List of Illustrations
Preface by Ricard Baxell
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter One The Rebel
Chapter Two The Bolshevik
Chapter Three Code Name ‘Lincoln’
Chapter Four Revolution?
Chapter Five ‘Class Against Class’
Chapter Six Wintringham on War
Chapter Seven The English Captain
Chapter Eight The Battle of Jarama
Chapter Nine ‘And These Were Ours Who Died’
Chapter Ten Expulsion!
Chapter Eleven The Revolutionary Patriot
Chapter Twelve The People’s Army
Chapter Thirteen Common Wealth
Chapter Fourteen A Prophet Without Honour
Appendix: Books by Tom Wintringham
Notes
Index
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Preface by Richard Baxell for
The Last English Revolutionary
Wintringham was in
a long line of English revolutionaries. Like John Lilburne
he went to prison for his beliefs. Like George Byron he was
a poet who fought for a lost cause in a foreign country. Like
Oliver Cromwell’s English Captains he came from Lincolnshire
stock and tried to bring about an English revolution.
Hugh Purcell, The Last English Revolutionary, 2nd
edition, p. 258.
When the first edition of Hugh Purcell’s
engaging biography of Tom Wintringham, The Last English
Revolutionary, was published in 2004, the author’s aim
was, he wrote, to ‘elevate him from a footnote of British
History to the main text.’ And rightly so, for Wintringham
fully deserves to be seen as a key figure within the British
left during the first-half of the Twentieth Century. In only
thirty adult years, Wintringham managed to be a founding member
of the British Communist Party, a commander of the British
Battalion of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil
War, the instigator of the Home Guard, and the forefather
of a new, if short-lived, political party of the left. Like
George Orwell, Wintringham was a public school boy who turned
against the establishment and was fully prepared to defend
his political ideals with both pen and sword.
… The release of this revised and fully updated edition
in February 2012 is apposite. The month marks seventy-five
years since Wintringham, the self-styled ‘English Captain’,
led the British Battalion of the International Brigades into
their first, bloody action on the Jarama battlefield in Spain.
As the author recounts, elegantly weaving together Wintringham’s
own memoir, English Captain (now also reprinted), with memoirs
of other participants and fresh archival sources, it was an
inauspicious beginning for the battalion, for within three
days, half of them – including Wintringham himself –
would be out of action, either killed or wounded.
The French writer Albert Camus famously wrote that supporters
of the Spanish Republic across the world felt ‘the Spanish
drama as a personal tragedy.’ This was certainly true of Wintringham,
who saw his friends and comrades cut to pieces on the battlefields
of Spain and the great cause, for which they sacrificed everything,
brutally crushed. Wintringham’s contribution in actual battle
may have been small, but the author points out, like Hugh
Thomas before him, how Wintringham played a significant role
behind the scenes. Drawing on new material, Hugh Purcell reveals
that Wintringham was arguing for an international legion a
full two months before the Comintern decided to send brigades
to aid the Republic at the end of September 1936. Whether
Wintringham was actually the initiator of the International
Brigades themselves may be open to debate, but the chapters
on Spain certainly provides ample evidence of Wintringham’s
fundamental role in the formation and training – such as there
was - of the British Battalion.
… The fourteen months that Wintringham spent in Spain
sit appropriately at the heart of this detailed and extensive
biography. For Wintringham, nothing was the same after Spain:
it was there that his political and personal lives collided
so dramatically, eventually forcing him to choose between
the woman he loved and the politics he lived. It was in Spain
that Wintringham met and fell in love with the American journalist
and ‘great talker’, Kitty Bowler, who many of Wintringham’s
comrades in the upper echelons of the Communist Party viewed
as, if not actually a Trotskyist spy, then certainly thoroughly
untrustworthy. The affair confirmed the view of a number of
influential Party figures, including the Communist Party General
Secretary Harry Pollitt, that Wintringham was an inveterate
‘skirt-chaser.’
Purcell’s biography now reveals the full extent – and
consequences – of Wintringham’s womanising. As one reviewer
of the first edition of English Revolutionary stated,
Wintringham’s central weakness throughout his life was women
– his treatment of them and his polygamy. Before his
time in Spain, Wintringham had briefly left his wife and son
to have an affair – and a child – with another woman.
While his wife may have been prepared to forgive, others in
the Communist Party were not. When Wintringham later returned
from Spain with Kitty, the CPGB gave Wintringham a choice
between Kitty, or the Party. When he refused to choose, in
the summer of 1938, Wintringham was expelled.
… Freed from the shackles of the Communist line, Wintringham
moved politically closer to Orwell’s ‘revolutionary patriotism’
during the Second World War. Ironically, Wintringham’s argument
for the necessity of entwining of war and revolution echoed
the philosophy of the Catalan POUM militias, which the Communist
Party had suppressed so viciously in Spain. Purcell admirably
explains how Wintringham’s experience of the Spanish Republican
Army where, at least theoretically, everyone knew why they
were fighting and believed in the cause, led him to develop
his idea of a Peoples’ Army, a defence force of volunteers,
which could provide an in-depth web of protection against
a Nazi ‘Blitzkreig’ attack on Britain. Wintringham became
the director of the guerrilla training camp at Osterley, training
volunteers in the ‘Local Defence Volunteers’ and, as Purcell
states, Wintringham deserves to be recognised as ‘the inspirer
of the Home Guard.’ However, not convinced by Wintringham’s
argument that a successful war needed a revolution, Purcell
notes wryly that: ‘Tom did not seem aware that the Wehrmacht
was a superb fighting army – and the product of a totalitarian
society’ (p.183). During the war Wintringham became a household
name, due to his regular articles in the Daily Mirror and
Picture Post about home defence and the war abroad. His 1940
pamphlet, New Ways of War, infamously described as ‘a do-it-yourself
guide to killing people,’ was popular for its well-aimed salvos
on army traditionalists which, we now discover, inspired Michael
Powell’s film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.
The film was a great commercial success and Wintringham’s
revenge on the men of the War Office who forced him out of
Osterley. Churchill apparently hated the film and probably
didn’t like Wintringham any better.
… Purcell concludes this authoritative biography with
the attempt by Wintringham and the Picture Post owner, Sir
Richard Ackland, to establish a new political party of the
left. While the Common Wealth Party met with some initial
success, Purcell notes with amusement that the Labour Party
Executive dismissed Common Wealth as ‘a party founded by a
rich man in order that he should become a political leader,
with views based not on Marx but on Marks and Spencer’ (p.
237). Ironically, as Purcell has now discovered, Wintringham
was the author of Your M.P., which sold a quarter
of a million copies and helped win the 1945 general election
for Labour. It also helped bury the Common Wealth Party under
the Labour landslide.
Since the publication of the first edition, enough new information
has come to light to fully warrant this new edition. Much
of it is due to the tireless efforts of the Grimsby librarian
and co-author, Phyll Smith, whose meticulous research into
Wintringham’s life has been of incalculable benefit to numerous
historians over the years, myself included. Phyll has unearthed
a wealth of new material for this new edition, ensuring that
the story of Wintringham’s life in the Party, with Kitty and
during the Second World War is now much more complete. We
already knew that Wintringham was a writer of great intellect
and skill, but the quantity and quality of his poetry was
something previously rather overlooked. What has remained
in this second edition is Hugh Purcell’s undoubted affection
for his subject, despite Wintringham’s many errors of judgement
in the worlds of sex and politics. While this new edition
certainly does not hide Wintringham’s flaws, it nevertheless
presents us with a picture of ‘a very likeable man, worthy
of respect’ and his summary of the ‘English Revolutionary’
is, I think, a fair one: ‘With hindsight he was right about
many things but wrong about some of the things that really
mattered.’
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