It is impossible to demonstrate that Grassic Gibbon was ever a member of the Communist Party as there are no records in existence.

In a letter to Naomi Mitchison on 10 August 1933 Gibbon claimed that he had been a member when he was in the Royal Army Service Corps.

I was thrown out of the Communist Party as a Trotskyist - while I was in the ranks of the Army, doing Communist propaganda. So I went Anarchist for a bit, but they’re such damn fools, with their blah about Kropotkin (whose anthropology is worse than Frazer’s) and Bakunin. When the last Labour Government went west, I re-applied to join the Communists, but they refused to have anything to do with me. Brief history of a revoluter. I once tried (and wrote a propaganda novel for it) to form a Society of Militant Pacifists - chaps who were to engage in sabotage, train-wrecking, and so on if another war came. But the Promethean Society pinched my members. [ 1 ]

The tone is flippant. Gibbon’s service with the RASC finished in March 1923. Were there expulsions from the CPGB for ‘Trotskyism’ at this time?

In a letter to Eric Linklater on 10 November 1934 Gibbon changed part of his account. ‘Everyone insists on regarding me as a Communist - except the Communist Party of Great Britain, which twice in 1931 refused my application to join.’ [ 2 ] The date of his application is the same as in the letter to Naomi Mitchison but in his letter to her Gibbon had ‘re-applied’.

It seems certain that Gibbon also told Hugh MacDiarmid that he had been expelled as a trotskyist when they met on several occasions in 1934 in London. MacDiarmid had joined the party in August that year. MacDiarmid repeated his criticism of Gibbon as a trotskyist on at least four occasions.

Gibbon was a Trotskyist and an ex-member of the CPGB. [ 3 ]

From the political angle, the principal criticism to be levelled against him is that which the Communist Party themselves levelled when they expelled him as a Trotskyist. [ 4 ]

Towards the end of his life he became better equipped and entitled to call himself a Communist, albeit with ineradicable Trotskyist leanings. [ 5 ]

and I think the Communist Party itself said later on that he must be regarded as a Trotskyist. [ 6 ]

Two years after the publication of the quotation immediately above MacDiarmid withdrew his criticism of Gibbon as a trotskyist without explanation. Dr Michael James McGrath recorded part of his interview with MacDiarmid when he was researching his thesis.

However, shortly before his death, Grieve stated that he had been wrong to say Mitchell had once been a member of the CPGB who suffered expulsion for Trotskyist sentiments. He did recall, nevertheless, that he and Mitchell attended open meetings of the CP while he was in Welwyn early in 1934 on business relating to the publication of Scottish Scene. [ 7 ]

McGrath also recorded that: ‘Grieve would not be drawn on the question of precisely what he meant when he called Mitchell a Trotskyist.’ [ 8 ]

McGrath recounted MacDiarmid’s statements about Gibbon’s party membership and about their attending open meetings in 1934 to Ray Mitchell, Gibbon’s widow. [ 9 ] She replied that she did not ‘believe that Leslie and Grieve attended meetings of the CP’ and continued: ‘Leslie was a member of the Communist Party in Aberdeen – or so I am told. He was not a member in London – he was in the RAF ...’ [ 10 ] But Gibbon couldn’t have been a party member in Aberdeen as he left early in 1919 before the party was formed.

In his synopsis ‘Memoirs of a Materialist’, written in 1934, Gibbon proposes ‘Shots of the author and his wife as Communist agents in a General Election’ and gives the date as ‘1931’. [ 11 ] This date is consistent with his re-application or application to join the CP referred to in letters to Naomi Mitchison and Eric Linklater. There was a CP candidate in Hammersmith North in October 1931 when Gibbon and his wife were living at 29 Percy Road. E F Bramley received 697 votes. But Mrs Mitchell recalled that they canvassed for the ILP.

John Manson

1. National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, NLS Acc. 5885.
2. NLS Acc. 10282/1 (part).
3. ‘Red Scotland’ NLS MS27035 f.86 (1935).
4. ‘Lewis Grassic Gibbon’ in Scottish Art and Letters 2, Glasgow, 1946, 43.
5. Hugh MacDiarmid to Dr James D. Young, 14 May 1966, published in Cencrastus 46, Edinburgh, 1993, 20.
6. ‘Interview... with Hugh MacDiarmid’ in Scottish Marxist 10, Glasgow, 1975, 12.
7. Michael James McGrath, ‘James Leslie Mitchell (Lewis Grassic Gibbon): A study in politics and ideas in relation to his life and work.’ PhD thesis, Edinburgh, 1983, 45-6.
8. ibid, 47.
9. Letter to Ray Mitchell, 10 November 1977, NLS MS26075, f.139.
10. Letter to Michael James McGrath, 14 November 1977, NLS Acc. 10540.
11. NLS MS26060 ff. 41 and 38 respectively. Valentina Bold (ed), Smeddum: A Lewis Grassic Gibbon Anthology, 785, has the quotation but not the date.

MSS are quoted by permission of the National Library of Scotland and of Edinburgh University Library.