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'The Past is Ours'
'"The Past is Ours": The Political Usage of English History by the British Communist Party, and the Role of Dona Torr in the Creation of its Historians' Group, 1930-56'.
This PhD was successfully completed at the University of Sydney, Australia in 2004.
This thesis provides a detailed re-evaluation of the Historians' Group of the CPGB, in particular the origins of the group, its relationship to Dona Torr, and its purpose. It also considers the influence of the members on later historical writing both in the English-speaking world and elsewhere. Though some previous studies have treated 'the Group' as a homogenous entity, or concentrated on a handful of academic stars, it had well over 100 members. Many were Oxbridge graduates; some wrote little (or in some cases nothing). Nonetheless, as Eric Hobsbawm has noted, they contributed actively to discussions and they often aided the researches of others. Systematic examination has made it possible to clear away misconceptions about their religious and socio-economic backgrounds, revealing networks of people, generational differences, dominant university recruitment grounds and the wide range of undergraduate historical discussions.
The thesis begins with the earlier context of the members of the Group, in the interwar period. We find that the party had little or no use for English history until directed to it by the Seventh Congress of the Comintern in 1935. For its first fifteen years, the party's stock of symbols and iconic events tended to be strongly influenced by Soviet examples and history was usually only used when it was about continental revolutions, especially the Paris Commune. After Moscow changed the line, the party made growing use of English historical themes in its propaganda. To appeal to a wider pool of potential allies, home-grown symbols, and idealised images of native proletarian heroism, were added. The theatrical and writing experts Randall Swingler and Montagu Slater also organised increasingly thematic historical pageants with costumes and singing. They had assistance from a committee chaired by Torr and aided by students such as Max Morris, who worked on draft scripts. The historians did research for the 1939 Chartist Centenary, the 'Heirs to the Charter' Pageant, and with associated Daily Worker articles. The internal debate asserting the value of such history was largely conducted by members of the Writers' Group, with figures such as Jack Lindsay and Edgell Rickword being most prominent. This was the most public strand of the campaign to assert that the party was the 'heir' to all previous British radicals and rebels, culminating in the major Chartism Pageant in 1939.
From 1936 the party's education effort was revolutionised by Victor Gollancz. His Left Book Club operated at both sophisticated and popular levels, and was a stunning success. His close alliance with the party enabled its ideological intervention in the form of Emile Burns and others who vetted a stream of useful books which met a strong demand for new interpretations aimed specifically at British audiences. For historians, no Club text was more important than A L Morton's People's History of England, for the party it was also a key work outlining a useful line on English History. It precipitated organised discussions by budding academic historians at Oxford, Cambridge and London universities. The burgeoning leftist and anti-fascist student groups began organising wide-ranging college study classes infused with key tenets of marxism-leninism, and key figures wrote articles and reviews critiquing establishment historical approaches for the new journal Modern Quarterly. The thesis discusses the relation of these publishing ventures to other historical activities at that time, and how these formed part of the agenda for the post-war Historians' Group.
Alongside this and to some extent co-ordinating it, was the party's Education Department, a 'Peoples' University' and a 'Faculty of History', all based at Marx House and led by Robin Page Arnot and Douglas Garman, with Torr as a frequent party lecturer. With perhaps around ten or so university historians, they formed the 'Marxist Historians' Group' in September 1938, with a 'History Bureau' for propaganda. From these earlier debates came the beginnings of a more systematic and thorough-going marxist analysis of Chartism and labour history. This collided with the views of hardliners such as Jurgen Kuczynski backed by Rajani Palme Dutt. This shows a striking independence, even defiance, on the part of Torr and her allies.
Torr and Garman worked at the party publishing house, Lawrence and Wishart, and they commissioned Christopher Hill's English Revolution intending it to be a central party text in celebrating the tercentenary of 1640-1940 with associated articles and pageantry. The war, with attendant mobilisation and bombing, disrupted this effort. On this issue too, the historians were assailed by fierce critiques from Kuczynski and Dutt. There were several articles and letters on the topic, but in addition to this published debate, Hill recalled attending full scale meetings in his army uniform to argue with Dutt and his allies. Hill attempted to trump their attacks by citing more up-to-date Soviet sources. The disagreements and numerous theoretical areas opened up for future research, were the foundation for, and set the agenda of, the post-war Historians' Group. True to his earlier track record, Dutt was never an ally of the Group. Perhaps uniquely the party gave academic historians access to its publishing house, its newspaper and journals, and sponsored party education classes on aspects of history, as well as recondite debates on the ancient world and slavery, the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the English Revolution, and chartism.
The role of Dona Torr has been underestimated. Assessing the party purposes of Torr is essential to any analysis of her relationship to the historians from both the pre-war and the post-war periods. As well as Torr, this thesis examines the work of Robin Page Arnot and Douglas Garman. Collectively their expertise and work was impressively wide-ranging. They were at various times in their lives: writers, linguists, publishers, editors, leading party educators, Comintern functionaries, marxist scholars, translators, and historians. However, their influence and role as facilitators of historians in the party has not been studied before.
For Tom Mann's eightieth birthday in 1936 there was a new almost biographical emphasis in the usual 'proletarian' celebrations. In this context the party had Torr write a booklet about his life. This was her first work of history, published in 1936. It is a carefully crafted work, full of useful marxist-leninist parallels suitable for party trainers. Mann was the best known party icon with broad appeal in the labour movement and there were many joint-party celebrations of his life. Mann was often publicly linked to party leader Harry Pollitt, in an effort to wrap him in Mann's past glories. Mann was deliberately raised to the Central Committee to fit Dutt's clearly articulated notions of politically useful biographical propaganda. Thereafter, Torr devoted her spare time to a fuller biography, Tom Mann, criticised in the thesis by Hobsbawm as 'hagiography'. But this was its intent - it was to accompany Edward Thompson's William Morris, and a planned work on Eleanor Marx by Allen Hutt. These works were part of a trilogy in the wider agenda of establishing the party's native roots, to bury the taint of 'Moscow Gold'. But her regular ill health, possible dementia, and the breaking up and reworking of the manuscript into an over-ambitious multi-volume work, almost totally derailed the project. Her closest friends in the Historians Group acted to ensure that at least one volume appeared in 1956.
Torr was acknowledged as the mentor for the Group well before her death in 1957. Thompson singled her out as partial co-author of his first major book, William Morris. In 1954 an impressive list of historians contributed to Democracy and the Labour Movement: Essays in Honour of Dona Torr, in which Christopher Hill asserted: 'So fertile has she been of ideas that a whole school of Marxist historians has grown up around her, fostered by her unfailing interest and aid.' John Saville initiated and edited this collection and spoke highly of her. Of those closest to Torr as 'pupils', few had done research degrees at university, and they had unusually close intellectual relationships with Torr, as a de facto PhD supervisor. However, Hobsbawm was one of the few Group members doing a research degree, and he was never close to Torr. In his 'memoir' of the Historians' Group, Torr just rated a fleeting mention, and in his recent autobiography, Interesting Times, he does not mention her at all. The accolades of her other 'pupils' indicate that Torr was considered by them a very important figure, yet she has hitherto received little scholarly attention. Although the records relating to her are fragmentary, she makes a fascinating case study of a woman cadre of the CPGB and the thesis examines how, and upon whom, she exerted an abiding influence, and what limitations there were on this influence. Her role as a labour historian is also discussed, as is the claim that she was a precocious proponent of what later became known as 'history from below'.
Another context is kept closely in mind - this was the era after 'bolshevisation' and so the pro-Soviet atmosphere was very important. Indeed key figures such as Torr, Hill and Maurice Dobb, visited the Soviet Union and deeply imbibed marxist-leninist orthodoxy. While an important limiting factor, it was not as simplistic as often portrayed. The many subtleties in the huge assortment of the works of Lenin opened out varied theoretical and historiographical lines of enquiry. Lenin has been completely ignored by analysts of the Group, but in this thesis his major writings are given their due. So too is the narrower Stalin-era version of the doctrine as exemplified in the notorious Short Course, which directly related to historical work in several cases. The pre-capitalist historians such as Rodney Hilton and Hill were particularly influenced by several of his major works on the peasantry. Although Hill's work is not a prime focus here, there were fierce debates in the pages of Dutt's Labour Monthly during 1940-41 over how to interpret his English Revolution and also over aspects of the 'impoverishment of the working class' thesis. Many top figures such as Torr, Dobb, Garman, Burns, Arnot, Dutt, and Kuczynski were involved in one or both of these debates. These largely set the agendas of the post-war Historians' Group.
