Party People, Communist Lives: Explorations in Biography. (Reviews/Comptes Rendus).

John McIlroy, Kevin Morgan and Alan Campbell, ed. Party People, Communist Lives: Explorations in Biography (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2001)

THE STORY of the Communist Party of Great Britain has exercised a surprising fascination on historians. Compared to the mass Communist Parties

of France, Italy or Greece, the British organization was weak, ill rooted, and insecure. In the 70 years of the party's existence, its membership peaked at just 50,000. Three of its five MPs belonged to the 1920s, a period of political flux, and only one of these remained with the party for more than a few years. The Communists did, however, play a role. In the 1940s and 1950s, they represented a substantial ramp of working-class sentiment. Left-wing frustration at the slow progress of parliamentary socialism was most easily expressed through the trade unions. Where there were unofficial strikes, or confident shop stewards willing to speak out against government 'austerity,' then active (or former) Communists were rarely far behind.

While the historiography has grown to such a point that there are now four full-length histories of the party from its birth in 1920 to its demise 70 years later, there are still few biographies of leading British Communists. Even those accounts that do exist have too often relied on a style of "exemplary" writing. The "good Communist" dedicated his or her life to the political struggle, leaving all other personal or domestic considerations behind. Any admission of weakness, by the memoirist or the loyal biographer, could only diminish the cause. The results were criticized, in one telling review, by the labour historian Sidney Pollard of a biography of the Sheffield Communist, George Fletcher. "Did George Fletcher never have doubts himself, one wonders? ... Here was no party hack, no 'professional'... was there ever a dilemma in his mind? ... Was he happy about purges in Russia, the sectarian position of the CPGB, the absence of democracy in the Third International, which he once attended as a delegate? ... Are good Communists really never assailed by doubts? And if they are, do their biographers really perform a service to the Party by hiding them?" (Sidney Pollard, "Leaven of Life: The Story of George Henry Fletcher, Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, 4 (1962), 56-7).

The authors of this collection employ the insights of the biographer in a different fashion, to explore a subjective world of experience and emotion, normally concealed from both official party biographies and conventional political history. As the editors suggest, "writing biography can be an exciting and rigorous way of writing history, one which restores the flesh and blood, the inspiration and perspiration to Communist lives; it is also a form which gives proper weight to human agency as well as its constraints." (5-6) The main contents of this book are eight biographical accounts of the lives of prominent British Communists. The first is devoted to Dora Montefiore, one of the best-known women Communists at the party's foundation. The second and third chapters record Arthur Reade, aesthete and 1920s student activist, and William Rust, full-time party officer and editor of the Daily Worker. The fourth and fifth biographical chapters describe Rose Smith, another party full-timer, and Arthur Homer, the Presi dent of the South Wales Miners' Federation. The sixth is devoted to three Scottish Communists, also prominent among the mineworkers, Willie Allan, David Proudfoot, and Abe Moffat. The remaining biographical chapters belong to Randall Swingler, Communist poet, and Jack Gaster, a late recruit from the left wing of the Independent Labour Party to the Communist bureaucracy. These substantive chapters follow a general, historiographical introduction. The penultimate chapter, "Visitors and Victims," records the experience of British citizens in the USSR after 1930. There is then a short afterword.

This is a thoroughly compelling and enjoyable book. It breathes the air of real lives spent in struggle. Although it is the product of eleven different contributors, the book coheres around common episodes and themes. Indeed a variety of perspectives is positively revealing, when different chapters cover similar ground. Nina Fishman's study of Arthur Homer tends if anything to play down the drama of Homer's clashes with the British Communist hierarchy. Homer was one of the best, independent leaders of the miners' unions. Unlike other leading Communists, he was unwilling to submit to the ultra-left politics of the late 1920s Comintern, and the claim that "rightwing" parliamentary socialism was the twin of fascism. Persuaded by his comrades to visit the Soviet Union in 1931, Arthur Homer then published a series of recantations, and returned to the party fold. Fishman's conciliatory account of this sinister process contrasts with Campbell and Mcllroy's lives of Allan, Proudfoot, and Moffat, which bring out the s heer stupidity of the Communist desire to establish separate "left-wing" unions at this time. It also sits oddly beside Barry McLoughlin's chapters, which list the several British victims of Stalin's mass purges. What might have happened to Homer, we might ask, had he arrived in Russia not in 1931, but in 1934?

The conventional criticisms that historians have made of biography describe its tendency to sensationalize, the over-concentration on famous personalities to the exclusion of more mundane but generally felt realities, a tendency to provide pseudo-psychological explanations of longer-term historical processes. This collection is admirably free from most such flaws, but not the middle one. The most typical British Communist was a man or woman working in a skilled working-class or lower-middle-class profession. Where, in this book, are the engineers who dominated party conferences, when the CP was at its height? The party was able to sustain meetings not just in London and the capitals, but also in provincial cities, and in many small British towns. What kept such people going, even when their branches were rootless, marginal, and small? How indeed did the nature of their commitment change between the heady, frightening days of the 1930s, and the slow, dull world of the 1950s? The political activity of such ordi nary Communists consisted mainly of paper selling, electioneering (especially after 1951), or work around just one or two approved party "fronts." Unless we can gain access to the minds of the party rank-and-file, we will never answer the great question of Communist historiography. Why did so many Communist Party members accept so loyally the twists and turns of Moscow-originated policy, when these changes committed them to making outrageous intellectual somersaults, and even though the Party leadership lacked the organizational means to impose such views on its members?

If any writers are well equipped to answer this question in the future, then it is the editors of this book. For Party People, Communist Lives is but the first fruit of a major project of Communist biography, based on the work of a group of scholars at Manchester University. The authors have been engaged in constructing a large database of several thousand life-histories, which when complete, should tell us more than anything about the lives of the Communist rank-and-file. The publishers deserve our thanks for bringing out this first volume, but it will also be interesting to see what discoveries lie ahead.