Harry Pollitt, the most well-known of the Communist Party of Great Britain’s (CPGB’s) general secretaries and the party’s leader for many years, died on 27 June 1960, on board a liner bringing him back from a speaking tour of Australia. Pollitt’s death was widely covered in the British bourgeois media and, as such, that coverage represents an early attempt to incorporate part of the CPGB’s history into anti-communist narratives. This has become relatively common in recent years, with the Labour Party right looking to recuperate communist actions such as the Kinder Scout mass trespass (1932) and the Battle of Cable Street (1936), while there has been a false attempt to picture CPGB figures such as Shapurji Saklatvala as pioneers of intersectionalism.
When one reads the obituaries of Pollitt from 1960 as a group, you quickly realise that bourgeois newspapers wrote fundamentally the same obituary across a variety of titles. The CPGB itself twigged what was going on. William Gallacher wrote in July 1960: “All who knew Harry admired the human, comradely side of his character. But many of them tried to dissociate his wide humanity from his dearly held political convictions. This is an old game with the lackeys of capitalism, particularly in the yellow press.”[i] As we shall see, this was an entirely apposite observation.
Politically, in terms of the CPGB and its goals, the obituaries were hostile. For The Times, Pollitt’s “life was devoted to an impossible task – that of attracting the mass of the British people to Soviet communism”.[ii] Similarly, for the supposed left-facing Guardian, “Pollitt’s communist policies bedevilled British trade unionism for a generation and, indeed, still weaken and disrupt it”.[iii]
‘Communist with a sense of humour’
However, Pollitt was cast in all the obituaries as an exception to the rest of the CPGB and thus as a stick to beat the party. For The Times: “Pollitt was often described as what many people regard as almost a freak of nature, a communist with a sense of humour. Short and bald, with a quiet manner and a twinkle in his eyes, he had likeable qualities which endeared him to some of his most bitter political opponents.”[iv] For the Telegraph: “He was a genuine British ‘rebel’ who was undoubtedly sincere in his devotion to the cause he espoused. His uncomplicated personality and sense of humour earned him a measure of popularity few communist leaders enjoy.” It added: “Unlike the majority of communist leaders, Mr Pollitt was no ‘intellectual’.”[v] For The Guardian, Pollitt, “enjoyed the respect of men who were his bitter political opponents. His sincerity in believing that his militant and revolutionary aims were in the interests of working people were unquestionable, and he carried his communism with a robust sense of humour that never deserted him”.[vi] For the Labour Party-supporting and resolutely anti-communist Daily Herald, Maurice Fagence argued: “Not everybody in this country likes communism. But everybody, of every political or religious belief, who met Britain’s number-one communist, Harry Pollitt, liked him.”[vii] Douglas Brown in the News Chronicle said: “Pollitt was known in wider left-wing circles than any other communist official. It was a tribute to the man that many who knew him received the news of his death with the comment: ‘Harry wasn’t like the others – he was a human being.’”[viii]
A picture emerged from this repetitious account of a sincere, humorous, and well-liked individual, British, a talker but a doer and someone who unquestionably loved his mother. Accompanying this as a negative was an impression of the rest of the CPGB as intellectual, insincere, unliked and unloved, anti-British. Indeed, on the issue of patriotism, the British establishment owed Pollitt one for his post-1941 conduct in the Second World War. As Fagence wrote: “… Russia was in our side and Harry Pollitt was rushing round trying to settle strikes.”[ix] (It is important to note that Pollitt was inspired in this by his attachment to the Soviet Union and not the British establishment although the political outcome wasn’t any less inspiring.) Indeed, while the CPGB offered another narrative in the 1960s of Pollitt as the loyal and dedicated communist, it did partially feed into this establishment narrative of Britishness, in line with the ‘British road to socialism’ that Pollitt had trailblazed with Stalin’s approval. Pollitt was thus deemed to be “a symbol of everything that was best in the British working-class tradition”.[x]
However, despite these memories of Pollitt being offered up as part of an undifferentiated establishment line, not all of it can be classed as opportunist and insincere. Fagence drew on memories travelling in a train with Pollitt and a group of industrialists: “Harry kept them all chuckling with the day-to-day fun of boilermakers and pitmen, weavers and shoe ‘clickers’ and all the men and women he knew and loved.”[xi] Similarly, Brinley Evans talked of how Pollitt was solicitous towards journalists’ welfare: “In a long bus queue on the opposite side of the square I noticed Harry Pollitt who was on a visit to the Rhondda [south Wales], and he waved to me: and then he sent one of his friends across the road to me to inquire whether I was ‘all right for the night’.”[xii]
The bourgeois media was clearly making use of Pollitt’s human attributes in the cause of discrediting the CPGB, but it should be emphasised that this would have been part of Pollitt’s job. What would have been the use of having a leader, who was, to some extent, a national figure, who didn’t know how to talk to people and encourage people to join the party; to talk to the media and engage his opponents without walking off in a huff? (Internal and external opponents on the Marxist left would tell a different story: Pollitt didn’t extend this natural bonhomie to members of the CPGB’s post-war opposition, for example.) This charming side of Pollitt only appears strange to us now because of the activities of certain modern (usually Trotskyist) sect ‘cadre’ who, in a parody of the worst aspects of the Stalin years, appear to see being anti-social and obnoxious as almost a professional calling. Pollitt’s basic political skills, whatever we make of his undoubted reformist political trajectory as leader, are ones that urgently need to be re-learnt by the contemporary revolutionary left.
[i] W Gallacher ‘We worked together for a great cause’ Daily Worker 2 July 1960
[ii] ‘Mr Harry Pollitt’ The Times 28 June 1960.
[iii] ‘Harry Pollitt’ The Guardian 28 June 1960.
[iv] ‘Mr Harry Pollitt’ The Times 28 June 1960.
[v] ‘Mr Harry Pollitt’ Daily Telegraph and Morning Post 28 June 1960.
[vi] ‘Harry Pollitt’ The Guardian 28 June 1960.
[vii] M Fagence ‘You just couldn’t hate Britain’s number-one communist’ Daily Herald 28 June 1960.
[viii] D Brown ‘Harry Pollitt dies in liner’ News Chronicle 27 June 1960.
[ix] M Fagence ‘You just couldn’t hate Britain’s number-one communist’ Daily Herald 28 June 1960.
[x] ‘Harry stood for Britain’s best’ Daily Worker 28 June 1960.
[xi][xi] M Fagence ‘You just couldn’t hate Britain’s number-one communist’ Daily Herald 28 June 1960.
[xii] B Evans ‘When in Rome…’ South Wales Gazette 15 July 1960.
Lawrence Parker 