Not wishing to come off as overly morbid, but as a strange twist of fate, the Dead Socialist Watch reveals that the late Al Richardson, founding editor of Revolutionary History and historian of the British Trotskyist movement also died on this day in 2003.
Whilst looking for a link for Robert Barltrop for the previous post, I stumbled across this link for Barltrop with the accompanying fascimile of a handbill advertising a debate between the SPGB and the Revolutionary Communist Party on the nature of the class nature of the Soviet Union, that dates from 1948. What's that got to do with Richardson? Well, Richardson, along with Sam Bornstein, wrote a two volume history of British Trotskyism, the second volume of which, 'War and the International - A History of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain, 1937~1949', covers the period leading up to the founding of the RCP in 1944, and its five years of existence. To the best of my knowledge, the only time there has been a unified Trotskyist movement in Britain.
No idea who Fenwick, the SPGB speaker, was. Surprised that it wasn't one of the big guns such as Turner, Wilmott, Young, Groves or Hardy from that period, but the RCP speaker, Roy Tearse, was a well known political figure on the fringes of left politics at the time. As Industrial Organiser of the RCP during the Second World War, alongside Jock Haston, Heaton Lee and Ann Keen, he was arrested and imprisoned under the Trades Dispute Act of 1927 for their support for an unofficial Apprentices' Strike that took place on Tyneside in 1944. The coalition government's Home Secretary during the war was Peter Mandelson's grandfather, Herbert Morrison, and, being an old lefty hack* himself, took the trouble, alongside Bevin, to keep tabs on the RCP, as they had stole a bit of the CPGB revolutionary rhetoric 'cos of the latter's support for the war effort during this period.
I'd be curious to know how the debate went. '48 was the year that Tony Cliff's The Nature of Stalinist Russia** was published as a duplicated internal document of the RCP, and it was also the year that the SPGB pamphlet, ‘Russia Since 1917: Socialist Views of Bolshevik Policy’ was also published. Not wishing to sound like an ortho-Trot from that period, but from reading political memoirs from that period I think the war years mindset were still in place for people at that time, with there still being a residue of expectation that a social and economic transformation was possibly on the agenda, and it was only after another couple of years that people withdrew from politics, retreating back into the private sphere, and leaving the politicos hankering after the good old days.
Getting back to Tearse again, it would be curious to find out what happened to him in the years after '48. The leading member of the RCP, Jock Haston, left Trotskyist politics to pick up a career in trade union education with the Electricians' Union, whereas Grant, Healy and Cliff started their own wee vanguardist franchises that were to have a major imprint of British Trotskyism (and student politics) for the next fifty plus years but in the case of Tearse, little is heard of him until he turns up as a leading member of The Discussion Group, perhaps the smallest and most discreet of the rebellions to take place in the SWP forerunner, the International Socialists, in the early seventies.
Christ, this post has more tangents than paragraphs. I think I'm still in shock from losing that post on Celtic slaughtering Man Utd 1-0. "And then I woke up, and it was all a dream . . ."
You've got to love the old standards
*Trust me, Morrison was John Reid, Alan Milburn and Stephen Byers all rolled into one. A member of the SDF in his early political life, he was recounting anecdotes about SPGB platform speakers fifty years after the fact in his autobiography published in the mid to late fifties.
**Better known as State Capitalism in Russia
6 comments:
Would it be too much to ask for a post on Teamster Rebellion, as really, I can't be bothered myself, and I think you'd do a better job anyway?
It probably is too much to ask. Are yu referring to the Dobbs' book?
Tearse's subsequent political future cannot have been worse than Fenwick's. According to SPGB oral tradition, Fenwick was the son of a bishop, a bookthief from Foyles and (VV's words) a "raving homosexual" (for which he had been sent to prison, it being illegal at the time). He is supposed to have left the party after falling in love with a Mosleyite speaker. He ended up in the National Front as the boy friend of Martin Webster. Type "Desmond Fenwick" into a search engine and see what comes up . . . In 1948 he was OK and the report of the debate in the August Socialist Standard is on its way to you in case you want to use it (it brings out the difference between the SPGB and RCP on Russia very well).
Christ,
I had to go and ask about Fenwick. The best I was hoping for was the revelation that he was in fact the great uncle of Terry. (I made that up).
Just google searched him, and I don't feel like making any daft jokes now. I'm pretty sick when I think about it, and I feel like deleting this post.
Not sure I'm too chuffed with the term 'raving homosexual", though I guess I understand it was a terminology for a different generation
Yeah, I do mean the Dobbs (without ') book.
Other professional bookthieves made it to German Foreign Minister and now Harvard (?) professor, without any kind of post-16 education. Fischer was never in the SPGB (or the "Weltsozialistischepartei Deutschlands", assuming there was one) though.
Aaah! Labour Herald and Matthew Warburton ... those were the days, I don't think. There are still questions about how much Libyan cash bankrolled that little operation via the WRP: I still have a nightmare about the Colonel being greeted as if he were Chavez by Ken -- though I'm not sure his current Trot apparatus (aka Socialist Action) would approve.
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