The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain. Juliet Gardiner

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СКАЧАТЬ charge stuck, however, of a movement controlled from Moscow, financed by ‘red gold’ and aiming at revolution. Yet if the NUWM attracted only relatively small numbers, the Communist Party certainly did no better. By August 1930 membership, which had peaked at 12,000 immediately after the General Strike in 1926, had fallen to fewer than 2,500, while the Labour Party had around 200,000 individual members. Since 1929 the CPGB had been pursuing the Communist International (Comintern)-dictated ‘class against class’ policy, identifying the Labour Party as the ‘third capitalist party’ and ‘social fascists’, and had severed links with other left-wing organisations including the ILP.

      Villages such as Mardy at the head of the Rhondda Valley and Lumphinnans in the West Fife coalfield were demonised as ‘Little Moscows’ for their industrial militancy, opposition to the coal owners — and to the capitalist system in general — and their supposed unwavering support for communism (though the ‘class against class’ policy had eroded cooperation in local politics with Labour built up over a decade — as it closed so many doors — and reduced the CP to an opposition party). Miners formed the hard core of the membership, but the party was strongest in London and Scotland. While most CPGB members were relatively young, working-class men, by late 1932, 60 per cent of them were out of work, and that figure was higher in Scotland. There were few female members, since women had been ‘completely neglected’ in the drive to grow a mass party, and the Young Communist League could only claim two or three hundred members.

      Moreover, the avenues of persuasion could be narrow. In Bolton, members of the Communist Party petitioned the central library to subscribe to the Daily Worker and periodicals such as The USSR in Construction and Labour Monthly, as well as to purchase what the local press dubbed ‘red’ books (such as Lenin’s Complete Works and Plekanoff’s Fundamental Problems of Marxism). The chief librarian circulated sample copies for a month, but the Library Committee gave hardly an inch, agreeing only that Labour Monthly could be placed in the reading room — and that for a trial period of six months only.

      Nevertheless, the decision had been taken not only to try to grow a mass working-class revolutionary movement, but also to engage in electoral politics. However, Communist candidates performed poorly, and seemed unable to capitalise on growing disappointment first with the Labour, and then with the National Government. Even in Seaham, Ramsay MacDonald’s own constituency, disgust with the ‘great betrayer’ did not translate into support for the Communist candidate, who only picked up 677 votes. The Party’s most solid support was in London and the depressed mining areas, particularly those in Scotland and South Wales, and at the depth of the Depression in January 1932 membership had risen to 9,000. Yet in the Merthyr Tydfil by-election in 1934, Wal Hannington only managed to pick up 9.4 per cent of the votes, and the Communists were hardly more successful in local elections. In Gateshead even a local ‘Douglas Credit’ candidate polled more votes than the Communist contender, and no council in England was ever controlled by Communists. Although Communist participation in elections was of considerable ‘nuisance value’, splitting the left vote and sometimes, as in Whitechapel in London’s East End, West Fife and a Sheffield seat, letting in a Conservative or National candidate, it was not until the 1935 election that the Party managed to send an MP to Westminster, when Willie Gallacher won West Fife and Harry Pollitt, the General Secretary, came within a whisker of being returned for East Rhondda.

      Attempts to build an industrial base met with little success either: the Minority Movement, the Communist industrial organisation, urged the setting up of alternative unions to rival existing trade unions, but only two ever came into being: the United Mineworkers of Scotland, based in the coal mines of Fife, and the short-lived United Clothing Workers of East London. The Minority Movement never attracted more than seven hundred members, and when it was finally wound up in 1933 it could claim only 550 party members organised in eighty-two factory cells.

      The Party’s greatest problem in the early 1930s was its retention rate: if the NUWM leached members, so did the CPGB, partly due to ‘rotten’ organisation, and partly to the rigour and commitment demanded of recruits to the cause. An anonymous member of the Bromley Communist Party in Kent recalled that it had been ‘a serious decision’ when, after much discussion, eight people ‘decided that the time had come to make a commitment to the Communist Party … for one thing the police, including the special branch, took a great interest in the activities, however trivial, of even rank and file members of the party. Secondly, a great many employers refused to employ anyone known to be associated with the party, and lastly, it meant virtual segregation and exclusion from the work of the Labour Party and even some Trade Unions.’ Cut off from the rest of the ‘reformist’ left, the CPGB built itself something of a world within a world. ‘Like practising Catholics or Orthodox Jews, we lived in a little private world of our own … a tight … self-referential group,’ frequenting cafés such as Meg’s in Parton Street in London and the Clarion in Market Street, Manchester (‘Communists met in cafés rather than pubs: there was quite a strong inhibition against drink’), the pro-Soviet Scala cinema in Charlotte Street in London, Henderson’s ‘bomb shop’ (which became Collet’s bookshop) and others in King Street and the Farringdon Road, as well as meeting at dances and whist drives organised by the Friends of the Soviet Union, the League of Socialist Freethinkers, the Rebel Players and the Federation of Student Societies, and the activities of the Workers’ Theatre Movement and the British Workers’ Sports Federation. They rambled collectively at weekends, took holidays at Socialist youth camps or Communist guest houses, or stayed in youth hostels as part of hiking trips (some YHA wardens were rumoured to be ‘sympathisers’). If the expenditure of £5 was feasible, they might take a week’s holiday with the Workers’ Travel Association in the Lake District, or maybe the Trossachs.

      Certainly a great deal was asked of a Communist: attending frequent meetings, organising, speaking, selling Party literature, trade union activities, membership of other outside bodies and ‘front’ organisations. Ernest Trory suggests the level of commitment required: ‘I had become engaged to a girl who was not at all interested in the Party. The engagement was later broken off but in the meantime I began to spend more time dancing and taking her to the pictures than was consistent with Party work … To make matters worse, I frequented the Empire Club. A real sink of iniquity … spending my time gambling and playing cards, when I was needed by the Party at a critical time …’

      As well as regular attendance at ‘advanced political training lectures’, the Bromley Communists were expected to sell the weekend edition of the Daily Worker (produced in its early days in an unheated office without electricity, the editor typing articles by candlelight) outside Woolworths and Marks & Spencer’s in the town centre, although they found they could shift more copies late on Saturday evenings, ‘when the bus crews returned to Bromley garage at the end of a day’s work’. However, ‘sales were not very great, twenty to thirty copies being considered adequate compensation for the long hours worked’. Perhaps that was hardly surprising, since at the time the Daily Worker, the first issue of which had appeared on 1 January 1930, echoed the Communist Party’s dilemma. It was to contain none of the ‘frills … dazzle … corruption and entertainment’ of the popular press, so as not to distract readers from the struggle. But Harry Pollitt, the Party’s General Secretary since 1929, was prepared to venture that he thought the paper was ‘dull and dismal’, and suggested that those who produced it should study the ‘techniques of the capitalist press’. ‘We constantly talk about being close to the masses,’ Pollitt argued in June 1930 when the paper was selling a maximum of 10,000 copies and haemorrhaging some £500 each week from Party funds, ‘but no one can say we carry this out in regard to the paper.’ What the ‘masses’ wanted was more general news, sport, humour and topical features, but what they got in the pages of the Daily Worker was ‘nothing save struggle and death on every page’. Two journalists, one from the Daily Mail, the other from the Daily Express, were invited to moonlight on the Daily Worker to teach the staff how to use capitalism’s skills against the capitalists. However, faced with the edict of the CPGB’s severe theoretician, R. Palme Dutt, that ‘The task is to destroy (not to take over) … so-called СКАЧАТЬ