The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain. Juliet Gardiner
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 “general news” and “sport” … and replace it by working-class technique,’ the pair scuttled back to their day jobs. Despite a gradual dilution of the paper’s strict on-message stance with more news — including some investigative ‘scoops’ — the odd photograph of Gracie Fields, film reviews, excellent cartoons and a women’s page with recipes and knitting patterns, it was some time before racing tips, which had disappeared after the first few issues, were allowed back; they remained a distinct selling point for much of the century.
In January 1933, Hitler’s assumption of the German chancellorship led to a change in the class-against-class policy, and in the summer of 1935 the Seventh (and last) Congress of the International affirmed the Soviet intention ‘to establish a united front on a national as well as an international scale’ against fascism — a front that it was argued should include democratic political parties across a wide spectrum. This was not to be a call to which the British Labour Party responded, though the change of policy did bring the CPGB new recruits, among them engineers, railwaymen, textile workers, builders and some in the distributive trades. Jack Gaster, who had previously regarded the Party as ‘ultra sectarian … their concept of a United Front was “We’ll unite with anyone who unites with us,”’ and had helped expel ‘a secret group of Communist Party members within the ILP’, had himself lost patience with the ILP by 1935 and joined the CPGB, undertaking frequent legal work for the Party.
Although the CPGB remained an overwhelmingly working-class party, it had always attracted a small number of intellectuals, particularly scientists, and in the 1930s it gradually drew in a coterie of undergraduates and recent graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, sometimes referred to sneeringly by Rose Macaulay as ‘the not-so-very intelligentsia’, or, as Beatrice Webb labelled them, ‘the mild-mannered desperadoes’.
In 1931 David Guest, son of the Labour peer Lord Haden-Guest, returned to Trinity College, Cambridge, after a year studying in Germany, where he had become convinced that the threat of fascism was dangerously real, and that communism was the only hope, and set about organising the Cambridge branch of the CPGB. This attracted his fellow philosophy student Maurice Cornforth, the poet Charles Madge, John Cornford, James Klugmann and Guy Burgess, all of whom were mentored by Maurice Dobb, an economist and Fellow of Trinity College who had been a member of the Party since 1923, and who had suffered professionally for his affiliation.
The best-known, most-heard (if most tenuously linked) of those Oxbridge students and ex-students who were drawn to communism in the mid 1930s were the ‘MacSpaundays’ — the poets and would-be poets W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day Lewis. ‘Tell us about the Thirties,’ a group of Cambridge undergraduates urged Day Lewis after the Second World War; ‘… it seems to be the last time that anyone believed in anything.’ ‘We were singularly fortunate compared with the young of today,’ acknowledged the poet, ‘in believing that something could be done about the social and political evils confronting us … no one who did not go through this political experience during the Thirties can quite realise how much hope there was in the air then, how radiant for some of us was the illusion that man could, under Communism put the world to rights.’
What communism offered such young intellectuals was ‘substitutes for a faith, heterogeneous ideas which served to plug “the hollow in the breast where God should be”’. Most of Day Lewis’s friends who became active in left-wing movements, or sympathetic to them, had similar backgrounds. All had been to public schools, ‘with their tradition of both authoritarianism and service to the community’. Three were the sons clergymen — Day Lewis himself, Louis MacNeice and Rex Warner — while W.H. Auden had ‘a devout Anglo-Catholic mother … we had all lapsed from the Christian faith, and tended to despair of Liberalism as an effective instrument for dealing with the problems of our day, if not despise it as an outworn creed’.
For Day Lewis the attraction to communism had both a religious and a romantic dimension: ‘My susceptibility to the heroic, played upon by Russian films in which the worker, mounted upon his magnificent tractor, chugged steadily towards the dawn and the new world, joined up with my natural partisanship of the underdog to create a picture, romantic and apocalyptic, of the British worker at last coming into his own.’ Nevertheless, he was, he admitted, ‘an extremely odd recruit to the Party’ in Cheltenham, where he was teaching at the time (though with a ‘gentlemanly