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A note on James Barke
In his review of A Weapon in the Struggle (CHNN No 9), Victor Kiernan wrote (of James Barke): ‘He joined the [Communist] Party [of Great Britain] in 1932 or 1933, and stayed in it until his death in 1958.’ Victor Kiernan relied on the information given in H. Gustav Klaus’s chapter on Barke; and I note that Andy Croft also referred to Barke as ‘…James Joyce writing about Glasgow with a Communist Party card in his pocket’ in Red Letter Days (London, 1990, 277).
My research in the Barke papers in the Mitchell Library, Glasgow, leads me to a different conclusion. In a letter to J Lennox Kerr, another novelist, dated 3 March 1936, Barke wrote:
‘I understand that you are anxious to know if I am a member of the Communist Party. The first time we met you asked me this question and I replied in the negative which was true and remains so. Now you have Max Goldberg’s reassurance. I am merely a Left writer — whatever that may be.’ (Box 4)
Max Goldberg is shown in a CP photo of the 1930s, reproduced on the cover of Scottish Labour History, Volume 31, 1996. In a letter to Hugh MacDiarmid, dated 9 February 1939, Peter Kerrigan — at that time, Secretary to the Scottish District Committee of the CP — wrote:
‘There is one thing in your letter [of 6 February] to which it is necessary to draw your attention. James Barke is not and never has been a member of the Communist Party.’ (NLS Acc. 7361-10)
In another letter to J Lennox Kerr who had written, ‘[r]umour has it that you are proceeding to America’, Barke replied, on 1 August 1946:
‘Rumour is not always a lying jade. I am also going to the USSR; but either there or America my conscience will be what it has always been: I can therefore be depended on to enjoy myself accordingly. Not having any political affiliations will not affect this in any way.’ (Box 10)
When Geoffrey Wagner, an American scholar wrote to Barke, on 12 June 1950, to ask him if he had wrotten about Lewis Grassic Gibbon in the Daily Worker, Barke noted in the margin of the letter: ‘I most definitely did not write here’. In an undated draft reply to Wagner, he wrote: ‘In so far as the Daily Worker and Our Time are concerned, I wouldn’t touch Our Time with a barge pole!’ [Our Time had ceased publication in the previous year.] (Box 1).
Notes made in a diary, on 5 and 6 August 1932, of a talk with Independent Labour Party (ILP) leader James Maxton, show that Barke indeed became disenchanted with Maxton at this time. (Box 5)
In a long letter to Grassic Gibbon, dated 5 September 1933, Barke wrote:
‘either you stand by the working class and its heroic vanguard the Communist Party or you stand (directly, indirectly or benevolently neutral — it doesn’t matter which) with Fascism…’ (Box 4).
In 1936 Barke contributed articles on ‘Lewis Grassic Gibbon’ and on ‘The Scottish National Question’ to Left Review. My conclusion is that Barke was a fellow traveller of the Communist Party in the 1930s. By 1946 he described himself as: ‘Not having any political affiliations’ (ibid). He remained in friendly correspondence with William Gallacher until his death. Gallacher and MacDiarmid both spoke at his funeral.
John Manson
Manuscripts are quoted by permission of the Mitchell Library and the National Library of Scotland.
Editorial note:
Though it is not conclusive either way, readers may be interested in Harry McShane’s description of an ‘extended’ meeting of the CPGB’s Scottish committee in the late 1930s to discuss a statement supporting the idea of a Scottish parliament, previously approved by the party’s national executive.
‘As this over-rode all previous policy and the executive had to get the endorsement of the Scottish membership, they called an “extended” Scottish Committee as a substitute for a full Scottish Conference. The extended committee had forty or fifty people instead of the normal fourteen to twenty. A lot of the people invited to the extended committee were the literary elements of the party, and when the vote was taken on the statement there were only two against: myself and Jimmy Barke, the novelist and playwright.’
Any reader able to shed any further light on this matter is invited to do so.
