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‘Andy Croft’s amalgam of essays on some of the dimensions of culture pursued and generated by British communists during give decades of this century, from the twenties through to the sixties, makes compulsive reading ... a lively and provocative collection.’ Tribune

For over seventy years, the Communist Party of Great Britain had an extraordinary impact on British cultural life, exercising an influence quite out of proportion to its size or political importance. Many art forms were revitalised, others profoundly changed, new ones established or shaped by groups and individuals associated with the party, who brought to the realm of cultural production – whether in music, film, theatre or literature – a dynamism and vision that helped to lay the foundations for a new radical culture, a progressive avant garde in which the struggle was always to produce a culture for and of the people, in the front line of the battle of ideas.

The distinguished contributors to this volume – the first serious study of the subject – draw on new research to recover the fascinating histories of the artists, poets, musicians, film-makers and cultural visionaries of the period, placing them in a broader historical context and providing an invaluable introduction to British social and cultural history in the twentieth century.

Introduction, Andy Croft

1. James Barke: A Great-hearted Writer, a Hater of Oppression, a True Scot by H. Gustav Klaus

2. To Disable the Enemy: the Graphic art of the Three Jameses by Robert Radford

3. Heirs to the Pageant: Mass Spectacle and the Popular Front by Mick Wallis

4. Notes From the Left: Communism and British Classical Music by Richard Hanlon and Mike Waite

5. Sylvia Townsend Warner in the 1930s by Maroula Joannou

6. An Intellectual Irrelevance? Marxist Literary Criticism in the 1930s by Hanna Behrend

7. King Street Blues: Jazz and the Left in Britain in the 1930s - 1940s by Kevin Morgan

8. The Boys Round the Corner: the Story of Fore Publications by Andy Croft

9. The Edinburgh People's Festival,1951-54 by Hamish Henderson

10. The World's Ill-Divided': the Communist Party and Progressive Song by Gerald Porter

11. The Sunshine of Socialism: the CPGB and Film in the 1950s by Bert Hogenkamp

Afterword by Paul Hogarth

Notes on Contributors

Index

Sujets

Political Ideologies

Political Science

Democracy

Informations

Publié par	Pluto Press
Date de parution	20 septembre 1998
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781849645089
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,6250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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A Weapon in the Struggle: The Cultural History of the Communist Party in Britain

Pluto Press

Edited by Andy Croft

A Weapon in the Struggle The Cultural History of the Communist Party in Britain

P Pluto Press LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA

First published 1998 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA

The right of the individual contributors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

‘Waiting at Cerbere’ reprinted by kind permission of the trustees of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s estate.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 7453 1209 8 hbk

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A weapon in the struggle: the cultural history of the Communist Party in Britain/edited by Andy Croft. p. cm. ISBN 0–7453–1209–8 (hardcover) 1. Communist Party of Great Britain—History. 2. Communism—Great Britain—History. 3. Great Britain—Politics and government—20th century. I. Croft, Andy. HX244.W43 1998 324.241'0975—dc21 98–24912 CIP

Disclaimer: Some images in the original version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook.

Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Production Services, Chadlington, OX7 3LN Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton Printed in the EC by T.J. International Ltd, Padstow

Contents

Introduction

1 James Barke: A Great-hearted Writer, a Hater of Oppression, a True Scot H. Gustav Klaus

2 To Disable the Enemy: the Graphic Art of the Three Jameses Robert Radford

3 Heirs to the Pageant: Mass Spectacle and the Popular Front Mick Wallis

4 Notes From the Left: Communism and British Classical Music Richard Hanlon and Mike Waite

5 Sylvia Townsend Warner in the 1930s Maroula Joannou

6An Intellectual Irrelevance? Marxist Literary Criticism in the 1930s Hanna Behrend

7 King Street Blues: Jazz and the Left in Britain in the 1930s–1940s Kevin Morgan

8 The Boys Round the Corner: the Story of Fore Publications Andy Croft

9 The Edinburgh People’s Festival, 1951–54 Hamish Henderson

106

123

142

163

vi A WEAPON IN THE STRUGGLE 10 ‘The World’s Ill-Divided’: the Communist Party and Progressive Song Gerald Porter

The Sunshine of Socialism: the CPGB and Film in the 1950s Bert Hogenkamp

Afterword Paul Hogarth

Notes on Contributors

Index

171

192

207

210

212

Introduction

I was asked in 1953 to take a weekend school on the theme ‘Culture is a weapon in the fight for socialism’. Thinking out what I would say, I felt that the theme stated no more than a half-truth. At the school I said that culture, as Caudwell had written of poetry inIllusion and Reality, heightens our consciousness of the world we want to win and our energy to win it. In this sense it was true that culture is a weapon in the fight for socialism. But the truth depended on recognition of the greater truth that socialism is a weapon in the fight for culture. For our final aim was not the establishment of a political and economic structure, but the heightening of human life. Without this recognition, the slogan became a perversion of the truth, since it degraded culture into a means to a political end. (Alick West,One Man in His Time)

This book takes its title from a slogan used by British communists at the height of the Cold War to define their attitude to cultural activity. There is a touching earnestness about the idea of culture as a weapon in political struggle; the thought that art and politics might be usefully and actively related seems unbelievably quaint in an age where both are more usually considered unconnected objects of private and passive consumption. But there is also a grisly vainglory here, an expression of the self-consciously embattled spirit in which the Communist Party conducted its cultural life, distorted by a slavish and idiotic devotion to imported Soviet examples, and a would-be military model of cultural organisation. And it is hard to think of a more self-defeating metaphor, as of course the enemy always had rather more divisions on the cultural front than the British Communist Party could ever deploy. Yet the Party’s artistic life was not always as reductive or as grim as its pronouncements on the subject. For all the talk of culture as a ‘weapon in the struggle for socialism’, the Communist Party also contained another, utopian, sense that socialism was a weapon in the fight for an enriched and democratic human culture. Delegates to the Party’s 1952 Party Congress, for example, after voting against ‘the Americanisation of Britain’s cultural life’ and ‘reactionary films and debased literature and

2 A WEAPON IN THE STRUGGLE comics’ were treated to a concert at which, between readings from Dickens and poetry from the Trinidadian communist Peter Blackman, the pianist James Gibb played Beethoven, John Goss sang Vaughan Williams’Hugh the Drover, the WMA Singers performed some English folk songs, the Birmingham Workers Choir sang an ‘eighteenth-century medley’, while Alan Bush conducted part of his operaWat Tylerand Unity Theatre provided some Old Time Music Hall. It was, to say the least, a contradictory organisation which by day endorsed the attacks in the Soviet Union on Shostakovitch and Akhmatova, and in the evening found relaxation and pleasure in such a jolly and idiosyncratic repertoire. Because the Communist Party never resolved this contradiction it was arguably condemned to failure. But it was also out of this contradiction that British communists made much of their most lively and entertaining art, some of which at least deserves to survive that failure. There is another contradiction which needs to be considered here. The arts have long been an easy target for anti-communist historiography. Few aspects of communist history have attracted so much attention as its cultural record, yet almost nothing is known about the specific cultural histories of the British Communist Party. The appalling treatment of artists in the Soviet Union, China and the People’s Democracies was always enough to suggest that communists could not be trusted with the imagination. Because communism in the Soviet Union appeared to prove itself the historical enemy of creativity, historians have been saved the trouble of examining what this meant for communist artists a long way from Moscow. These essays attempt to unravel both contradictions by considering some of the achievements and failures of communist artists who, though mostly forgotten now, once had an extraordinary impact on British cultural life, out of all proportion to the Party’s political influence (which was itself out of proportion to its size). Together they represent a kind of tentative outline history of some of the ways in which the Communist Party tried to intervene in British cultural life – in painting, theatre, music, poetry, fiction, criticism, film, song and even historical pageants – and of some of the ways in which individual artists tried to play their part in the life of the Communist Party. There are many obvious omissions here, to which I hope this collection will encourage others to attend – the work of Caribbean communists like Claudia Jones in establishing the Notting Hill Carnival, the influence of actors and writers from Unity Theatre on the development of TV drama, the role of Reggie Smith, Ewan MacColl and Charles Parker in shaping British radio drama, the involvement of London communists in the first Londonmela. There are many individuals whose work is not discussed here, but whose distinguished careers also need to be assessed one day – the Lutenist Diana Poulton, for example, who was also manager of the Party publishers Lawrence & Wishart; Montagu Slater, head of film scripts

INTRODUCTION 3 at the Ministry of Information and librettist of Britten’sPeter Grimes; sculptors like Lawrence Bradshaw and George Fullard; the polymath Jack Lindsay, author of over 160 books; the film-maker (and table tennis champion) Ivor Montagu; Thomas Russell, secretary of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. And no assessment of the Communist Party’s contribution to British cultural life will be complete without some account of the role of communists in local Workers Theatre Movement (WTM), Workers Music Association (WMA) and Unity groups (in 1949 the amateur People’s Theatre in Newcastle performed theworldpremiere of O’Casey’sCock a Doodle Dandy), in Left Book Club groups, in Glasgow Unity Theatre, in the wartime Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA) and the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA). Although for reasons of space these essays do not go much beyond 1956, this is not to imply that the departure of so many of its most distinguished artists that year left the Party short of cultural energy or ideas. A fuller account of communist cultural initiatives would have to include, for example, the evangelical promotion of children’s poetry by communist teachers inside NATE and ILEA in the early 1970s (when Chris Searle was sacked for publishing a book of poetry by children from a secondary school in Stepney), the work of Buzz Goodbody and Colin Chambers at the RSC, the role of communists in setting up the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers, the impact of magazines likeArtery, FireweedandRed Letters. As late as 1977 the Party was able to attract 11,000 people to Alexandra Palace for the People’s Jubilee. If thereafter the Party never regained the cultural authority it had once enjoyed, it nevertheless continued to engage the loyalties of distinguished and well-known figures like Tilda Swinton, Sally Hibbin, Dick Gaughan and Ken Currie. This book therefore represents only the beginnings of a discussion about the particularities – and the peculiarities – of British communist cultural history. It may be that the cultural legacy of the Party will prove – together with its anti-colonial work and its role in the trade unions – its most important and enduring contributions to British life. But so long as histories of the Party, whether hostile or sympathetic, underestimate its cultural record, our understanding of its wider failures and successes is unlikely to be either adequate or very useful. There are four ways in which this case may be put. Firstly, the Communist Party always took its cultural work very seriously indeed. It invested an enormous amount of energy in its cultural projects and placed great responsibilities on its ‘cultural workers’. Only an organisation which placed such importance on culture could have spent most of the Cold War in open conflict with its own best artists. (Curiously, the Party paid rather more attention to the arts and to the encouragement of creativity during the High Stalinist years of the Cold War than it did during the ascendancy ofMarxismTodayin the 1980s, when culture more

4 A WEAPON IN THE STRUGGLE usually meant ‘lifestyle’.) The arts were one of the ways in which communist ideas entered the mainstream of British life and through which the Party was able to identify itself as the defender of native, popular traditions and as the bearer of the new and, therefore, of the future. This was obviously the case in the 1930s and 1940s, when the Party attracted the avant-garde (Henry Moore), the fashionable (Stephen Spender) and the popular (Patrick Hamilton), when the communist jazz band leader Ben Frankel was writing dance musicandfilm scoresandchamber music. It was true in a more substantial sense during the Second World War, when communists in CEMA and ABCA found themselves at the head of the wartime ‘cultural upsurge’ which was articulated so powerfully in the Party’s bestselling magazines,Our TimeandSeven. Conversely, during the Cold War it was one of the ways in which the Party was seen to be locked in the past, hostile to every new cultural development (Bop, Sartre, Alban Berg, Graham Greene, Gershwin, Rock and Roll and even Picasso). The changing fortunes of communist artists are therefore a good measure of the Party’s wider fortunes, its arguments about culture a coded history of wider strategy debates. Secondly, the Communist Party created in practice a uniquely participatory artistic internal life which bore as little resemblance to the idea of the ‘fighting unit in the Battle of Ideas’ as it did to the usual caricatures of intellectuals seduced by Stalin. The Party’s attempts to develop a native communist ‘tradition’ brought together professionals and amateurs in ways which, though sometimes high minded and patronising, were always accessible and educative (the classicist George Thomson once held open meetings at Marx House where comrades were invited to propose revisions to hisMarxism and Poetry). What British newspaper but theDaily Workerever celebrated Shakespeare’s birthday by reproducing the full text of Gaunt’s speech fromRichard II(mischievously suggesting that it was ‘Shakespeare’s comment on the Marshall Plan’)? What British newspaper but theDaily Workerever had a playwright (Sean O’ Casey) on its editorial board? For most of its life the paper carried a full page of book reviews each week (out of only six pages) as well as weekly columns surveying new cinema, jazz, theatre, music, art, records, dance, radio and laterTV. It occasionally ran serialised stories (one ran for 21 weeks in 1949) and frequently carried comical, topical verse; the satirical poet ‘Krasny’ made an appearance as early as February 1930. TheDaily Worker, and before that theSunday Worker, regularly ran educational debates on issues of cultural history, part of a sustained, long-term project to introduce working-class readers to the ‘best’ of their cultural heritage. Much of the autobiographies of working-class Party leaders like Tom Bell and T.A. Jackson were essentially annotated reading lists of the books which made them communists. Party members were routinely encouraged to read, write, sing, speak, act, even to make films. During an otherwise unedifying debate in theDaily Workerin 1952 on the role of ‘cultural workers’, one

INTRODUCTION 5 Party member confessed that although his borough committee had granted his request for a four-month ‘sabbatical’ from Party activity in order to finish a novel, he had been unable to do so; it was only when he resumed his responsibilities in the Party and in the Ex-Servicemen’s Movement for Peace that he was able to regain the impulse to write. Writing in particular was a natural reflex among several generations of self-educating working-class communists. Imprisoned in 1916 for opposing the war, Bob Stewart put the experience to good use in a book ofPrison Rhymes; when the Welsh poet T.E. Nicholas was gaoled in 1940 (under Defence Regulation 18B) he too wrote a book about the experience – a collection of prison sonnetsin Welsh; taken prisoner in North Africa in 1942, a young barber called Dan Billany spent the rest of the war in an Italian prison camp, where he wroteThe Cage, one of the great prison camp novels. Harry Pollitt used to review children’s fiction in theDaily Worker, Willie Gallacher once published a book of satirical verse and Palme Dutt wrote a play about Dimitrov. The first Party meeting I attended in Middlesborough was devoted to a discussion ofNineteen Eighty-Four; Teesside communists played an important part in founding a local community-writing festival (now in its tenth year); one of the branch’s last acts was to organise a poetry reading in support of the local campaign against the Gulf War. Thirdly, although the Party’s celebration of native, radical, democratic cultural traditions was inspired by the Soviet example, its cultural successes were much more than the sum of the Soviet cultural models it was expected to follow. With the exception of some musicians (the distinguished pianist Geraldine Peppin once described the Party Musicians Group as ‘dead from the cock up’) the cultural work of the Party was probably less damaged by international events than most other aspects of the Party’s work. Finally, this was an organisation entirely at ease with ideas of criticism and cultural debate. Despite the best efforts of King Street, the Communist Party never resolved its attitude to culture and the arts. There was always room for fierce controversy and argument; on one occasion an article by T.A. Jackson defending ‘bourgeois culture’ generated over a hundred letters to theDaily Workerin three days. In 1956 the paper had to interrupt a long-running controversy about Burns’ Night to make space for readers’ letters about the 25th Congress and the revelations about Stalin. Accounts of the Communist Party which underestimate its cultural life inevitably reduce the autodidact culture of this instinctively argumentative organisation to a stage army under orders from Moscow or King Street. Moreover, not all King Street’s cultural thinking was conducted in Moscow’s military metaphors. ‘Why do we want political power? What is it for?’ asked John Gollan at that 1953 conference on ‘Culture as a Weapon in the Fight for Socialism’. After ritually denouncing ‘Western values’ and genuflecting to supposed cultural freedoms in the Soviet Union, Gollan