WeeklyWorker

21.04.2022

Forgive us our trespasses

Establishment celebrations of the Kinder Scout mass trespass of 1932 brush over its communist politics. Lawrence Parker puts the record straight

Ninety years ago - on Sunday April 24 1932, to be precise - a mass trespass on Kinder Scout in the Peak District of Derbyshire, was led by young communists. This article will deal later with the mythology that has grown up around this event and how it has been appropriated by the British establishment. Before we get into the weeds tracing this act of gross historical vandalism, I want to refer to some sources from 1932 that frame the story very differently to the one subsequently broadcast by the likes of the National Trust (president: Prince Charles) and David Miliband of Her Majesty’s Labour Party.

The Daily Worker, paper of the Communist Party of Great Britain, reported on April 27 1932 that six comrades of the Lancashire British Workers’ Sport Federation (BWSF) had appeared in New Mills Police Court and were remanded on bail. They were from the Greater Manchester area: John Thomas Anderson (21), a piecer, was charged with grievous bodily harm against a keeper, while five others, along with Anderson, were initially charged with unlawful assembly and a breach of the peace. The Daily Worker said:

Access to the mountains is a sore point with the ramblers of Lancashire … the finest rambling spots are closed to the young worker ‘hikers’. Kinder Scout is barred to them because our ‘betters’ must have their grouse shooting.1

The more mainstream Ramblers’ Federation was excoriated for putting its faith in an Access to Mountains Bill in parliament2 and was referred to as an organisation of the “elite” among the ramblers - one that had “systematically prevented any action of the ramblers to break through the trespass laws”.3

When the accused appeared at Derby Assizes on July 6 1932, some more interesting facts about the mass trespass were heard in court:

A crowd of 150 to 200 assembled on Hayfield recreation ground and was addressed by [Benny] Rothman [Young Communist League member and secretary of the Lancashire BWSF],4 who gave orders, saying one whistle would be sounded for ‘advance’, two for ‘retreat’, and three for ‘advance in open formation’. The crowd moved off, continued counsel, with ‘General’ Rothman at its head …5

The Daily Worker continued:

Returning from the encounter [with gamekeepers employed by the Duke of Devonshire], the ‘hikers’ sang the ‘Red flag’ and shouted “Down with the landlords and ruling classes and up with the workers” and “Down with the bobbies” [ie, the police].6

The court’s attention was also drawn to a BWSF poster found in the area, which again scorned attempts to engage with an Access to Mountains Bill. The poster added: “It is a crime for working class feet to tread on sacred ground on which Lord Big Bug and Lady Little Flea do their shooting.”7 A BWSF leaflet from 1932 lists the following demands:

In any case, Rothman - clearly no mean publicist - had made the intransigent stance of the BWSF crystal-clear to the Manchester Evening Chronicle shortly before the trespass:

With sufficient support we believe we can make our action effective, even in face of the opposition we shall no doubt receive from gamekeepers and police. We feel we cannot any longer submit to being deprived of the beauties of the countryside for the convenience of the landowners. Wherever we claim we have a just right to go we shall trespass en masse.9

Communist goals

Readers will by now be able to infer that CPGB and YCL members were leading the mass trespass. The BWSF was originally founded in 1923 by members of the Labour Party; by 1928 it was being led by young communists and was affiliated with the Comintern’s Red Sport International (although not all the BWSF membership would have necessarily been ‘politicos’). Thomas Linehan argues that for the CPGB and YCL,

sports organisations were to be adjuncts of the communist political movement and subordinate to it and communist goals. During the antagonistic phase of ‘class against class’ [the so-called ‘third period’ of 1928-33] communist criticism of social democratic sports organisations became particularly shrill, accusing them of being ‘reformist’ bodies that strove for class reconciliation …10

It is obvious that the Kinder Scout mass trespass was part of this distinct political trajectory of the CPGB in the early 1930s.

As we shall see, Benny Rothman was subsequently critical of the tactics that he and his BWSF comrades employed but he did not later sugar-coat the fact that the action had not been universally popular in 1932:

The Manchester Ramblers’ Federation was hostile to the trespass. Prominent ramblers’ leaders prophesied dire consequences if the mass trespass took place, one saying that it would put back access to mountains by 40 years and antagonise the landowners, but in Sheffield, where the rambling movement was at a more grassroots level, they were not so antagonistic.11

The passage of time (and opportunist politics) had not quite blunted Rothman’s later negative attitude to some of his fellow ramblers of the 1930s:

We were newcomers to rambling. In addition, we were essentially a working class movement and most of the established rambling clubs consisted of either middle class professional people or specialist ramblers such as ornithologists, botanists and geologists. They were highly suspicious of us, and we were frankly suspicious of them. They believed we were ‘politically motivated’ … and loutish … We doubted that they wanted us on the moors any more than did the landowners, and they appeared to be quite happy with the existing state of affairs.12

The BWSF sent its members to the annual Winnats Access Rally in June 1932, where they heckled speakers such as philosopher and broadcaster CEM Joad and Liberal Manchester MP Philip Oliver.

This set the tone for much of the rambling movement’s initial response to the BWSF action on Kinder Scout. Historian David Hey argues:

The mainstream rambling bodies, which had used organised trespass before in defence of footpaths, were angry that these young Manchester communists had, as they saw it, ruined their patient lobbying work. Philip Daley of the Manchester Ramblers’ Federation … spoke for many when he said that it was “a positive hindrance and deterrent to the discussions and negotiations to secure the freedom of the hills”.13

Simon Thompson has also commented on what were either non-existent or hostile reactions from the rest of the ‘outdoor’ movement in 1932. Sir Lawrence Chubb, the first secretary of the National Trust, argued that the mass trespass was a “peculiarly stupid and mischievous business and those arrested should rightly face the consequences of their own foolhardiness”.14 Similarly, the trespassers do not seem to have been received favourably by locals when they returned through the village of Hayfield; unsurprising, given that some of the gamekeepers who had clashed with Rothman and company were themselves local men.15

If the six BWSF defendants had been treated leniently by the courts then it is more than likely that we would never have heard of the Kinder Scout mass trespass. But a jury comprised of country gentlemen and military figures took the class war seriously enough to hand out a range of prison sentences to five of the six defendants of up to six months.

This backfired and there was widely expressed disgust at the harsh nature of the sentencing: “… the Manchester Guardian captured the public mood when it said that the trespass had resembled a university rag and should have been treated as such.”16 Rothman and his BWSF comrades played no significant role in subsequent access campaigns after another attempt at mass trespass on Froggatt Edge in the Peak District was a failure.

After prison, Rothman worked as a YCL organiser in Burnley before becoming a trade union activist for the CPGB.

Party culture

While the Lancashire BWSF may have only been peripherally, although spectacularly, involved in the 1930s rambling and hiking movement (a point well researched and argued by historians such as Hey and Thompson), it is important to gauge that such activities were important to the British communist movement in this period and that Rothman and company were not doing anything that would have been particularly strange as far as the YCL and CPGB were concerned.

When Rothman stressed in 1982 that he and his comrades were not “ornithologists, botanists and geologists”, he was not joking. The CPGB and related bodies, such as the YCL and BWSF, used hiking in an instrumentalist manner. A Daily Worker writer recommending “sleepy, unspoilt Sussex” for a short walking tour to London comrades, told readers:

Note the marks of tanks and armoured cars over the common paths; see the notices telling you to beware of military operations. The Labour government, like its predecessors, uses these quiet country places for its rehearsals for the war with the Soviet Union.17

Similarly, the article talked of “treasuring a memory of a pleasant view, as you stride along, returning to London refreshed and ready to carry on the good work of helping capitalism dig its own grave”.18 A report from a Glasgow BWSF weekend camp at East Kilbride reported running, “workers’ sport”, swimming, drill and so on. This expanded sense of hiking and rambling was in part a reflection of the work of more advanced Comintern organisations in Europe:

We know that our fellow workers on the continent often do route marches, accompanied by semi-military manoeuvres - a necessary training for us as well, if we really mean to prepare for the battles ahead.19

The Daily Worker looked forward to rambles, hikes and camps that would be “entirely different from the affairs organised by our opponents”, noting that some rambles had featured short discussions, while others “make their presence felt by the shouting of mass slogans and the formation of demonstrations”.20

Linehan is undoubtedly correct when he argues that “communist rambling was consciously political” and that “this was rambling with a difference, rambling as progressive and class-conscious”.21 Edward Upward offers a semi-fictional example of this type of culture in his CPGB novel In the thirties, albeit one set in the late 1930s in the era of the popular front. The communist protagonist uses a countryside hike with party comrades to muse on the credibility and strength of the CPGB, with a few references that seem more akin to the early 1930s (Workers’ Theatre Movement singing unpatriotic songs mocking the royal family, for example) and its more combative party culture.22

It is also clear that trespassing on ‘private’ land was also tacitly encouraged by the CPGB in the early 1930s. The previously mentioned article about hiking in Sussex remarked: “The second day could be spent exploring the beautiful woods that lie to the west of Midhurst; you will find each wood carefully marked ‘private’, but shut your eyes to this and walk right past.”23 This kind of injunction was still being made by CPGB writers in 1936: “To be chased from a field by gamekeepers and dogs is an object lesson in elementary politics. (It’s a free country - but try walking on it).” The article added: “A party of walkers should never allow themselves to be intimidated, provided they are doing no damage.”24

Given that some of the CPGB’s politics had veered into respectability at this point with the popular front (the CPGB remained, however, thoroughly disreputable in the late 1930s - even its moderation was presaged with the defence of an enemy in the British state’s eyes: the Soviet Union), there was a slightly changed emphasis on legal tips and rights, and CPGB members who encountered obstructions to public right of ways were advised to take the matter up with the Commons, Open Spaces and Footpaths Society. This was obviously a less-militant approach than that taken by the organisers of the Kinder Scout mass trespass, who ignored official bodies and effectively took the law into their own hands.

It will now be clear what the Kinder Scout mass trespass was. It was a provocative, militant action organised by young communists, designed to get up the noses of private landlords and gamekeepers and to show up the more moderate sections of the rambling community. The mass trespass was only popular among the BWSF and its young supporters, although the prison sentences did galvanise more support. The trespass was thus bounded by the political preconceptions of the CPGB in the early 1930s: taking a pre-emptive strike around immediate issues in the hope that such localised actions would spur on the class struggle towards a Soviet Britain. In that sense, it was powered by hopelessly economistic reasoning that represented a deterioration of the CPGB’s perspectives of the 1920s; but it was also a powerful symbolic distillation of the politicised culture that young communists developed around the practice of hiking and rambling.

This, you might think, would have made the Kinder Scout mass trespass an extremely poor candidate for later celebration by sections of the British establishment. However, it was CPGB members’ willingness in the 1970s and 1980s to smooth away the blunt communist edges of the mass trespass that effectively paved the way for the event to be lionised by avowed anti-communists and supporters of private property and capitalism. The second part of this article will trace that process of incorporation in more detail.

Heart

The reframing of the mass trespass began a few years later by Rothman himself. In a 1940 interview, given anonymously to Progressive Rambler, Rothman talked of the mistakes made in 1932: “The big one was, of course, that we entirely ignored the organised ramblers and in fact considerably antagonised them by our reference to them in our publicity.”25 This change of heart towards what in 1932 were regarded as tame and ‘reformist’ rambling organisations reflects the turnaround in CPGB politics in the intervening period to 1940. Popular front politics from the mid-1930s meant alliance with such forces and dilution of criticism. While the CPGB of 1940 was ostensibly opposed to the imperialist World War II, its politics were still being couched in the language of cross-class alliances, as shown by the CPGB-sponsored People’s Convention of 1940-41.

This did not mean that the mass trespass merely faded from the CPGB’s memory. One of the participants was a friend and fellow Manchester communist of Rothman, Ewan MacColl, then known as Jimmie Miller, who composed a song in 1932 called ‘The Manchester rambler’ (sometimes known as ‘I’m a rambler’ or ‘The rambler’s song’). This song, with its famous refrain, “I may be a wage slave on Monday, but I am a free man on Sunday”, drew upon the YCL’s culture of hiking and rambling in the early 1930s. This song was widely covered by other folk artists from the 1950s.26 (MacColl also wrote a less well known song called ‘Mass trespass 1932’.)

The legacy of the Kinder Scout mass trespass came to the fore again in the late 1970s, as the event approached its 50th anniversary in 1982. It was the build-up and celebration around 1982 that was foundational for the subsequent recuperation of this history. But it is important to realise that this act of appropriation was made possible by the fact that the CPGB itself was prepared to soften the meaning of the mass trespass, essentially removing it from communist politics and the culture of the early 1930s and relating it to a frame of reformist politics and what could be achieved through parliamentary means. Thus, Kinder Scout was made into a reflection of a CPGB that was suffering death by a thousand opportunist cuts.

In August 1977, Dave Cook - then national organiser of the CPGB and a prominent member of its Eurocommunist faction - wrote an article for the party’s theoretical journal Marxism Today on ‘The battle for Kinder Scout’. Cook was himself a keen rock climber (the piece had first appeared in Mountain magazine).

On one level, Cook’s writing was better than much that subsequently appeared, in that it did not hide the involvement of the YCL in the BWSF or that these forces “presented the question of access to the hills in open class terms”27. He also admitted that middle class leaderships of groups such as the Ramblers’ Federation and the Footpaths Preservation Society “looked with some alarm at the increasingly bitter clashes between keepers and working class ramblers”.28 Cook, though, did not labour these points: rather, they added some incidental colour to the rest of his narrative. In his eyes, the mass trespass was less situated in the CPGB’s political culture of the 1930s (Eurocommunists, and the party’s right-opportunist leaders they worked with in the 1970s, found ‘third period’ militancy to be a distinct embarrassment) and more in a diffuse “long tradition of moorland walking among Manchester and Sheffield workers”.29

The ultimate frame of reference for the Kinder Scout mass trespass was the relationship between mass action led by communists and parliament (as, of course, specified by the CPGB’s British road to socialism programme). According to Cook,

Many more battles were necessary before the Access to Mountains Bill was finally put on the statute book by Attlee’s Labour government [presumably a reference to the 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act], but it was ‘The battle for Kinder Scout’ that lifted the movement from the level of ‘private members’ lobbying to that of mass politics.30

The problem with this latter-day interpretation is that it bore very little resemblance to the motivations of the YCL/BWSF in 1932. As we have seen, Rothman argued that his group were newcomers to the rambling movement and did not see themselves as part of any ‘tradition’. The political juncture of communist politics in Britain at this point meant that the picture of the YCL as a ginger group for the reformist actions of the Labour Party in parliament would have been treated, in the more tense atmosphere of 1932, as a form of rank opportunism (to put it mildly).

As we have seen previously, some of Rothman’s own writing for the 50th anniversary of the mass trespass did record some of the specificity of the 1932 action. In other places, it was clearly the politically soft and disorientated CPGB of 1982 talking, rather than that of 1932. Like Cook, Rothman portrayed the mass trespass as something that had the 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act (NPACA) as its natural terminus. Rothman said:

It is interesting to note that 56% of all moorland and mountains to which the public now have access under the NPACA of 1949 is in the Peak District … The history of struggle for access, the years of battles with gamekeepers and landowners, culminating in the mass trespass onto Kinder and the ensuing trespasses in Derbyshire, left their mark on landowners and legislators. It made the position of the ramblers’ negotiators much stronger. The mass trespass was not in vain.31

In a similar mode, Rothman built on the critique he had made of his group’s tactics back in 1940 with the soft, inoffensive politics the CPGB was touting in 1982:

It is easy now, after 50 years, to look back and see the mistakes made by the mass trespass organisers. We should never have antagonised the leadership of the Ramblers’ Federation and those rambling leaders who had worked hard over a long period of time. We should have perhaps used our youthful zeal and energy inside the rambling movement, but, of course, the faults were not all on one side.32

The CPGB and YCL were not mentioned in Rothman’s 1982 booklet and there are only passing references to the BWSF and the Daily Worker.33

Reformist thrust

Much the same reformist thrust was evident in an April 1982 series (including articles by Cook and Rothman) in the Morning Star. There were only the most cursory references to the BWSF and the Daily Worker in relation to the 1932 mass trespass, which was served up as an event to be more easily digested by respectable circles in the British labour movement; this period was when Labour Party dignitaries started to attend the anniversary celebrations. (As Stephenson wryly notes, “Roy Hattersley, Michael Meacher and David Miliband attended the 50th and subsequent anniversaries, seeking to attach their names to the event, despite the fact that Labour activists at the time had opposed the trespass.”34)

Rothman argued: “It is now freely admitted, by all but a tiny minority of flat-earthers in the rambling movement, that the mass trespass of 1932 played a considerable part in helping to achieve what access exists today.”35 Noll Scott reported on the 1982 re-walk of the mass trespass: “A score of the original trespass veterans were on hand to hear their comrade, Benny Rothman, recall the struggle which heralded the birth of Britain’s first national park and pointed the way to the Countryside Act of 1949.”36

It is perfectly clear that this reframing of the Kinder Scout mass trespass, gutting it of its communist context in favour of making it a way-station for the Attlee government and the creation of national parks, paved the way for its recuperation by the Labour Party and the establishment. David Miliband - then ‘New Labour’ environment secretary - speaking in 2007 on the 75th anniversary of the trespass, said:

We sometimes like to think that the thinking of politics is ahead of that of the people. There can be no doubt that in the 1930s the politics were way behind the people, and the trespassers showed the way forward on access to moorland, which is now enshrined in the Countryside and Rights of Way Act [2000].37

This type of rhetoric can infect writers to the left of the Labour Party and the Morning Star. In a piece for Jacobin in 2018, Marcus Barnett, while not downplaying CPGB/YCL motivations in the trespass, concluded:

The Kinder Scout trespass was one of the most audacious and important direct actions in British labour history. Its cultural and political impact was profound, drawing reference as late as 2000, when the Labour government passed the Countryside and Rights of Way Act.38

It is clear that Barnett is here reproducing the event’s subsequent ‘official’ framing by the CPGB and Labour Party from the 1970s and 1980s, albeit with some added left hyperbole.

The 11th Duke of Devonshire - whose grandfather, as a part-‘owner’ of Kinder Scout, had been involved in the prison sentences handed out to the YCL leaders of the trespass - said at the 70th anniversary celebrations:

Although I was only 12 years old when it happened, I have always been very influenced by the mass trespass. I am still horrified both by the attitude of landowners at the time, who included my grandfather, the 9th duke, in not allowing people to walk in open country, and by the vicious sentences handed down to the trespassers.39

Interestingly, the duke added that his ambition was to “depoliticise the access situation through good neighbourliness”.40 It is therefore easy to see how the CPGB’s later painting of the mass trespass as a more diffuse event was manna from heaven for such figures; the implicit message being that if you drop the extremities of your politics then landowners will negotiate with you: a classic reformist trap.

Indeed, there was a subtext in some of the material that CPGB members produced in the 1980s that implicitly unpicked the reformist narrative that the organisation had subsequently erected on top of the mass trespass. Howard Hill was a CPGB member and rambler from Sheffield who produced a useful book on the access movement in 1980.41 He shrewdly queried the motivations of the 9th Duke of Devonshire in initially granting access to Kinder Scout in the 1940s:

... though to him goes the credit for signing one of the first access agreements, on Kinder Scout, it was he who resisted demands for access onto his Barden Moor in West Yorkshire. This, I suggest, is evidence that by conceding access in the Peak he calculated he would be in a stronger position to retain his privileges in west Yorkshire. Yet, if this surmise is correct it was in vain, for, although he still retains some private shooting, he gave way to pressure from the ramblers of west Yorkshire.42

In other words, access agreements and parliamentary acts are, from a landowner’s point of view, a negotiation about the terms of their ownership and future privacy, entailing an acceptance of their property rights. This shows official processes around access agreements in their true light. Dave Cook, in his Morning Star article of April 1982 on the legacy of the Kinder Scout mass trespass, drew attention to ongoing threats to access in the countryside:

In the Scottish Highlands, big capital has bought up estates, bulldozed ugly paths deep into wilderness areas, and now lease exclusive shooting rights to wealthy clients. Inevitably, attempts to restrict entry follow.43

While national parks were an undoubted gain for all working class people, they never solved access issues for ramblers and hikers in the countryside; that will never be achieved until private property is abolished. On that basis, the BWSF and YCL shouting “Down with the landlords and the ruling classes” in 1932 actually enshrined truths that the later CPGB - hopelessly attached to ‘hegemonic’ reformism, parliament and a squalid barter over the terms of ‘private’ ownership - was incapable of bringing to light.

This process carries on to the present day, with the Kinder Scout mass trespass being celebrated by all sorts of official bodies, such as the National Trust and rambling and political organisations that, in 1932, would have been all too happy if Benny Rothman, the YCL and the CPGB were drowned in boiling oil. This hypocrisy will no doubt be fully on show for the 90th anniversary. Historical mass action, gutted of political signifiers, will be applauded, while access to the countryside is still presaged on lack of access: ie, private property. This was made perfectly clear by Michael Meacher, the ‘New Labour’ minister responsible for pushing through the Countryside and Rights of Way Act in 2000: “Walkers will have rights, but also responsibilities: to respect the countryside and its wildlife and the needs of those who depend on it for their income.”44

It is this notion (‘Enjoy your privileges on our land, but never forget who owns it’) that powers the appropriation of the Kinder Scout mass trespass - or at least the fumigated version that was offered by the CPGB in its dotage - by respectable elements in British society.

  1. ‘Ramblers remanded on charge of “unlawful assembly”’ Daily Worker April 27 1932.↩︎

  2. An Access to Mountains Act (1939) was eventually introduced as a private member’s bill by Arthur Creech Jones, Labour MP for Shipley, on behalf of the Ramblers’ Association. This proved to be a damp squib, given that it was effectively gutted by Conservative amendments. An Access to Mountains Bill was first brought before parliament in 1888.↩︎

  3. ‘Ramblers remanded on charge of “unlawful assembly”’ op cit. A National Council of Ramblers’ Federations had been founded in 1931 to group together various regional bodies.↩︎

  4. Rothman (1911-2002) was unemployed at the time of the Kinder Scout mass trespass.↩︎

  5. ‘Mass trespass: workers in court’ Daily Worker July 8 1932.↩︎

  6. Ibid.↩︎

  7. Ibid.↩︎

  8. Cited in B Rothman The 1932 Kinder trespass: a personal view of the Kinder Scout mass trespass Altrincham 1982 p20.↩︎

  9. Cited in ibid p19.↩︎

  10. T Linehan Communism in Britain 1920-39: from the cradle to the grave Manchester 2014 p120.↩︎

  11. B Rothman op cit p19.↩︎

  12. Ibid p20.↩︎

  13. D Hey, ‘Kinder Scout and the legend of the mass trespass’ Agricultural History Review 59 (2) 2011, p212.↩︎

  14. Cited in S Thompson The fashioning of a new world: youth culture and the origins of the mass outdoor movement in interwar Britain (unpublished DPhil thesis 2018, p196).↩︎

  15. Ibid p195.↩︎

  16. Cited in D Hey op cit.↩︎

  17. P James, ‘Whit exodus of the workers’ Daily Worker June 6 1930.↩︎

  18. Ibid.↩︎

  19. P James, ‘Hiking - the working class way’ Daily Worker May 23 1930.↩︎

  20. Ibid.↩︎

  21. T Linehan op cit p154.↩︎

  22. E Upward In the thirties London 1978, pp269-82.↩︎

  23. ‘Whit exodus of the workers’ op cit.↩︎

  24. PJ Poole, ‘Walk where you will!’ Daily Worker February 27 1936.↩︎

  25. Cited in H Hill Freedom to roam: the struggle for access to Britain’s moors and mountains Ashbourne 1980, p82. I have been unable to track down the original issue of Progressive Rambler, but it is likely to have been the April 1940 issue.↩︎

  26. B Harker Class act: the cultural and political life of Ewan MacColl London 2007 pp33-35.↩︎

  27. D Cook ‘The battle for Kinder Scout’ Marxism Today August 1977.↩︎

  28. Ibid.↩︎

  29. Ibid.↩︎

  30. Ibid.↩︎

  31. B Rothman op cit p48.↩︎

  32. Ibid.↩︎

  33. For the Daily Worker reference see ibid p44, where Rothman recorded that Dave Nussbaum got one more month in prison for selling the paper at the mass trespass.↩︎

  34. S Thompson op cit p196.↩︎

  35. B Rothman, ‘How we reclaimed our mountains’ Morning Star April 21 1982.↩︎

  36. N Scott ‘1932 trespass is rewalked by thousands’ Morning Star April 26 1982.↩︎

  37. Cited in B Rothman The battle for Kinder Scout, including the 1932 mass trespass Altrincham 2012 p89.↩︎

  38. www.jacobinmag.com/2018/04/kinder-scout-anniversary-worker-rambling-private-property.↩︎

  39. www.theguardian.com/society/2002/apr/17/guardiansocietysupplement.↩︎

  40. Ibid.↩︎

  41. Howard Hill (1913-80) was recruited to the CPGB from the Labour Party in the 1930s, retaining membership of both parties until ‘coming out’ as a CPGB member in 1940.↩︎

  42. H Hill op cit p95.↩︎

  43. D Cook, ‘Ramblers, grouse and Mr Lenin’ Morning Star April 24 1982.↩︎

  44. www.theguardian.com/society/2002/apr/17/guardiansocietysupplement.↩︎