COMMUNIST HISTORY
NETWORK NEWSLETTER
No 2, October 1996

Introduction

Following the generally encouraging response to the first of these newsletters, it is now hoped to put one out every six months. Thanks again to Jane Harden for putting together this one. Any short news items, conference reports or abstracts, books or suggestions of books for review (especially any not likely to be noticed elsewhere) and notes on work in progress will be gladlly received at the address below. Please contact me first about any longer items.

Kevin Morgan

Editor CHNN
Department of Government
University of Manchester
Manchester
United Kingdom
M13 9PL

Contents

Announcements

• Popular Front Seminars
• Communist Oral History
• CPGB Dayschool
• John Saville Special Award

• Research on Alan Winnington
  Colin Holmes
• George Fullard, Sculptor (1923-1973)
  Gillian Whiteley
• The Communist Party and Industrial Militancy, 1964-74
  John McIlroy and Alan Campbell

• CPGB London District Archives
  Jo Stanley
• Unpublished Autobiography: Molly Murphy
  Ralph Darlington

• A Veritable Dynamo — Lloyd Ross and Australian Labour 1901-1987 Stephen Holt, reviewed by David Howell
• Un Parti Sous Influence — Le Parti Communiste Suisse, Une Section du Komintern, 1931 à 1939, Brigitte Studer, reviewed by Kevin Morgan
• Camaradas e Companheiros : História e Memória do PCB, Relume-Dumará, reviewed by Marco Aurelio Santana

• 'Communism and the Labour Movement', Scottish Labour History Society
  Douglas Allen]
• 'Sabotage is Suspected', Naval Docklands Society
  David Turner
• 'Getting the Balance Right', Socialist History Society
  Mike Squires

Announcements

POPULAR FRONT SEMINARS: A series of seminars on the Popular Front, part of a programme on the international communist movement, is being held on Fridays at 5.30 p.m. in the British Local History Room, Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, Malet St., London WC1E 6BT. Seminars include David Margolies, 'Left Review & problems of cultural policy in the Popular Front' (18 October); Robert Radford, 'The Artists' International Association' (1 November); Sarah Wilson, 'Art & the French Popular Front' (15 November); Michael Corris, 'Reinstalling "disorder & insensitivity": Ad Reinhardt & the modernist left' (29 November); O.K. Werckmeister, 'Picasso's Guernica & the cultural policy of the Popular Front in France & Spain' (13 December). Further information from Rick Halpern, Dept. of History, UCL, Gower St, London WC1E 6BT.

COMMUNIST ORAL HISTORY: The Communist Oral History Project is producing a second newsletter, available in December, which can be obtained by sending 50p and an SAE to Mike Squires, 20 Elmfield Road, London SW17 8AL. The project is also holding a life-history day school for communists and ex-communists at the Marx Memorial Library, Sunday 30 March 1997, 10.30 am-4 pm. The tutor will be Jo Stanley, who teaches life history at the University of Sussex, and donations to cover costs will be taken on the day. Further information and bookings c/o Mike Squires. Contributions are badly needed to assist the project in its work, which is almost entirely self-funded, and will be gratefully received at the same address.

CPGB DAYSCHOOL: Oxford University Department for Continuing Education is holding a day school on the CPGB on Saturday 19 April 1997. The speakers will be Andy Croft, Nina Fishman, Kevin Morgan and Andrew Thorpe. Further details and booking form from OUDCE, 1 Wellington Square, Oxford OX1 2JA (01865-270308).

JOHN SAVILLE SPECIAL AWARD: To celebrate John Saville's 80th birthday, the Lipman-Miliband Trust is to make a special award of £3,000 for a project reflecting one or more aspects of John Saville's life. The application deadline is 31 December 1996 and further details can be obtained from: The John Saville Award, Journal of Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, Keele University, ST5 5BG.

Work in Progress

Alan Winnington

Alan Winnington died in East Germany on 26 November 1983. He was 73. He was born in London in 1910 and served as press officer of the CPGB before becoming chief sub-editor on the Daily Worker and then one of its correspondents. Winnington travelled to the Far East in 1948 and accompanied the People's Liberation Army in its march to Peking. In 1950 he went to Korea to report on the war and its impact, a task which occupied him until 1954. In 1954 renewal of his British passport was refused. It was alleged that he had engaged in the interrogation of British POWs. Moreover, his claim that germ warfare had been used against the communists caused indignation in some western circles. The decision against renewal was not lifted until 1968. Meanwhile, after a period in Peking, Winnington had made his base in East Berlin where he settled in 1960.

Apart from his newspaper reports, Winnington produced pamphlets, such as I Saw the Truth in Korea (1950). He engaged in travel and anthropological research, an interest revealed in his Slaves of the Cool Mountains (1950). He wrote detective stories, including Catseyes (1967) and Berlin Halt (1970). Winnington also left a posthumous autobiography called Breakfast with Mao (1980).

He was one of those remarkable figures who attached himself to communism when still young and served it on the international rather than the domestic scene for the remainder of his life. More needs to be known of his activities and at present I am collecting information on all aspects of his career. Anyone who can offer any leads, however slight or tenuous, is encouraged to contact me at the Department of History, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, S10 2TN.  

Kevin McDermott

George Fullard, sculptor, 1923-1973

Fullard came from a politically active mining family in Sheffield: his father, a Communist who was blacklisted after organising a deputies' strike at the Nunnery Colliery, wrote plays for Sheffield Left Theatre Club. Fullard, himself, was active in the Young Communist League in the late 1930s and early 40s whilst he was at the Sheffield College of Art. After serving two years in a tank regiment and receiving near fatal injuries at Monte Cassino in 1944 he took up his place at the Royal College of Art in Ambleside. It seems that he never resumed membership of the Communist Party after the war, though, like many other writers and artists, he remained a committed socialist.

He felt that he could contribute more through his own artistic work — work which was underpinned by a political view but never in any overt or propagandistic way. He was very much involved with John Berger's circle throughout the 1950s. In the New Statesman and Nation and elsewhere, Berger championed his work, alongside the 'Kitchen Sink' artists and other 'famously unacceptable' realists (Berger's term). Around 1956-57, Fullard was part of the Geneva Club, an informal discussion group set up by Berger and others which met regularly in central London and was attended by various writers, artists and scientists including Randall Swingler, Professor Bernal, John Willett, Doris Lessing and Paul Hogarth.

Fullard's work was also part of 'Looking at People' in 1957 — the first exhibition of contemporary British art to travel to the Soviet Union since 1917. Investigations at the National Musuem of Labour History have provided evidence that Fullard had some connections with the Communist Party Artists Group's Realism, the short-lived journal which ran to six issues between 1955 and 1956. In the 1960s, Fullard went on to become a well-established young sculptor, working in the 'assemblage' tradition and exploring the theme of 'war' in a profoundly personal and distinctive way. He was Head of Sculpture at the Chelsea School of Art when he died in 1973. 

Importantly, Fullard's work, in the 1950s, was in sympathy with that of other artists and sculptors working in a humanist, figurative and 'realist' tradition — for example, Peter Peri, Ghisha Koenig and Betty Rea — and I am pursuing these connections as part of my work on Fullard. Having completed an MA in Sculpture Studies at the University of Leeds in 1995, with a substantial study of Fullard's work, I am now researching for a PhD. I have already contacted a number of Fullard's former friends, colleagues and students but I would welcome information from anyone who may be able to help with contacts, advice or support. 

Please contact: Gillian Whiteley, 115 School Road, Beighton, Sheffield, S19 6EG tel: (0114) 247 2325; or: via the Department of Fine Art, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT. 

Gillian Whiteley, University of Leeds

The CP and Industrial Militancy, 1964-1974

It is now almost a quarter of a century since the industrial militancy of the 1960s and 1970s began to subside in the face of the demise of the post-war boom, redundancies and factory closures, and the 'social contract' of Harold Wilson's 1974 Labour government. Time enough, perhaps, to at least begin to reconsider historically what was a unique and intriguing phenomenon in the decades since 1914. Assessed soberly, it was associated with a significant increase in union membership and density; important breakthroughs in recruiting women members and white collar workers; the extension of workplace organisation and industrial action to the public sector; the development of struggles amongst black workers; a strike wave marked by membership insurgency and the rediscovery of mass and flying pickets as well as new tactics such as factory occupations and work-ins; and the revival of the political strike against incomes policy and anti-union legislation.

The importance of what was then termed the 'new militancy' to industrial politics and to a labour historiography in which key figures judged 'the forward march of labour' to have been halted almost two decades earlier appears incontestable. Royden Harrison suggested: 'The labour unrest of 1970-74 was far more massive and incomparably more successful than its predecessor of 1910-14'. [1] Others saw the period as important in delivering limited gains in class consciousness. [2] Even Eric Hobsbawm interrupted his strictures on economism in the post-war years to enter the significant qualification 'with the exception of the great struggles of 1970-74'. [3] Eric might well have added 'and the struggles in 1969 against In Place of Strife'. He might have supplemented his delineation of the secular decline of Labour's role with the observation 'with the exception of 1966', when, of course, the Party polled a percentage of the vote as great as in 1945 and insignificantly less than at 'the climax of labourism' in 1951. If we are to begin to take the historical measure of the militancy we need to examine at the least the decade after 1964 rather than simply characterise it as a phenomenon of the early 1970s.

Recent work has not added significantly to earlier studies. Robert Taylor's survey of unions and politics since 1945, for example, was commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary British History. It presents a competent, well-rehearsed account of these years, but his focus (in common with much of the research associated with the Institute) is largely 'top-down'. It is almost completely dependent on secondary sources and scarcely takes forward the necessary historical tasks of interviewing protagonists and examining the documentary resources that are already available. Discussion of the roots of the militancy is limited to brief references to inflation, taxation policies and 'the spirit of 1968'. The book has little to say about the development of militancy: there is one sentence on the Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions (LCDTU) and nothing about the Communist Party. Taylor views the period somewhat one-sidedly as a time in which 'self-regarding sectionalism gathered pace with the erosion of notions of solidarity' and chides leaders like Jack Jones for his alleged failure to understand 'the resurgence of old style, acquisitive sectionalism'. [4]

More rigorous analysis is required with more detailed examination and explanation of developments amongst activists, in the workplace and in the unions, to complement the present pervasive emphasis on high politics and semi-automatic responses from below. We need to re-scrutinise earlier work on causation which suggested that inflation and state intervention centred on incomes policy had disturbed differentials, increased the transparency of wage determination and extended orbits of comparison within the working class. Most conventional industrial relations literature on these topics remains resolutely ahistorical. One serious attempt at historical study — the collection of essays edited by Terry and Edwards on shopfloor organisation in the West Midlands engineering industry in the post-war period — nevertheless is 'factory bound' and concentrates on the labour process to the neglect of politics. Although the editors acknowledge that 'in a desire to refute Cold War allegations of Communist agitation, academic analyses for many years shrank from acknowledging the importance of activists', they conclude that their 'case studies give no indication of Communist Party influence'. [5] In fact the essay by Steve Jefferys on Longbridge briefly acknowledges in its conclusion the role of around 20 CP shop stewards in building up shop floor organisation in the plant from the 1940s to the 1960s, but this issue is not centrally addressed in the body of his text. [6] 

The question of politics inside the unions at the local and district, as well as national, levels has generally been neglected. The growth of militancy is often noted in terms of the rise to leadership of Lawrence Daly (NUM), Hugh Scanlon (AEU) and Jack Jones (TGWU) and their political stances in relation to state policy. The internal political processes which produced this ascendancy, the internal interests they served, the internal political problems they negotiated, the existence of independent political bases inside the unions, go largely unanalysed. Similarly, there is little published work concerning the development of Broad Lefts and 'rank and file' organisations during this period, the trajectory of shop steward politics and the role of the Communist Party (CP) and other left groups in the unions.

The growth of a strain of political, solidaristic militancy which climaxed in the 1972 miners' strike and the campaign against the Industrial Relations Act seems to us to be of as great importance, and as deserving of analysis, as the commonly identified tendencies towards economism and sectionalism. In our research, we are seeking to examine the campaigns against the anti-union legislation of 1969-74 in their wider contexts. We want to explore in more detail the nature of the opposition within the unions, how it was constructed, the key factors which drove it and the agency of those who sought to broaden and politicise it.

There is little in the literature about the dynamics of how grievance over and opposition to state intervention and legislation emerged, how they were focused at the workplace and within union structures, and how they were translated into defiance. There is little about how those struggles which began briefly to transcend the sectionalism by which the period is so often characterised were generated. Describing the 1972 strikes in solidarity with the dockers imprisoned in Pentonville a few years later, the then General Secretary of the CP wrote: 'Within hours, tens of thousands downed tools, within a day the number rose to thousands. The strikes snowballed. Rank and file pressure for industrial action became irresistible'. [7] What is missing, if we reject spontaneism as an explanation, is any analysis of how, by whom, and where strike action was built, and where and why it wasn't.

Further attention is needed to the decline in militancy from the 1970s and its consequences. The relationship of industrial militancy and political change remains an unresolved issue in socialist analysis. We need to address again how the direct action which contributed to the downfall of the Heath government was followed in February 1974 by the lowest Labour vote since before the war and was accompanied by decline in the membership of the CP and insignificant growth in the membership of other left groupings. Debate as to whether the downturn in militancy could be explained by the 'bureaucratisation' of workplace organisation or by broader political factors has also been mothballed. Yet as with other issues raised by the labour unrest of the 1960s and 1970s, it is important to an understanding of post-war politics more generally and to contemporary prognoses of trade union renewal. 

The CP had no doubt as to the significance of the period:

'... the crisis of British capitalism extended and political consciousness amongst the working class grew. The class struggle reached an intensity beyond anything experienced in the post-war period if not in the entire history of British trade unionism'. [8]

The CP played an important role, although most accounts of its work in the unions during this period are fragmentary and impressionistic. For Francis Beckett, the 1960s and 1970s were the CP's 'best days' in the industrial field, a time when its influence in the unions was stronger than it had ever been. [9]

In unions such as the TGWU and the NUM, the Party wielded significant influence with its supporters constituting around a quarter of the national executive. In the AEU, it was strong at shop steward and district committee level, as well possessing representation on the small executive, and dominated TASS, the technical and supervisory section. Party members were entrenched in the leadership of smaller organisations such as the Sheet Metal Workers, the Constructional Engineering Union (federated with the AEU) and the Tobacco Workers. Direct influence was also increasing in the growing white collar unions such as ASTMS and NUT. The Party had either maintained, or in some cases developed, strong regional bases, notably amongst engineering workers in North London, Manchester, Sheffield and the West of Scotland, miners in Scotland, South Wales, Kent and, more recently, Yorkshire. There was a flowering of 'Broad Left' groups dominated by the Party, particularly in the AEU, TASS, ETU and UCATT, working around papers such as Engineering Voice, Flashlight, and the Power Worker.

The Party's industrial base, in specific regions and unions, was therefore still impressive. Its network of shop stewards meant it was able to lead or strongly influence important rank and file struggles, from the Roberts-Arundel strike in 1966 which was often seen as heralding the new militancy, to the work-in at UCS which symbolised its insurgent and confident mood. That two of the 'Pentonville Five' and one of the 'Shrewsbury Three' were CP members was only symbolic of the wider role played by the Party in hundreds of lesser disputes during these years. How factory branches operated remains unclear. Conferences in the 1960s reaffirmed their strategic importance but characterised them as a 'weak link' in the Party's work.

Nonetheless, the CP's direct influence in the high union politics to which it aspired was limited: Ken Gill was its sole representative on the TUC General Council. It sought to wield influence indirectly through its relationship with left-leaning, 'progressive' union leaders, a broad and porous category which included not only Jones and Scanlon but middle of the road elements such as Harry Urwin, Marie Patterson and Lord Briginshaw. Some writers, notably Willie Thompson, have stressed the fragility of Party power in the unions. It was, in his view, purchased at the price of a 'left unity' which compromised independence; it was based upon 'anodyne blandness and diplomatic evasion', and a determination to follow events and leaders rather than take political initiatives. [10] The influence of the CP's trade union Advisory Committees seems to have been small, even in relation to leading members such as Will Paynter, Eddie Marsden and Ken Gill — all of whom were at one time or another criticised by Party members for the positions they took on industrial issues. Some felt that the leading trade unionists 'had more input into the Party than the Party had into them'. [11]

Raphael Samuel has taken this point further, seeing in this period 'a retreat into trade unionism' and a 'flowering of workerism':

Industrial comrades were no longer obliged to show themselves 'politically active' by turning up at rallies and demonstrations or 'politically educated' by putting themselves through Party schools. The factory branches concentrated on more immediate questions — measured day work, for example, or productivity bargaining ... Membership drives were discontinued. Lunch-time propaganda meetings disappeared. Daily Worker sales dwindled. At best the factory comrades formed militant industrial mafias ... at worst they functioned as trade union electoral machines. [12]

This privileging of the industrial over the political is seen as bearing an industrial practice which in comparison with the trade union work of earlier generations of CP militants was circumscribed and depoliticised. In consequence, CP militants were assimilated to the ranks of trade union officialdom. The question of whether there was a marked change requires further investigation: certainly assimilation to officialdom had been under way since the 1930s, even if disrupted by the Cold War, and a tendency towards disjunction between industrial and political activities by CP members was visible throughout the post-war period. [13] Samuel seems on firmer ground when he argues that the way trade union work was conducted played a role in the later paralysing outbreaks of inner party conflict.

It seems unquestionable that primacy should have been given to the development and politicisation of militant trade unionism in this period, for it constituted the central dynamic of working class activity. Whether the approaches taken were the right ones is a more contentious issue. The major instrument of co-ordinating opposition to anti-union legislation was the LCDTU, established as a 'lobby organising committee' in 1966 with Jim Hiles as secretary and Kevin Halpin as chair, and sponsored by some 20 organisations, largely shop stewards' committees. It was supported by an increasing range of trade union bodies and came into its own from 1968, organising one day strikes against In Place of Strife in February and May 1969 and against the Industrial Relations Bill in December 1970. The LCDTU held a series of major conferences, with up to 1,500 delegates in attendance and a range of nationally known speakers such as Ray Buckton (ASLEF), Bill Keyes (SOGAT) and left MPs, which stimulated opposition to the legislation and to Heath's incomes policies. It provided a focus for opposition and a forum for disseminating CP policy. It was never intended to constitute a 'rank and file committee', a left-wing organising centre in the unions, nor a sustained democratic network of militants counterposed to the existing hierarchy. It never possessed any local organisation and its political programme reflected official union policies. It was criticised on these grounds from the left. Its parameters were essentially those of a Party policy which continued in the main to oppose 'rank and fileism' in favour of pressure on the official leadership, union electoralism and winning positions:

Militant struggles from below, far from creating difficulties for the official leaderships of unions, is of positive assistance to those trade union leaders who are actively fighting to advance the interests of their members. Such militancy and action by the membership strengthens the bargaining position of the official negotiators. Without such militancy and action, the left wing members on the Union Executives and the General Council of the TUC could never have shifted the Executives and the General Council itself to build the campaign which compelled the government to withdraw In Place of Strife. [14] 

In the new conditions after 1974, the union lefts' support of the 'social contract' exposed the limitations of CP policy and contributed to the Party's internal problems.

Given the cursory and often anecdotal nature of commentaries on the Party's industrial work in the 1960s and 1970s, there is a need for more detailed studies of how the CP's trade union interventions were organised; of the relationships between union activists and the Party, and between rank and file CP members and the Party's political and industrial leadership; the role of the Party in different unions; the relationship between the Party and the Broad Lefts; and the role which the LCDTU — described by Thompson as 'a substantial achievement' — played in organising and extending militant campaigns. We also need to explore why the Party did not grow in what seemed to be promising conditions. 

Our research aims to produce papers which address several of the themes touched on above: the dynamics of workplace militancy, the question of 'rank and file movements' in the unions, and the role played by the CP in these. Within the Party archives, there are a number of sources for such a study, although the material is often scattered and fragmentary. The minutes of the Political and National Executive Committees for the period contain some relevant material on national policy but they are often terse and compressed. The industrial department's files contain more detailed information though it is rarely comprehensive: for example, a file of miscellaneous leaflets, press cuttings and occasionally minutes of trade union meetings relates to the 1960s (Archive reference: CP/CENT/IND/1/3). A more useful file (CP/CENT/IND/1/2) provides details of factory branch organisation in the 1960s which permits us to trace the declining geography of the Party's industrial strength: at a national conference on factory branches in June 1966, 222 factory branches with 2,799 members were reported, a drop from the 265 such branches covering 3,249 members in 1963. Although the conference adopted the goal of forming 50 new factory branches by the end of the year, a report by Peter Kerrigan to the Executive Committee in March 1968 indicated that the total then stood at only 213, of which 34 were not functioning. There are industrial files in the papers of George Matthews which contain some materials on 'national meetings' of members in particular unions but there does not appear to be any systematic runs of minutes of the various advisory committees.

CP District records are of varying detail: the West Midlands district file for the period 1945-76 (CP/CENT/ORG/5/2) contains some reports to the centre which make occasional reference to industrial matters, one of which is relevant to Samuel's analysis cited above: 'we have many comrades prominent in their [i.e.carworkers'] leadership. Yet there is an outstanding gap between our influence and standing, and our actual party membership and our number and strength in the motor industry'. [15] The file for the North West District (which included the industrial strongholds of Manchester and Merseyside) for 1969-75 (CP/CENT/ORG/6/8) has even less material on trade union matters. While there is a good run of Secretariat and District Committee minutes, those of the District Committee's Industrial Sub-Committee are absent. 

Although there is a small file on the LCDTU (CP/ORG/MISC/LCDTU), it contains circulars relating only to the period 1976-80. There are in the Matthews papers scattered LCDTU circulars and conference reports but these are far from comprehensive. We are in the course of collating LCDTU material from other sources and will eventually lodge this in the archive to supplement the existing files. We would appeal to any readers who have any similar LCDTU documents to deposit them in the Party archive or to allow us access to photocopies (for which we are willing to pay the cost). The same appeal (and offer) applies to other documents relevant to industrial branches, national advisory committees and 'Broad Lefts'. We would also like information from any members of the Communist Historians' Network on the availability of tapes of interviews or transcripts relevant to the topics discussed here. Finally, we would welcome contact with Party trade union activists who were involved in the LCDTU. If the kind of history 'from below' of the militancy of 1964-74 for which we have argued above is to be written, it will not be solely, or even mainly, based on the sources currently available in the Party archive, invaluable though they are. 

John McIlroy

Department of Sociology, University of Manchester M13 9PL.

Alan Campbell

Department of Economic and Social History, University of Liverpool, PO Box 147, Liverpool L69 3BX.

1.	R Harrison, 'Introduction' in R Harrison (ed), Independent Collier: the Coalminer as Archetypal Proletarian Reconsidered (Harvester, 1978), p.1. [ Back ]
2.	J Kelly, Trade Unions and Socialist Politics (Verso, 1988), pp.14-15.  [ Back ]
3.	E Hobsbawm, 'The Forward March of Labour Halted?' in M Jacques and F Mulhern, The Forward March of Labour Halted? (Verso, 1981), p.18.  [ Back ]
4.	R Taylor, The Trade Union Question in British Politics: Government and Unions Since 1945 (Blackwell, 1993), pp.147-8, 262.  [ Back ]
5.	M Terry and P K Edwards, 'Conclusion' in M Terry and P K Edwards, Shopfloor Politics and Job Controls: the Post War Engineering Industry (Blackwell, 1988), p.221.  [ Back ]
6.	S Jefferys, 'The changing face of conflict of shopfloor organisation at Longbridge, 1939-1980', in Ibid., p.82.  [ Back ]
7.	A Hutt, British Trade Unionism: a Short History (Lawrence and Wishart, 6th edition, 1975), p.240. The concluding chapter was written by John Gollan. [ Back ]
8.	Ibid., pp.266 et seq. [ Back ]
9.	F Beckett, Enemy Within: the Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party (John Murray, 1995), p.149. [ Back ]
10.	W Thompson, The Good Old Cause: British Communism 1920-91 (Pluto, 1992), p.133.  [ Back ]
11.	Beckett, Enemy Within, p.176.  [ Back ]
12.	Samuel, 'The lost world of British communism: pt 3', New Left Review, No. 166, pp.84-91. [ Back ]
13.	See the comments deriving from interviews with Bert Ramelson and Mick Costello in F. Lindop, 'Unofficial militancy in the Royal Group of Docks, 1945-67', Oral History Journal, Vol. II, no. 2, 1983, pp.29-30.  [ Back ]
14.	B Ramelson, Productivity Agreements: an Exposure of the Latest and Greatest Swindle on the Wages Front (CP, 1970), p.23.  [ Back ]
15.	West Midlands District Committee, Draft Political Report to District Congress, 26/27 June 1960.  [ Back ]

ARCHIVAL NEWS

CPGB London District Archives

The London District CPGB Archives have now been largely catalogued and are added to the central CPGB Archives at the National Museum of Labour History (Ref CP/LON). Thanks to a grant by the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust, the capital's records are now available for students' use. 

The main categories into which they fall are London District Congresses, District Secretariat, District Committees, Bulletins and Circulars, Finance, Advisory Committees, Events, Industry, Membership. At the time of going to press, the categories still to be sorted include correspondence, elections, miscellaneous. While most of the material is post-WW2, there are some leaflets and congress programmes and documents that go back to the 1920s. While most of the files tail off after 1984, there are some remaining miscellaneous files including secretariat minutes up to 1990. 

By no means are all the records there. If it was not for Max Egelnick, a former District Organiser, the collection would only be half as full. Some of his papers will be placed in a special Max Egelnick collection to be sorted later and covering mainly North West London activities in the 1950s-60s, when he was Area Organiser. 

Some of the most interesting files to me are the Advisory Committee files or the topic files on race. Much Greek Cypriot material exists, especially a relation to the party newspaper Vema and the Cypriot Advisory Committee. While the minutes of the West Indian Advisory Committee are sparse, there are enormous files of newspaper cuttings and publications on race and racism for the 1950s, probably collected by Kay Beauchamp who at one time worked in the organisation department and later at Liberation. 

Women's activity within London district CPGB is less well documented. While there is biographical data for the first women's schools in the 1950s, most of the material is associated with the 1970s and 1980s women's liberation movement. 

Some membership records are closed, because they refer to sexual and criminal allegations or activities. But material about the 1980s split in the party and the expulsion or suspension of many leading London comrades is available in Membership and District Committee files.

Jo Stanley

Unpublished Autobiography: Molly Murphy

J T Murphy was one of the most important worker-intellectual figures of the early 20th century British revolutionary socialist tradition. The chief theorist of the first work war shop steward's movement, Murphy went on to make a far-reaching contribution to the early development of the British Communist Party, as well as serving on the Communist International based in Moscow, before eventually leaving the CPGB to join the Socialist League and then campaign for a Popular Front against fascism and a new world war. As well as writing hundreds of newspaper and journal articles on an immense range of industrial relations, trade union and political issues, Murphy's reflections on the crucial period in the history of the British working class movement in which he played such a prominent role were recorded in the book Preparing for Power and in his autobiography New Horizons. His distinctive contribution, hitherto somewhat neglected, should become more widely known following the publication of the full-length political biography which Ralph Darlington is currently writing.

During the last few years a range of new documentary material revealing important details on Murphy's activities and political influences has become available. Much of this new evidence is located within the Comintern archives in Moscow. But the recent acquisition of Murphy's personal papers by the National Museum of Labour History has provided another important source. One of the most notable items amongst this material is an unpublished book-length autobiography by Murphy's wife, Molly, albeit ghost-written by Murphy himself. This document, which was written in the late 1950s, makes fascinating reading, not merely for the fresh insights it sheds on Murphy's activities, but also because it reveals the full extent of the political commitment of a revolutionary female activist in her own right.

Ethel or 'Molly' Murphy was born in 1890 and brought up in Lancashire. Under her mother's influence she joined the Manchester Committee of the Workmen's Social and Political Union to campaign for votes for women. This involved her organising meetings and distributing leaflets outside factory gates across the city, and being arrested by police in the process. Molly met many of the leading women of the suffragette movement, including the Pankhursts who were also based in Manchester. In 1912, at the age of 22, she became the full-time organiser of the Sheffield branch of the WSPU and, amongst other activities, became involved in putting firecrackers into letter boxes as part of the suffrage campaign. Whilst selling copies of the newspaper 'The Suffragette' in Sheffield, she met Jack Murphy and although declining his offer of marriage, remained good friends with him for a number of years. After moving on to train in Worcester and London to become a fully qualified nurse, Molly worked in the West London Hospital in Hammersmith. When Murphy visited her in December 1920, and related his exploits travelling to Russia and meeting Lenin at the 2nd Comintern Congress, she immediately agreed to a new proposal of marriage and returned with him to Moscow early in 1921.

Molly's autobiography proceeds to document their life and activities during the 1920s and early 1930s, both in Russia whilst Murphy was an executive committee member of the Comintern (including her reflections on the economic and political turmoil within revolutionary Russia, her own meeting with Lenin in the Kremlin, the atmosphere and political figures inside the famous Lux Hotel, and Murphy's role in the expulsion of Trotsky from the Comintern) and in Britain where he was a central committee member of the Communist Party (including Murphy's involvement with the Comintern rep Michael Borodin, and with Tomsky in the formation of the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee, his arrest with other Communist leaders prior to the General Strike, and the internal party fight to implement the 'new line'). During most of this period Molly was a full-time housewife, bringing up their son Gordon, born December 1921, although she later became an active member of the Hackney branch of the CP, before leaving the party when Jack was expelled in 1932, the events of which are also well documented in this manuscript. After returning to full-time nursing, Molly responded to an appeal from the Spanish Medical Aid Committee for nurses to serve in Spain, and in January 1937 looked after the wounded on the battlefront around Madrid, returning home exhausted in July 1937. Some of her letters from Spain, with various momentoes and photos, are currently on display at the NMLH exhibition 'Home and Away, Spanish Civil War, 60 Years On'.

This unpublished manuscript should prove to be immensely interesting to a wide range of people concerned with the CPGB, the suffragette movement, and/or the Spanish Civil War. It is hoped that the memoir can be published. If anybody has ideas as to a publisher could they please contact Ralph Darlington on 0161 745 5456.  

Ralph Darlington, University of Salford

SOME RECENT BOOKS

A Veritable Dynamo

Stephen Holt, A Veritable Dynamo — Lloyd Ross and Australian Labour 1901-1987, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Qld, 1996, pp.xvii and 196.

Lloyd Ross was born into a socialist family and spent his life in the Australian labour movement. His political record defies conventional categories - a member of the Communist Party during the second half of the thirties, he later became a thorough anti-Communist. But this was not a simple case of 'The God that Failed'. Stephen Holt's biography provides abundant material on a complex figure.

In the 1920s Ross's socialist idealism had to come to terms with the pessimism on the Australian Left precipitated by the divisions of the War and the subsequent establishment of conservative supremacy. Influenced by the Welsh socialist and educationalist, Mark Starr, he studied in England as a post-graduate, worked in New Zealand as an adult-education tutor, and then returned to Australia at the start of 1933. His innovative approach and sheer vitality as a tutor for the Newcastle Workers' Education Association attracted the attention of Left activists. His espousal of the strategy of a broad anti-fascist coalition strengthened left support in his successful candidacy for the secretaryship of the New South Wales branch of the Australian Railway Union in September 1935. Shortly afterwards he joined the Communist Party, motivated in part by the indifference of several leading labour figures to the challenge posed to progressives by the Abyssinian crisis.

Holt emphasises Ross's achievements in the ARU and plays down his Communist membership. Railway workers had lacked industrial confidence in New South Wales since the defeat of the 1917 strike; in the late thirties Ross pursued a strategy of seeking advances on specific issues and combined this with a firm advocacy of the United Front against fascism. This combination ensured the support of the left within the ARU, but it began to unravel as the Communist Party shifted away from its initial pro-war position. Initially Ross expressed doubts to just a few friends, but following the fall of France, his concerns about the Communist position deepened and were complemented by an assessment that the ARU was weakened by controversy over the war. Most fundamentally, he felt that labour unity had to be maintained, an acute consideration in New South Wales with its record of factionalism and splits. By September 1940, Ross had been expelled from the Communist Party; profiting from factional realignments in the ARU, he used all the resources of his office to marginalise former allies.

His political model had become British intellectuals, such as John Strachey, who had abandoned support for a Labour-Communist alliance, and instead saw the war as the springboard for a radical social reconstruction. Ross placed his hopes in the federal administration of John Curtin and in September 1943, having left the ARU, he became Director of Public Relations in the Department of Post-War Reconstruction. His hopes that Labour post-war strategy might promote far-reaching reforms remained unfulfilled; he found the Party's agenda lacking both coherence and radicalism.

As post-war difficulties increased and some unions became more combative, Ross moved to a more combative anti-Communist position. He found shared values with the social catholicism of Bob Santamaria and moved closer to the Industrial Groups, committed anti-Communist factions within individual unions. He worked with the ARU leadership to help undercut the 1949 miners' strike — a tactic that brought him into open conflict with his Communist brother, Edgar, the editor of the Miners' Federation newspaper. It all seemed like the classic trajectory of the Communist renegade, especially when Ross's subsequent Presidency of the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom is included.

Yet the saga contained two further twists. As the leadership of the Australian Labour Party became more hostile to the factionalism of the Groups, Ross refused to support a breakaway party. He reacted to the Democratic Labour project in 1956 as he had reacted to Communist inspired fragmentation in 1940. Moreover, in 1952, following the ending of his public service post, Ross, now backed by Groupers, regained his ARU position. Gradually members became frustrated by a relative decline in wages and reacted to the threat of job losses through technical change and rationalisation. Ross responded; by the sixties he was canalising and articulating militant sentiments, although unlike the thirties, the union did not shift politically to the left.

The detail of Holt's account is impressive, but the narrative does not address the key analytical questions. Were Ross's political shifts the result of opportunism, vanity, principle? It is salutary to read a biography which suggests that viewing the past through conventional political boundaries may make the past seem more tidy than it was; but it is certainly the case that as Ross knew all too well, those who repeatedly ignored boundaries, were typically anathema to former comrades. The account suggests little about Ross's motivations; he remains something of an enigma, viewed very much from the outside.

There remains the issue of distinctiveness. Such intellectual journeys were not unique. John Strachey is one obvious case; Clifford Allen, pacifist, ILP intellectual and supporter of Ramsay MacDonald in 1931 is another. In neither case, does a simple claim of apostasy fit. Ross, nevertheless, differs in one critical respect — his trade union activities. Arguably it was his work in the ARU in the late thirties that contributed most effectively to a United Front with significant, albeit local, achievements to its credit; and from 1952 his further involvement in the union helped to ensure that his politics moved back to the centre of the labour movement. It is perhaps in the insights offered by this idiosyncratic figure into trade union factionalism that this book makes its most significant achievement. 

David Howell, University of York

Un Parti sous Influence

Brigitte Studer, Un parti sous influence: Le Parti Communiste Suisse, une Section du Komintern 1931 à 1939, L'Age d'Homme, Lausanne, 1994, pp.818.

The Swiss Communist Party (PCS) was one of Europe's smallest, and this eight hundred-page monograph, covering just one decade in its history, may at first appear aimed at a rather narrow readership. In fact, as a fully documented case study in the workings of a Comintern section Studer's volume merits attention well beyond the ranks of Helvetic specialists. Making extensive use of archives in Moscow as well as Switzerland, she offers a careful delineation of the Comintern's structures and modus operandi, focussing on the Swiss case but providing ample argument and data of a more general application. Thus there are substantial sections on funding, on cadre formation, including material on the International Lenin School, and on the role of the Comintern's leading bodies, its commissions and its emissaries. Special attention is given the CI's clandestine communications networks, in which Studer demonstrates that Switzerland was a crucial link, and there is full discussion of the recruitment and activities of the International Brigades. In the absence to date of any comparable treatment of an English-speaking communist party, Studer's is an invaluable contribution on the relations between the Comintern and one of its member parties.

While these relations take up the bulk of the volume, there are also useful sections on the personnel and implantation of the PCS, including a comprehensive biographical appendix. Rooted most firmly in German-speaking Switzerland, whose predominance was not always appreciated in the French and Italian-speaking cantons, the PCS derived little apparent benefit from the popular front stance that proved so attractive elsewhere. By 1939 its membership fallen to below a thousand and its share of the national vote to below one per cent. Both these figures were all-time lows and Studer's account is essentially one of increasing political marginality, even as compared with other smaller communist parties.

Although her book is a mine of information, Studer's interpretative framework is more open to debate. Her stated aim is to combine a close attention to Comintern command structures with a proper sensitivity to the indigenous social determinants of Swiss communism. That is a laudable objective, but not really achieved here. Despite much sociological data and the recovery of local issues and personalities, these are rarely allowed to qualify or even impact upon an essentially totalitarian model in which communists give total allegiance to the party, and the party total allegiance to the international. Acknowledged points of reference are the works on French communism of Kriegel, Robrieux and Tasca (A Rossi) and one could have wished that Studer's numerous but rarely cited interviewees had been drawn on to test these authors' assumptions more rigorously.

Here as elsewhere, Comintern archives are presented as the clinching argument for a centripetal interpretation. If the British case is anything to go by, however, even these records, despite their Moscow-centred perspective, can reveal something rather more complex than just a culture of control, if only the historian is alert to countervailing as well as centralising currents. Studer explicitly distances herself from some recent social histories of communism and is no doubt right to stress the danger of sanitised accounts that neglect the international dimension. If she veers in compensation towards an overly traditionalist perspective, she does so with a formidable scholarship that will not be found in some other recent counter-revisionist publications.  

Kevin Morgan, University of Manchester

Camaradas e Companheiros

Pandolfi, Dulce Chaves, Camaradas e Companheiros : História e Memória do PCB, Relume-Dumará: Fundação Roberto Marinho, Rio de Janeiro, 1995.

In 1992, after 70 years of existence, the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) disbanded. Following the decisions of its 10th congress the party decided to put an end to its activities as a communist party. Following the path of other communist parties around the world, the majority of the delegates decided to change the name, the symbol and the structure of the party creating a new one. Strikingly, the new party, despite ridding itself of so much, continues to regard itself as the heir of the old party. Albeit unsuccessfully, a rival group has been trying to keep the organisation as it was in the past with the slogan: 'We have been, we are and we will be forever communists'.

The PCB was the most enduring political party in Brazilian political history, even though it faced difficult periods throughout its existence. During these seven decades the party could only act as a legal organisation for less than ten years, in two quite distinct and separate periods. One could say that the entire history of the PCB was marked by the paradox of proclaiming itself as a revolutionary party and yet attempting to form part of a legal political framework advancing a democratic agenda. Its life was thus marked by the process of conflict and integration. This led to some periods of almost total integration, accepting the rules of bourgeois order; and others of total and fierce opposition to the government of the day.

One interesting aspect of the party's history is the fact that it was unable to develop its own official history. Due to the hard conditions of the clandestinity and to some internal problems it was only officially tried once, when a history commission was established in the 1970s, but the attempt did not succeed. That failure might be credited mainly to a sense of protectiveness. This could still be witnessed in interviews with certain groups of former PCB militants for whom it is sometimes still difficult to provide information about their own activities within the party and about the party's own actions. As a real or perceived danger to different Brazilian governments throughout its existence, the PCB was an easy scapegoat for the agitation and the turmoil amongst the workers.

Having said this, the PCB did have to show great caution to protect itself in periods of severe repression. As the main target for the authoritarian regime the PCB had to be very careful with regard documents, reports, official diaries etc. All sort of things could be used against them as proof of activities opposing the government. One very well known episode showing the dangers of laxness was the seizure by the police of the Prestes notebooks just after the military coup in 1964. These notebooks were personal diaries of the PCB general secretary Luís Carlos Prestes, by far the most important indidual in the party's history and head of the PCB's organisation for 40 years. His private notes about the secret meetings of the Party at the previous period before the coup, including names and political positions of his peers, gave to the dictatorship important information which were used to prosecute several militants of the PCB. In such circumstances a source for historians could be easily transformed into a source for an official prosecution by the police.

Nevertheless, we can find great number of writings about the PCB. These include academic works, memoirs of militants and other historical researches. We now have several institutions within which we can find large amounts of documentation including newspapers and party's publications, interviews and personal papers of militants. [1] Among them are Arquivo de Memória Operária do Rio de Janeiro (AMORJ) located at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (IFCS/UFRJ); Centro de Pesquisas e Documentação de História Contemporânea do Brasil (CPDOC); and Arquivo Edgard Leuenroth located at Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). An ongoing project, the Programa de Preservação da Memória do PCB, now brings together almost all institutions involved with the recuperation of the party's history, including the recovery of archives, books, photographs, newspapers and oral records.

An analysis of a political party can be easily distorted by the blur produced in the political battlefield. The fact is that living almost its entire life undercover and participating in almost all the important periods of Brazilian republican life from 1922-1992, the PCB became an important element in all kinds of stories and myths. These accounts were thus at the very forefront of the political struggle. Most of such propaganda presented the communists either as heroes and relentless freedom-fighters or, conversely, as fanatics, sectarians and dangerous authoritarians. As viewed from the party's own press or from conservative newspapers and books, the actions of the real human beings who made up the PCB seem to have vanished into thin air.

Dulce Pandolfi's book, in contrast, provides an acute and impartial analysis of the party's history without losing sight of a more politically engaged perspective. It covers the whole history of the party but in a non-chronological fashion. The aim of the book is to analyse the views built up by the party towards its own history which is, for Pandolfi, 'the central and strategic element of its political identity' (page 14). To address this issue, she uses as tools of analysis such concepts as collective memory, individual memory and official memory. Based on a very comprehensive range of documents, both written and oral, Pandolfi shows the complex process of building up a political identity. Using very dissimilar views of militants in different echelons of the party, she points out the successive distinct identities experienced by the militants of the PCB throughout its history.

By including these discordant views Pandolfi avoids the monochordal approach of official histories and shows the contradictions in party actions, practices and representations. Particular periods or episodes are highlighted around which the party could develop its identity. First the book analyses the representations of the origins of the party and the significance of the break with anarchism for early Brazilian communists. Secondly, it examines the radical experience during the backfired communist uprising of 1935. The following section examines the relationship between the party and its charismatic leader during the long period in which it was known as the 'Party of Prestes'. In the next two chapters the tension between the ideas of reform and revolution and its relationship with Brazilian realities is considered. There are striking testimonies by PCB militants bearing both positive and negative views of the short period of legality between 1945 and 1947 and attempted explanations of the military coup of 1964. For the latter, some militants seemed to blame the passivity of the party's reformist stance, whilst others attributed the responsibility to the anxiety of holding a revolutionary position. The book's last section is devoted to the final years of transformation that seemed to decree either the death of the party or at least a dramatic change from what had previously been known as the PCB.

Pandolfi's analysis is very sensitively presented, in contrast with more sensationalist accounts that focus above all on the PCB's relationship with the Soviet Union. Another recent book Camaradas, by the journalist William Waack, demonstrates the difference. While supported by extensive research in the Moscow archives, Camaradas seems to reinforce clichés about Moscow gold and the CPSU's almost total control over the PCB without taking into account the national component acting upon that interference and attempt at control. These differences are highlighted by the two authors' divergent understanding of the communist uprising of 1935, one of the defining moments in the PCB's history. Traditionally, at least in the more sensationalist literature, the event has been characterised as an international conspiracy arranged and prompted by Moscow with the Brazilian communists figuring as mere puppets. [2] Pandolfi, however, is among those authors taking quite the opposite view. She argues it was really the Brazilian communists with their characteristic self-confidence who, during a meeting in Moscow, had convinced the Comintern of the preeminence of the Brazilian revolution, thus giving a very distorted and inflated perspective of their own possibilities.

Pandolfi's book is thus not only a fruitful contribution to the history of political parties in Brazil and particularly to the history of the PCB. It also provides a crucial new dimension by analysing the party through the representations of the actors involved.

Marco Aurelio Santana, Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto, Brazil

1.	For more information about the institutions concerned with the history of the PCB, contact Elina Pessanha at the Arquivo de Memoria Operaria do Rio de Janeiro (AMORJ/LPS), Instituto de Filosofia e Ciencias Sociais, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Largo de Sao Francisco, N.1., Centro, Rio de Janeiro, Cep: 20.051-000. [ Back ]
2.	The involvement of Moscow was clear. Several international members of the Comintern were sent to Brazil to help the revolutionary process. Among them was Paul Franz Gruber, a German who turned out to be an infiltrated agent of the British intelligence service. The government was informed before hand about the uprising, and by sending wrong coded information to revolutionaries around the country could prevent events happening at the same time. The moment was totally disconnected. Restricted to Rio de Janeiro, Natal and Recife it became easily smashed. [ Back ]

CONFERENCE REPORTS

Communism and the Labour Movement

The Society's Spring Conference in the West of Scotland attracted a healthy attendance of 80-plus. Proceedings opened with Willie Thompson of Glasgow Calendonian University giving an overview of "Communism in Scotland". Emphasising the strong Scottish influence within the national organisation, he outlined 6 main phases of activity: 1) the early years of growth, with industrial struggles, the Spanish Civil War and World War Two; 2) the defensiveness of the Cold War years of the 1950s; 3) the recovery of the late 50s/early 60s based round the anti-nuclear movement; 4) the most successful era of hegemony within the labour movement in the late 60s/early 70s; 5) the period of retreat from the mid 70s; 6) the final phase of defeat in the 1980s as the whole labour movement weakened. Though always a small organisation with no mass membership, the party gained a reputation for always playing a role in fighting for the peoples' causes.

Carol Thornton of Glasgow Caledonian University presented her recent researches into "Scottish Communism in the 1920s". In the early years of the decade, the party did have influence and considerable electoral support in Greenock, Dundee and Motherwell elections. The party's convoluted relationship with the Labour Party and the debates over affiliation were explored, with the conclusion that these manoeuvres, and the Stalinist theory of Socialism in one Country, gradually weakened the revolutionary potential of the early days.

Kevin Morgan of Manchester University presented new evidence from his researches in the Moscow Archives on "The Early Years of the Communist Party" (see the Manchester conference report in the April 1996 Newsletter).

Alan Campbell of Liverpool University surveyed "Communism in the Scottish Coalfields in the Inter-War Years", since these areas developed as major centres of Minority Movement activity in the 1920s, leading to the founding of the 'Red Union', the United Mineworkers of Scotland in 1929. Maps and statistical tables helped illustrate how the strength of communist support was determined by geographical, economic and social factors, flourishing in Fife and Lanarkshire, compared to Ayrshire and the Lothians.

Three perspectives were given on the breakdown of the CPGB and the re-formation of the communist movement in the 1980s: John Foster (Paisley University) on the Communist Party of Britain; Eric Canning on the Communist Party of Scotland; Doug Chalmers on the Democratic Left.

Chair Andy Clark apologised for the last-minute absence of the day's final speaker - his brother Alex, former miner, CP and Equity official, and first STUC Arts Officer. He outlined the talk Alex would have given on the experience of their family and community that had made them lifelong communists, finishing with a stirring account of the role played by so many communists in the working-class struggle over the years.  

Douglas Allen, Scottish Labour History Society

Scottish Labour History Society Day Conference
23 March 1996, Mitchell Library, Glasgow

The Dockyard and Sabotage Scare, 1933-37

Papers at this conference dealt with alleged Dockyard sabotage from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries. The following is an abstract of the paper of David Turner, who is currently writing his PhD thesis on the CPGB in the Medway towns and who plans to write a joint article on the topic of sabotage with Kenneth Lunn of the University of Portsmouth.

From the outset, the CPGB was seen by the British state as the dangerous agent of a hostile foreign power, carrying out Soviet-inspired acts of subversion, espionage and sabotage against the armed forces of the British Empire.

In consequence, the state began in the 1920s to take what it saw as necessary protective measures Procedures to exclude Communists from government posts involving 'confidential work' seem to have begun in 1925. In 1928 CP members in such posts ceased to be issued with Party cards, becoming 'undercover' members.

In the 1930s, despite the CP's continued small size and lack of significant influence, it was still regarded as a major threat to the security of the state. An important factor in this was the CP's efforts to spread its influence among 'workers in uniform'. This was an important aspect of Party work until mid-1935, but it seems then to have been completely abandoned.

As far as espionage is concerned, it is true that some, very few, CP members were involved in such activities, as the 1938 Woolwich Arsenal spy case demonstrates.

As to sabotage, there would seem to be no political reason why the CP should have engaged in such tactics and there is no evidence that it ever did so However, in the mid-1930s the Admiralty believed that communists were involved in a major campaign of sabotage directed at the Royal Navy; in response, a witch-hunt of communist Dockyard workers was initiated.

Between 1933 and 1936 there occurred nine incidents of apparently deliberate damage to Royal Navy vessels in British Dockyards: four were at Devonport, three at Chatham, one at Sheerness and one at Portsmouth. There was also an incident in a private yard, at Barrow-in-Furness. The Admiralty arrived at the conclusion that as many as six of these could be attributed to politically-motivated sabotage, rather than malicious damage.

In February 1936 John Salisbury was dismissed from Devonport Dockyard 'services no longer requred' ('SNLR'). He was identified by MI5 as the communist ringleader in the Yard, but there was no evidence to show he was a saboteur.

Subsequently, 'positive vetting' (active investigation of personal backgrounds) was introduced for prospective Dockyard employees and a new purge procedure was agreed by the Cabinet, without reference to Parliament.

In September 1936 Harold Easthope, a casual worker at Devonport, whose son was allegedly a Communist, was dismissed.

In January 1937 four workers from Devonport Dockyard (Francis Carne, Alfred Durston, Henry Lovejoy and Edward Trebilcock) and one from Sheerness Dockyard (Henry Law) were dismissed 'SNLR', after MI5 identified them as Communists. None of these men could be proved to have carried out any act of sabotage; they were not prosecuted, not informed of the case against them and not allowed the opportunity to defend themselves.

The Labour opposition tabled a motion of censure over the dismissals. The First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir Samuel Hoare, argued that the men were not being sacked for their politics but for 'actions and associations that were calculated to incite to acts detrimental to the safety of the State and the Navy ...'. He maintained that no proof could be presented, in a court of law or anywhere else, as the secret service had to be kept secret.

Meanwhile, Chatham Dockyard the authorities were quite happy to employ a man they knew to be an active member of the British Union of Fascists.

Within the Dockyards the response was muted, as the Dockyard workers exhibited the passivity and conservatism for which they were notorious. This appears to have led the CP itself to devote little effort to fighting the sackings.

There was strong opposition from the broader labour and trade union movement, as a result of which Ernest Bevin protested on behalf of the TGWU (to which two of the dismissed men belonged). However, Prime Minister Baldwin and the First Lord of the Admiralty won Bevin's support by playing on his anti-Communism. Bevin subsequently met with the Head of MI5 to discuss how he could assist in any future such purge.

David Turner, Canterbury Christ College

Naval Dockyards Society Conference:
'Sabotage is Suspected, 14 September 1996, London

'Getting the Balance Right': The CPGB

The aim of this conference was to look at the CPGB's positive achievements. There was an opening overview by Eric Hobsbawm after which four morning workshops were devoted to the party's contribution to specific movements. Nina Fishman dealt with the role of communist activists in the trade unions, Richard Croucher with the National Unemployed Workers Movement and Noreen Branson with the CPGB's work with national Liberation movements. Bill Moore and Neil Barratt evaluated the party's role in the struggle against war and fascism. Bill Moore was concerned with the CPGB's national campaigns and Neil Barratt looked specifically at the communists' role in the anti fascist struggles in Lancashire during the thirties.

In the afternoon the focus was on the party's contribution in various academic and cultural fields. Stanley Forman looked at communist influence on film and film making, while Andy Croft examined the effect that communists had had on the literary scene. David Parker and Ron Bellamy surveyed the activities of the party's History and Economics groups respectively. Ron Bellamy was unable to attend the Conference but his paper was discussed in the economics workshop. Finally, Jim Mortimer in the closing session made an assessment of the CPGB's contribution to the labour movement, and in a critical appraisal examined both the party's successes and its failures.

The Conference was attended by a little over ninety people and it brought together both academics and many who were activists in the CPGB and had contributed to the various movements and campaigns that were discussed by the conference. The Socialist History Society is planning to publish all the papers. Those by Bill Moore, Neil Barrett, Noreen Branson, Stanley Forman, Ron Bellamy and Jim Mortimer will all be available within the next few months; details from the address below. 

Mike Squires, Socialist History Society, 50 Elmfield Road, London SW17 8AL

'Getting the Balance Right'
Birkbeck College, 22 June 1996