RED MERSEY : THE COMMUNIST PARTY IN LIVERPOOL AND BIRKENHEAD, 1920-1940

By Chris Jones

Socialist History Society. 63  pages. £5. ISBN 978-1-916-3423-6-1

Reviewed by Jim Burns

It isn’t easy to follow the history of the Communist Party of Great Britain on a local basis. As Chris Jones explains in his survey of activities on Merseyside, “documentary evidence is in short supply”. Nonetheless, he’s managed to compile an informative account of Party activity, and in doing so provided fascinating information about some of the colourful characters who were prime movers in events in the interwar period. It has always struck me that the real story of a party that frankly never came even close to achieving any kind of political power in Britain, might be found in the personalities of its members as much as in the details of its policies.  

Many of them had backgrounds in other organisations, such as the Labour Party, the Independent Labour Party, the Socialist Labour Party, the Shops Stewards Movement, and syndicalism. Liverpool was one of the few places in Britain where syndicalist ideas had some currency, and a branch of the Industrial Workers of the World, (IWW, the famed Wobblies),was established there. Its port pulled in ideas from abroad, particularly the United States. The “casual and seasonal nature of building and dock work” in the Liverpool area presented problems when anyone attempted to unionise workers in those sectors, but the IWW had a reputation for organising the unorganisable.  

The 1919 Communist Unity Convention brought together delegates from various parties to create a “party of a new type”. This was the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), and among its founding members was Mary Bamber, “a tireless union activist recruiting women in the poorest paid  industrial sectors”. Her daughter Elizabeth, “Bessie as she was popularly known”, later married Jack Braddock, secretary of the Liverpool branch of the CPGB. They eventually became “one of the most powerful political unions in Liverpool’s history”, and dominated Labour politics in the city, though they turned resolutely anti-communist as they did so. Attempts by communists to infiltrate the Labour Party were staunchly resisted.

One of the curious aspects of politics in Liverpool is that, despite its reputation for industrial militancy, it never voted for communist candidates in any great numbers in either local or national elections. It didn’t have a reputation as a politically radical city.  Jones notes that “for almost a century from 1841 onwards the city of Liverpool was to remain Conservative”. In the twentieth century the role of the churches, especially the Catholic Church, certainly  had a large part to play in the repudiation of communism.

It does seem true that communists in Liverpool were targeted by the local press, in particular by the Liverpool Echo, and by the Catholic Church and the police. The National Unemployed Workers Movement was a communist-run organisation, and known Party  members were sure to be marked for arrest when the police broke up marches and demonstrations. Jones tells how Jack Braddock, though by then an ex-communist and  Labour councillor, was identified by nineteen police witnesses as being the man “on a lorry inciting riot”.  In fact, he’d been at a council meeting at the time and had his own witnesses, “including members of other parties and even a clergyman, to prove it”.  I was also amused by the story about Leo McGree, a long-time member of the Party, being taken to Walton prison on a train. He was handcuffed to a plain-clothes policeman and cheerfully told other passengers how difficult it had been to apprehend the man.

If the Liverpool communists struggled to establish a reasonable membership list in the 1920s, they were not helped when the Party line changed at the beginning of the 1930s and  “class against class” became the slogan to live by. All those outside the Party were looked on as “social fascists” and not to be associated with. On an international level this, it has been suggested, facilitated the rise to power of Hitler in Germany, the Communist Party having refused to co-operate with Social Democrats and others opposed to the Nazis. On a local level in Liverpool Jones sums it up in the following way : “Potential allies were treated with scorn. Unnecessary attacks were made on people who in other circumstances might have been able to support campaigns of the working class. Almost inevitably, this overt sectarianism was to isolate the party and membership figures started to decline”. There had been 385 members in 1927, but by 1930 it was down to 58.

Things improved in the 1930s when the growing threat of fascism became evident, Hitler took over in Germany, Mussolini invaded Abyssinia, and Franco launched a campaign to overthrow the Republican government in Spain. For a time the Communist Party appeared to stand alongside a range of liberal and left-wing groups under the banner of a  Popular Front, the new policy now approved by Moscow. Membership started to rise, but was hit again when news of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact was released. Jones’s account ends in 1940 with communists divided about whether or not to support the war. Some national leaders  like Harry Pollitt wanted to, but others followed the Moscow line and spoke against joining in the battle to resist the Nazi onslaught across Europe. It all changed again in 1941, when Germany invaded Russia, but that’s another story.

Aside from the accounts of the twists and turns in communist tactics, and the struggle to hold together a functioning communist group in Liverpool, there are some interesting details concerning cultural activities among the activists on Merseyside. There was a Workers’ Film Society which showed films from Russia and Germany not likely to get into the commercial cinemas , and a Workers’ Theatre Group. The Left Book Club had  a branch in the area, and people like Arthur Koestler (then still a dedicated communist) and the singer Paul Robeson put in appearances, as did the philosopher and science-fiction writer Olaf Stapledon. According to Jones, “His novel Starmaker has been described as one of the most influential works of science fiction ever written and was claimed to be the inspiration for Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001”.

Some individual biographies at the end of the book tend to make me think I may have a point in saying that it’s the people and not the party policies which provide the main interest. Several of them fought in Spain and, for example, I was intrigued by the exploits of Albert Edward Cole, a one-time seaman and member of the IWW who left the CPGB IN 1939 when the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed. Another who left after service in Spain was Charlie Martinson who, while there, had seen how the non-Stalinist Marxist POUM was suppressed by the communists. He worked on the docks when he returned to Liverpool, and as a miner in St Helens, and became a member of the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). And there was Jack Hedley who, among other things, had been an organiser for the Irish Transport and General Workers Union. When he volunteered to go to Spain he was in his 50s.

My preference for reading about people rather than policies shouldn’t be allowed to detract from Chris Jones’s good work in showing how a local party organisation tried to carry out  useful and practical activities while having to adhere to sometimes impractical central office dictates. He has clearly given a lot of time to research in building up a picture of what it was like to be a communist in the Mersey area between 1920 and 1940.

 

 

 

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