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'People of a Special Mould?' — An Antipodean View
Historians of communism and communist parties from around the world gathered in Manchester in April 2001 for the three-day 'People of a Special Mould?' communist biographical and prosopographical conference. Below Kerry Taylor reports on his experiences of the conference. Jeremy Tranmer's conference report can be found here.
Travelling from Palmerston North, New Zealand, to Manchester is no easy task, total travelling time approximately 35 hours. There were moments along the way when I questioned whether I really wanted to go the Manchester. Would the conference justify the expense and the effort? Thankfully the answer turned out to be an unqualified yes. The People of a Special Mould conference was a rich and rewarding gathering.
Perhaps it's a product of smallness, but New Zealanders at major international gatherings often feel themselves to be outsiders. How often have we heard "You've come all the way from New Zealand! You must be mad"? Well perhaps. However, any feeling of isolation did not last long, over a coffee before the conference formally kicked off conversations began which were to continue over the whole weekend. People were talking passionately about their subject, this was going to be total immersion in communist history, Heaven!
Much to my delight there were even a couple of papers, other than my own, which touched very briefly on New Zealand. Karen Hunt in her engaging examination of the making of Dora Montafiore, a founding member of the CPGB, discussed the close political relationship her subject had with Harry Holland, later the leader of the New Zealand Labour Party. Barry McLoughlin and John Halstead, in an excellent paper on British party members at the Lenin School, discussed the less than positive experience of Alan Eaglesham, one time General Secretary of the Communist Party of New Zealand. Both papers lead to extended 'after-match conversations', which was something of a characteristic at the conference. People shared ideas, shared knowledge of sources and also just shared enthusiasm.
This open and positive interchange was most welcome. The last time I was in Europe for a conference on communist history was in 1992, a workshop on the National Sections of the Comintern held in Amsterdam. That conference was highly charged, various political lines were reflected in the papers and debated on the floor. Political point scoring seemed more the order of the day than scholarly interchange. Perhaps distance from the collapse of the Soviet block has allowed us to consider communist history less hysterically. Or perhaps the subject matter of social history rather than the political line is somewhat less inclined to sectarian controversy. There's food for thought here, perhaps the basis for another conference.
This is not to suggest the conference was free from strong debate. Interestingly most of the moments of sharp debate over interpretation were in my observation associated with papers on individuals or sections of papers which dealt with individuals. There was, for example, some prickliness over Tania Unludag's interpretation of Clara Zeitkin.
There was also significant debate in the papers that touched on the struggle in Southern African. For example Irina Filatova's paper on Africans at the Communist University of Eastern Toilers, Vladimir Shubin's on South African communists in exile and Johnathan Grossman's paper on the struggle within South Africa in recent decades. Again the differences were often over the role, experiences or interpretation of particular activists. Cumulatively these papers served to remind us of the politically charged and highly contested nature of the recent past in South Africa. The politics of history is still very acute here.
Papers dealing with the British communist movement were especially appealing to me, in part because they provide a good basis for comparisons with colonial off shoot populations such those in New Zealand and Australia. There was an embarrassment of riches here. Some papers I had to read rather than attend the presentation, as we were spoilt for choice. Kevin Morgan's reflections on communist families and Andy Flinn's on the CPGB's national branches were rich in both material and interpretation. The number of direct parallels to the New Zealand experience in the family dimension of British communist politics was particularly striking. In contrast the lack of a tradition of organizing ethnically in the New Zealand communist experience was highlighted for me by Flinn's paper, which demonstrated the importance of the national branches, often against the intentions of the CPGB hierarchy. Similarly, Jason Heppell's paper on Jewish communists in Britain was thought provoking as much for how different the New Zealand experience was from Britain.
Perhaps this is the thing I most took from the conference, a renewed sense of the real potential for enriching our work by more extensive comparative reflection. I have to confess a personal bias against comparative work in the past. So often the results of such work are banal and unremarkable. I left Manchester with a renewed sense of its possibility.
