist Party occasions could also be dictated by the code on correct appearance. ‘We told one very nice comrade’ said Hymie Fagan, another East End communist,‘that he couldn’t come on the poster-parades unless he shaved off his beard, which he did.’83 As with flamboyance of dress, unconventional dress was frowned on, particularly when it did not fit with the Party’s image of itself as an authentic workers’ party. The wife of the Cambridge don Maurice Dobb, Fagan has written, ‘was told that she could not join us wearing a plaid coat and sandals. We did not want our members to appear queer, in the original sense of the word, in the eyes of the working class.’84 Bourgeois members of the CPGB would go to great lengths to proletarianise themselves and conform to this code. The bourgeois communist MP, J. Walton Newbold, would dress as scruffily as possible because he imagined that this made him appear more proletarian to his comrades.85 On a related theme, some would even discard their middle-class names, such as Gabriel Carritt who, on becoming a communist in the 1930s, ‘started to call myself “Bill”, wanting to shed my bourgeois background – as if I could’.86 There was a dress code for the Party’s women activists, too, as Margaret McCarthy explained. ‘We did, in fact, tend somewhat to the spartan, even in the way of dress and decorations; we frowned on cosmetics and the sensuous aspects of life generally, considering them petty, bourgeois and degenerate’.87 It was a dress code that appeared to find favour throughout the Diaspora of the world communist youth movement, as the CYI apparatchik Harry Young explained: For most of us frugality and austerity was part of our way of life, of our revolutionary ethics. We were dedicated revolutionaries, we abhorred any suggestion of ostentation or personal gratification, even the girl comrades dressed in the simplest practical clothing. ‘Make-up’ was anathema, ‘bourgeois’, the only ornamentation of any sort a red-kerchief over the hair in the summer.88

Not all communist women would have identified with this puritan position, however. The debate that flared in the Daily Worker in late 1935 on the issue of cosmetics and communist women was a case in point. The issue initially sprang to life in October 1935 with the appearance in the Daily of ‘Aline O’Neil’s Beauty Parlour’ column. At this point, O’Neil, said to be ‘a beauty specialist of many years’ standing’, was commissioned to advise the newspaper’s women readers on ‘their beauty problems’.89 Some Party women complained, however, charging

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that giving ‘beauty tips’ to activists was unbecoming for a revolutionary newspaper. A Hull communist thought that women should be building a Soviet Britain rather than ‘plastering their faces with powder and their lips with lipstick’.90 Another irate reader, one Bertha Braunthal, wrote that: ‘It is degrading for women to paint their faces and lips just to please the man, instead of trying to win him by personal charm resulting from intellectual, political and trade union activity in the ranks of the working class movement.’91 Similarly, true beauty, rather than being acquired artificially from without via the application of decadent bourgeois cosmetics, could only come from within, through proper diet and rational living. The Daily’s women readers were therefore advised by comrade Braunthal to eat plenty of fruit, vegetables and cheese, exercise regularly, sleep the whole year round with the window open, and clean the whole body once daily with a friction glove to stimulate blood circulation.92 It seemed that Bertha Braunthal was another cold water bathing enthusiast because it was suggested that the latter task be administered with the aid of cold water. Bertha Braunthal’s course of natural beauty treatment and opposition to cosmetics drew protest from others, mainly proletarian Party women. A Poplar correspondent argued that it was vital that the Daily retained Aline O’Neil’s beauty tips column.This was ‘in order to show the young women whom we wish to get inside the Party, that communists are not wearers of red shirts or vegetarians, or other “cranks”, but normal working-class people who live the same lives as themselves’.93 A woman ‘Factory Worker’ was just as dismissive. ‘The suggestion that make-up is incompatible with personal charm and intellectual development is absurd’ she said, before asking ‘has Comrade Braunthal any idea how much inclined one feels for physical culture courses after standing in a shop or at a bench all day?’94 The Daily Worker could lead the fight to build the communist future, ‘Factory Worker’ concluded, ‘while still giving useful, every-day advice on such practical questions as to how to preserve and repair our looks under present-day conditions’.95 A male communist advocate of ‘beauty hints’ for Party women, using more unflattering language, remarked that the Party will make little headway with workers if female comrades came across as ‘pimply faced frumps’.96 Despite the letters of protest from Bertha Braunthal and others, Aline O’Neil’s ‘beauty tips’ articles remained and became a regular weekly feature in the communist press over the next few years. The great majority of the articles avoided giving women readers a political sermon. Their neutral tone seemed in keeping with the climate of the Popular Front when the Party slackened its traditional attachment to doctrinal purity and tried to appeal more to the mainstream. There were tips on various aids to facial beauty, including advice on morning facial care routines, cleansing lotions, and neck exercises to ‘beautify sagging muscles’.97 There was also help to combat acne, dark hollows under the eyes, and poor blood circulation in the winter months.98 There were hair and hand care tips, too. The Daily’s women readers were given advice on affordable shampoos,

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staving off grey hair, and how to combat chilblains.99 Occasionally, Aline O’Neil did deliver a political sermon with her beauty advice. Poor states of mind, she told her women readers, such as humility, resignation and meekness, particularly in the face of capitalist power and conditions, were often ‘the worst enemies of good looks’. These mental states affect the face such that ‘every line turns down, every muscle slackens, the sparkle goes out of your eyes and the light fades from your face’.100 It was the same, continued O’Neil, with those other negative mental states we tend to acquire ‘while we have to live and work under a capitalist system’, fear, depression and jealousy. With fear, ‘the skin acquires a grey, sodden appearance, the light dies away, the whole face looks dead’ and the hair goes dank and often brittle’, while with depression ‘ugly lines appear’, the ‘skin becomes sallow, the figure sags’ and ‘one can do nothing with one’s hair’.101 Jealousy, ‘one of the ugliest forms of distorted individualism’ and an emotion commonplace in conditions of competitive capitalism, played particular havoc with one’s looks. According to Aline O’Neil, jealously ‘creates acids and poisons in our bodies’ which revealed themselves in skin discolouring and sagging muscles.102 Further, and imagining herself an expert in physiognomy, an inner jealous state showed itself through a narrowing of eyes and mouth such as ‘to make the whole face bear a furtive and vindictive expression’.103 Aline O’Neil’s remedy for a return to a state of beauty was for the woman to replace these negative mental states with positive ones through engagement with life and political activism. That is, to replace humility, resignation and meekness with pride in self, ‘blazing indignation’ and a fighting outlook, and fear and depression with daring, audacity and a personal commitment ‘to fight against the condition that is causing your depression’.104 Here physical beauty is equated with political activism. In this discourse, beauty features as the child of communist activism, the tangible reward for a life given over to meaningful struggle against perceived injustice in the ranks of the revolutionary movement. ‘Fill your life with a new inspiration’, she urged, ‘a new adventure that will demand your whole energy and attention, that will give you a great objective, that will leave no time for trifling fears, miserable despondency, or hateful jealously.’105 The ‘new adventure’ she urged on her women readers was communist activism, as she went on to explain: I would suggest joining the Communist Party, the Party which challenges this decaying system that breeds all these base emotions. Personal troubles fade in the golden glow of a life with a purpose. Here is a high adventure for you that will destroy the killing atmosphere of the workshop and factory, the deadening routine of the office, that will shatter the walls that imprison us and send us marching in unison with workers all over the world towards a future of radiant health and beauty.106

In her impassioned attack on communist cosmetics, Bertha Braunthal claimed that ‘this make-up business is a clumsy imitation of bourgeois decadent society,

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which lives a perverted, unhealthy and unnatural life, based solely on the lowest grade of sex-appeal’.107 The equating of the bourgeois life with decadence and sexual impropriety was a common theme in CPGB leisure discourse. The Party press frequently delighted in shocking its proletarian readers with bawdy tales of drunken orgies and steamy sexual encounters in British ‘high society’. ‘Half clad women in orgies in Baronet’s flat – Scathing exposure of bourgeois degeneracy’, screamed a Daily Worker headline in June 1930.108 Another account told of ‘riverside revelries indulged in by boiled-shirted, evening-dressed young idlers of the upper class’, complete with ‘lawn chasing’ of inebriated young women in their underclothing, while another referred to the ‘futile, decadent and parasitic life’ that ‘is characteristic of the “gilded youth” of the bourgeoisie’.109 Prone to sexual impropriety and debauchery, the bourgeois ‘type’ was thought to be a paradigm of obscenity and decadence. The bourgeois ‘decadent’ lived a life that was, in fact, considered to be the complete inverse of that of the communist. Or at least that ideal-type communist that conformed to the Party’s preferred image of its activists as models of sound habits, good behaviour and right ways of living, both in their private as well as their public lives. Notes 1 Margaret McCarthy, Generation in Revolt (London: Heinemann, 1953), p. 95. 2 Workers’ Weekly, 25 September 1925, p. 4. 3 Constitution and Rules: As Adopted by the Special Delegate Conference, Manchester, 23–24 April 1921. 4 Daily Worker, 12 August 1930, p. 6. 5 Ibid. 6 See, Eve Rosenhaft, Beating the Fascists? The German Communists and Political Violence 1929–1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 7 Daily Worker, 9 October 1930, p. 4. 8 Ian MacDougall (ed.), Militant Miners: Recollections of John McArthur, Buckhaven; and Letters, 1924–26, of David Proudfoot, Methil, to G. Allen Hutt (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1981), p. 143. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., p. 83. 12 NMLH. CP/HIST/06/02. MS. Ralph Russell, They Think I Lost: Conclusions From a Communist Life. Unpublished autobiography. 1995. 13 Ibid., p. 30. 14 Douglas Hyde, I Believed: The Autobiography of a British Communist (London: Heinemann, 1952), p. 41. 15 McCarthy, Generation, p. 104. 16 Ibid. 17 SWML. AUD/446. Interview of Will Paynter, interviewed by Hywel Francis, 6 March 1973. 18 SWML. AUD/193. Interview of Will Picton, interviewed by Hywel Francis and colleagues, 9 May 1973. 19 Interview of Will Paynter. 20 Ibid.

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21 See RGASPI. RC 495/100/826, fos. 63–6. Minutes of Meeting of Political Bureau, 6 February 1932. Reports From Districts, South Wales. 22 Interview of Will Picton. 23 Interview of Will Paynter. 24 SWML. AUD/329. Interview of Phil Abrahams, interviewed by Hywel Francis, 14 January 1974. 25 RGASPI. RC 495/100/826, fos. 136–67. Report of the Manchester District, 7 March 1932. 26 McCarthy, Generation, p. 234. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid, p. 234. 29 Hyde, I Believed, p. 220. 30 Ibid., p. 79. 31 Nan Green, A Chronicle of Small Beer:The Memoirs of Nan Green (Nottingham: Trent Books, 2004), p. 62. 32 Charlotte Haldane, Truth Will Out (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1949), p. 177. Divorce figured in Haldane’s life, too, as we saw in Chapter 4. 33 BUL. 2-858. MS. Harry Young, Harry’s Biography. Chapter entitled ‘Women’, p. 9. 34 McCarthy, Generation, p. 104. 35 Ibid. 36 Daily Worker, 14 February 1930, p. 9. McCarthy, Generation, p. 99, regarding Party attitudes to so-called ‘undue frivolity’. 37 Ernie Trory, Between the Wars: Recollections of a Communist Organiser (London: Crabtree Press, 1974), p. 67. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., p. 76. 40 Ibid. 41 Ivor Montagu, The Youngest Son: Autobiographical Sketches (London:Lawrence & Wishart, 1970), p. 339. 42 Bob Darke, The Communist Technique in Britain (London: Penguin, 1952), p. 112. 43 Trory, Between, p. 50. 44 The ban came into effect on 22 January 1930. 45 Daily Worker, 22 January 1930, p. 11. 46 Daily Worker, 25 January 1930, p. 4. 47 Ibid. 48 Daily Worker, 20 February 1930, p. 10. 49 Ibid. 50 For an interesting account of the racing ‘addiction’, see Mike Huggins, Horse Racing and the British, 1919–39 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). 51 Daily Worker, 25 January 1930, p. 4. 52 Daily Worker, 16 January 1930, p. 10. 53 Daily Worker, 8 February 1930, p. 11. 54 Stephen G. Jones, ‘Labour, society and the drink question in Britain, 1918–1939’, The Historical Journal, 30:1 (1987), 105–22. See also H. Russell Smart, Socialism and Drink (Manchester: Labour Press Society, c.1892). 55 William Knox (ed.), Scottish Labour Leaders, 1918–1939 (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1984), pp. 22–3. 56 James Klugmann, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain,Volume 1: Formation and Early Years, 1919–1924 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1969), p. 48. 57 Thomas Bell, Pioneering Days (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1941), pp. 42–3.

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58 Bob Stewart, Breaking the Fetters:The Memoirs of Bob Stewart (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1967), p. 20. 59 Jack Murphy, New Horizons (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1941), pp. 16–17, 20. NMLH. CP/IND/KETT/01. Margot Kettle Papers MS, Memoirs of Jessie Taylor (Jessie Gollan), (March 1983), pp. 42–3. Francis Beckett, The Enemy Within:The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party (London: Merlin Press, 1998), p. 15, on Gallacher. 60 Ian MacDougall (ed.), Voices From Work and Home: Personal Recollections of Working Life and Labour Struggles in the Twentieth Century by Scots Men and Women (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 2000), p. 327. 61 Stewart, Breaking, pp. 48, 85. 62 Beckett, The Enemy, p. 10, on McManus’s Russian drinking bouts. Young, Harry’s Biography. Chapter entitled ‘Arthur McManus’, p. 3, regarding his liking for Benedictine liquors. William Rust was another such apparatchik who was rather partial to fine living. It seems that ‘Rust enjoyed the trappings of power, the food, the holidays, the theatre tickets, to which his influence gave him access’. Cited in Andrew Flinn,‘William Rust: the Comintern’s blue eyed boy?’, in John McIlroy, Kevin Morgan and Alan Campbell (eds), Party People, Communist Lives: Explorations in Biography (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2001), p. 98. 63 Will Paynter, My Generation (London: Allen & Unwin, 1972), p. 55. 64 Ibid. 65 Harry McShane and Joan Smith, Harry McShane: No Mean Fighter (London: Pluto Press, 1978), p. 158. 66 Mary Docherty, A Miner’s Lass: Memoirs by Mary Docherty (Preston: M. Docherty, 1992), p. 118. 67 Daily Worker, 12 August 1930, p. 6. 68 Ibid. 69 Daily Worker, 13 November 1935, p. 6. 70 Ibid. 71 The Communist Review, 3:6 (October 1922), p. 292. 72 Ibid. 73 Daily Worker, 12 August 1930, p. 6. 74 Ibid. 75 Daily Worker, 5 August 1930, p. 6. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid. 78 Young Worker, 10 March 1928, p. 4. 79 Daily Worker, 4 September 1930, p. 4. 80 Daily Worker, 11 September 1930, p. 4. 81 Joe Jacobs, Out of the Ghetto. My Youth in the East End: Communism and Fascism, 1913–1939 (London: Janet Simon, 1978), pp. 79–80. 82 Ibid. 83 BUL. 2-261. MS. Hymie Fagan, An Autobiography. (n.d), p. 74. 84 Ibid. 85 A. J. Davies, To Build a New Jerusalem:The Labour Movement From the 1880s to the 1990s (London: Michael Joseph, 1992), p. 105. 86 NMLH. CP/IND/KETT/01. Margot Kettle Papers MS, Memoirs of Gabriel ‘Bill’ Carritt (May 1983), p. 31. 87 McCarthy, Generation, p. 104. 88 Young, Harry’s Biography. Chapter entitled ‘The daily life of a Comintern (Young Communist) Official’, p. 3. 89 Daily Worker, 31 October 1935, p. 7.

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90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109

Daily Worker, 2 December 1935, p. 7. Daily Worker, 25 November 1935, p. 7. Ibid. Daily Worker, 28 November 1935, p. 7. Ibid. Ibid. Daily Worker, 2 December 1935, p. 7. See Daily Worker, 16 January 1937, p. 7, and 20 February 1937, p. 7. See Daily Worker, 3 October 1936, p. 7, 10 October 1936, p. 7, and 31 October 1936, p. 7. See Daily Worker, 23 January 1937, p. 7, 27 February 1937, p. 7, and 17 October 1936, p. 7. Daily Worker, 25 July 1936, p. 7. Daily Worker, 1 August 1936, p. 7. Daily Worker, 8 August 1936, p. 7. Ibid. Daily Worker, 25 July 1936, p. 7, and 1 August 1936, p. 7. Daily Worker, 8 August 1936, p. 7. Ibid. Daily Worker, 25 November 1935, p. 7. Daily Worker, 21 June 1930, p. 5. Daily Worker, 13 July 1931, p. 1, and 7 June 1930, p. 1.

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8 Communists at play

It’s a free country – but try walking on it.1

Despite being over-burdened with Party tasks and other responsibilities, Britain’s interwar communists did find space to play. Engagement in a fairly varied recreational life that included social functions, dances, concerts and day-trips to the seaside would brighten lives usually heavily over-determined by the more serious business of striving to steer the historical process towards the final destination of proletarian emancipation. Communist limbs strained by excessive Party work and spirits dulled by consuming the products of a ‘mass culture’ leisure industry that seemed held in the tight grip of commercialisation, philistinism and standardisation, would be further rekindled by going on comradely rambling and camping outings to tranquil rural destinations. In other leisure fields, communists went on cycle runs and treated themselves to the ‘joys’ of Soviet Cinema. Like much of the CPGB’s activity, communist leisure activity was dialectical, in that it defined itself in relation to that which it opposed and sought to transcend, in most cases ‘bourgeois’ leisure but also leisure as understood and defined by the socialist or social-democratic tradition. During the interwar period, the CPGB worked to create a separate space for its members to enjoy leisure outside the dominant commercial framework which was said to be infused with bourgeois values. Additionally, though to a lesser extent, the culture of separation extended to isolating Party members from the social-democratic tradition of leisure. In so doing, the CPGB sought to replace a bourgeois and social-democratic culture of leisure with a communist one. Finally, in communist hands, leisure was regarded as an aspect of the wider communist political struggle. Communist political values would be affirmed through leisure, while the Party and YCL would pursue wider political goals through leisure activities. In a similar register, recruits to the various organs of the Party absorbed communist values and models of behaviour through their participation in communist leisure. Communist recruits enjoyed Party and YCL-run recreational activities almost

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from the moment the CPGB was born.They could be found attending communist social functions. In the London area alone during 1921, they were invited to a ‘Grand May Day Carnival’ in Harringay on 1 May by Finsbury Park Branch, a concert in central London for locked-out miners and their families two days previously, and a dance organised by Soho Branch at the International Socialist Club in City Road to aid the Russian Famine Fund a few months later.2 If we move forward a few years, to 1924, we can see evidence of similar social activity in the London area. On 1 May there was the ‘Workers May Day Carnival’ at Shoreditch Town Hall organised by the London DPC, the Croydon Local’s ‘Red Social and Dance’ in October where ‘comrades, sympathizers, families and friends’ were treated to the sounds of the ‘All Red Jazz Band and Communist Orchestra’, and a ‘jolly’ communist dance at Battersea Town Hall a few months later.3 There were other leisure events. We know that by June 1923 Manchester YCL members took time off from political work to go cycling and rambling.4 At this point, YCL activists in Fife, Sheffield, Barrow and the London area were engaging in a wide range of leisure pursuits that included swimming, tennis and netball.5 All these activities were exclusively communist affairs and operated under the aegis of local YCL groups. These early Party and YCL-run recreational activities seemed to have the blessing of the CPGB’s higher echelons. In its Report to the Fifth Party Congress at Battersea (7–8 October 1922), the Organisation Commission set up to push through changes to the CPGB’s organisation and methods of work, recognised the legitimate role that social functions could play in revolutionary activity and recommended an enhanced programme of Party-organised recreational provision.‘Socials’, the Report observed,‘are the means of drawing sympathizers, particularly from among women, youth and children, into the movement. For this purpose we will organise concerts, dances, plays, tea parties, outings and other recreations.’6 With such declarations, the Party hierarchy affirmed the connection between the wider communist political struggle and the realm of leisure. Despite this positive endorsement from the Party leadership, communist leisure seemed to be afflicted by slow development and a lack of dynamism in this early period. In August 1923 a Party member complained that ‘in our movement we have very little or none at all of the lighter side of life, such as can only be obtained through good social functions’.7 The murmurings of dissatisfaction continued to surface in later years. In late 1925 Party official Jack Murphy felt the need to admonish those within the CPGB who, when seeking to recruit new members, ‘look with a sneer upon those who want to play football, or sing songs, or go to the theatre, or read a novel, or join in a dance’.8 Murphy went on to lecture his comrades on the need to impress on new and potential recruits that ‘communists are neither killjoys or pessimists’ and ‘that it is not obligatory to walk about with four volumes of theses in your pockets at once’ to be a Party member.9 This perception in some Party circles that more progress needed to be

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made on the leisure front, and that an impression lingered in the minds of potential recruits that the life of a communist was austere, ascetic and overly instrumentalist in its approach to all areas of life, applied with particular relevance to the communist youth wing. The YCL was seen as a rather ‘dull’ mirror-image of the adult Party that was obsessed, like the parent body, with developing mass work in the industrial arena over all other forms of activity, including leisure.10 This image of the YCL in these early years as austere and instrumentalist was entirely justified.Take the comment of the then YCL Secretary William Rust in mid-1925 that the League was an organisation of fighting young workers grouped in the workshops, mines and factories, and not ‘a mere social, cultural and pleasant Sunday afternoon amusement organisation’.11 Here Rust had in mind the Labour Party’s League of Youth and the ILP’s Guild of Youth which he dismissed as ‘frivolous’ social clubs, rather than bodies that worked for serious political change along the lines of the communist movement. From 1927, a process that was particularly evident in the YCL, we begin to see a move away from such attitudes. From this point, communist work in leisure started to develop more constructively in a variety of directions from the organising of summer camps for communist youngsters to the staging of history pageants with a progressive message emphasising such themes as ‘people’s history’ and ‘struggle from below’.We have seen in an earlier chapter how a more well-disposed attitude towards leisure from this period was ‘brightening’ the YCL’s inner branch life and general profile by widening its landscape of leisure provision so as to render the communist youth experience more fulfilling and attractive.12 By this date and beyond, in this ‘brighter’ landscape, communist youngsters were playing in soccer and cricket teams that competed in local leagues as in Manchester, and enjoying social functions and dances enlivened by swing bands, games of charade, ‘fun competitions’ and solo performances by amateur artistes.These artistes were usually drawn from Party and YCL ranks, such as Jimmie Ord of Fife. The talented performer Ord, an unemployed coalminer, sang at communist concerts in the Fife area, and was also ‘in constant demand’ by local Burns Clubs anxious to hear his renditions of ‘The Immortal Memory’. The new mood was infectious. Communist ‘mass’ organisations of this period and after made efforts to incorporate leisure pursuits into their activities. The communist-led United Mineworkers of Scotland (UMS), formed in April 1929, sought to build model youth organisations with a robust leisure orientation. In the Buckhaven area of east Fife, young communist UMS activists formed a soccer team which affiliated to the Scottish Football Association and competed in the local league under the name of East Fife UMS. Saturday night dances and raffles helped finance the venture.13 In addition, of course, the rambling excursions enjoyed by communist youngsters acquired an increasingly ‘brighter’ face from 1927. During 1927 and beyond we can see signs of increased activity on the leisure front on the Party’s adult wing also. The Party, as well as the communist-

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led BWSF, organised day-trips to pleasurable locations, as with the outing arranged by Tyneside DPC to nearby Whitley Bay on 30 July 1927, an ‘enjoyable’ day where the comrades participated in sports and a relay race.14 Further south that same summer, and in a similar spirit, 700 London-based communists braved the ‘unsettled’ weather by going on a communist ‘away-day’ to High Beech in Epping Forest.15 High Beech would become a popular venue for London communists. Even in the dark days of ‘Class against Class’ during the late 1920s and early 1930s when the Party almost shrank to the dimensions of a small sect, communist Londoners rallied there. In early September 1931, on a day of ‘brilliant weather’, following a mass ramble through Epping Forest, a group of over 300 gathered for a ‘workers’ Gala’ at High Beech where they enjoyed sports, dancing and lively sketches by the Workers’ Theatre Movement which slammed Ramsay MacDonald’s recently formed National Government.16 Adult members took up more sedate forms of leisure, too, such as chess. ‘Workers' Chess Tournaments’ were arranged to cater for this need.17 The Daily Worker also ran a regular feature on ‘chess notes’ from 1935.18 In some ways, the communist perspective on leisure overlapped with the socialist or ‘social-democrat’ view of leisure. Both believed that there should be more facilities available for working people to enjoy leisure, and viewed workers’ involvement in leisure as a necessary counterweight to the burdens imposed by capitalist working conditions. Additionally, both communists and socialists preferred workers to pursue leisure in a constructive spirit which stressed fraternity and which induced feelings of ‘community’. Both were suspicious of bourgeois and capitalist leisure forms and sought to ‘protect’ workers from their influences. We can see this in relation to a ‘mass entertainment’ form such as the Hollywood ‘movie’. American films, wrote Arthur Bourchier in an ILP pamphlet in 1926, ‘on the whole, are inane, vulgar and disappointedly trashy’ and only when films are ‘not produced by vulgar minded money-grubbers’ will they have educational value for the masses.19 In a similar tone of disapproval, CPGB film critic Ralph Bond, who penned a regular column on cinema in the Daily Worker under the pen-name of ‘Arthur West’, charged the Hollywood 'dream factory' with dulling proletarian minds with puerile plots and crass formulaic narratives.20 Britain’s cinemas, said Bond in 1930, are: swamped by an avalanche of tawdry, banal productions that are an insult to the eye and an abomination to the ear … Putting on the Ritz, Movietone Follies, Broadway Scandals, Paris, College Coquette, Hot for Paris, and dozens more like these present the typical Hollywood output. There is not an intelligent idea or the intelligent working out of an idea in the lot of them.21

As an antidote to Hollywood ‘dope’, members were urged to always apply a communist perspective when relaxing at the cinema or, preferably, treat themselves to the latest cinema offerings of the new Soviet Cinema. Bond revelled in the perceived visual and technical accomplishment of Soviet productions like

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Victor Turin’s Turksib (1930), a documentary film on the building of the Turkestan to Siberia railway, or Alexander Dovzhenko’s The Earth (1930) depicting the working lives of the Ukrainian peasantry.22 While the latter was, in truth, a contrived gloss over of the brutal reality of Ukrainian collectivisation, Bond preferred to tell his readers about the poetry and aesthetics of the film’s photography which: holds one spellbound. Not artificial studio lighting, but sunlight and clouds, the wind and the soil. The shots of glistening raindrops, resting on a swaying cluster of apples … the hazy twilight creeping across the fields after the day’s work is done, the big, limitless horizon … And, pervading all, the impulse, the urge to build, to create the new society.23

Soviet Cinema also sought the cultural elevation of the audience for Bond, whilst the themes of Soviet films spoke to real social issues and expressed the hopes and aspirations of ordinary workers. Thus: from America conventionalised themes and artificial studio-constructed stories, the products of distorted imaginations. From Russia clear, simple and vital themes, stories bound up with the lives of the people, the honest treatment of human emotions, a cinema of the masses.24

Despite this shared perspective on certain points, communists opposed the socialist attitude to leisure in other respects. The socialist or social-democratic idea that leisure was primarily a matter for the individual, that the worker could achieve personal satisfaction and an enlargement of the self through leisure, to communists seemed naïve and blind to political realities. Although activists young and old were encouraged to play at Party or YCL-run social occasions, communist leisure was never free from the imperatives of the political struggle. It was this dimension which defined communist leisure and set it apart. As with the organised sports that we looked at in a previous chapter, leisure was never intended to be placed in a separate compartment to that of the CPGB’s political activity. Although a ‘brighter’ image was injected into communist work after 1927 through the increase of leisure provision for activists, this was never intended as an endorsement of the idea of ‘leisure-for-leisure’s-sake’. Rather, members’ participation in leisure pursuits was always meant to further communist political aims. As with communist workers’ sport, participation in communist leisure served to cement members’ support for the wider political project. ‘Time out’ for play also built group loyalty, kindled communist enthusiasm, and lifted Party and YCL spirits for the political battles ahead. In another sense, increasing the provision of leisure presented the Party and the YCL with recruitment opportunities. As mentioned above, leisure’s potential in this respect was recognised in 1922 when the Party Report on Organisation cited ‘socials’ as a means of ‘drawing sympathisers’. There is evidence that communist leisure

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activity pulled in recruits. One such recruit was Edinburgh’s Jessie Gollan whose initial interest in the YCL was roused ‘because it started off with Sunday afternoon walks in the Pentlands, and we’d sit down and have little discussion groups … and that was most enjoyable’.25 Another was Lou Kenton, drawn into the London YCL through rambler friends.26 In addition, the ‘lighter’ communist social functions presented opportunities to raise funds for a variety of political causes close to communist hearts or, in that spirit of guardianship that was a characteristic of the extended communist ‘family’, to provide financial support to help the families of deceased or imprisoned Party members.27 The latter continued a labour movement practice that can be traced back to the Chartists in an earlier age of radicalism who used the revenue from their tea-parties, soirées and balls to assist the families of incarcerated members of the movement.28 Through participation in Party, YCL and BWSF-run leisure, communist allegiance was affirmed and stridently announced. Communist recreational occasions usually featured stirring renditions of revolutionary songs rounded off with a heart-felt rendering of the ‘International’ for the edification of passers-by and onlookers. When Tyneside communists rallied to Whitley Bay on 30 July 1927 as mentioned above, the 200 Party members present staged a ‘Red Flag gathering on the sands’. With the Red Flag fluttering in the warm breeze in the centre, the large circle of ‘Geordie’ comrades proceeded to treat the ‘big crowd’ that had gathered around them on the sand to a ‘community singing of the International’ and other revolutionary songs.29 In similar overt displays of communist allegiance, CPGB social functions were dedicated to the first Workers’ State. Brighton CP, for example, went to great lengths to put on a lavish three days of celebrations in Brighton over the weekend of 5–7 November 1938 to commemorate the twenty-first anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Starting with an ‘All Russian Evening’ on the first day, the events unfolded to include a programme of community singing of Russian songs, Russian dances performed by the Unity Dancing Group, a recital of Russian music ‘old and new, and ‘a mass declaration by Brighton Unity Theatre Salute to the Soviet Union’.30 On the final day of the celebration, to coincide with the Revolution’s anniversary, the organisers laid on a film show which featured the Russian films Youth and Storm over Asia.31 Some leisure activities lent themselves admirably to the agenda of the wider communist political project. Cycling seemed to exhibit all the necessary ingredients. Frank Tennant, a Dundee YCL organiser, thought that a communist cycle club ‘can be of value to the Party in a thousand and one ways’. They could, he explained, spread communist propaganda to isolated towns and villages, act as distributors of Party and YCL literature, and participate in Party-sponsored poster parades.32 Here, communist cyclists carried on the tradition of the socialist cyclists attached to the Clarion Cycling Clubs who enthusiastically carried socialist propaganda and literature to the far-flung towns and villages of late 1890s northern England.33 By the 1920s, to the CPGB, Clarion cyclists had long forsaken such evangelical efforts to spread the ‘gospel of brotherhood’ and build

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the socialist commonwealth and this tradition has passed to the communists. For the latter, the bicycle had a range of political uses. Writing in the Young Worker in March 1926, an advocate of bicycles reckoned that, besides getting ‘one out of the town to keep the mind fresh’, a bicycle is invaluable during an industrial dispute ‘when sharp united action is half the battle’.34 When a dispute flares in a particular pit in one of Britain’s coalfields, the writer went on to explain,‘the first thing the strikers must do is to send word to the workers in all the other pits around and send it quickly. For this work cyclists, and a good many of them, are essential’.35 The bicycle was cast in another utilitarian role when it was perceived to form ‘an essential part of any scheme of Workers’ Defence Corps’.36 Cycling also lacked an obvious competitive focus and seemed expressive of the proletarian’s lifestyle and values. Communist writers on leisure usually represented the bicycle as a proletarian machine, whereas motor-car ownership was regarded as a middle-class preserve and conflated with the vices thought to be associated with members of that social group. Private car ownership had risen sharply during the interwar years. By 1939 there were around two million privately owned cars whereas in 1922 the figure was 314,769. Despite the rise, driving a car remained a socially limited activity. Not surprisingly, the Communist Party saw signs of the class struggle on Britain’s roads, albeit in a minor key. It could be seen in the aggressive behaviour of the motor-car ‘hogs’ who were ‘responsible for the many accidents which befall cyclists’, those ‘be-goggled louts who display their class superiority by eating up road mileage to the danger of cyclists’.37 Cycling’s apparently proletarian character presented the Party,YCL and BWSF with recruitment possibilities. Cycling, because of its affordability, enthused another advocate, ‘is the real means of transport of the workers’ and the proletarian cyclists whose numbers ran into millions provided the BWSF with ‘an immense field to work upon’.38 In another register, cycling was equated with a healthy lifestyle. Not least, it offered proletarian communists rest and respite from the daily toil of capitalist work. ‘After a hard day’s grind at the factory or workshop’, advised a cycle enthusiast in the Daily Worker in 1931, ‘a comfortable spin along the by-ways is very restful’.39 Cycles also carried worker communists from the cities and towns to hitherto unexplored spaces of picturesque beauty. These ventures far afield could also open new vistas of class awareness for the discerning rider. ‘While out cycling’, noted a group of West Essex communist cyclists, ‘one is often confronted with the class issue. One comes across imposing manors in very pleasant and well-laid grounds in the heart of the country. Members of the idle rich spend their days enjoying these glorious surroundings, while workers are cooped up in overcrowded dwellings in the cities.’40 Fidelity to communism and political radicalism was proclaimed through distinctive names like the ‘Red Wheelers’ and the ‘Spartacus Cycling Club’, the latter the title given to the BWSF’s cycling section in April 1931.41

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By the 1930s rambling and camping had become, like cycling, a favourite recreation of communists. As with cycling, hiking in communion with soothing nature signified a healthy lifestyle. Like cycling, hiking had its own aesthetic also in that it carried communists to pleasurable, picturesque destinations. On these excursions, communist hikers often found themselves pitted against the rigours and challenges of the elemental. The rambling enthusiasts who ventured out from England’s urban centres in increasing numbers during the 1930s remembered Nan Green, then an ardent communist rambler from Nottingham, were ‘jolly groups of open-air worshippers who loved testing their strength against natural obstacles such as bog, mist, rocks and high hills, rolling home in the evening by “ramblers’ trains”, almost drunk with fresh air and singing noisily with pure joie de vivre’.42 In striding out along England’s bridle roads or climbing its rugged hills, communist walkers joined the throng of intrepid hikers with massive rucksacks, shorts, thick socks and ‘oiled boots’ that were a feature of the 1930s English landscape. It has been estimated that there were over half a million regular countryside walkers in the 1930s, with as many as 10,000 frequenting the Derbyshire Peak District alone during the summer weekends.43 Like so many other aspects of communist behaviour during the interwar period, however, communist rambling was marked by difference. Of course, there were some shared features. Communists joined with non-communist walkers in seeking to experience an exhilarating condition of open-air ‘drunkenness’, as Nan Green put it. There was also a shared appreciation of nature’s health-imparting properties, and its physical attractions. Communist writers could wax lyrical about England’s ‘picturesque’ landscape and pastoral charm just as effusively as their non-communist contemporaries. One comrade wrote of the ‘beautiful, un-spoilt country with rolling downs and quiet villages’ of the Sussex and Hampshire border region.44 Cecil Day Lewis’s attempt to win hikers for communism in The Magnetic Mountain (1933) struck a similar key: You that love England, who have an ear for her music, The slow movement of clouds in benediction, Clear arias of light thrilling over her uplands, Over the chords of summer sustained peacefully; Ceaseless the leaves’ counterpoint in a west wind lively Blossom and river rippling loveliest allegro, And the storms of wood strings brass at year’s finale: Listen. Can you not hear the entrance of a new theme.45

Nevertheless, this communist countryside discourse should not be confused with the sentiments emanating from the English pastoral tradition. Communists did not seek to encourage walkers to regain contact with the ‘spirit of beauty’ which the rural idyllists of the pastoral tradition imagined resided in the English countryside. Communists spurned such forms of ‘nature worship’, with their suggestion that nature had the power to impart a sense of personal tranquility

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and peace which was beyond understanding.46 CPGB countryside rhetoric also eschewed the sorts of sentiments expressed by the contemporary heritage and preservationist lobby which indulged in an unabashed celebration of what they saw as the timeless beauty of the English countryside, a discourse which was steeped in sentimentality and nostalgia. Nor did communists lapse into the more obsessive nature worship of reactionary ‘muck and mysticism’ groups like English Array and back-to-the-land fantasists like Rolf Gardiner, a discourse which exhibited some of the themes of Nazi ‘blood and soil’ romanticism, not least in its equating of a life close to the soil with spiritual and even ‘racial’ regeneration.47 Nor were communist rambles mere reflections of earlier socialist rambles such as those of the Clarion Field Clubs of the 1890s, with their ecological stress on the individual walker gaining personal knowledge of plant life, flowers, animals and birds.48 Although they ‘knew when their lungs were full of pure air and burst into song as naturally as the birds’, stated a CPGB writer on rambling in late 1936, ‘workers living in the East End and confined to shop or factory all the week cannot be expected to come out on Sundays to study botany or geology’.49 Rather, communist rambling was consciously political. This was rambling with a difference, rambling as progressive and class-conscious. Communist rambling and camping, a Party writer declared in 1930, should take a form ‘entirely different from the affairs organised by our opponents’.50 Certainly, at least during the ‘Class against Class’ years, there was an attempt to shape an arrangement different to that of the official ‘bourgeois’ rambling clubs where ‘a sort of Fabian earnestness prevailed’ and which attracted ‘be-spectacled schoolmasters, elderly aficionados with long walking sticks, hearty schoolmistresses, [and] studious clerks’ in the words of Nan Green.51 Communist rambling, on the other hand, at least in the first half of the 1930s, inclined towards a dominant proletarian face. By the 1930s rambling was no longer confined to middle-class walkers and had become a proletarian recreation, particularly in the northern England towns. Like camping, rambling was a relatively cost efficient form of recreation affordable to proletarian urban dwellers. Additionally, cheaper rail facilities, the desire to obtain some release from bleak urban and industrial environments, and a situation of growing unemployment in the northern industrial areas, fuelled the rambling urge. Rambling’s changing social composition was recognised by Party and YCL strategists like the London BWSF Secretary Michael Condon, who saw that a well-organised, vigorous and regular schedule of communist rambling under the auspices of the BWSF presented recruitment possibilities.52 Another of the political functions of Party and YCL-organised rambling, and camping, was to build communist loyalty and impart a sense of comradeship. ‘A well-organised camp can forge a close-knit unity among the dwellers under canvass’ a Daily Worker writer explained. Furthermore, ‘the essence of good camping’, continued the writer, ‘especially with large numbers, is the spirit of

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equality’ which comes from ‘a just distribution of the toil and of the play, and for these reasons alone, campers are brought together in a fine spirit of comradeship’.53 A communist ramble performed a similar function. In the favoured form of the mass ramble, it was a pursuit experienced collectively and which helped forge a closely bonded social group. Rambling 20, 30 or 100 strong, ‘over moorland, through country lanes, on paths, alongside winding brooks, climbing hills or descending them’, recalled the Manchester communist rambler Mick Jenkins, ‘we sang at the top of our voices feeling the spirit of comradeship’.54 Communist rambles tended to be noisy, exuberant affairs, unlike an earlier tradition of rambling. ‘The old Ramblers’ Federation atmosphere of the quiet Sunday ramble through the countryside, admiring the beauties of nature, discussing Shaw and Lawrence, was passing’, said Jenkins.55 Like camping, the ramble provided opportunities and a useful forum to instill communist ideals. There was recognition of their value as a means of political education.56 Some rambling groups settled down to an earnest political discussion after a walk, like the one held under the summer’s evening stars by the forty-five comrades of the London group of the BWSF in 1930 on the subject of ‘India and its relation to the Yorkshire struggle’ following their tramp from Caterham to Epsom Downs.57 A ramble and camp had other political uses. Our outdoor ventures, advised one communist in May 1930, should be utilised ‘for the purpose of physical drill and exercises, such as are practised by the Territorials’.58 In particular, he added rather abstrusely, communist camps ‘must enforce a proletarian discipline’. These military manoeuvres were ‘necessary training’ for communists deemed the comrade, ‘if we really mean to prepare for the battles ahead’.59 It appeared that some local BWSF groups placed great stress on physical drill and exercise. The weekend ramble and camp of the Glasgow BWSF at East Kilbride the following month featured boxing, wrestling and ju-jitsu ‘with class purpose’, a Sunday morning hour-long run before breakfast, and a mass exercise of ‘seventy young workers going through gymnastic exercises and Swedish drill together’ after dinner following a ramble.60 Communist rambling and camping also provided opportunities to take the Marxist message wider afield, beyond traditional areas of communist strength. It was not an uncommon sight during the 1930s to observe a column of communists clad in improvised rambling clothes striding to the outskirts of their town, down bridle roads, or through sleepy hamlets loudly proclaiming their communist faith by the shouting of mass slogans or the singing of revolutionary songs. As we ‘shake the dust of the town off our feet and seek for a purer atmosphere in the country’ every Sunday, stated a Newcastle communist hiker in 1931, ‘we swing gaily along, singing our hiking songs and thereby attracting the interest of people we pass on the way’.61 During the Popular Front years when the CPGB moved beyond its traditional constituency to embrace social groups other than the proletariat, communist hikers were encouraged to bring the Marxist message to agricultural workers. The communist monthly the Country

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Standard was one of the main avenues used by the Party to reach rural workers.62 Harry Pollitt urged comrades when ‘out on hiking expeditions’ to rural destinations to ‘take with them half a dozen copies of the Country Standard and let it spread its work and influence through the country’.63 On another level, red rambles rekindled communist spirits and enthusiasm for the political fight ahead. Returning from forays into the hills of the Derbyshire dales or the fells of Cumberland and Westmoreland with his fellow YCL hiking enthusiasts, Ewan MaColl felt that ‘we were returning to the political struggle refreshed and determined to destroy capitalism’.64 If anything marked out communist rambling as different and gave it its overt political character, it was the organised mass trespasses of the early 1930s. Like cycling, rambling carried proletarian communists far afield, to places where stark class iniquities could be observed. Bands of communist hikers would frequently arrive at inaccessible spots due to landlords’ private property rights. Ramblers’ ‘perambulations around the countryside’, stated a Party rambling expert, ‘bring them up against the present social system in one of its clearest and most detestable aspects.To be chased from a field by gamekeepers and dogs is an object lesson in elementary politics.’65 Prior to the mass trespasses, the Party press offered friendly advice as to how to negotiate the situation. ‘Sleepy, unspoilt Sussex’ was an excellent area for a short walking tour advised one Peter James in June 1930. Particularly enchanting were ‘the beautiful woods that lie to the west of Midhurst’ which were to rendered accessible through a simple measure: ‘you will find each wood carefully marked “Private”, but shut your eyes to this and walk right past’.66 Nearly two years later another communist writer asked, ‘how much longer are we going to allow some of the best of the countryside to remain closed to the rambler without a protest?’67 Two days later on 24 April, there was the now well-known mass trespass on Kinder Scout, a high plateau in the Derbyshire Peak District, by some 500 ramblers led and organised by the Lancashire BWSF.68 The fact that much of the land on Kinder Scout, an area of wild beauty which comprised moorland and mountain, was privately owned by the Duke of Devonshire whose keepers jealously preserved the area for grouse shooting for the ‘sport’ of rich local landowners, helped trigger the direct action of the mass trespass on Kinder Scout. Other communist-inspired ‘rights-of way’ mass trespasses against the institutionalised privileges of private landlordism followed the Kinder Scout excursion, such as the trespass of 400 Rhondda workers on to Dinas mountain in Pen-y-Graig the following July and the trek by 200 ramblers of the Sheffield Ramblers’ Rights’ Movement over Broomhead Moors a few months later.69 Communist rambling epitomised the communist attitude towards play. Hiking past green hills, waving cornfields and rolling downs, drinking the air fresh with the fragrance of nature, signified a healthy lifestyle and outlook. Communist rambling was also assertively political, class-conscious and tended to assume a proletarian character. Through participation in progressive rambling,

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hikers young and old experienced communist ‘fraternity’ and were introduced to an alternative way of life and subculture outside the framework of the existing capitalist society. Party and YCL rambles provided scope to instill communist education and impart Marxist knowledge as tired comrades concluded their outdoor exertions by settling down to earnest political discussions. Exuberant, vocal red rambling also pulled in recruits and spread the communist message far afield. While progressive rambling transported communists to pleasurable locations, it also brought them sharply up against private property rights, opening up the fundamental political question of land ownership, an issue which gave focus, momentum and a sense of moral purpose and status to communist rambling. On a final note, communist rambling could serve as a metaphor for the lows and highs of the activist’s life as Ewan MacColl, in an imaginative flourish, informs us: The political battles were, in their own way, just as exhilarating as finding one’s way by compass across a moor shrouded in mist … Yes, it was true that there were scores of boring repetitive jobs to be done – addressing envelopes, running off page after page on a duplicating machine, the thousand-and-one things which had to be done if the Party was to keep functioning – but these were like the tussocks of bent-grass and the bogs which made crossing Beaklow difficult. There were branch meetings, district meetings, conferences, education classes – they were like the bracken-covered braes which led to the high plateau from which one could see the hazy peaks of the final goal: the end of capitalism and the beginnings of a new form of society based upon all mankind’s needs …70

Notes 1 P. J. Poole, ‘Rambling notes’ for Party members, Daily Worker, 27 February 1936, p. 6. 2 The Communist, 30 April 1921, pp. 2, 5, and 17 September 1921, p. 11. 3 See Workers’ Weekly, 25 April 1924, p. 6, 17 October 1924, p. 1, and 12 December 1924, p. 5. 4 Workers’ Weekly, 9 June 1923, p. 4. 5 Ibid. 6 Report on Organisation Presented by the Party Commission to the Annual Conference of the CPGB (Battersea, 7–8 October 1922), p. 61. 7 Workers’ Weekly, 25 August 1923, p. 4. 8 Workers’ Weekly, 25 September 1925, p. 4. 9 Ibid. 10 For more on this, see chapter 3. 11 William Rust, What the Young Communist League Stands For (London: CPGB, June 1925), p. 22. 12 See above, Chapter 3. 13 Ian MacDougall (ed.), Militant Miners: Recollections of John McArthur, Buckhaven; and Letters, 1924–26, of David Proudfoot, Methil, to G. Allen Hutt (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1981), p. 82, on Ord.The Buckhaven UMS soccer venture is mentioned by John McArthur in the same volume, pp. 127–8. The UMS itself found it difficult to compete for members and

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14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

influence with the established ‘reformist’ unions. It was eventually wound up in December 1935 at the behest of the CPGB leadership in an effort to build a single miners’ union for Scotland in line with the ‘unity’ imperatives of the Popular Front. Workers’ Life, 12 August 1927, p. 4. Workers’ Life, 24 June 1927, p. 4. Daily Worker, 8 September 1931, p. 4. See Daily Worker, 27 April 1931, p. 4. See, for example, Daily Worker, 6 July 1935, p. 3. Arthur Bourchier, Art and Culture in Relation to Socialism (London: ILP Publication Department, 1926), p. 10. On Bond, see Bert Hogenkamp, Deadly Parallels: Film and the Left in Britain, 1929–39 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1986), p. 47 and passim. Daily Worker, 23 June 1930, p. 5. Daily Worker, 10 March 1930, p. 10, on Turksib. Daily Worker, 20 October 1930, p. 3. Daily Worker, 16 October 1930, p. 4. NMLH. CP/IND/KETT/01. Margot Kettle Papers MS, Memoirs of Jessie Taylor (Jessie Gollan) (March 1983), p. 45. British Library National Sound Archive. C609/86/01-04. Lou Kenton Interview (1998). For examples, see The Communist, 30 April 1921, p. 5, 17 September 1921, p. 11; and Workers’ Weekly, 21 March 1924, p. 3. See Eileen Yeo, ‘Culture and constraint in working class movements, 1830–1855’, in Eileen and Stephen Yeo, Popular Culture and Class Conflict 1590–1914: Explorations in the History of Labour and Leisure (Sussex: Harvester, 1981), p. 168. Workers’ Life, 12 August 1927, p. 4. Ernie Trory, Between the Wars: Recollections of a Communist Organiser (London: Crabtree Press, 1974), p. 117. Ibid. Workers’ Weekly, 14 April 1923, p. 4. David Prynn, ‘The Clarion Clubs, rambling and the Holiday Associations in Britain since the 1890s’, Journal of Contemporary History, 11:2 and 11:3 (July 1976), p. 69. Young Worker, 6 March 1926, p. 4. Ibid. Ibid. Daily Worker, 6 January 1930, p. 11. Daily Worker, 18 July 1930, p. 6. Daily Worker, 25 April 1931, p. 6. Daily Worker, 14 November 1931, p. 6. Daily Worker, 11 April 1931, p. 6. Nan Green, A Chronicle of Small Beer:The Memoirs of Nan Green (Nottingham: Trent Books, 2004), p. 27. John Lowerson, ‘Battles for the countryside’, in Frank Gloversmith (ed.), Class, Culture and Social Change: A New View of the 1930s (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1980), p. 268. Daily Worker, 14 May 1936, p. 6. Cited in Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 236. Daily Worker, 13 June 1930, p. 4. On the Array and Gardiner, see G. Boyes, The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 154–64. Prynn, ‘The Clarion Clubs’, p. 68.

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49 50 51 52 53 54 55

56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

Daily Worker, 10 September 1936, p. 8. Daily Worker, 23 May 1930, p. 6. Green, A Chronicle, p. 27. Daily Worker, 1 April 1930, p. 11. Daily Worker, 5 August 1937, p. 7. NMLH. CP/IND/MISC/1/1. MS. Mick Jenkins, Prelude to Better Days. Autobiography, n.d., p. 181. Ibid., pp. 182–3. The Federation of Rambling Clubs was set up in 1905. This was followed by the formation of the National Council of Rambling Federations in 1931, which became the Ramblers’ Association in 1935. Daily Worker, 23 May 1930, p. 6. Daily Worker, 26 May 1930, p. 6. Daily Worker, 23 May 1930, p. 6. Ibid. Daily Worker, 7 June 1930, p. 6. Daily Worker, 16 May 1931, p. 4. Started life as the Country Worker in 1935. Relaunched as the Country Standard in March 1936. Harry Pollitt. Concluding Speech to the Congress. ‘It Can Be Done’, Report of the Fourteenth Party Congress of the CPGB, Battersea, 29–31 May 1937, p. 204. Ewan MacColl, Journeyman (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1990), p. 178. Daily Worker, 27 February 1936, p. 6. Daily Worker, 6 June 1930, p. 6. Daily Worker, 22 April 1932, p. 6. Benny Rothman, The 1932 Kinder Scout Trespass (Altrincham: Willow Publishing, 1982). Daily Worker, 16 July 1932, p. 2, and 21 September 1932, p. 2. MacColl, Journeyman, pp. 178–9.

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9 Culture from below: a culture for proletarians

… the Communist Party has been my university.1

The communist project to craft an activist of a new type had a wide remit, as we have seen in previous chapters. This project had a cultural register, too. As in virtually all areas of communist activity in this period, the CPGB’s cultural agenda would be politically charged. Convinced that ‘bourgeois’ culture aimed to secure the docility, passivity and ultimate compliance of the masses, the CPGB sought to dislodge apparently corrupting bourgeois thoughts from the minds of its activists and replace a bourgeois cultural perspective with a communist one. The Party hoped that aesthetic judgements purged of bourgeois influences would ensure clarity of political thought and inspire increased political purpose. While cultural communists felt members should be shielded from the influences of the dominant cultural forms, the question as to what should replace these forms was more problematic. For example, what should the new communist culture look like, particularly a culture that would have to be forged in circumstances of existing capitalism? Should this communist culture be an exclusively proletarian culture? Indeed, was there such a thing as a culture for proletarians, or ‘proletarian culture’? Other questions needed to be addressed. How should the Party relate to the cultural legacy of the national past? Should it be spurned wholesale, or should its best elements be identified for the consumption of Party comrades? Further, how should British communists relate to other contemporary cultural movements, such as literary modernism? Related to these questions, of course, was the issue, more pedagogic in character, of nurturing the cultural outlook of worker recruits. How should this be achieved? What methods of instruction should be used? Should this be through formal, or more informal, means? Such questions as these would engage the attention of Party cultural writers during our period as they set about the task of seeking to shape the idea and ingredients of a culture for proletarians. Flushed with hope and expectation after observing the consolidation and increasing strength of the first ‘Workers’ State’, Britain’s communists in the

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interwar period felt a growing sense of capitalism's decay and inevitable passing. To their mind, bourgeois art and culture appeared bereft of creative energy, which seemed to confirm the devitalised condition of capitalism and its impending death. Progress in civilisation, observed Raymond Postgate in 1921 whilst still a Party member, ‘is only made by a ruling class in the period of its growth and at the height of its power’. It followed, for Postgate, that ‘the discovery of knowledge and the production of beauty are no longer within the powers of the declining capitalist class’.2 Bourgeois art seemed ‘at the point of death’ for the communist composer Rutland Boughton as well. Writing in the CPGB press in 1923 just prior to his enrolment in the Party, Boughton of The Immortal Hour fame, felt that ‘bourgeois art is played out because bourgeois life is played out’, as shown by the ‘dullness of the Royal Academy’ and the parlous state of the London theatre.3 ‘A dying art is not to be galvanized back to life’, continued Boughton, who believed that the bourgeois arts had ceased to be suitable vehicles for ‘spiritual apprehension and beautiful revelation’, essential qualities of creative art in his opinion. The Royal Academy was a frequent target of communist vitriol. When the Academy was not displaying in portraiture the ‘wonderful smooth and beef-red faces’ of the ruling class, who through their patronage ‘have paid to have their likeness immortalized’ in paint, a Daily Worker article commented, it featured insipid ‘pictures of “still-life” – of flowers, fruit and knick-knacks’ or ‘the comforting and cool interiors of the houses of the bourgeoisie’.4 ‘Such are the “art” achievements of the Royal Academy’, the piece concluded, ‘a huge waste of skill, energy and paint expended in the service of propping up a decaying civilization – capitalism’.5 The bourgeois artist’s detached dilettantism and obsessive introspection were symptoms of this ebbing of creative energy, or entropy. The new culture being shaped to give artistic expression to the aspirations of the coming class of the proletariat, stated Party member William McLaine in 1921, would have no time ‘for the introspective heart searchings of despairing neurotics obsessed with the idea that what they feel and think is vital to the community’, as in much contemporary bourgeois literature.6 Similarly, a pictorial art that described scenes ‘that can only be appreciated by the Lotus-eating idlers’, or plays that ‘do nothing but portray middle class life in all its feeble inanity’, would also find no place in the new proletarian culture.7 Culture should no longer be an instrument of the ruling class to impose its values on the masses, continued McLaine. There would be no room in the coming culture, therefore, ‘for the music that stirs the martial feelings and makes the peace-loving individual long to march to battle’, or the ‘songs that have been written to glorify generals and kings or to commemorate battles in which thousands of our people were slain’.8 Decadence in art and the increasing commercialisation of culture were further symptoms of this ebbing of creative energy. To the Cambridge don Maurice Dobb, writing in 1927, a new culture was required to replace ‘the decadence of bourgeois art’, with its display of ‘introvert preciosity and tendency

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to mysticism, or its sheer commercial philistinism as seen in the cinema and stage’.9 Not surprisingly the idea of bourgeois ‘culture’, particularly commercialised ‘mass culture’, as an instrument to dupe and divert the masses featured in Party cultural criticism. The fruits of high culture, such as they are, declared the communist couple Eden and Cedar Paul, are jealously reserved for members of the dominant caste and ‘such elements of bourgeois culture as are allowed to filter through to the “lower” classes are designed to drug the workers’ minds into acceptance of the existing system’.10 Many of the communists’ favourite themes regarding culture in the capitalist mode of life are present in this disparagement of bourgeois culture – bourgeois culture as having lapsed into decadence after exhausting its creative impulse, cultural decadence as a portent of the impending death of capitalism, the introspective focus of bourgeois writers and artists, the disengaged and recreational function of bourgeois art, the arts as the preserve of the ruling class, ‘high culture’ as a hallmark of social standing, and bourgeois ‘mass culture’ as a cynical tool to dupe the masses. But what of the nature of the new culture that should counter or supersede bourgeois culture? What themes should this alternative culture seek to portray, and from where should come the writers and other artists who would give expression to such themes? Maurice Dobb glanced, approvingly, at developments in Soviet Russia in the fields of drama, literature, music and particularly literacy to give him a sense of the new culture.There, in contrast to the dying culture of capitalist society, he saw a new culture coming into being which was ‘strong and pulsing with life’.11 The communist literary critic Ralph Fox preferred to use a nature metaphor to express a similar perception. Soviet art life, he enthused, ‘moves like a torrent in Spring, rushing with joy and hope’.12 For Maurice Dobb, it was the social realm which gave form and potency to the alternative culture. ‘Art is an expression, an emotional systemization, of feeling and experience’, according to Dobb, and since social experience acted as a greater stimulus to the emotions than the individualist experience that so obsessed the bourgeois artist, then the social realm was the main well-spring of a vibrant art and culture.13 Rather than retreating from the world, divorcing itself from reality, as in the sublime detachment of much bourgeois art, communist cultural writers like Dodd believed that culture would be enriched by having an intimate contact with social problems and momentous political events. In this regard, artists seeking to shape the new culture should aim to express the class struggle in art, because the emotions aroused by social conflict and stirring historical episodes such as 1917 were always richer and more profound than feelings stirred by the conflict of individualist motives.14 This take on the respective merits of different modes of artistic stimuli was shared by most cultural communists. Rutland Boughton urged Britain’s artists to seek their material in the world of social movements and social struggle if they wished to rekindle their creative capacity which meant, for him, that they should align themselves with the struggle of the proletariat because it

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is ‘the only world force which can possibly be creative’.15 ‘Having realized, then, where move those forces which give to life, form and leisure and beauty and inspiration, the artist will at once know on which side he is bound to be’, he added, ‘for if he is to do any work worth doing he must find a great human movement’, as with the current movement for workers’ emancipation.16 The social field was deemed to be the main source of this vibrant new culture, then, and the latter should have its roots in the proletariat and emerge organically from an intimate relationship with its experiences and struggles. In this way, art and culture would serve as weapons in the proletariat’s struggle for human enrichment and emancipation. Such an orientation was to be a splendid departure from culture under capitalism which ‘allows a few artists to make things for the enjoyment of the masters and their associates – for bored wasters with private incomes’ as Rutland Boughton expressed it in 1926.17 Cultural communism would be heavily charged politically and would stridently denounce the classical notion of culture which stressed that art and politics should be kept apart if the perceived dignity of the former was not to be lowered. Communists, on the other hand, preferred a politically engaged art that was responsive to contemporary life, relevant to the age of which it was a part, and which had some relation to the social conditions which brought it forth. Here, art and politics were to meld, become interchangeable in a seamless discourse. It should be pointed out that this was not politics rendered aesthetic as in the carefully staged political theatre and mass spectacle of fascism, where stylistic presentation, overwhelming choreography and elaborate performance served to mask social conditions and a contemporary reality built on property relations. Rather, communist art was to absorb and reflect all the ingredients of social life and political struggle, its pathos, dramas, hopes and tragedies, and was to be nourished through this interaction. The communist approach to culture not only marked a departure from the perceived deficiencies of bourgeois culture but also from that of earlier positions on culture taken by the British Left. Although, as in the communist aesthetic, there was an emphasis on the importance of social commentary through art, as with the enthusiasm for the social problem plays of Ibsen, Shaw and Galsworthy, the pre-communist socialist, Fabian and Cooperative aesthetic was ethical rather than overtly political.18 Here the stress was on bringing the individual, through an introduction to the highest products of art and culture, spiritual deliverance from the alienation and ugliness of rapacious capitalism. It was a discourse inspired by the aesthetic ideals of John Ruskin and William Morris and influenced by the earlier cult of beauty of the Pre-Raphaelites and Shelley.19 This was culture as spiritual uplift, as passage to a higher realm of morality, beauty and spirituality, rather than culture as weapon of class struggle to emancipate the proletariat as a class. If there was a political impulse in this pre-communist discourse it was to be found in the belief that consuming the highest products of culture made one not only enlightened, but gentle, kind and morally righteous.

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This would then instill a desire to improve the wider society and build, not the new proletarian order of things, but the coveted socialist commonwealth based on mutual goodwill and universal brotherhood. Rather than an art which found its themes and inspiration in the proletariat’s world, as in the communist cultural aesthetic, this outlook inclined cultural socialists and Fabians in particular towards an uncritical, even elitist appreciation of traditional canonical works.20 This was because the classical products of literature, music and the pictorial and performing arts were thought to enshrine universal truths, point up high moral lessons, and help one gain the power of sublime insight. In this sense, culture was something brought to the worker from without, rather than something that emerged organically from the worker’s experience. Implicit in this cultivation of a more elevated life and sense of self-hood was the instinct for individual betterment and thus release from the proletarian condition. In the communist aesthetic, on the other hand, one finds a forthright celebration of proletarian life. Thus art should give expression to the workers’ lives, their perspectives, aspirations and hopes, as well as their trials in the world of work. In painting, remarked William McLaine,‘our artists must paint the world as seen by the worker … They must paint labour at its task in the field, the forge, the factory.They must use their imaginative genius to glorify the beauty of honest toil.’21 We also see an attempt in the communist aesthetic to move beyond reliance on the traditional canon in its belief in the capacity of the working class to create culture. The artists who would give imaginative expression to working class themes were to come from the proletariat’s ranks because ‘only those who have lived the working class life can understand it’, declared McLaine.22 ‘Our new proletarian culture movement can find its feet’, he stressed further, ‘if we set to work to bring out the talent in our own ranks and see that proletarian writers, artists and composers are given the fullest possible scope.’23 Thus, proletarian ‘poets and songsters must provide songs for the common people to sing’, while ‘our playwrights must prepare proletarian dramas that illustrate the class struggle’.24 In relation to the latter, Rutland Boughton, for his part, hoped that before long ‘the theatre will become the proletarian church, and the arts resume their right place as vehicles of divine worship and common joy’.25 As well as taking a pronounced proletarian form, this new ‘proletcult’ aesthetic was to be both aggressive and agitational. It should also be unashamedly biased, even didactic, with its themes chosen or crafted for the express purpose of heightening class realities. Another feature of this alternative culture is that it would make a virtue of its relative lack of refinement, pragmatism, raw energy and eschewing of classical forms and motifs. Why was this so? For many British proletcult enthusiasts, the conditions for generating a more sophisticated proletarian culture did not as yet exist in Britain because of the nature of the capitalist system and the worker’s place within it. Embroiled for the most part in day-today ‘bread and butter’ conflicts because it was a struggling class preoccupied with seeking redress in the workplace, the working class apparently had little

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opportunity, or inclination, to develop a more advanced culture that allowed for an engagement with the finer aspects of art and culture. Proletarian culture within British capitalism was, therefore, by necessity, bound to be immature and under-developed. If this culture had any specific defining characteristics it is that it tended to be turbulent, even ‘primitive’, but always combative. The notion of workers’ culture in capitalism as immature and under-developed had been expressed earlier by Anatoly Lunacharsky, People’s Commissar for Public Enlightenment in 1920s Soviet Russia, in an important essay on ‘Working Class Culture’ that he wrote in 1918, and which was reprinted in two installments in The Plebs journal in 1920. As long as an exploited subaltern class, Lunacharsky wrote, ‘is so crushed down as to be able to bother itself only about daily bread, about the bare necessities of existence, its culture will be poor’.26 Because of such pressures, such cultures apparently displayed distinctly unclassical features. ‘The culture of the struggling proletariat is a highly specialized class culture, fashioned in conflict’, he stated, and ‘it has no time to bother about exact and perfect form. Every class, while striving to grow, is romantic, and its romanticism takes the typical forms of “Storm and Stress”.’27 It followed, for Lunacharsky, that ‘we cannot demand from the “culture of conflict” the fair fruits of perfect form or easy energy which will certainly appear in future’.28 Most British advocates of proletcult identified with this position.The sophisticated proletarian culture of ‘exact and perfect form’ was for the future, they felt. In the meantime, a culture for proletarians should take the form of a ‘culture’ which spoke to and sought to develop the combative instincts of a subaltern class. Eden and Cedar Paul’s book, Proletcult, published in 1921, was one of the earliest British communist statements on this position. When given an opportunity to raise their knowledge and understanding, declared the Pauls, working men and women do not seek tuition in the area of ‘a vague general culture’ but wish to ‘understand the nature of the system in virtue of which, when employed, they are galley-slaves chained to the bench …’29 ‘Instead of asking for lectures on Shakespeare or on Greek art’, therefore, the worker ‘demands information on the mechanism of contemporary social life’, such that he or she is then ‘well on the way to an understanding of the fact that the working class and the employing class have nothing in common’.30 The Pauls were not surprised by this apparent preference for a utilitarian culture, or ‘narrow culture’ as they put it. They believed it to be entirely consistent with the workers’ pragmatic approach to the problems that assailed them on a day-to-day basis, as well as being a necessary stage on the road towards the acquisition of a more sophisticated culture which was as yet thought to be, as mentioned, unattainable in the circumstances of contemporary capitalist life. Lest they were assailed by charges of cultural philistinism, of watering down culture to suit utilitarian political ends, the Pauls and other proponents of a ‘fighting culture’ for a pragmatic subaltern class were keen to assert that this richer culture would emerge once class society had withered away and been replaced by a communist mode of life. A workers’ state, according

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to the Pauls, would to an increasing extent ‘devote its attention to what we have termed the arts and graces of life. The social revolution will have released the creative forces slumbering in the proletariat; art and science will blossom abundantly and will assume new forms’.31 In the meantime, in the non-Soviet west, ‘where the possibilities of proletarian art still lie shrouded in the womb of the future’, other forms of workers’ cultural self-expression would have to be fashioned.32 Indeed, it should be the professed goal of the proletarian culture movement to recognise these facts of proletarian life, to be aware that the workers’ culture was a culture fashioned in conflict, a fighting culture for a combative class, and shape its cultural programme accordingly. ‘The first aim of Proletcult (in its pre-Revolutionary phase) is to simplify’, they continued, ‘to concentrate, to discard everything which does not contribute to the growth of a fighting culture. Not general culture, professedly unbiased, but a fighting culture, admittedly tendentious, is the avowed aim of the revolutionary proletariat.’33 Others shared the Pauls’ preference for ‘simplification and concentration’, for a narrow utilitarian culture for a pragmatic, ‘fighting’ class. In early 1922 Mark Starr, a Plebs League tutor like the Pauls, and at this stage still a CPGB member, reproached those educationalists who would wish to introduce ‘the worker to the beautiful and wonderful things in life’, such as getting ‘to know all that is good in literature, in music and painting’, because of ‘the danger that such studies may become fascinating hobbies’ and lessen the worker’s usefulness to the class struggle.34 For Starr, rather than ‘getting to know’ literature, music and painting, workers needed to be introduced to subjects that enabled comprehension of the system that enchained them and which aroused the revolutionary mentality essential to its overthrow. The subjects thought to be most conducive to achieving these ends were economics and modern history. As Raymond Postgate put it:‘Art and literature are recreations of a class at least partly victorious; a still struggling class attends strictly to business. “Business” is Modern History and Economics.’35 Moreover, both subjects were to display an unapologetic bias towards Marx’s materialist version of history and Marxist economics respectively, while the former should have a distinct social and industrial history orientation, being the branches of history most relevant to workers’ experiences and the goal of inducing insight into the workings of exploitative capitalism. Given such opinions, it should not surprise us to find that one of the chief focuses of CPGB proletcult was in the realm of educational provision for worker activists, with a stress on subjects thought most likely to illicit revolutionary action in the sphere of work and politics. The organisation of such provision for activists in ‘relevant’ subjects, in the belief that this chimed with the requirements of a fighting culture for a pragmatic class, became a key facet of communist cultural politics, particularly during the 1920s. Prior to 1923, the CPGB was content to leave responsibility for such matters to the Plebs League, which had emerged out of the 1909 Ruskin College students’ strike. The strike was sparked

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by the sacking of Ruskin Principal Dennis Hird and efforts by Oxford University to incorporate the College more directly under its aegis, a move which the strikers saw as an attack on the sanctity of independent working-class education. By the early 1920s the Plebs League and its sister bodies the Central Labour College (CLC) and Labour Colleges, all of whom were committed to upholding the principle of independent education organised by and for the working class, had set up an impressive nation-wide network of branches, labour colleges, study circles and evening classes.36 In mid-1921, for example, regionally based Labour Colleges in Manchester and London ran twenty-three classes and forty classes respectively, while the Sheffield Labour College boasted twenty-three evening classes, 450 students and 100 affiliated organisations.37 By 1924 the National Council of Labour Colleges (NCLC), which had emerged in 1921 as the Labour College movement’s governing body with responsibility for coordinating the activities of the various regional colleges, had secured the affiliations of twentyfour trade unions. Text books and the Plebs League’s journal, The Plebs, would complement the instruction received through classroom tuition and, at this stage, 1920–22, communist writers tended to dominate the columns of the latter, including the Pauls, Raymond Postgate, Mark Starr, William McLaine, Maurice Dobb, Frank and Winifred Horrabin, J. T. Walton Newbold and T. A. Jackson. The Plebs League, CLC and Labour Colleges, with the CPGB in tow at this stage, sought to steer an independent course for workers’ education between the minimum of instruction ‘pseudo-education’ offered through formal state schooling and that promoted by the Workers’ Education Association (WEA). To these former bodies, the WEA’s favouring of non-partisan and impartial education, the traditional canon of knowledge, the principle of ‘knowledge for its own sake’, and its eager reliance on state rather than labour movement funding was, at best, naïve and reformist and, at worst, collaborationist. Rather, proletarian students should be given partisan, tendentious Marxist-orientated tuition, ‘not “education for education’s sake” but’, in the Pauls’ proletcult rhetoric, ‘education for revolutionary ends’, so as to instill deeper understanding of the class struggle and develop a fighting culture.38 The CPGB was initially content to place the responsibility for the tuition of radical workers ‘under the guidance and direction of those specializing in that particular field’ in the words of the Party’s then Chairman Arthur McManus, which meant collaboration with the Plebs in particular.39 By the time of the Fifth Party Congress at Battersea in October 1922, in line with the instruction of the Comintern’s Third Congress (July 1921) to reconfigure its organisational structure and methods of political work, the CPGB had resolved to dispense with the services of the Plebs League and NCLC and build its own educational organisation in the form of Party ‘Training Groups’ and a Party Training Department.40 A failed attempt to subsume the Plebs League and Labour Colleges directly under the Party’s aegis followed but, in the end, the imperatives of restructuring and ‘Bolshevisation’ merely led to a split in the ranks of the communist intellectuals

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when a number of Plebs’ educationalists and intellectuals decided to bid farewell to the Bolshevik brand of communism. Those who had exited the Party by 1924 included the Horrabins, Mark Starr, Ellen Wilkinson, Morgan Philips Price, J. T. Walton Newbold and Raymond Postgate. The CPGB would not recover from this intellectual hemorrhage until the 1930s when it recruited a new raft of writers and academics from the British university system. The Plebs’ and NCLC’s calumny, for the CPGB, was that in their zeal to safeguard the integrity of independent working-class education they eschewed party political affiliation, which left their students ‘in a hopeless maze of pursuing education for education’s sake’ as one communist critic later explained it.41 From this unsatisfactory situation had emerged ‘a coterie of one-time students who are either violently anti-party or armchair critics of no good to any movement’.42 The Plebs League and NCLC were further accused of presiding over a fundamental separation between workers’ education and the political and industrial struggles that were an everyday aspect of the worker’s life. Consequently, tuition, learning and knowledge became mere academic exercises, thus reducing the Marxism offered by Plebs and NCLC tutors to an arid ‘abstraction’ detached from political action and everyday reality. The CPGB gave itself the remit, therefore, of henceforth ensuring that the two spheres of education and politics were brought into their proper relationship. From 1923, then, responsibility for proletarian education had been prised away from that which the CPGB derided as the unaffiliated intellectual fringe of the labour movement. The Party admitted that the early progress of the communist Training Groups was faltering and unimpressive, however. Although there were approximately 800 members ‘undergoing training’ in ninety Training Groups by March 1925, London and Glasgow Districts accounted for 50 per cent of this total.43 Efforts to improve matters were being hampered by a dearth of competent tutors, the overloading of members with other duties, the dispersed nature of the membership and District organisations, the intellectual gulf between the training syllabus and those attending classes, and the gradual falling away of activity in many of the Training Groups.44 Undaunted, the British Party declared its intention to abide by the goal of the CI that ‘no effort will be spared to raise the theoretical and cultural level of the Party membership in all sections of the Comintern’ through Party Training.45 Other auxiliary institutions played a part in this cultural and theoretical awareness raising project. There was the CPGB’s Central Training School in London, which held rigorous six-month courses for prospective trainers who on completion of their induction were responsible for establishing Training Groups in the branches and regions. By 1930 the Party claimed that there were eighty-six such trainers bringing enlightenment to some 700 members in the branches and a further 192 members in District Schools.46 After 1925 there were also Weekend Schools held in areas of communist strength, such as Manchester and Scotland. From 1925 the British Party was also dispatching its more promising young recruits to the Lenin

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School in Moscow, where they underwent a rigorous eighteen-month training course, which included the study of Russian and German. By the 1930s the Marx House Schools had been established, in Manchester and in London. Under the guidance of its first Principal Robin Page Arnot, the latter began classes in October 1933 in the premises of the newly opened Marx Memorial Library at Clerkenwell. It is not too difficult to be critical of formal communist education. Teaching methods in the Training Groups could be overly didactic and overplay rote learning and question and answer sessions. Also, class materials used by trainers had a narrow epistemological base and were usually heavily slanted towards the Marxist and Leninist classics. Moreover, the Marxism on offer to proletarian learners, particularly during the 1920s, inclined towards a narrow historical materialism that drew on nineteenth-century evolutionary materialist and positivist doctrine.47 As Stuart Macintyre has pointed out, this 1920s ‘proletarian Marxism’ was over-simplified and tended to reduce reality and its various ‘levels’, namely history, economics, philosophy and politics, to direct causality and simple equivalence.48 Training often involved recruits being instructed in a prescriptive way to immerse themselves in the relevant Marxist literature, prior to being assessed on their textual knowledge through the question and answer method. The Leeds activist Ernie Benson has left us with a recollection of a Training Group at work in the West Riding District in 1928: Really it was group discussions of a particular subject, such as [Marx’s] Rent, Interest and Profit, [Marx’s] Wage Labour and Capital or Lenin’s State and Revolution and Left-Wing Communism. Members of the group were asked to study the pamphlets and each in turn would lead the discussion on these subjects, followed by questions put by the group members, who in turn were asked why they had raised a particular question. Derision of comrades was forbidden, so that nobody would hold back a contribution no matter however mistaken it might be.49

More varied teaching methods were introduced by the later 1920s and 1930s, including essay writing, problem solving, and debate. Workers’ study circles modelled on the factory-based study circles of Soviet Russia were also encouraged. Nevertheless, an excessively pedantic, orthodox and doctrinaire approach continued to mar areas of communist education through the 1930s. At the Lenin School in Moscow, for example, over-zealous doctrinaire Stalinists were primed to seek out deviations from the Stalinist line. The Edinburgh communist Fred Douglas, a student at the School in the 1930s, witnessed the dismissal of a number of supposedly ‘deviant’ staff and students in formal ritual ceremonies which resembled public confessions.50 That said, for many worker recruits brought up on a meagre diet of formal schooling, communist education was a welcome source of new knowledge and enlightenment which undoubtedly helped raise their intellectual and cultural level. The Lancashire YCL activist Margaret McCarthy remembered her initial

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encounter with communist tuition: ‘I felt a burning desire to know and to learn. It must be appreciated that I had left school finally at thirteen, and now, for the first time since then, someone expected me, even intended me, to study, and gave me the means, through literature, lectures, classes and conferences, to do so in a purposeful and directed way … the more I studied and understood the better young communist I would become.’51 This was not ‘education for education’s sake’, nor a desire for personal self-improvement to gain release from the proletarian condition. Proletarian comrades studied and read, in the best spirit of proletcult, to enhance their political knowledge so they could further the class struggle. ‘We wanted to get educated for our own self-esteem and knowledge’, recalled the Derbyshire miner Bas Barker, a Lenin School student in the late 1930s, ‘so we would be more able to argue the case in support of the working class movement.’52 The effort to give shape to a culture for proletarians, to encourage a combative culture for a subaltern class, was not solely confined to formal education and training. Some efforts were made to map out a proletcult aesthetic for theatre, art, music and literature.The story of the Workers’Theatre Movement, though agitprop rather than cultural expression, has received extensive treatment.53 British communists interested themselves in art to a serious degree only in the 1930s, against the backdrop of the rise of fascism and deepening structural unemployment. Communists demanded an engaged art that had a relation to these times, as well as the workers’ world. Art should also draw its themes and inspiration from this relationship with political and social realities. In so doing, art should draw the workers into activism by functioning as a medium of political enlightenment and self-transformation. It followed that radical art should be accessible, which meant that its subject matter and style of presentation should not stray beyond the boundaries of socially recognisable modes of vision. The art which satisfied the criterion of accessibility was realist art. Apparently, this was an art for proletarians, if not a proletarian art. As one Party member put it, ‘the art of the working class when it is freeing itself from capitalism is largely an exposure, a satire showing up realities’, evolving into ‘a vivid, piercing floodlight on real things, showing their essential nature and their linked relationships in a way that art alone can do’.54 Those artists, like the ‘three Jameses’, Holland, Boswell and Fitton, Cliff Rowe, Peggy Angus and Clive Branson, who gravitated towards communism during the 1930s usually opted for subjects and themes from ordinary life. As James Holland, a former Royal College of Art student, explained in 1935: ‘With my own work, I want to show something of the real life of this country which goes on in industrial towns, factories, shipyards, coalfields, shops and offices.’55 This was a realist paradigm that owed much to a long-established tradition of socially sensitive realism embodied in the work of William Hogarth and Victorian graphic illustrators like Luke Fildes and Hubert von Herkomer.56 The principal outlet for the communist-

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inclined artists was the Artists’ International which was founded in 1933, soon after to be reconstituted as the Artists' International Association (AIA). The AIA aimed ‘to work for the unity of artists for peace, democracy and cultural development’, staged well-attended didactic exhibitions, and succeeded in recruiting over 600 members by mid-1936.57 A similar impulse towards realist themes can be found in British communist discourse on music, particularly during the more distinctly proletcult phase of the 1920s. Some communists hoped to foster a music which illustrated presentday realities, and one which differed from the usual tunes of the British labour movement. These latter tunes were ‘in most cases poor words wedded to a patriotic melody or a church hymn’ for one comrade writing in 1921, or songs ‘which preach of gentle love and kindness’ or sing ‘of maypoles and lads and lassies in some age yet unborn’ for another writing later. The modern labour movement, on the other hand, needed something more vibrant, a music which illustrated class realities and aroused strong class emotions.We need ‘songs which will gather up and sweep forward a wave of bitter, undying hatred of capitalism’, it was proclaimed,‘songs of battle, songs of the factory … songs which ring with the tread of organised labour’.58 Unfortunately, these early hopes of bringing forth stirring songs dealing with exploitation and resistance and rooted in occupation and industrial struggle did not reap much harvest during the 1920s and 1930s. There was no coherent or effective strategy in Party circles between the Wars to revive traditional working-class songs. In the same vein, nor was there a firm effort to initiate a folk revival that drew on the progressive song tradition of a kind that could be set up in radical opposition to the bourgeois-Romantic ‘Cecil Sharp canon of English folk music’ embodied in the first English folk song revival.59 The latter was initially launched at the fin de siècle and as it took shape it studiously steered clear of promoting progressive, industrial and ‘provocative’ material concerning social rifts in its songs and published material. Rather, it favoured the promotion of songs with a rustic bias which emphasised rural harmony and spoke of village greens and dancing milkmaids, or ballads which sang of undying love. In keeping with the spirit of the First Revival which viewed folk song and dance as a refining influence, some traditional songs ‘rescued’ by Sharp during his forays into Britain’s rural environs ended up with heavily bowdlerised lyrics. Overtly sexual, violent and other ‘disturbing’ lyrics would be judiciously expunged or reworked to render the song more suitable for middleclass consumption and drawing room or school performance. There were some communist gestures in the direction of encouraging a ‘second’ English folk song revival to counter the Cecil Sharp canon between the wars. In the spirit of ‘unity’, communists did collaborate with the Woodcraft Folk, the Cooperative movement’s organisation for children and youth which was formed in 1925 and which made efforts to rediscover and promote an alternative culture of vernacular song. Nevertheless, a more concerted communist push to bring about a radical, alternative folk song revival had to wait until after the Second World War

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with the rise of the ‘Second English Folk Revival’, a cultural movement in which the likes of Ewan MacColl, A. L. Lloyd and other like-minded communist folk song enthusiasts played a significant role. There was another strand to interwar communist musical taste. In a less populist register, CPGB music discourse intended to instill an appreciation of the ‘classics’ in working-class musical taste. There were frequent expressions of appreciation in communist writing for composers who hailed from the traditional canon, with reference made to the ‘poignant beauty’ of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D major or the ‘beautiful and intricate trellis-work of sound’ that enlivened Bach’s organ works.60 In a similar spirit of cultural uplift, the middle-class communist composers of the later 1930s like Alan Bush, along with the Workers Music Association (WMA) which he helped found in 1936, sought to bring the ‘classics’ to proletarian audiences.61 Bush would become the first President of the WMA, the period’s principal forum for bringing music and the working class into a closer relation.The WMA brought together musical societies like choral groups and orchestras, promoted social songs, put on courses for the instruction of workers’ choirs, composers and conductors, and aimed to democratise performance skills and musical taste more generally. These were positive moves, although the idea of proletarian culture as ‘primitive’ persisted. In the words of Alan Bush: The rising class of the present age, the working class, can only develop its cultural life with extreme difficulty. The atmosphere of the worker’s daily work, where the economic suicide of his class goes on without cessation, is no basis for culture … The worker’s culture can only be centred in the class struggle. Out of the experiences and needs of the class struggle will be evolved those new elements which will bring about a true revival of art. At first such works of art, designed as weapons in the class struggle, may be crude and primitive. But they will share these characteristics with the early Christian music, the early Protestant music and the early expressionist music of the beginning of the seventeenth century, when compared with the highly cultivated Greek music, Roman Catholic music, and the classical style of the respective period.62

An even greater effort was made to bring the working class and literature into a closer relation. The CPGB used its press outlets to cultivate a literary outlook. The Daily Worker ran articles recommending ‘books for the workers’.63 It also urged every Party local ‘to form a library for the use of its members’.64 Recommending a long list of ‘fascinating and enthralling’ books that were ‘alive, vivid’ and ‘palpitating with significance’, a list which included works by Flaubert,Tcheckoff, H. G.Wells and Lytton Strachey, the Daily Worker told its readers that ‘without books there is no life, in any full sense’.65 During the proletcult years, Party organs were particularly effusive about novels which combined a proletarian outlook with a firm anti-capitalist message.66 Upton Sinclair’s novel Mountain City was thus lauded by the Daily Worker in 1930 as ‘a realistic inside

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picture of American “high finance” and society’, a ‘sardonic but vivid and authentic picture of the avarice, the exploitation, the privilege, the corruption – all the things we mean by capitalism’.67 There was far less enthusiasm for the modern English novel, as evident on Arnold Bennett’s death in March 1931.The Daily Worker cast Bennett as an ‘aspiring bourgeois’ and derided his literary legacy which, though showing an occasional interest in the theme of ordinary lives, too often lapsed into a cringing fascination with ‘the bourgeois dream of endless luxury’, a recurring motif which was evident in such novels as The Grand Babylon Hotel (1902) and The Imperial Palace (1930).68 If Bennett’s writing too frequently degenerated into a ‘song of praise for bourgeois prosperity’, other modern English novels were thought to have lapsed into a mode of writing of a kind which reflected the increasing decadence of bourgeois life. The obscurantist tone of modernist writing offended cultural communists in this respect, as well as the morbid obsession with primitive rites and the ‘fetish’ for honing in on the individual’s sexual life. D. H. Lawrence’s literary output appeared symptomatic of these latter indications of modern ‘decadence’. Although admitting that his oeuvre had disturbed bourgeois sensibilities in the past, Lawrence was nevertheless dismissed as a ‘reactionary’ with no class perspective.69 The later 1930s marked a new moment in communist literary discourse. If earlier CPGB critical discourse had a weakness, it is that it too often assumed a simplistic correlation between literary production and economic and social circumstances, as in the claim that capitalist decadence was more or less directly mirrored in modernist literature. By the middle to late 1930s, as a result of an influx of literary talent into the Party, there was a less reductive aspect to the CPGB’s observations on literature. At various stages through this period, the CPGB boasted amongst its membership a bevy of accomplished writers and novelists such as Ralph Fox, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Edward Upward, Christopher Caudwell, Jack Lindsay and Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Spender, Day Lewis and Caudwell also wrote poetry. Other poets could be found in Party ranks by the mid- to late 1930s, including Hugh MacDiarmid, Douglas Garman, Edgell Rickword, Randall Swingler, Montagu Slater, John Cornford, Valentine Ackland, Roger Roughton, Jack Beeching and Arnold Rattenburg.To this list we should add communist ‘men of letters’ such as T. A. Jackson and Alick West. Although some enrolled prior to this date, such as Fox and Jackson, most joined the CPGB after 1933. The Party benefited from the radical turn in British intellectual life which took place with the advent of Hitlerism in 1933, fascism’s alarming advance after that date, and the onset of the Spanish Civil War. Artists and intellectuals felt, with justification, that the fascist advance posed a serious threat to culture and the independence and sanctity of the artist and that the CPGB was the only political body that understood the seriousness of the fascist threat. The main outlet for the writers, novelists and poets who joined the Party at this point was Left Review.70 Founded in 1934 by the British Section of the

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Writers’ International, a body which had been formed a year previously, Left Review ran until 1938. Although the novelists and poets who joined the CPGB after 1933 were principally motivated to join by a loathing and fear of fascism, many were also fired by a democratic and humanist urge to change society in a way that would fundamentally benefit working people. These writers viewed themselves as the intellectual wing of a wider movement for proletarian emancipation and saw culture as an intrinsic part of this socio-political struggle, not an abstract pastime for the private consumption of the individual. In a manner not dissimilar to the Romantic notion of the writer as a prophet of political progress, the communist intellectual took on the mantle of activist, in the same spirit of a Party activist in a trade union, factory or colliery. Ralph Fox wrote of the social responsibility of the writer in 1936, a few months before he was killed in Spain fighting for the Republic: Can a novelist remain indifferent to the problems of the world in which he lives? Can he shut his ears to the clamour of preparing war, his eyes to the state of his country, can he keep his mouth closed when he sees horror around him and life being denied daily in the name of a State pledged to maintain the sanctity of private greed?71

The humanism which motivated writers like Fox to seek to improve the workers’ conditions of life also inspired him and like-minded others to give shape to a socially sensitive literature which could draw a working-class readership to it. This was a new cultural aesthetic that benefited from a tendency, unlike in previous years, to treat past and present literary output in a non-deterministic fashion.There was far less inclination to read off a novelist’s oeuvre from his or her class position, or to dismiss much of the literary output of the past as ‘bourgeois’. This non-reductive cultural Marxism enabled an appreciation of the relative autonomy of literary activity and a more sensitive approach to the traditional canon of English literature. One feature of this less mechanist approach was the attempt by those who gathered around Left Review to revive what they saw as a lost English radical literary tradition that embraced Milton, Bunyan, Swift, Blake, Blake, Keats and even Shakespeare, and claim it, somewhat dubiously, for the twentieth-century communist movement. There was greater appreciation of the traditional canon in other respects. In The Novel and the People, Ralph Fox wrote approvingly of the eighteenth-century English novel, as epitomised by the imaginative fiction of Defoe, Swift and Smollett and particularly the ‘humane realism of Fielding’. To Fox, Fielding’s work ‘spoke the truth about life with an uncompromising courage’.72 There was fulsome praise, too, for some nineteenthcentury English novels. Fox felt moved to write of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights that it was ‘beyond time and space, immortal, primeval and elemental as the passion which gives the book its life. It is the novel become pure poetry.’73 Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and Samuel Butler’s scorching expose of the pious conventions and hypocrisies of Victorian life, The Way of all Flesh, were lauded in a similar

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way.74 While recognising that the three books’ concerns spoke to other times and places, their power, remaining true to a materialist conception of the novel, lay in their ability to articulate a realist picture of unfulfilled life and love in conditions of aggressive Victorian capitalism. Thus Wuthering Heights was ‘the most violent and frightful cry of human suffering which even Victorian England ever tore from a human being’.75 Unlike the earlier socialist, Fabian and Cooperative aesthetic, however, this was a highly qualified endorsement of the traditional canon of English literature. There was scant praise for Jane Austen. Though her fiction is ironical with richly drawn characters who have problems which ‘are incapable of solution within their society’, it ‘tamely surrenders’ at every turn rather than treat its characters truly. The existence of the other world outside of Austen’s ‘world of sheltered gentility’, of enclosures, hunger and the onward rush of rapacious capitalism, ‘must never, never be recognised’.76 Dickens, too, whose genius, humanity and ‘teeming mind’ created stories and characters of such richness that they have forever entered the popular mindset, nevertheless, halts at the point of giving a realistic appraisal of the soul of man in capitalism.77 Dickens, Fox decided, ‘had fantasy, but not poetry; humour but not irony; sentiment, but not feeling; he gave a picture of his age, but he did not express his age; he compromised with reality but he did not create a new romanticism’.78 The writer of the new proletarian novel coming into being will look elsewhere than to Dickens when seeking stimulation, continued Fox. Rather, he will acknowledge as his inspiration Wuthering Heights, Jude the Obscure and The Way of all Flesh ‘when he attempts the task of conquering reality, that ceaseless creative war in which Dickens hauled down the battle flag to replace it by a blameless white flag of sentimental compromise’.79 To the communist critics of the later 1930s, the retreat from reality, the drift towards compromise and reluctance to see the novel as a vehicle of social improvement, was even more marked in the work of the modernist literati of their own age. Aldous Huxley’s largely autobiographical novel, Eyeless in Gaza, which through the character of Arthur Beavis explores the meaninglessness of modern existence and, by extension, Huxley’s own sense of despair about life, was dismissed by a DailyWorker review as an essay in disgust and self-loathing, and a timid retreat from reality.80 Referring to the image deployed at the start of the book of a bath of dirty water, which stood as a metaphor for modern life and lost time, the review stated that Huxley ‘is fascinated by that bath of dirty water, but instead of daring to get into it, he remains outside, peering disgustingly into the scum, stirring it with a disdainful finger now and then, and unable to do more. Then he turns away to give us an account, not so much of it, as of his nausea’.81 Modernism was accused of turning away from reality in anther respect. Alick West decried the goal of Surrealist literature to disassociate words from their conventional associations as an illusory liberty and an empty political gesture which posed no threat to existing property relations. ‘That the demand for a new social order appears primarily as the demand for a new verbal order is the first

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weakness of surréalisme’, West argued, ‘for it means that the liberation of words veils the acceptance of the social conditions which give them their meaning.’82 That modernism appeared to retreat from reality into abstraction and pure form, that there should be an inclination to disassociate words from the reality that they were meant to depict, was anathema to those Party critics who believed that it was only through a realist paradigm that one could highlight class realities in a time of mounting political crisis. Much of ‘the paleness and anemia’ of modern writing, Ralph Fox complained, is due to the fact that many intellectuals had deliberately cut themselves off from the ‘eternal spring of renewal’ that could only come from an intimate contact with real concrete situations and the living speech of those engaging in real-life struggles.83 Although the CPGB’s literary criticism had become more refined by the midto late 1930s, there remained a determination that literature and poetry should be accessible to working people and not, as with art, breach the boundaries of socially recognisable modes of understanding. Party literary critics in this later period, therefore, even if they hailed from a non-proletarian background, still remained wedded to the idea of the proletarian novel which spoke to the aspirations of the coming proletarian future. Maurice Dobb thought he glimpsed the outline of the proletarian novel in Fedor Gladkov’s Cement, a novel of Soviet reconstruction. With its ‘fierce unflinching realism’, ‘vivid writing’, and optimistic message of a determined people ‘surging towards a dimly-perceived goal’, Cement was an ‘epic of proletarian reconstruction’ for Dobbs.84 The book’s theme of growth and transition towards a potentially harmonious future excited Dobbs in particular. ‘Like a symphony which gathers into a rhythmic whole a tumbling variety of minor themes’, he enthused in suitably metaphorical language, the novel ‘ends not on a final, dying chord but on a cadence’.85 In other respects, the proletarian novel, preferably penned by authentic proletarians, should be written in clear prose and have its living characters set in real conditions. Heroic characters should feature, too, though not idealisations or stereotypes, but types that give a sense of the ‘lights and shades’ of character. The proletarian novel should seek to tell the truth about life as the author pictures it with, as Ralph Fox explained it, ‘a fierce and brutal anger which lives because it is human anger awakened by the degradation of human life’.86 Finally, the proletarian novel should emulate the best elements of all great literature in that it should exhibit irony, contain elements of poetic fantasy, express a philosophical attitude to life, show a love of humanity, and portray the ‘soul of man’ which should be achieved in the epic style. There were a few authentic home-grown proletarian writers who strove to express the feelings of their class through ‘proletarian novels’, including the Salford-born Walter Greenwood of Love on the Dole (1932) fame, James Hanley who penned Grey Children (1937) about poverty in South Wales, and the railwayman A. P. Roley, the author of Revolt (1933), a thriller which dealt with labour agitation during 1919 and 1921. Some of the proletarian writers were or became Party

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members, like the one-time carpenter’s mate John Sommerfield, the Glasgow shipyard worker James Barke, and the coalminers Joe Corrie and Lewis Jones, the latter the author of Cwmardy (1937) and We Live (1939), stirring novels of life, communism and labour agitation in the South Wales coalfield. It is not difficult to detect fault with the communist effort to identify or forge a culture for proletarians. It could be patronising, particularly when articulated by ‘bourgeois’ communists on ‘missionary’ work. At times, it was overly didactic, doctrinaire and political, as when it assumed too close an affinity between art and propaganda. Some of the 1930s British proletarian novels just mentioned, for example, were prone to dogmatism, excessive political melodrama of plot, and were stocked with heroic worker types. There are other criticisms that could be made. They occasionally lapsed into documentary in an effort to express their ‘social-realist’ message and never managed completely to break free from bourgeois conventions and forms. Many of them inherited ‘the most routinated procedures of popular fiction’ including over-sentimentality, while the mode of writing ‘stuck more or less sturdily to the same old and received bourgeois style’.87 Additionally, cultural communists were sometimes too inclined to see culture and knowledge as primarily doctrines of action, rather than additionally as means of contemplation. The project’s analysis also tended towards the reductive and deterministic. This was particularly true of the proletarian Marxism of the 1920s, which was tied to a rather narrow epistemological base. Additionally, the 1920s proletcult enthusiasts looked at ‘culture’ through a narrow educationalist paradigm for the most part and seemed reluctant to embrace a more expansive notion of culture. On a related plane, these ‘proletcult’ advocates proved too willing to postpone the question of the viability and development of a more ‘sophisticated’ proletarian culture in the belief that this more ‘advanced’ culture could only cohere in the context of a British communist future which, of course, would never arrive. There was a tendency, too, particularly before 1934, to dismiss much of the traditional canon of culture and knowledge as ‘bourgeois’, and thus irrelevant to the political present and communist future. On the positive side, in a general sense, the CPGB’s project revealed the ideological determinations underpinning a particular cultural text. Although this was sometimes done in a reductive fashion, this at least served to highlight the representational basis of knowledge and culture and show that all texts exist within culturally determined power structures. In a personal register, the effort to influence cultural taste and shape a culture for proletarians undoubtedly raised the intellectual and cultural level of many communist worker activists. The Edinburgh Party activist Murdoch Taylor felt grateful that ‘any mind enrichment’ that he experienced in his communist years ‘came out of the fact that the Party taught me the tools of reading and other things’.88 As for their reading, proletarian communists could be avid consumers of a range of literature that drew comparison with the best aspects of the worker-autodidact tradition. Sometimes it was the Party or YCL which took the initiative, sometimes the activist. The

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voracious reading habits of the proletarian philosopher and communist workerautodidact T. A. ‘Tommy’ Jackson is well known, as is Party member Tom Mann’s enduring love of Shakespeare.89 The NUWM organiser Wal Hannington boasted a personal library that included books by Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, Edward Gibbon, Paul Lafargue, John Stuart Mill, Adam Smith and Thomas Paine amongst others.90 Helen Crawfurd delighted in her personal ‘treasure trove’ of books wherein ‘no discover ever enjoyed himself as I did, in the company of philosophers, travellers and explorers. The history of Peru and the robbery of the Incas; the history of the Scottish churches; of Wallace and Bruce; of the Border Wars; of Sir Walter Scott, Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Victor Hugo, Anatole France, Barbusse, Kropotkin, Tolstoy – my reading was wide and extensive.’91 Margaret McCarthy, too, reveled in the joys of reading. ‘What a wealth of new literature I discovered in those days’, she recalled of her years as a YCL activist. Along with ‘the exciting novelists of the Russian revolution, of whom Fedor Gladkov with his Cement was the most outstanding’, McCarthy ‘devoured everything possible by Maxim Gorky’ as well as the ‘magnificent Russian writers’ of the nineteenth century.92 For Jim Arnison, an aspiring young communist from a staunch communist family in Salford, ‘to take a book out was a precious thing. First, the scouring of the shelves to find something suitable, then to take it to the librarian for stamping and then off home to find a corner to curl up and read. It was magic.’93 In the best spirit of ‘proletarian culture’, there was usually a definite purpose behind this reading, with one’s choice of literature usually motivated by the higher calling of the class struggle. Helen Crawfurd, for her part, felt that she was ‘moving always among the wrongs and sorrows of mankind’, while Margaret McCarthy found herself drawn towards ‘the American proletarian novels’ of Jack London, Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis, uncompromising narratives about class inequities which ‘were swallowed up eagerly’.94 Upton Sinclair novels like Jungle, where ‘the vicious character of the class struggle in America is so vividly portrayed’, would make ‘a deep impression’ on the Manchester proletarian communist Mick Jenkins as well.95 ‘I was reading about class society. This helped me a great deal … Here was a source of knowledge and experience that made possible a deeper understanding and deeper conviction’.96 The novels of Jack London elicited a similar response. ‘Jack London!’, gushed Jenkins. ‘What hours of midnight candle I’ve burned thoroughly enjoying him … Time and again I had fallen asleep whilst reading and the candle had burned to the wick!’97 Finally, for a brief historical ‘moment’ during the interwar years, particularly during the 1920s and early 1930s, the question of ‘proletarian culture’ featured as an aspect of the cultural discourse of the political Left which merited serious discussion. In a related sense, the British communist effort to shape and provide a culture for proletarians encouraged communist worker-recruits and other workers to express themselves within their own idiom, language patterns and cultural codes. In so doing, this project accorded workers a ‘voice’ and gave

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dignity to their modes of expression and life experiences, as well as the idea of a proletarian culture. Notes 1 Ewan MacColl, Journeyman (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1990), p. 386. 2 The Communist, 16 April 1921, p. 9. 3 The Communist Review, 4:2 (June 1923), pp. 82–4. Boughton joined the CPGB at the start of 1926. See Workers’ Weekly, 12 February 1926, pp. 1, 5. 4 Daily Worker, 16 May 1931, p. 4. 5 Ibid. 6 ‘Art and the worker’, The Communist Review, 2 (June 1921), pp. 18–20. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 The Plebs, XIX:11 (November 1927), p. 366. 10 Eden and Cedar Paul, Proletcult (London: Leonard Parsons, 1921), pp. 27–8. 11 The Plebs, XVIII:1 (January 1926), p. 16. 12 Daily Worker, 2 March 1936, p. 4. 13 The Plebs, XIX:11 (November 1927), pp. 363–6. 14 Ibid. 15 The Communist Review, 4:2 (June 1923), pp. 82–4. 16 Ibid., p. 83. 17 Workers’ Weekly, 12 February 1926, pp. 1, 5. 18 See, Raphael Samuel, ‘Theatre and socialism in Britain, 1880–1935’, in Raphael Samuel, Ewan MacColl and Stewart Cosgrove (eds), Theatres of the Left 1880–1935: Workers’Theatre Movements in Britain and America (London: Routledge, 1985), pp. 3–73. 19 Ibid., pp. 4–5. 20 See, for example, Ian Britain, Fabianism and Culture: A Study in British Socialism and the Arts, 1884–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 223–52. 21 ‘Art and the Worker’, p. 20. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 The Communist Review, 4:2 (June 1923), p. 83. 26 The Plebs, XII:10 (October 1920), p. 161. 27 The Plebs, XII:11 (November 1920), p. 190. 28 Ibid. 29 E. and C. Paul, Proletcult, p. 12. 30 Ibid., p. 13. 31 Ibid., p. 22. 32 Ibid., p. 104. 33 Ibid., p. 14. 34 The Labour Monthly, 2:1 (16 January 1922), p. 54. 35 The Communist, 16 April 1921, p. 9. 36 The CLC was a residential college based in London. It closed in 1929 when union scholarships began to dry up in the wake of the 1926 defeats in the General Strike and miners’ strike. 37 Brian Simon, ‘The struggle for hegemony, 1920–1926’, in Brian Simon (ed.), The Search for Enlightenment:The Working Class and Adult Education in the Twentieth Century (Leicester: National Institute of Adult Continuing Education, 1992), pp. 28–9.

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38 E. and C. Paul, Proletcult, p. 14. 39 The Plebs, XII:10 (October 1920), p. 163. 40 Andy Miles, ‘Workers’ education: the Communist Party and The Plebs League in the 1920s’, History Workshop Journal, 18, (Autumn 1984), 102–14. 41 The Communist, 2:8 (September 1927), pp. 81–3. 42 Ibid. 43 ‘Party Training’, Report of the Seventh (Glasgow) National Congress of the CPGB, 30 May – 1 June 1925, pp. 159–60. 44 Ibid. See also ‘Party Training’, Speeches and Documents of the Sixth (Manchester) Conference of the CPGB, 17–19 May 1924, pp. 75–6. 45 ‘Party Training’, Report of the Seventh (Glasgow) National Congress, pp. 159–60. 46 Stuart Macintyre, Proletarian Science: Marxism in Britain, 1917–1933 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1986), p. 86. 47 Ibid, pp. 104–13. 48 Ibid. pp. 95–6. 49 Ernie Benson, To Struggle is to Live: A Working Class Autobiography,Volume 2. 1927–197: Starve or Rebel (Newcastle:People’s Publications, 1980), pp. 10–11. 50 Ian MacDougall (ed.), Voices From Work and Home: Personal Recollections of Working Life and Labour Struggles in the Twentieth Century by Scots Men and Women (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 2000), p. 551. On the Lenin School, see also Gidon Cohen and Kevin Morgan, ‘Stalin’s sausage machine: British students at the International Lenin School, 1926–37’, Twentieth Century British History, 13 (2002), 327–55. 51 Margaret McCarthy, Generation in Revolt (London: Heinemann, 1953), p. 97. 52 Bas Barker and Lynda Straker, Free But Not Easy (Matlock: Derbyshire County Council, 1989), pp. 31–2. 53 See, for example, Samuel, MacColl and Cosgrove (eds), Theatres. 54 Daily Worker, 18 December 1930, p. 3. 55 Cited in Lynda Morris and Robert Radford, The Story of the Artists’ International Association 1933–1953 (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1983), p. 20. 56 Ibid., p. 15. 57 Tate Gallery Archive. AIA File. 7043.18.1. Constitution of Artists International Association, October 1938. 58 Workers’ Weekly, 1 January 1926, p. 4. The view of the comrade writing in 1921 was expressed in The Communist Review, 2:1 (November 1921), p. 86. 59 These points and the point regarding communist collaboration with the Woodcraft Folk are mentioned in Gerald Porter, ‘“The World’s Ill-Divided”: The Communist Party and progressive song’’, in Andy Croft (ed.), A Weapon in the Struggle (London: Pluto, 1998), pp. 171–91. The First Revival and Cecil Sharp are also discussed in Georgina Boyes, The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993). 60 Daily Worker, 7 October 1930, p. 4, and 10 June 1930, p. 5. 61 Richard Hanlon and Mike Waite, ‘Notes from the Left: Communism and classical music’, in Croft (ed.), A Weapon, pp. 68–9. 62 Alan Bush, ‘Music’, in C. Day Lewis, The Mind in Chains. Socialism and the Cultural Revolution (London: Frederick Muller, 1937), pp. 133–4. 63 See, for example, Daily Worker, 24 January 1930, p. 11, and 4 April 1930, p. 5. 64 Daily Worker, 15 April 1930, p. 8. 65 Daily Worker, 21 February 1931, p. 4. 66 As with Tressall’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist. See Workers’ Weekly, 24 December 1926, p. 4. 67 Daily Worker, 9 May 1930, p. 4.

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68 Daily Worker, 30 March 1931, p. 2. 69 Daily Worker, 4 March 1930, p. 8, and 11 July 1930, p. 4. 70 New Writing (1935–40) was another forum for Marxist cultural writers, as was the Left Book Club. 71 Ralph Fox, The Novel and the People (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1937), p. 14. 72 Ibid., p. 58. 73 Ibid., p. 68. 74 Ibid., pp. 70–1. 75 Ibid., p. 70. 76 Ibid., pp. 61–2. 77 Ibid., p. 71. 78 Ibid., p. 67. 79 Ibid., p. 71. 80 Daily Worker, 24 June 1936, p. 7. 81 Ibid. 82 Alick West, ‘Surréalisme in literature’, Left Review, 2:10 (July 1936), pp. vi–viii. 83 Fox, The Novel, p. 139. 84 The Plebs, XXI:4 (April 1929), pp. 89–90. 85 Ibid., p. 89. 86 Fox, The Novel, p. 52. 87 Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 309,319. 88 NMLH. CP/IND/KETT/01. Margot Kettle Papers MS, Recollections of Murdoch Taylor (March 1983), p. 60. 89 See T. A. Jackson, Solo Trumpet (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1986), pp. 21–5. Dona Torr, Tom Mann and his Times (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1956), pp. 67–8. 90 Wal Hannington, Never On Our Knees (London: Lawrence & Wishart), p. 38. 91 NMLH. CP/IND/MISC/10/1. MS. Helen Crawfurd. Untitled autobiography, c.1950s, p. 398. 92 McCarthy, Generation, p. 100. 93 Jim Arnison, Decades (Salford: Arnison, 1991), p. 15. 94 Crawfurd, Untitled autobiography, p. 398, and ibid., regarding McCarthy. 95 NMLH. CP/IND/MISC/1/1. MS. Mick Jenkins, Prelude to Better Days. Autobiography, n.d., p. 27. 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid.

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PART IV The communist life cycle: end of the cycle

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10 In memoriam

Farewell! but not forever, farewell! They cannot kill the spirit, my brother; In thunder I’ll rise upon the field where I fell, More boldly to fight out another.1

The CPGB did not disengage even at the end and termination of the life cycle. Death, too, would feature as an aspect of communist politics in interwar Britain. Britain’s communists felt that death and the dead were always close. Capitalism, in particular, they thought, was infused by death. In a judgement fiercely held, they identified the capitalist mode of production that encompassed them with proletarian death, usually premature. The equating of capitalism with premature proletarian death was a recurring feature in the Marxist narrative on capitalism that was pre-figured in Marx’s earlier reflections on Capital, as we shall see. The solemn ceremony of the communist funeral would provide an opportunity to mourn and remember stricken proletarian comrades and vent quiet anger against ‘heartless capitalism’. This concluding chapter will consider how communists and the Party interred, mourned, memorialised and remembered their dead. In the course of doing so, it will look at the communist ‘Red Funeral’, its meaning, ritual, symbolism and place within the CPGB’s narrative of mourning and remembrance. British communists fell in combat, as well as at the point of production in the struggle with ‘rapacious’ capitalism, as in the Spanish Civil War in the fight against fascism, capitalism’s supposedly darker, murderous alter ego. This life or death struggle against fascism beyond Britain’s shores would add many martyred communist deaths to the CPGB’s ‘Roll of Honour’, not all of them proletarian of course. This chapter will consider another feature of the British communist treatment of death. If communists believed that death was always close then so, too, they felt, were the dead. In the communist narrative of mourning and remembrance, fallen comrades would be called back from the dead to aid the living, both the dead of the British Party and the dead martyrs of the world communist movement who hailed from other lands.

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In late May 1929, John Devine, a young Lanarkshire miner and YCL activist attached to the Bellshill Local, dejected and destitute, set out on foot from the Kent coalfields where he had been involuntarily sent under the Industrial Transference Scheme (ITS) to his home in Scotland.2 He never made it home, however, collapsing on a roadside in Carlisle near to death from exhaustion and extreme privation. Taken from the roadside to the nearby Carlisle Poor-house Hospital, Devine was pronounced dead almost on arrival.3 ‘Murdered by capitalism’ and Stanley Baldwin, the person thought to be responsible for the ITS, was the uncompromising verdict of an enraged Communist Party on hearing of John Devine’s passing. National Unemployed Workers’ Movement Organiser Wal Hannington, vowed that the NUWM would take up the fight with vigour against the unjust Scheme which had led to the young Scotsman’s premature death.4 Another Baldwin injunction to colliers to work following the 1926 General Strike and miners’ strike, the so-called ‘eighth hour’ of the working day or ‘Baldwin’s hour’, was held to be responsible for causing the premature death of another communist miner, the thirty-six-year-old Joseph Belshaw. A resident of Ashtonin-Makerfield, Lancashire, Belshaw was killed during the ‘eighth hour’ by a roof fall at the Edge Green Colliery in November 1927, leaving a wife and three children ‘in straightened circumstances’.5 When the last, excessive hour of the working day claimed the lives of two coalminers killed by a heavy fall of stone in the main haulage road at the Barnsley Main Colliery in November 1930 and the inquest recorded a verdict of ‘Death by Misadventure’, the Communist Party registered its own verdict: ‘Murdered by Capitalism’.6 Britain’s coalmines would take a steady toll of communist miners’ lives between the wars.7 Premature death, usually violent, stalked other industries as well as Britain’s coalmines. ‘Whose turn will it be next?’, asked an aggrieved communist railway worker in the Party press in June 1923 when he reflected on the untimely death of his CPGB comrade and fellow rail union activist, Sam Jones. Another statistic of ‘the cancerous system of death-traps on our railways’, Jones had been found ‘mangled under the wagon of his train’ after a chain had enveloped him while he was shunting trucks.8 Alfred Tindall, a YCL activist, suffered a similar gruesome death a few years later when he got caught in the machinery ‘and terribly mangled’ as he was repairing belting at the Bradford mill where he worked.‘Thus capitalism has claimed one more victim’, was the judgement of the communist press.9 Another untimely young death ‘for which capitalism was responsible’, arising from a fatal work accident this time on a construction site, claimed the life of Manchester YCL activist George MacLoughlin. MacLoughlin died from a fractured skull when he plunged twenty-three feet down a hoist-well whilst carrying out carpentry work.10 ‘Murderous capitalism’ was held responsible for the deaths of unemployed comrades, too. When the thirty-four-year-old Rotherhithe communist Frederick Edwards, one time Secretary of the NUWM, died of consumption in late 1923, having passed away his final hours in a cramped room only eight feet square, and leaving a wife and two children, his demise was

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blamed on ‘the criminal housing conditions and murderous “economy” of capitalism’.11 A similar note of angry condemnation was struck the same year when a Party activist from Gateshead in Newcastle, Alexander Fullarton, was laid to rest. At the time of his death at age forty-seven, Fullarton, who left a widow and four children, was an unemployed furnace-man engaged in temporary relief work. A life ‘sacrificed for profit and property’ lamented a grieving comrade in a graveside tribute to Fullarton. Comrade Fullarton ‘had been done to death by the capitalist system’, the lament continued, and ‘neither pestilence nor disease was responsible for the death’ which had swept him away ‘in the prime of his manhood’.12 These outpourings of fierce anger against a ‘heartless system’ were commonplace. When the Salford communist Madge Hicks was ‘cut down in the fight’ in 1923 aged only twenty-six, her memorial in the Party press left no doubt as to where the finger of blame should be pointed: ‘Marjorie Hicks (murdered by the system) “Lord, God there’s a debt to square!”’13 Why was there such a strong inclination on the part of communists to equate the capitalist system with premature proletarian death and, in a related sense, to accuse the same system of ‘murdering’ proletarians? Aside from the obvious point that working and safety conditions in contemporary British industry left a great deal to be desired, much of the explanation lies in the communist conviction that capitalism was bestial, a rapacious, murderous predator whose voracious hunger for surplus-labour and profit inclined it routinely to kill workers.This sentiment, and the related image of the work-place as a place of tremendous suffering, had a long ancestry in Marxist thought. Consider Marx’s comment on Capital’s interactions with the workers in Wage Labour and Capital (1849) where he asserts that ‘capital does not live only on labour. A lord, at once aristocratic and barbarous, it drags with it into the grave the corpses of its slaves, whole hecatombs of workers who perish in the crisis.’14 Capital assumes nightmarish, predatory and murderous form again in Capital (1867), Marx’s magnum opus, with the deployment of the famous vampire metaphors. To Marx, ‘capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks’.15 Again, in the passage on the working day, the extension of the working day into the night ‘only slightly quenches the vampire thirst for the living blood of labour’.16 Marx’s vampire has been read as a metaphor for capital’s insatiable, parasitical thirst for accumulation which weakens the body of the victim as it strengthens itself, and as a means to illustrate the notion of capital as dead labour reigning over and hungering after living labour.17 Given this discursive strain in Marxist thinking on Capital, as well as the CPGB’s own encoding of capitalism as murderous, it should not surprise us to see variations on the vampire trope in the rhetoric of British communism. In 1930, for example, the CPGB press damned capitalism’s treatment of youth as ‘a veritable blood-sucking of the rising generation’.18 Clearly, monstrous features and murderous behaviour were signs of malevolent intentions and a greed that could not be satiated. In the political drama to be

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enacted, therefore, communism, or the Party, would function as virtuous hero, not unlike Theseus of Greek legend fame in his battle with the Minotaur, for it was not human flesh that was to be put to the sword but a troublesome, repellant monster. Communist anger against ‘monstrous capitalism’ was inflamed further by premature deaths believed to have been caused by the security apparatus of the capitalist state. Thus Jack Forshaw, Secretary of the Salford Local, imprisoned for his communist activities under the Emergency Powers Act during the General Strike, a diabetic who was already in poor health, died from pneumonia whilst on bail having contracted a chill during ‘confinement in a damp cold cell’.19 Pneumonia resulting from a term of imprisonment, this time for interrupting the two-minute silence on Armistice Day, also claimed the life of ‘comrade Thomson’ of the Dundee Local.20 The hardship of the three-month prison term, combined with a general lack of nourishment, left Thomson ‘too weak to shake off the pneumonia’.21 It was pleurisy turning to tuberculosis, contracted as a result of a six-month spell of imprisonment with hard labour for ‘seditious’ speeches, that sent John Steele to his grave in early 1924.22 A former SDF and SLP activist prior to joining the CPGB who had ‘given 32 years of his life to the Cause’, Steele left a wife and three young children.23 Forshaw, Thomson and Steele were all buried with ‘full communist honours’. Deaths other than those felt to have been caused by ‘demonic capitalism’ were also mourned. The occasion of tragic, unexpected death would also bring forth messages of condolence from the Party to grieving relatives and comrades. When the thirty-two-year-old W. Rooke of the CPGB’s Southwark Local in south London lost his life in 1926 in a vain effort to save his wife and baby from a fire at their home, he was hailed as a martyr whose capacity for self-sacrifice ‘in such tragic and dangerous circumstances’ will be ‘treasured by all the members of the Party’.24 A few months later the Party press carried the heartrending details of the bereavement of J. Hibbert of the Cudworth Local in south Yorkshire following the loss of his twelve-year-old son. A keen member of the Young Comrades’ League, the young Hibbert used to help his communist father ‘sell four dozen copies of the Workers’ Weekly every week’ prior to his sudden passing.25 In a similar spirit, a message of consolation from the Party went out to comrade Peter McOmish Dott following the tragic, accidental death of his twenty-six-year-old communist daughter Jean from gunshot wounds in 1923 whilst honeymooning in Canada.26 The passing of young comrades was keenly felt. When the Sheffield communist Frank Wilson died at the tender age of twenty-five years in 1933, around 400 members of the Communist Party and other Left organisations attended his funeral.27 The early demise of Albert Pearce, a YCL Executive Committee member, a few years previously from kidney failure at the age of twenty-four years was said to have aroused ‘a regret inexpressibly deep’ in the hearts of the many comrades who turned out to witness his body being borne to its final resting place at Wandsworth Cemetery.28

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At the further end of the life cycle, the older communist fighters were not forgotten either. In the dedication to the seventy-nine-year-old Rotherham comrade J. Laycock who died in April 1930, Party members were informed that even on the day of his death this ‘stalwart’ of the working-class movement had given his usual ‘Party training class’ to the group of pensioners and allotmentholders who regularly attended these sessions.29 Other displays of revolutionary ardor to the last included Mrs Addy of the Manchester CP. When Mrs Addy finally succumbed in May 1924 to the effects of peritonitis it put an end, readers of the Workers’ Weekly were told, to this ‘indefatigable’ comrade’s regular week-in, weekout stints, ‘in spite of her advanced age’, to the entrance of Trafford Park Industrial Estate where she would sell Party literature to the Manchester proletariat.30 It was a similar story with the sixty-seven-year-old James Bland of the Northampton Local. An SDF pioneer in an earlier age, joining the CPGB in 1925 at age sixty-five, comrade Bland diligently ‘delivered his usual quota’ of Party newspapers almost up to the point of his death in February 1927.31 These dedications to departed comrades in Party literature served a number of purposes. Reports on those said to have been ‘killed by capitalism’ functioned to instill in the living a loathing of the ‘system’ and a yearning for transcendence and revenge, the latter being integral to the search for meaning and consolation for a saddened Party faithful. These ritual expressions of anger towards the ‘system’ and sympathy for comrades cut down before or during their prime also served to affirm the political bond between those left behind. Beyond the genuine desire to memorialise the contributions of dead comrades, the dedications to deceased Party activists other than those said to have been cut down by ‘demonic capitalism’, such as the older fighters or the victims of accidental, untimely deaths, also carried an implicit political message. The tributes to the ardent revolutionary work of J. Laycock, Mrs Addy and James Bland undertaken almost to the point of death the dedications stressed, for example, served to remind members of their own obligations towards the Party and the revolutionary struggle. The tributes also served the purpose of reminding the living of their obligations towards departed comrades. Thus, the living were called on to serve the dead and their memory. Sometimes this was done in a quite explicit fashion. When the Young Pioneers’ leader Effie Geddes died unexpectedly in September 1933 during a visit of British Pioneers to the Soviet Union following a short illness, a poem dedicated to her memory contained the following lines of verse: Mourn not too sadly, I have fought gladly! And, would you honour me, Take up my task!32

If rapacious capitalism, untimely accidents or ‘natural causes’ claimed the lives of communist activists then so, too, the CPGB had to admit, though without a trace

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of irony, did dedicated Party work. Thus departed souls like the young Albert Pearce of the YCL, the CPGB’s Tenth Congress pronounced in 1929, ‘were victims of their own unsparing and selfless devotion, taxing to the utmost physique which was undermined by capitalist exploitation’.33 The Party was just as candid on the death of other activists. When Ada Smith of Kennington, ‘a very active, self-sacrificing’ communist, passed away in July 1924, it was said that her hard work on behalf of the Party in south-east London to the neglect of her own health and well-being had ‘doubtless hastened her death’.34 Similarly, when the Daily Worker announced the death of the then thirty-one-year-old Eric Varney in February 1931 from tuberculosis, it felt inclined to point out that ‘it was his relentless over-working of himself that led to his break-down and illness’.35 In his short life ‘of completely selfless devotion to the cause of the workers’ revolution’, Varney had worked in the Soviet Union in the Bolshevik revolution’s early years, learnt Russian during pockets of spare time there, served as general manager of the SundayWorker on returning to England, contributed regular pieces to the CPGB press, translated Krupskaya’s Memories of Lenin into English and, ‘with his accustomed feverish energy’, helped build up the Party’s St Pancras Local.36 A few months after Eric Varney’s passing, the death of Scottish YCL activist Joe Jermyn was announced. ‘Always did he place the cause before self’, proclaimed the dedication in the Party press, ‘and no doubt his intense and sustained activity led to the illness which caused his premature end’.37 When Lewis Jones of South Wales died unexpectedly in January 1939 at the age of forty-two, it was said locally that ‘exhaustion’ had contributed to his early passing.38 An unsparing Party activist, on the day of his death Jones had addressed thirty meetings in the streets of Rhondda through a loudspeaker appealing for food for the Spanish Republic.39 Clearly, committed Party work carried the risk of serious illness, and even an early death. While it was one thing to confront death with stirring dedications and messages of consolation drawn from the corpus of Marxist anti-capitalist rhetoric, it was quite another to fix upon the most suitable means of burying departed comrades. With some communist deaths this was never really an issue, the circumstances and context of the passing tending to determine the nature of the interment.When Effie Geddes, whom we met above, died in the Soviet Union in 1933 she was buried in Kharkov, where she passed away, in a ceremony presided over by the Kharkov Pioneers.40 Comforted by ‘the display of international solidarity at her graveside’ and his own faith in Soviet communism, Effie’s communist father Alex Geddes felt moved to comment that ‘Effie lies snuggled in the bosom of Soviet Russia; she would have wished no better resting place’.41 There had been other British communists before Effie Geddes who had been laid to rest ‘in the bosom of Soviet Russia’. The Welsh miner Tom Hewlett was buried in Moscow in August 1921 in a cemetery in a cultivated garden located behind one of the Kremlin walls. Hewlett had been killed in a railway accident in Moscow where he was visiting as a communist delegate to the Third

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International Congress.To his grieving British comrades, Hewlett had joined ‘that mighty host who have gone to their graves because of the unquenchable fire of justice burning in their bosoms’.42 Close-by to Hewlett’s grave was a larger grave where lay those who fell in the Bolsheviks’ storming of the Kremlin in November 1917.43 As with Effie Geddes, ‘the bosom of Soviet Russia’ was deemed a suitable place for comrade Hewlett’s final rest. In lying alongside ‘the martyrs of the great Russian Revolution’, according to a Party spokesperson, he had found ‘a fitting burial place’.44 The one-time Red Clydeside activist and effectively the CPGB’s first General Secretary Arthur MacManus thought mother Russia a fitting resting place, too. It was at his own request that his ashes were placed, with due ceremony, in the Kremlin wall in Red Square on his death in 1927.45 The ashes of a communist coalminer, George Lumley, previously a check-weighman at Ryhope colliery in the north-east, who, like Effie Geddes and Tom Hewlett, died on a trip to the Soviet Union, would later join those of MacManus in the Kremlin wall.46 There were other interwar British communists whose final resting place was the Soviet Union, though not through choice as with Arthur MacManus. Neither were these burials accompanied by the respectful ceremonial that characterised Effie Geddes’ burial in Kharkov. These were the tragic victims of Stalin’s terror or Bolshevik paranoia relating to security. They included Rose Cohen, arrested by the NKVD on the trumped-up charge of ‘spying for British intelligence’ and summarily shot in November 1937 and, ironically, MacManus’s own brother-in-law, William Wheeldon, who was executed at an ‘unknown place’ a few years previously probably, it is thought, on the same charge.47 For the great majority of the British communist dead, home soil would be their final resting place. There were some exceptions. Before he died, in 1940, ‘Jock’ McCann, a communist Scot who had settled in Sheffield, left instructions that his ashes should be scattered at the Sheffield CPGB’s principal meetings’ venue in the city during a Party gathering ‘so he could be there’, always.48 A Party meeting was duly called, remembered a Sheffield comrade, ‘and during it one of the women [comrades] scattered Jock’s ashes all around’.49 Dying British communists, or their families, tended to opt for interment in a conventional grave in a local cemetery, however, although even here there was a desire to announce communist faith. This was done principally through the medium of the communist red funeral and its associated ritual. In its most evolved ceremonial form, the communist red funeral of the interwar period consisted of a processional cortege displaying red flags and other symbols of the communist revolution, mourners wearing red stars, badges, rosettes or carrying red flowers, a moving eulogy to the fallen at the graveside, and the rendering of solemn revolutionary hymns following the lowering of the coffin into the grave. We should not assume that these classic choreographic features of the red funeral were present from the beginning, however. Rather, they evolved only slowly and gradually. In the early years of the Party, communist funerals tended to be rudimentary and even bland, or were dependent on the form of pre-existing

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funerary ritual, though emptied of their overt religious content. Leading Party officials, like Arthur MacManus, were repelled by the ‘matter-of-factness’ of some of these early burials, with their usual diet of propaganda speeches, ‘songs badly sung’, and ‘lack of human feeling’ often shown towards the deceased.50 MacManus’s comrade Tom Bell, then also on the Party’s EC, agreed. He hoped for a time when the movement would stage a ceremony that contained ‘splashes of red colour, good music, and fitting tributes to the work done by the comrade while alive’.51 Although stripped of ‘the trappings and religious humbug of the Church’, the red funeral ceremony should not descend into an ‘anti-religious demonstration’ Bell believed, but ‘should be an occasion for manly resolve to continue the work of the pioneers’ of the working class movement.52 In these early years it was not so easy to shrug off the vestiges of pre-existing death ritual, including death ritual which contained a religious theme. When Alexander Fullarton, whom we met above, was buried in January 1923 there was a melding of traditional, pre-communist ritual with the communist funeral observances that were in the process of coming into being. Thus, although Fullarton’s coffin was draped with the Red Flag, and borne by bearers each of whom wore a red rosette or tie and a band of red ribbon tied with black fabric over the shoulder, it was carried to the cemetery following a church service to the strains of the ‘Dead March’ in Handel’s oratorio of Saul.53 At the graveside there was a further co-mingling of traditional with more radical forms. At this point, Fullarton was accorded military honours by the sounding of the ‘Last Post’ accompanied by a roll of muffled drums, while the ceremony was brought to a conclusion by Party members and others singing the ‘Red Flag’.54 Even some of the radical elements of the ceremony drew on pre-existing forms, this time within the Left socialist tradition, as with the procession of some 500 individuals which respectfully fell in behind Fullerton’s coffin to the cemetery which bore the mark of a style of mass protest to a ‘site of grievance’ which dated back to the Chartists. Although it is important to recognise that the communist burial ceremony relied on pre-existing forms, particularly in the CPGB’s early years, it is equally important not to over-emphasise this, for there was much that was radically different to the traditional Christian burial or the so-called bourgeois funeral, and consciously so. The communist experience was as unique in death as it was in life. A church service was very rare in a communist red funeral, the coffin tended to be carried through the streets on the sturdy shoulders of willing comrades rather than borne on a hearse, and there were no clergy in evidence at the graveside or crematorium. In a similar iconoclastic spirit, stirring words of tribute or revolutionary songs replaced prayers for the repose of the soul of the dead person to conclude the ceremony.There was no confessional element either, where the dying would make their last confession to a priest in order to receive absolution for sins committed. Often, the opposite was the case. Unless the death was unexpected and came suddenly, gravely ill or dying Party members, in a final

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gesture of communist faith, would give firm instructions to comrades or family members to ensure that clergy would not be present at the death-bed or funeral proceedings.55 In addition, the colour red, the symbol of the blood of the martyrs of the revolution, as opposed to traditional black, was the dominant colour note of the ceremony. When one of the founders of Brighton communism, Oscar de Lacy, was buried in October 1930 the Brighton Local staged the seaside town’s first red funeral, an occasion which exhibited many of the above features. The deceased’s coffin, draped with a Red Flag, was physically carried through the Brighton streets by his comrades behind which the mourners solemnly marched carrying wreaths in the shape of Soviet Stars, and Sickles and Hammers. In a consciously secular gesture, the processional cortege then went straight to the cemetery and graveside without passing the church, where a simple ceremony was conducted over the open grave consisting of a few words of tribute to the fallen comrade followed by the singing of the last verse of the ‘Red Flag’ in a minor key.56 By the mid-1920s and into the 1930s, red funerals had become quite commonplace in the CPGB’s ritual calendar.57 Red funerals were staged for many of the deceased Party members mentioned above, including those of Jack Forshaw, John Steele and Albert Pearce. There were many others. When the South Wales communist collier H. Jonah Thomas was given a red funeral in April 1925, it attracted the largest gathering ‘of men with red stars and badges ever seen in the Valley’.58 During the ceremony, in the usual note of conscious departure from traditional observances, it was Party members who acted as pall bearers. A similar note was struck at the interment of Jack Leith of the Welwyn Local, Surrey, in October 1927. Although Leith’s body was consecrated at St Michael’s Church in East Wycombe, the final act of what was until then a traditional church service took a sharply secular turn when six Party members promptly ‘stepped into the church, placed the coffin on their shoulders, and carried it, covered with the Red Flag, to the grave’.59 There is even an affecting account of a bereaved communist couple from the mining village of Ferndale in South Wales who arranged a red funeral for their dead child, the baby being interred in the nearby Mardy Cemetery.60 Although the choreography of the red funeral tended to follow a recognisable pattern, there could be local variations in mourning behaviour. At the funeral of local activist Charles Eadie in the Caerau and Maesteg area of South Wales on 18 August 1934, a large gathering of Party members assembled outside the house of the deceased and, in a moving gesture, collectively struck up the ‘Red Flag’. Many in the gathering, who came from ‘all over South Wales’ to pay their last respects, wore red rosettes and at the conclusion of the service the rosettes were thrown down into the grave on to the coffin in another moving gesture of respect towards their departed comrade.61 When the wife of Party activist George Deacon was interred with due communist ceremony at Caversham Cemetery, near Reading, in November 1926, in another local variation, members of the Miners’ Choir sang at the graveside.62

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The red funerals of British communism served many functions. Beyond respectfully honouring fallen comrades, in their symbolism they proclaimed allegiance to the Soviet motherland, as with the wreaths of red flowers that attended almost all ceremonies. The wreath, usually of red tulips or red carnations, was usually designed as a five-pointed Soviet star, or as a hammer and sickle. Both designs were on display at Charles Eadie’s funeral mentioned above.63 Such wreaths could display quite distinctive features. At the funeral of Birkenhead activist Dick O’Dell in early November 1930, the Soviet star of red flowers from the local Party was four feet high.64 In their affirmation of the higher purpose of the revolution in graveside eulogies to the fallen for which the deceased had given their lives, red funerals also offered meaning and consolation to bereaved family members. They also had a social dimension, in terms of bonding within the political group. In the ritual expressions of collective mourning or dedication, such as the intoning of revolutionary hymns in the crematorium, they affirmed the social affinity between those left behind collectively to continue the struggle. If there was a template for communist red funerals to follow, it was the Russian Bolshevik model that provided it. In the CPGB’s early years, it was the hope that Russian funeral observances would eventually be absorbed into British communist death ritual. ‘The funeral service of a Russian revolutionary is as glorious in its emotional splendour as the ritual of any Church’, exclaimed the Party press in 1921.65 It then went on to complain that Britain’s revolutionary movement had never attempted to introduce any of the ‘beautiful touches’ that ennobled the Russian ceremonies into its own funeral services. ‘The beautiful pathos of the whole thing becomes engraved in one’s memory’, continued the panegyric, as in the impressive spectacle that was John Reed’s funeral.66 The staged exhibition of Lenin’s funeral in Moscow a few years later in January 1924 also taught lessons in Soviet death protocol. Harry Pollitt attended as a representative of the CPGB and the Comintern. Pollitt helped carry the CI banner in the funeral cortege and was one of the Guard of Honour who stood in turn around Lenin’s bier, which was positioned on a red catafalque set in an imposing environment of evergreens, palms, palm fronds, lilies, and red banners in the Hall of Columns.67 Pollitt referred to his participation in Lenin’s funeral ceremony on behalf of British workers as the ‘proudest moment’ in his life.68 It was Tom Bell who commented later, with some satisfaction, that the British Party had ‘profitably learned from our Russian comrades how to do honour to our proletarian fighters when dead’.69 The Russian Bolsheviks’ valedictory hymn to the fallen, the ‘Russian Funeral March’ or ‘Funeral Song’, stirred British communist emotions in particular.This ‘song of the revolution’, thought The Communist Review, ‘is one of the most beautifully sad pieces of music in the world. It translates the misery and anguish of the Russian masses into melody. Its heart-throbbing melancholy rhythm bespeaks not only of oppression but of tragic loss.’70

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This Russian dirge evidently travelled well because it featured in the funeral ceremony for Arthur MacManus which took place in Golders Green, London, prior to his ashes being transported to Russia for depositing in the Kremlin wall. By all accounts, MacManus’s send-off in London in early March 1927, which culminated in a cremation at the Golders Green Crematorium, was an impressive spectacle. It showcased most of the classic motifs of the communist red funeral, many of which were adopted from the Russian Soviet model. Watched over by a guard of honour, ‘wee Mac’s’ body was laid out in the hall of the Party local of which he was a member in a ‘blood-red coffin covered by a Party banner and a scarlet wreath’, before being borne to the Crematorium on the shoulders of his ‘closest comrades’.71 Behind this was strung, for a long distance, a doleful cortege of almost 2,000 mourners made up of Party and YCL members, communist sympathisers and local workers, many of whom carried banners of scarlet draped with black that fluttered ‘in the sharp gusts’ of the March wind. There then followed a ‘brief and simple’ ceremony in the Crematorium Chapel, which commenced with the ‘heart rending strains’ of the ‘Russian Funeral March’. The ceremony then concluded with a string of eulogies to their departed comrade from Party notables that included Tom Bell, Harry Pollitt and Willie Gallacher. Taking place in the days of the ‘United Front’ before the adoption of the divisive ‘Class against Class’ line, this was a non-sectarian occasion with non-Party members from the wider labour movement in respectful attendance, including Ben Tillett from the TUC’s National Joint Council, A. M. Wall of the London Trades’ Council, and James Maxton of the ILP.72 An international dimension was sought, too. Invitations were extended to the German Communist Party but its representative was refused entry to Britain. Thus thwarted by a paranoid British state, the KPD’s Eleventh Party Congress at Essen in early 1927 announced, in a metaphoric gesture of solidarity, that ‘German communists lower their banners over the grave of MacManus’, the ‘leader and champion of British communism’.73 As MacManus’s coffin finally disappeared into the flames, it needed the organ pealing out the ‘International’ to break the ‘unbearable silence’ that gripped his grieving comrades, holding back their tears. Then, in a rousing finale, a great chorus resounded through the chapel from the majority of the throats of those present: ‘A communist leader is dead! Long live communism!’.74 For all their protestations against religious ceremonial in funeral observances, church burials, and the messages of spiritual comfort drawn from Christian cosmology, ‘the trappings and religious humbug of the Church’ as Tom Bell put it, communists were just as reluctant to accept the finality of death as their Christian counterparts.75 This refusal to think of dead comrades as finally dead, the idea of the dead as still present, was often articulated in terms of a spiritual presence. We can see this if we consider the eulogies that accompanied the burial or cremation of some of the deceased communists mentioned above. ‘His body is beneath the earth, but his spirit will always be with us’, declared the Party representative at John Steele’s funeral.76 The deaths of Albert Pearce and

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Arthur MacManus brought forth similar rhetoric. ‘Comrade Albert Pearce is dead’, exclaimed the Party press, ‘but his work and spirit lives. We who are left will live in his spirit and carry on his work.’77 MacManus’s life, which was ‘given freely to the Revolution, is a symbol of the spirit which will carry the Revolution to triumph’.78 Dedications to other fallen Party members were replete with such commentary. ‘We remember our dead comrade’s work’, stated the Daily Worker on the death from pneumonia of ‘comrade Mrs Wilson’ of the Birkenhead Local in 1931, ‘and know that her spirit still lives’.79 If, as we have seen earlier in this chapter, in its dedications to the fallen the Party called on the living to serve the dead by continuing their work, in this particular dedicatory trope the spirit of the dead was evoked to aid the living in their quest to carry on the political struggle. This was emphasised by The Communist Review in 1921: The orthodox funeral of religious bodies is based upon the assumption that their dead will rise again. With greater beauty and with a greater truth the communists bury their dead with the unalterable conviction that the work of a lost comrade never dies, but lives on in the movement as an inspiring and shining light to those who are left behind to carry on the great struggle.80

Here there was a commingling of death with life, the spiritual with the corporeal, with the spirit of the dead being summoned to animate the living in their political efforts to fashion a new world.81 On other occasions this idea of the dead as still present was articulated in terms of garden or nature imagery, as expressed in the final verse of a poem to the fallen Arthur MacManus: For you no vaulted tomb, no granite prison, But the great winds of March to cast your seed On the broad earth receptive of your ashes, To burst in bloom when mankind shall be freed.82

Similarly, when Alfred Watts of the Fleet Street Local died of cancer in February 1928, his dedication contained the words that ‘the good work that he did will live after him and bear its fruit’.83 The CPGB memorialised the dead of the world communist movement, as well as its own dead. When the British Party mourned Karl Liebknecht’s passing, for example, foully murdered by the agents of ‘reaction’ as communist remembrance literature explained it, it was consoled by the thought that ‘the seed he has sown has borne fruit’ in the communist youth movement which now holds aloft his banner.84 This analogy enabled the communist dead to be reconfigured as the seed of regeneration and collective renewal, attesting to their imperishable, universal presence. The idea of life in death went beyond narrative. It infused communist death symbolism, too. The colour of the Red Flags that draped the coffins of the Party’s

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dead was not the same as the colour red which splashed the streets during the formal ceremonials staged by the British state, as with the red poppy on Remembrance Day. To its communist detractors, the red poppy, which was ‘only meant to play on sentimentality’, flourished briefly on 11 November and then slept. The Red Flag of communism also symbolised the dead but ‘no sentimental lethargy does it inspire but awakens new life, new fire, a wholehearted desire to help fight against the class who deny us the right to enjoy the products of the earth’.85 To call up the dead in the service of the Party, to infuse the living with the spirit of dead comrades and their deeds, meant constructing a new vocabulary of immortality around the themes of the eternal struggle for justice, revolutionary sacrifice and martyrdom. It was a discourse that drew on a pre-communist Christian idiom of suffering and ultimate resurrection. Certainly, traditional religious motifs did feature in the CPGB’s narrative of mourning and remembrance. The image of the martyred proletarian suffering a Christ-like passing figured in British communist death imagery, for example, which served to assimilate the martyred communist with the Christian tradition of suffering, resurrection and transfiguration.86 There was nothing more emblematic of the spirit of revolutionary sacrifice and martyrdom for the Party, nor of the idea of the communist dead as imperishable, than the deaths of Party and YCL members who fell in combat, as in the fight against fascism and Francoism during the Spanish Civil War. Between 1936 and 1939, around 2,300 volunteers from Britain, Ireland and other ‘British’ areas of the globe volunteered to fight in Spain, most serving with the British Battalion in the fifteenth International Brigade. These volunteers were drawn from across the social-class divide and included Oxbridge aesthetes, writers and other intellectuals, although the majority of the English-speaking Brigaders were labourers, motor drivers, coalminers, seamen, painters and clerks, many of them unemployed. Over 500 of this number were eventually killed, with perhaps as many as 400 of the dead being Communist Party or YCL members. As the Roll Call of the British communist dead in Spain mounted, it affected all in the Party. Spain, recalled Mary Docherty, then a communist children’s organiser in Fife, ‘was a very nerve racking time for all of us. I was always afraid of reading the Daily Worker, afraid of whose name might be there either killed or missing.’87 ‘Many of the cream of our Party never came back’, Docherty added.88 ‘Young communists’, exclaimed the YCL National Council at the League’s Ninth National Congress in early 1937, ‘guard jealously the honour of your organization, so bravely upheld by our fighters in Spain. Enter the future inspired by their deathless example!’89 In the CPGB’s pantheon of martyred heroes, the British communist volunteers struck down in the fight to defend Spanish democracy and freedom in peril, ‘and whose graves are scattered all over Spain’, were granted an exalted place.

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Notes 1 Poem dedicated to H. Jonah Thomas, South Wales communist miner, following his death as a result of a pit accident. Workers’ Weekly, 24 April 1925, p. 7. 2 The ITS was a grant-aided, retraining scheme set up in 1928 for the purpose of relocating labour from unemployment ‘blackspots’ to areas of employment in the south. 3 Workers’ Life, 7 June 1929, p. 6, and Young Worker, 8 June 1929, p. 3. 4 Workers’ Life, 7 June 1929, p. 6. 5 Workers’ Life, 2 December 1927, p. 4. 6 Daily Worker, 6 December, p. 5. 7 See, for example, Workers’ Weekly, 9 June 1923, p. 6, 21 May 1926, p. 5, and 14 January 1927, p. 1; and Workers’ Life, 18 November 1927, p. 4. 8 Workers’ Weekly, 30 June 1923, p. 4. 9 Daily Worker, 2 June 1930, p. 4. 10 Workers’ Weekly, 20 June 1924, p. 6. 11 Workers’ Weekly, 14 December 1923, p. 2. 12 The Communist, 27 January 1923, p. 8. 13 Workers’ Weekly, 25 July 1924, p. 2. See also, Workers’ Weekly, 11 August 1923, p. 2. 14 Karl Marx, Wage Labour and Capital, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works in One Volume (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1968), p. 93. 15 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 342. 16 Ibid., p.367. 17 Franco Moretti, Signs Taken For Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms (London:Verso, 1983), pp. 90, 91, on the former reading. Mark Neocleous, ‘The political economy of the dead: Marx’s vampires’, History of Political Thought, 14:4 (Winter 2003), 668–84, on the latter interpretation. Neocleous points out that Marx saw capital as nothing but the accumulated, thus ‘dead’, labour of the past. 18 Communist Review, 2:12 (December 1930), p. 94. 19 Workers’ Weekly, 18 June 1926, p. 4, and Jim Arnison, Decades (Salford: Arnison, 1991), p. 4. 20 Workers’ Weekly, 21 July 1923, p. 4. 21 Ibid. 22 Workers’ Weekly, 29 February 1924, p. 4. 23 Workers’ Weekly, 7 March 1924, p. 6. 24 Workers’ Weekly, 15 October 1926, p. 2. 25 Workers’ Life, 6 May 1927, p. 4. 26 Workers’ Weekly, 28 September 1923, p. 4. 27 Nellie Connole, Leaven of Life: The Story of George Henry Fletcher (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1961), p. 188. 28 Young Worker, 22 October 1927, p. 1. 29 Daily Worker, 14 April 1930, p. 5. 30 Workers’ Weekly, 16 May 1924, p. 4. 31 Workers’ Life, 25 February 1927, p. 4. 32 Daily Worker, 9 September 1933, p. 6. 33 The New Line: Documents of the Tenth Congress of the CPGB, Bermondsey, London, 19–22 January 1929, p. 33. 34 Workers’ Weekly, 11 July 1924, p. 4. 35 Daily Worker, 12 February 1931, p. 2. 36 Ibid.

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37 Daily Worker, 6 August 1931, p. 4. 38 Lewis Jones, Communist Party Biographical Project Prosopographical Database. 39 Mentioned in the Foreword to the 1978 edition of Lewis Jones, We Live (London: Lawrence & Wishart, [1939] 1978), p. 1. 40 See, Daily Worker, 8 September 1933, p. 3, and 9 September 1933, p. 6. 41 Daily Worker, 13 September 1933, p. 3. 42 The Communist, 20 August 1921, p. 9. 43 Jack Murphy, New Horizons (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1941), p. 119. 44 The Communist, 20 August 1921, p. 9. 45 NMLH. CP/IND/MURP/01/02. MS. Molly Murphy, Nurse Molly. Autobiography, n.d., p. 99 46 Ernie Benson, To Struggle is to Live: A Working Class Autobiography, Volume 2: 1927–1971: Starve or Rebel (Newcastle: People’s Publications, 1980), p. 79. 47 Barry McLoughlin, ‘Visitors and victims: British Communists in Russia between the Wars’, in John McIlroy, Kevin Morgan and Alan Campbell (eds), Party People, Communist Lives: Explorations in Biography (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2001), pp. 210–30. 48 Bas Barker and Lynda Straker, Free But Not Easy (Matlock: Derbyshire County Council, 1989), p. 65. The meetings’ venue was Barkers’ Pool, alongside Sheffield City Hall. 49 Ibid. 50 MacManus’s comments were recalled by Tom Bell. See Thomas Bell, Pioneering Days (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1941), p. 95. 51 Ibid., p. 96. 52 Ibid. 53 The Communist, 27 January 1923, p. 8. 54 Ibid. 55 The South Wales communist Morgan Williams, for example, ‘made it very clear to his daughter’ that ‘there’s to be no Parson in my funeral’. As told by Edgar Evans. See, SWML. AUD/213. Interview of Edgar Evans, interviewed by Hywel Francis and David Smith, 14 July 1973. 56 Account of the burial in Ernie Trory, Between the Wars: Recollections of a Communist Organiser (London: Crabtree Press, 1974), p. 23. See also, Daily Worker, 1 November 1930, p. 2. 57 For some accounts, see Workers’ Weekly, 19 May 1923, p. 2, 9 May 1924, p. 4, 23 January 1926, p. 3, 18 June 1926, p. 4, 6 July 1928, p. 4; and Daily Worker, 2 January 1933, p. 2, 14 March 1934, p. 4, and 23 October 1936, p. 6. 58 Workers’ Weekly, 24 April 1925, p. 7. 59 Workers’ Life, 14 October 1927, p. 2. 60 Stuart Macintyre, Little Moscows: Communism and Working-class Militancy in Inter-War Britain (London: Croom Helm, c.1980), p. 16. 61 Daily Worker, 23 August 1934, p. 3. 62 Workers’ Weekly, 19 November 1926, p. 4. 63 Daily Worker, 23 August 1934, p. 3. 64 Daily Worker, 5 November 1930, p. 2. 65 The Communist Review, 2:2 (December 1921), pp. 134–5. 66 Ibid. 67 Account in John Mahon, Harry Pollitt:A Biography (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976), p. 92. 68 Workers’ Weekly, 22 February 1924, p. 4. 69 Bell, Pioneering Days, p. 96. 70 The Communist Review, 2:2 (December 1921), pp. 134–5. 71 Workers’ Life, 4 March 1927, p. 1, and 11 March 1927, p. 1. 72 Ibid.

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73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

82 83 84 85 86

87 88 89

Ibid. Ibid. Bell, Pioneering Days, p. 96. Workers’ Weekly, 7 March 1924, p. 6. Young Worker, 22 October 1927, p. 1. Workers’ Life, 4 March 1927, p. 2. Daily Worker, 29 January 1931, p. 4. The Communist Review, 2:2 (December 1921), p. 134. The CPGB’s fascist rivals called the dead to aid the living also. See Thomas Linehan, ‘The British Union of Fascists as a totalitarian movement and political religion’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 5:3 (Winter 2004), 415. Fascism even made a cult of death. See Mark Neocleous, ‘Long live death! Fascism, resurrection, immortality’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 10:1 (February 2005), 1–19. The Communist, April 1927, p. 100. Workers’ Life, 17 February 1928, p. 1. Workers’ Life, 13 January 1928, p. 2. Workers’ Weekly, 20 November 1925, p. 4. In The Communist, 6 August 1921, p. 4, for example, there is a drawing of a half-naked, scourged and evidently dying worker bound to a stake under the title ‘The martyrdom of Labour’, which draws on this symbolism. Mary Docherty, A Miner’s Lass: Memoirs by Mary Docherty (Preston: M. Docherty, 1992), pp. 141–2. Ibid. p. 142. NMLH. 329.241. ‘We March to Victory’, Report of the National Council to the Ninth National Conference,Young Communist League. Covering the Period February 1936–April 1937, p. 24.

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Afterword

‘It is the simplest thing so hard to achieve’, goes the final line in Bertolt Brecht’s famous poem,‘Praise of Communism’.Yet many British communists between the Wars felt the striving to realise their communist vision worthwhile, even though ‘the patents of their nobility’ lay far into the future as Max Eastman put it. Looking back on a lifetime of revolutionary activism which incorporated virtually all of the interwar years as an activist for the British Communist Party, the then octogenarian Harry Young paused to pen some words in his autobiography under the heading ‘I Dedicate My Whole Life’, which have left a vivid sense of that life and experience: … This was to be my life’s work. Yes!, my whole existence will be concentrated on knowledge. I will be a dedicated revolutionary renouncing all stupid, transitory pleasures for the noble ideal of fighting for the emancipation of my class; the working class, and thereby leading humanity to socialism, the new world. Such are the vistas and anticipations of life when we are young. Looking back on it all today, after a long and eventful life I do not regret one iota of it. It has been packed with incident and experience, sometimes harrowing, at other times inspiring, and yet again some of it amusing – but never boring. I always gave it every ounce I’d got. (‘I Dedicate My Whole Life’. BUL. 2-858. MS. Harry Young, Harry’s Biography, p. 2.)

I hope that the reader will feel that this book has given some insight into the communist life and experience as it unfolded at the various stages in the life cycle. If this has been achieved then it will have fulfilled its objective.

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Select bibliography

It is unnecessary to duplicate all the material already cited in the notes, and thus the following does not include published proceedings, contemporary reports and pamphlets relating to the CPGB and the YCL. Unpublished primary sources In public repositories

Bodleian Library, Oxford Johnson-Pollard Collection St Pancras CPGB Local, minutes, circulars and correspondence British Library National Sound Archive, London Taped interviews, C609 Brunel University Library, London Autobiographies of the working class Arthur Collinson, One Way Only Hymie Fagan, An Autobiography Harry Young, Harry’s Biography National Museum of Labour History, Communist Archive, Manchester Margot Kettle Papers. Recollections and memoirs of: Peggy Aprahamian Frieda Brown Gabriel ‘Bill’ Carritt Henry Fern Elsie Gollan Arnold Kettle Margot Kettle Jean MacGibbon John Maynard Smith Jessie Taylor Murdoch Taylor

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Marie Teller Meg Wintringham Other autobiographical sources: Cox, I. (Untitled) Crawfurd, H. (Untitled) Jenkins, M., Prelude to Better Days Murphy, M., Nurse Molly Russell, R., They Think I Lost: Conclusions From a Communist Life Wilson, D. A., Letter to John Atfield Miscellaneous: John Gollan biography Party Individuals Russian State Archive, Moscow Comintern Archive Comintern proceedings, reports and other files relating to the British Party, RC495/38 RC495/100 Tate Gallery Archive, London Papers relating to the Artists International Association, AIA File, 7043

Oral sources

South Wales Miners’ Library, Swansea Interviews: Phil Abrahams Tom Adlam Jake Brookes Idris Cox Ben Davies Edgar Evans Mrs John Morgan Evans Dai Francis Stanislau Maximillian Goldberg Harry Howell Len Jeffreys Mavis Llewellyn Will Paynter Will Picton Mel Thomas Norman and J. B. Thomas

203

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Published primary sources Newspapers and journals

Challenge The Communist Communist Review Country Standard Daily Worker The Labour Monthly Left Review Modern Quarterly New Writing The Plebs Sunday Worker Workers’ Life Workers’ Weekly Young Worker Autobiographical books

Arnison, J., Decades (Salford: Arnison, 1991). Barker, B. and L. Straker, Free But Not Easy (Matlock: Derbyshire County Council, 1989). Bell, T., Pioneering Days (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1941). Benson, E., To Struggle is to Live: A Working-Class Autobiography,Volume 2: 1927–1971: Starve or Rebel (Newcastle: People’s Publications, 1980). Braddock, J. and B. Braddock, The Braddocks (London: MacDonald, 1963). Cockburn, C., I, Claud (London: Penguin, 1967). Copeman, F., Reason in Revolt (London: Blandford Press, 1948). Darke, B., The Communist Technique in Britain (London: Penguin, 1952). Dash, J., Good Morning Brothers! (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1969). Docherty, M., A Miner’s Lass: Memoirs by Mary Docherty (Preston: M. Docherty, 1992). Gallacher, W., The Rolling of the Thunder (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1947). Green, N., A Chronicle of Small Beer:The Memoirs of Nan Green (Nottingham: Trent Books, 2004). Groves, R., The Balham Group: How British Trotskyism Began (London: Pluto Press, 1974). Haldane, C., Truth Will Out (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1949). Hannington, W., Never On Our Knees (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1967). Hardy, G., Those Stormy Years: Memoirs of the Fight for Freedom on Five Continents (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1956). Harman, C. (ed.), The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner (London, Chatto & Windus, 1994). Hobsbawm, E., Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (London: Allen Lane, 2002). Hodge, H., It’s Draughty in Front:The Autobiography of a London Taxi Driver (London: Michael Joseph, 1938). Holt, W., I Haven’t Unpacked: An Autobiography (London: George G. Harrap, 1949). Horne, H., All the Trees Were Bread and Cheese:The Making of a Rebel (Bedfordshire: Owen Hardisty, 1998). Horner, A., Incorrigible Rebel (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1960). Hyde, D., I Believed:The Autobiography of a British Communist (London: Heinmann, 1952). Jackson, T. A., Solo Trumpet (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1986). Jacobs, J., Out of the Ghetto: My Youth in the East End: Communism and Fascism 1913–1939 (London, Janet Simon, 1978). Jones, J., Unfinished Journey (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1937).

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Kane, J. and B. Kane, No Wonder We Were Rebels:The Kane Story (Doncaster: Askew, n.d.). McCarthy, M., Generation in Revolt (London: Heinemann, 1953). MacColl, E., Journeyman (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1990) . MacDougal, I. (ed.), Militant Miners: Recollections of John McArthur, Buckhaven; and Letters, 1924-26, of David Proudfoot, Methil, to G. Allen Hutt (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1981). MacDougal (ed.), Voices From Work and Home: Personal Recollections of Working Life and Labour Struggles in the Twentieth Century by Scots Men and Women (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 2000). MacEwan, M., The Greening of a Red (London: Pluto Press, 1991). McShane, H. and J. Smith, Harry McShane: No Mean Fighter (London: Pluto Press, 1978). Meynell, F., My Lives (New York: Random House, 1971). Moffat, A., My Life with the Miners (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1965). Montagu, I., The Youngest Son: Autobiographical Sketches (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1970). Murphy, J., New Horizons (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1941). Paynter, W., My Generation (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1972). Piratin, P., Our Flag Stays Red (London: Thames, 1948). Pollitt, H., Serving My Time: An Apprenticeship to Politics (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1940). Pountney, E., For the Socialist Cause:The Class Struggle in the Time of My Forebears and Myself (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1973). Stewart, B., Breaking the Fetters:The Memoirs of Bob Stewart (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1967). Stratton, H., To Anti-Fascism By Taxi (Port Talbot: Alun Books, 1984). Trory, E., Between the Wars: Recollections of a Communist Organiser (London: Crabtree Press, 1974). Utley, F., Lost Illusion (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1972). Watters, F., Being Frank:The Memoirs of Frank Watters (Doncaster, Frank Watters, 1992). West, A., One Man in His Time: A Personal Story of this Revolutionary Century (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969). Wicks, H., Keeping My Head:The Memoirs of a British Bolshevik (London: Socialist Platform, 1992). Other

Ackland, V., Country Conditions (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1936). Fox, R., The Novel and the People (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1937). Day Lewis, C., The Mind in Chains: Socialism and the Cultural Revolution (London: Frederick Muller, 1937). Lindsay, J., A Short History of Culture (London: Gollancz, 1939). Paul E., and C. Paul, Proletcult (London: Leonard Parsons, 1921). Rothman, B., The 1932 Kinder Scout Trespass (Altrincham: Willow Publishing, 1982). Sinfield, G., The Workers’ Sports Movement (London: CPGB, c.1927). Upward, E., In The Thirties (London: Quartet Books, 1978). Secondary sources Biographies

Connole, N., Leaven of Life: The Story of George Henry Fletcher (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1961). Darlington, R., The Political Trajectory of J. T. Murphy (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998). Docherty, M. (ed.), Auld Bob Selkirk: A Man in a Million (Cowdenbeath: M. Docherty, 1996). Frow, E. and R. Frow, Bob and Sarah Lovell: Crusaders for a Better Society (Salford: Working Class Movement Library, 1983). Harrison, S., Good to be Alive:The Story of Jack Brent (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1954).

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Herbert, M. and E.Taplin (eds), Born With a Book in His Hand:A Tribute to Edmund Frow 1906–1997 (Salford: North West Labour History Group, 1998). Hill, M., Red Roses for Isabel (London: May Hill, 1982). Knox W., (ed.), Scottish Labour Leaders, 1918–1939 (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1984). Mahon, J., Harry Pollitt: A Biography (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976). McIlroy, J., K. Morgan and A. Campbell (eds), Party People, Communist Lives: Explorations in Biography (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2001). Morgan, K., Harry Pollitt (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993). Sloan, P. (ed.), John Cornford: A Memoir (London: Jonathan Cape, 1938). Squires, M., Saklatvala: A Political Biography (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990). Torr, D., Tom Mann and his Times (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1956). Other

The Communist Party Biographical Project Prosopographical Database. Dictionary of Labour Biography. Other secondary books and articles

Almond, G., The Appeals of Communism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954). Andrews, G., N. Fishman and K. Morgan (eds), Opening the Books: Essays in the Social and Cultural History of the British Communist Party (London: Pluto Press, 1995). Beckett, F., The Enemy Within:The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party (London: Merlin Press, 1998). Branson, N., History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1927–1941 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1985). Bruley, S., Leninism, Stalinism and the Women’s Movement in Britain, 1920–1939 (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1986). Callaghan, J., Rajani Palme Dutt:A Study in British Stalinism (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1993). Callaghan, J., The Far Left in British Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). Campbell, A., The Scottish Miners, 1874–1939 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). Cohen, G. and K. Morgan, ‘Stalin’s sausage machine: British students at the International Lenin School, 1926–37’, Twentieth Century British History, 13 (2002), 327–55. Cornell, R., Revolutionary Vanguard: The Early Years of the Communist Youth International, 1914–1924 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982). Croft, A., Red Letter Days: British Fiction in the 1930s (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990). Croft, A. (ed.), A Weapon in the Struggle (London: Pluto, 1998). Croucher, R., We Refuse to Starve in Silence: A History of the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, 1920–46 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1987). Cunningham, V., British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). Dewar, H., Communist Politics in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1976). Eaden, J. and D. Renton, The Communist Party of Great Britain Since 1920 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002). Fishman, N., The British Communist Party and the Trade Unions 1933–45 (London: Scolar Press, 1994). Francis, H. and D. Smith, The Fed: A History of the South Wales Miners in the Twentieth Century (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1980). Hinton, J., The First Shop Stewards’ Movement (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1973). Hogenkamp, B., Deadly Parallels: Film and the Left in Britain 1929–39 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1986). Hunt, K. and M. Worley, ‘Rethinking British Communist Party women in the 1920s’, Twentieth Century British History, 15:1 (2004), 1–27.

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Jones, S.,‘Sport, politics and the Labour movement; the British Workers’ Sports Federation, 1923–1935’, British Journal of Sports History, 2:2 (1985), 154–78. Jones, S., Workers at Play: A Social and Economic History of Leisure (London: Routledge, 1986). Kaplan, J. and L. Shapiro, Red Diapers: Growing Up in the Communist Left (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998). Kendall, W., The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, 1900–21 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969). Klugmann, J., History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Volume 1: Formation and Early Years 1919–1924 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1969). Klugmann, J., History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1925–1927,Volume 2:The General Strike (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1969). Krüger, A. and J. Riordan, The Story of Worker Sport (Leeds: Human Kinetics, 1996). Laybourn, K., and D. Murphy, Under the Red Flag: A History of Communism in Britain, c. 1849–1991 (Stroud: Sutton, 1999). Macfarlane, L., The British Communist Party: Its Origins and Development Until 1929 (London: MacGibbon & Kee)1966). Macintyre, S., Little Moscows: Communism and Working-Class Militancy in Inter-War Britain (London: Croom Helm, 1980). Macintyre, S., Proletarian Science: Marxism in Britain, 1917–1933 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1986). Margolies, D., Christopher Caudwel, Marxism and Culture (London: Goldsmith College, 1989). Margolies, D. and M. Joannov (eds), Heart of the Heartless World: Essays in Cultural Resistance in Memory of Margot Heinemann (London: Pluto Press, 1995). McDermott, K. and J. Agnew, The Comintern:A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin (London: MacMillan, 1996). Miles, Andy, ‘Workers’ Education: the Communist Party and the Plebs League in the 1920s’, History Workshop Journal, 18 (Autumn 1984), 102–14. Mishler, P., Raising Reds:The Young Pioneers, Radical Summer Camps, and Communist Political Culture in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). Morgan, K., Against Fascism and War: Ruptures and Continuities in British Communist Politics, 1934–41 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989). Morgan, K., Labour Legends and Russian Gold (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2006). Morgan, K., G. Cohen and A. Flinn (eds), Agents of the Revolution: New Biographical Approaches to the History of International Communism in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005). Morgan, K., G. Cohen and A. Flinn (eds), Communists and British Society 1920–1991 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 2005). Morris L, and R. Radford, The Story of the Artists’ International Association, 1933–1953 (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1983). Newton, K., The Sociology of British Communism (London: Allen Lane, 1969). Pelling, H., The British Communist Party: a Historical Profile (London: A. & C. Black, 1958). Rafeek, N., ‘Rose Kerrigan, 1903–1995’, Scottish Labour History Journal, 31 (1996), 72–84. Roberts, E., The Anglo-Marxists: a Study in Ideology and Culture (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997). Rose, J., The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). Samuel, R., ‘The lost world of British Communism’, parts 1–3, New Left Review, 154, 156 and 165 (1985–7). Samuel, R., E. MacColl and S. Cosgrove (eds), Theatres of the Left 1880–1935:Workers’ Theatre Movements in Britain and America (London: Routledge, 1985). Simon B. (ed.), The Search for Enlightenment: The Working Class and Adult Education in the Twentieth Century (Leicester: National Institute of Adult Continuing Education, 1992).

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Steinberg, D., ‘The Workers’ Sport Internationals 1920–28’, Journal of Contemporary History, 13:2 (April 1978), 233–51. Thompson, W., The Good Old Cause: British Communism, 1920–1991 (London: Pluto, 1992). Thorpe, A., The British Communist Party and Moscow, 1920–43 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Thorpe, A, ‘The membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1920–1945’, The Historical Journal, 43:3 (2000), 777–800. Weitz, E., Creating German Communism: From Popular Protests to Socialist State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). Wheeler, R., ‘Organized sport and organized labour: the Workers’ Sports Movement’, Journal of Contemporary History, 13 (April 1978), 191–210. Wood, N., Communism and British Intellectuals (London: Victor Gollancz, 1959). Woodhouse, M. and B. Pearce, Essays on the History of Communism in Britain (London: New Park, 1975). Worley, M., ‘For a proletarian culture: Communist Party culture in the Third Period, 1928–1935’, Socialist History, 18 (2000). Worley, M., Class Against Class:The Communist Party in Britain Between the Wars (London: I. B.Tauris, 2002) . Unpublished material

Gabbidon, C. M., ‘Party life: an examination of the branch life of the Communist Party of Great Britain between the wars’ (D Phil thesis, Sussex University, 1991). Waite, M., ‘Young people and formal people activity: a case study. Young people and Communist politics in Britain 1920–1991’ (M Phil thesis, University of Lancaster, 1992).

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Index

Note: literary works can be found under authors’ names; ‘n.’ after a page reference indicates the number of a note on that page. Abrahams, Phil 131, 136 Ackland, Valentine 173 Aid for Spain 73 alcohol, CPGB and 135–7 Arnison, Jim 178 Arnot, Robin Page 68, 107, 169 Artists’ International Association (AIA) 171 Austen, Jane 175 Barke, James 177 Barker, Bas 73, 117, 170 Bell, Tom 4, 74, 75, 123, 136, 192, 194, 195 Bennett, Arnold 173 Benson, Ernie 72, 83, 169 birth control, CPGB and 18–20 Blatchford, Robert 117 ‘body communism’ 115, 121–4, 128 ‘body fascism’ 124 ‘Bolshevisation’ 1, 105, 106, 108, 167 of the CPGB 93–6 of the YCL 45–9, 51 Bond, Ralph (‘Arthur West’) 149–50 Boswell, James 125, 170 Boughton, Rutland 161, 162–3, 164 Boy Scouts 30, 33, 39, 49, 54–5 Braddock, Bessie 73, 80 Branson, Noreen 206 Brecht, Bertolt 201 Brent, Jack 101, 103

British Socialist Party (BSP) 1, 94, 134–5 British Workers’ Sports Federation (BWSF) 5, 56–7, 117, 118–22, 123, 138, 149, 151, 152, 154, 155, 156 Brontë, Emily 174 Wuthering Heights (1847) 174–5 Brown, Isabel 19, 78, 79, 98, 104 Browne, Stella 16, 18–9, 20 Bukharin, Nikolai 61, 92 Burns, Elinor 68, 69, 81 Burns, Emile 68, 69, 81 Bush, Alan 172 Butler, Samuel 174 Way of all Flesh,The (1903) 174–5 Callaghan, John 94 Campbell, Alan ix Campbell, Annie 68, 77 Carritt, Gabriel ‘Bill’ 82, 139 Central Labour College (CLC) 167 see also National Council of Labour Colleges (NCLC) Chartism and Chartist precedents 4, 23, 80, 151, 192 chess, CPGB and 16, 149 Church Lads’ Brigades 30, 49, 54 cinema, CPGB and 146, 149–50 Clarion Cyclists 4, 117–18, 151–2 Clarion Field Clubs 154 Clarion, The 117 ‘Class against Class’ (‘Third Period’, 1928–35) 3, 11, 15, 16, 18, 35–6, 37, 38, 58, 59, 84, 105, 120, 134, 149, 154, 195

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Cohen, Gidon ix Cohen, Rose 191 communist children’s movement 3, 24, 27–41 passim, 50, 59 attitude to ‘bourgeois’ children’s organisations 30 attitude to schools 31–3 attitude to socialist children’s organisations 30–1 children’s books 22–4 see also Trease, Geoffrey communist children’s newspapers Drum, The 36, 38 Worker’s Child, The 22, 34 Communist Children’s Sections (1923–25) 28, 29 Young Comrades’ League (1925–30) 29–37 passim Young Pioneers (1930–39) 37–40 Young Pioneers’ League (1925) 28–9 Communist International (Comintern) 1, 2–3, 46–8, 50, 58, 59, 81, 92–3, 94, 102, 119, 132, 167, 168, 194 see also Zinoviev, Grigorii Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) 92, 104–5 Communist Youth International (CYI) 19, 46–8, 51, 61, 133, 139 Condon, Michael 120, 123, 154 see also British Workers’ Sports Federation (BWSF) cooperative movement 30, 59, 171, 175, see also Owenism and Owenite precedents; Woodcraft Folk Copeman, Fred 68, 73, 105 Cornford, John 173 cosmetics, CPGB and 139–42 Country Standard 155–6 Cox, Idris 73, 76–7, 82 Crawfurd, Helen 97, 103, 178 Croft, Andy 206 cycling, CPGB and 4, 53, 119, 146, 147, 151–2 Darke, Bob 69, 71, 72, 76, 79, 82, 134 Dash, Jack 122 death rituals, CPGB and 191–5 death rituals, CPSU and 104–5, 194 Dickens, Charles 175, 178 Dimitrov, Georgi 59 divorce, CPGB and 75, 133

Dobb, Maurice 68, 139, 161–2, 167, 176 Docherty, Mary 30, 39, 40, 197 Drum, The 36 Duncan, Kath 82 Duncan, Sandy 82 Dutt, Rajani Palme 68, 82, 92, 93, 134–5 education, CPGB and 166–70 see also Lenin Schools Engels, Frederick 74, 103 Fabianism 4, 154, 163–4, 175 Fagan, Hymie 139 Fern, Henry 104 ‘First Period’ (1920–22) 2 Fitton, James 125, 170 Fletcher, George Henry 69, 76, 81 Flinn, Andrew ix Fox, Ralph 162, 173, 174–5, 176 Gallacher, Willie (MP) 78, 102, 136, 195 gambling, CPGB and 134–5 Geddes, Alec 80, 190 Geddes, Effie 36, 37, 39, 80, 189, 190, 191 gender profile (CPGB) 97 General Strike 34, 51, 79, 83, 97–8, 105, 120, 186, 188 Gollan, John 59, 123, 136 Gorky, Maxim 178 Green, Nan 24, 132, 153, 154 Greenwood, Walter 176 Grosz, George 125 Guild of Youth (ILP) 49–50, 59, 62n.21, 148 Haldane, Charlotte 68, 69, 75, 81–2, 133 Haldane, Professor J. B. S. 68, 69, 75, 82 Hanley, James 176 Hannington, Wal 78, 178, 186 Hardy, George 81 Hardy, Thomas 174, 178 Jude the Obscure (1895) 174–5 Holland, James 170 Holt, William 96, 99, 101, 107 Horne, Harold 75 Horner, Arthur 69, 76, 131 Horrabin, Frank 68, 167, 168

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Horrabin, Winifred 68, 167, 168 housecraft, CPGB and 17–18, 77 Hunt, Karen 97 Hutt, George Allen 68, 96, 101, 106–8 Huxley, Aldous 175 Eyeless in Gaza (1936) 175 Hyde, Douglas 73–4, 96, 99, 101, 117, 130, 132 Independent Labour Party (ILP) 4, 49–50, 59, 69, 80, 135, 149, 195 see also Guild of Youth (ILP) Industrial Transference Scheme (1928) 186 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) 31 International Brigade 68, 69, 73, 81, 82, 101, 197 International Class War Prisoners’ Aid (ICWPA) 85 Inkpin, Albert 82, 93, 106 Inkpin, Harry 82, 93 Jackson, T. A. ‘Tommy’ 33, 78, 104, 167, 173, 178 Jacobs, Joe 74, 83, 138–9 Jenkins, Mick 20, 39, 54–5, 57, 96–7, 104, 155, 178 Jones, Jack 71–2, 79 Jones, Lewis 177, 190 Kane, Jock 68, 73 Kerrigan, Rose 68, 78 Kettle, Arnold 100, 101 Kinder Scout mass trespass (1932) 156 Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Communist Party of Germany, KPD) 59, 106, 129, 195 Labour Church movement 102 Labour League of Youth (Labour Party) 49, 59, 62.n21, 148 Labour Party 59, 117, 119, 135 see also Labour League of Youth Lancashire weavers’ strike (1932) 96–7 Lawrence, D.H. 155, 173 Lawton, Linda ix Laybourn, Keith x Left Review 125, 173–4 Lenin Schools 73, 102–3, 111n.68, 169, 170

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 22–3, 76, 81, 92–3, 104, 105, 123, 169, 194 Lewis, Cecil Day 153, 173 Liebknecht, Karl 50, 57, 196 Lindsay, Jack 173 literary modernism, CPGB and 173, 175–6 literature, CPGB and 166, 172–8 ‘Little Moscow’ 3, 40, 57, 84, 98, 99 Llewellyn, Mavis 84 Lloyd, A.L. 172 London, Jack 178 Lovell, Bob 85 Lucerne Sport International 118 Lunacharsky, Anatoly 165 Luxemburg, Rosa 76 McArthur, John 79, 81, 98–9 McCarthy, Margaret 47, 61, 73, 82, 85, 97, 99–100, 101, 103–4, 108, 117, 130, 132, 133, 139, 169–70, 178 MacColl, Ewan 78, 81, 102, 103, 157, 172 McIlroy, John ix McLaine, William 53, 54, 161, 164, 167 MacManus, Arthur 13, 68, 191, 192, 195–6 McShane, Harry 68, 104, 137 Mann, Tom 37, 78, 178 marriage, CPGB and 67–79, 130–3 see also divorce, CPGB and Marx House Schools 169 Marx, Karl 76, 80, 95, 104, 116–17, 166, 169, 185, 187 Maxton, James 195 membership figures and recruitment performance (CPGB) 92–3, 97, 105–8 miners’ strike (1926) 34, 95, 97, 105, 108, 186 see also General Strike Moffat, Abe 78, 82, 98 Moffat, Alex 13, 73, 82, 98 Moffat, Alice 13, 73 Moffat, Jim 82 Montagu, Ivor 134 Morgan, Kevin ix, 82, 83 Morris, William 163 mothercraft, CPGB and 5, 11–12, 13–17, 18, 19–21 Murphy, Jack 68, 69, 76, 78, 95, 96, 103, 108, 128–9, 136, 147

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Murphy, Molly 21, 68, 69, 76, 78–9, 96 music, CPGB and 171–2, 192, 194 National Council of Labour Colleges (NCLC) 167–8 National Minority Movement 78 National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM) 78, 178, 186 Newbold, John Turner Walton (MP) 68, 139, 167, 168 Ord, Jimmie 48, 68, 99 Owenism and Owenite precedents 4, 134–5 see also cooperative movement parentcraft, CPGB and 20–4 Paul, Cedar 16, 21, 68, 69, 162, 165–6, 167 Paul, Eden 68, 162, 165–6, 167 Paynter, Will 84, 85, 101, 130–1, 133, 136–7 Pearce, Albert 116, 117, 188, 190, 193, 195–6 personal appearance, CPGB and 139–42 personal hygiene, CPGB and 128, 137–8, 140 Picton, Will 131, 133 Plebs’ League and The Plebs 165, 166–8 ‘political religion’, CPGB and 2, 93, 102–5, 131 Pollitt, Harry 23–4, 37, 58–9, 68, 69, 78, 80, 82, 93, 104, 107, 156, 194, 195 Pollitt, Marjorie 68, 69, 98 ‘Popular Front against fascism and war’ (1935–39) 3, 18, 37–8, 46, 59–60, 95, 105, 140, 155 Postgate, Raymond 161, 166, 167, 168 Pountney, Ernie 78 Proletarian Sunday Schools 31 proletcult 5, 164–79 passim Proudfoot, David 96, 98, 101, 106–7, 108 rambling and camping, CPGB and 20, 39, 53, 56, 119, 122, 146, 153–7 red baptism 75–6 red families 67, 79–86 Red Sport International (RSI) 119 ‘Red Wheelers’ 4, 152

Reed, John 194 Renton, David x Rickword, Edgell 173 Rothstein, Andrew 80–1 Rothstein, Theodore 80–1 Ruskin College students’ strike (1909) 166–7 Ruskin, John 163 Russell, Ralph 68, 130 Russian Revolution (October 1917) 46, 123, 151, 162, 191 Rust, William 34, 48, 50, 51–2, 53–4, 58, 68, 75, 76, 107–8, 116, 117, 121, 144n.62, 148 Samuel, Raphael ix, 100 ‘Second Period’ (1923–28) see ‘United Front’ sexual propriety, CPGB and 128–9, 130–3, 142 Sharp, Cecil and the first English folk song revival 171 Sheffield Ramblers’ Rights Movement 156 Sinclair, Upton 172–3, 178 Sinfield, George 119, 121 see also British Workers’ Sports Federation (BWSF) Social Democratic Federation (SDF) 4, 81, 135–6, 188, 189 ‘social fascist’ see ‘Class against Class’ Socialist Labour Party (SLP) 1, 4, 75, 188 Socialist Prohibition Fellowship 136 Socialist Sunday Schools 30–1, 102 Socialist Workers’ Sport International (SWSI) 118 Soviet Union 37, 78, 80, 119, 122, 136–7, 189, 190–1 influences on CPGB 12, 16, 17–19, 22, 28, 31, 39–41, 46, 82, 122, 150, 151, 162, 165, 169, 178, 194–5 Spanish Civil War and Republican Spain 60, 61, 73, 81, 84, 173, 185, 190, 197 see also Aid for Spain; International Brigade ‘Spartacus Cycling Club’ 152 Spender, Stephen 173 sport, British communism and 115, 117–22

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see also British Workers’ Sports Federation (BWSF) sport, social-democratic tradition and 118, 119–20 Springhall, Dave 28, 29, 31–2, 52, 58 Stalin, Joseph, 18, 76, 104, 191 Stewart, Bob 68, 85, 95, 101–2, 136 Sunday Worker 80 Surrealist literature 175–6 Swingler, Randall 173 Tapsell, Walter 58, 119 Taylor, Murchoch 80, 82, 177 Teller, Marie 73, 80, 82 Thälmann, Ernst 76 ‘Third Period’ (1928–35) see ‘Class against Class’ Thorpe, Andrew x, 105 Trades Union Congress (TUC) 119, 195 Trease, Geoffrey 23 Trory, Ernie 72–3, 85, 96, 133–4, 137 ‘United Front’ (‘Second Period’, 1923–28) 2–3, 118, 195 United Mineworkers of Scotland (UMS) 5, 148, 157n.13 University Labour Federation 59 Upward, Edward 76, 173 Utley, Freda 16, 80, 103 Varney, Eric 190 vegetarianism, British communists and 123, 140 Watters, Frank 82 Weisel, Eli 5 West, Alick 68, 75, 173, 175–6

Wicks, Harry 121–2, 123 Wintringham, Tom 82 Woodcraft Folk 30, 42.n33, 171 see also cooperative movement Workers’ Bulletin 98 Worker’s Child, The 34 Workers’ Education Association (WEA) 167 Workers’ Music Association (WMA) 172 Workers’ Olympiads 118, 119 Workers’ Theatre Movement 40, 57, 149, 170 Worley, Matthew x, 97 Young Communist 45, 50 Young Communist League (YCL) 2, 22, 27, 28, 30, 33, 35, 39, 40, 45–61 passim, 67, 73, 81, 82, 83, 84, 115, 116, 118, 121–2, 123, 136, 138, 139, 146–7,148, 150–1, 154, 156, 177, 178, 186, 188, 190, 195, 197 attitude to ‘bourgeois’ youth organisations 49, 54–5 attitude to socialist youth organisations 49–50, 58, 59 ‘Brightening League life’ policy 54–8, 60–1 ‘Festival for Fitness’ (1937) 60 sport and 53, 56–7, 60, 117–22 see also ‘Bolshevisation’; Gollan, John; Rust, William Young Comrade, The 28, 30, 33, 36 Young, Harry 19, 68, 79, 133, 139, 201 Young Worker 28, 29, 32, 41, 50, 55, 59, 75, 152 Zinoviev, Grigorii 92, 93

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