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Esmonde Higgins
and 'The Nucleus': 1923-24
Esmonde Higgins makes a couple of brief appearances in Kevin Morgan's Harry Pollitt, most significantly as a member of 'the nucleus', that shadowy group of intellectuals, led by Pollitt and the Dutts, that aimed to capture the leadership of the British Communist Party [1]. I have an interest in Higgins as his 'biographer in the making'. In Australian libraries [2] there are very good sources for Higgins's life in the Party and the Labour Research Department (LRD), mainly his almost weekly letters to his parents and his sister, but strangely almost no letters have survived for the last thirteen months before his return to Australia in May 1924 the period when he would have been active in 'the nucleus'. Hence this note, written in the hope that it may jog the memory of researchers with a better knowledge of the CPGB's sources than I have.
Higgins was born in Australia in 1897. He became a socialist and radical nationalist while attending Melbourne University, and a Sinn Fein sympathiser (his father was born in Ireland) and Communist at Balliol College in 1919-20. His closest friends at this time were Andrew Rothstein and Tom Wintringham, and with the latter he spent part of the summer of 1920 working in Moscow. He and Wintringham went to London in April 1921 to assist the Left during the miners' strike, and they later shared digs in London. By the middle of the year Hig (as he was known in these circles) was working at the LRD, where for the next two years he was part of a group (including Hugo Rathbone) funded by the All-Russian Co-operative Society to prepare a monthly economic and political bulletin. His letters at this time describe in great detail and with remarkable self-awareness the life of a Communist romantic. 'You can't guess how earnest and how chock full of gusto I feel, or how bloody fatuous and scornful of the lack of all results so far', he wrote to Pollitt [3]. Always another meeting to attend, another report to write; always the disappointment of limited results; but none of this could outweigh the exhilaration of clandestine revolutionary work, and the warmth of comradeship, for Higgins.
From the point of view of the Dutts and Pollitt, Higgins had the right credentials for 'the nucleus'. He had no connections with any of the pre-Bolshevik forces that had formed the Party. He was bright. He was modest, with no political ambitions, at least not in the British Party. And he was loyal and self-sacrificing. But these virtues also meant that he had no roots in the British revolutionary movement. So, what could he do for 'the nucleus'? In a ship-board diary, written while returning to Australia, he tried to sum up his recent experiences: on the Workers' Weekly he had sub-edited for 12 months and contributed about 1000 words per issue for 15 months; on the Russian Information Review he sub-edited for nine months. He had written 600 words every week for two months as the industrial correspondent for the Labour Press Service. There were occasional pieces by him in The Communist Review and the Labour Monthly [4] This suggests that his main role was journalistic. But was there more? In this connection, an undated and unaddressed letter in his Papers is worth considering. It is clearly from the period of 'the nucleus', because it mentions the Workers' Weekly. Internal evidence suggests that it is to Harry Pollitt, and it has the same bantering, familiar, self-deprecating and slightly deferential tone that Hig adopted towards Harry in other letters. Slightly abbreviated, the letter says:
Here are the minutes laborious, but inelegant, bloody.
I now know more or less what I want to suggest as a proper arrangement of intercourse between the TU Section, the Press Section, and the WW. I didn't this afternoon. I am off soon to splash in Somerset House again, so I'll put it in writing for you.
First, there's one thing that's been tickling me. It's that I feel you'd have no bloody excuse not to be more energetic and productive as secretary of the TU Section than I as sec. of the Press Section. I'm not trying to cry, but to suggest that I should get regularly more close to the work your Section is doing. The Press Section, apart from what [it?] is supposed to read in Journals is turning its own guts out (or ought to be). The stuff which comes into you may be overwhelming and may three-fourths of the time be tripey, but surely live, and, in a sense, fresh. So, I want to suck in a little blasted interest in industrial doings of the moment through the muck which comes to your Section, as well as to read earnestly and methodically the bloody Gerald, and a clump of journals...
That ought to ease the position for the Weekly, as well as for the accursed Press Section. If I suck your blood, and systematically ponder over things which seem timely and insistent, I ought to be able to give the Weekly a better chance on that side of its starved existence and, especially, to make better play with the damned good stuff which comes in to be written up. But, at the same time, will you help strenuously to knock the idea into Murphy that at each Industrial Committee we must put our heads together and settle what things must be done not by the Industrial Committee for the Weekly; that the Committee should consider one of its prime functions is, not just to use the Weekly for the appeals for the benefit of the Committee, but to feed the Weekly, or at least to suggest that it should be fed, with industrial stuff that the Weekly should have; and that the business of planning what to throw at the Weekly should after all depend mainly on Murphy himself?
I am willing quite to act as a go-between and to take the game quite seriously, but I am a babe in experience, a muddle-headed oaf with no possible initiative, and an unmercifully slow worker at everything. So, there's a huge reason for mobilising the whole Committee, especially for planning and suggesting and using its head...
So, will you please see if you can:
help to turn the attention of the Industrial Committee, and especially of Murphy, more and more to the needs of the poor bloody WW;
keep the double needs of the Press Section - hitherto a bloody whited sepulchre - and the industrial side of the WW very close to the point while you are knocking about with any kind of work which can in any way be useful;
put up with my buggering you about and your papers?
And one thing always remember that for the Weekly the result intended is never notes or diminutive articles, but news which can be made into propaganda by headlines, and adjust your suggestions and jottings to that notion.
You can't guess how earnest and how chock full of gusto I feel, or how bloody fatuous and scornful of the lack of all results so far.
See you at 4. Can you not be late? The reason is that I'm scared of those brats. They regard me somehow as a convenient buffoon. And they'll start a rough-house at once if there's no one more dignified knocking round. I want the conversation to become extraordinarily improving, to make them jump at the notion of them getting rid regularly of the paper, and generally change their whole bloody manner of life. For Christ's sake come ready to manoeuvre this.
I'm not coming to the Dept. After Somerset House I'm going back to do things at home. It's not worth coming here. Olive said I was to fix with you where to feed before Gadzooks. I'll leave it to you.
Thanks,
Hig [5]
The letter is about the proper relationship between the revolutionary press and the revolutionary leadership of the industrial struggle. It appears that Higgins was secretary of the Press Section, and that he was writing to the secretary of the Trade Union Section. He mentions also a larger entity, the Industrial Committee, presided over by J T Murphy. Higgins seems to be part of the Industrial Committee. If this Committee is the same as the Industrial Department, set up after the party's Fifth Congress at Battersea, it is surprising to find Higgins, a young middle-class intellectual from the Antipodes, participating in such a key area of party work. It might be pertinent, however, to note that, when Higgins returned to Australia, the security service considered him to have credentials as an industrial revolutionary. Another part of the puzzle might be the lengthy, unpublished analysis of the Dock Strike of 1923 that Higgins wrote for the British party in 1933. Bearing in mind the special role of the Workers' Weekly in this struggle (a daily edition was published), we can see what Hig was driving at in his argument with Murphy and the Industrial Committee about the kind of relationship needed between the trade union strategists and the party press.
But what were these 'Sections'? Who or what was 'Gerald'? Or 'gadzooks'? If Pollitt was the recipient of this letter, is it not surprising that Higgins, however jokingly, seeks to advise him of how to relate to the Party's press work? Readers with thoughts about these questions, or references to sources, might like to contact me.
Terry Irving, Department of Government
University of Sydney, Australia 2006
fax: 61 2 9351 3624; email: terryi@sue.econ.su.oz.au
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1. |
Kevin Morgan, Harry Pollitt, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1993, p.33; see also p.121.
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2. |
Higgins's papers are in the Mitchell Library, Sydney (ML MSS 740); his sister Nettie was an important literary figure, and her papers are in the National Library of Australia, Canberra (Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers, NLA MS 1174). His uncle was Judge H B Higgins, of the Arbitration Court and the High Court of Australia, described by his biographer as 'the rebel as judge' (John Rickard, H B Higgins, Allen and Unwin Australia, Sydney, 1984); his nieces Aileen and Helen Palmer, both became Communists; Helen Palmer broke with the Party in 1956 and edited the 'revisionist' journal Outlook between 1957 and 1970.
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3. |
Undated, E M Higgins Papers, 740/7, ff 475-478.
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4. |
J N Rawling Papers, N57/174, Butlin Archives of Business and Labour, Australian National University, Canberra.
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5. |
Higgins Papers, op.cit., 740/7 ff475-478.
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