The Last English Revolutionary: a biography of Tom Wintringham Hugh Purcell Sutton, 288pp, £20 ISBN 0750930802

During the dizzy "invasion summer" of 1940, when Nazi raiding parties were expected to arrive at any moment, the usually placid British people realised with a shock that they might have to defend themselves, and had no earthly idea how to go about it. Luckily, Tom Wintringham was on hand. A commander of the British Battalion in the Spanish civil war, he had trained volunteers in the use of guerrilla tactics, and now drew on this experience to write articles in Picture Post based on the idea that "every village can be made into a fortress". They were read by millions.

An improvisatory spirit prevailed: tanks, Wintringham taught, could be upturned using "crowbars, lengths of tram-line or similar pieces of metal". If trip-wire rigged up between trees didn't stop German motorcyclists, a few hundred milk bottles hurled in their direction would do the trick. Golf clubs, axes and cheese-cutters were rudimentary armaments, and makeshift cover could be fashioned using bicycles, a waterproof and an old packing case. As part of his "do-it-yourself guide to killing people", Wintringham even gave precise details of how to make a hand grenade, including the recommended brand of glycerine produced by ICI.

Within months, he had founded an unofficial training school for the Home Guard at Osterley Park, west London. Several comrades from Spain were on hand to teach the techniques of "ungentlemanly warfare"; Roland Penrose, the surrealist painter, gave lessons in camouflage. The school proved a great success, but the War Office was unnerved from the start by the thought of civilians being educated by International Briga-diers, and Wintringham's calls to "arm the citizens" had alarmingly revolutionary connotations. He was, after all, a known "Red", who shared George Orwell's belief of the moment that "the war and revolution are inseparable".

Along with advice on smoke and mortar bombs, Wintringham's bestselling books demanded the confiscation of private land, an end to empire, and local "councils of action" to assume control of the people's militia. Unable to close Osterley, the War Office was forced to take it over. Wintringham quit in late spring of 1941, by which time the threat of invasion had diminished, Molotov cocktails in the Home Counties seemed incongruous once more, and his cherished citizens' militia had become Dad's Army.

As Hugh Purcell shows in this approachable biography, Wintringham's life had, from early on, been shaped by war and communism. He enlisted in the Royal Flying Corps in 1916, on his 18th birthday, and saw action as a poetry- scribbling private on the Western Front; four years later, having caught the Marxism bug at Oxford, he had a part in forming the Communist Party of Great Britain. He became an apparatchik, finding a distinctive voice only in the 1930s, when he started to write about the efficacy of guerrilla warfare. As Purcell emphasises, the CPGB's pursuit of a Popular Front policy also freed Wintringham, who came from a Liberal, dissenting family, to identify his socialism with an English democratic lineage stretching back to John Lilburne: his advocacy of "armies of freemen" owed as much to the Levellers as to Lenin.

In a similar vein, the British volunteers "fighting for liberty" against Franco were promoted as inheritors of a tradition that began with Byron's expedition to Greece. From Barcelona, Wintringham lobbied CPGB headquarters to find recruits for an international force. The formation of the British Battalion in January 1937 owed much to him, but his record as its commander is almost comically bad: he was active at the front for only four days of the 15 months he was in Spain, getting injured on the second day of both battles in which he was involved, the first being the disastrous counter-offensive at Jarama (his visitors in hospital included Ernest Hemingway and Stephen Spender). He was an effective instructor, however, and was popular with fellow volunteers, one of whom described him as "a warmly human Marxist with a cool head". He was much less popular with party officials, who were concerned that his affair with the American journalist Kitty Bowler was all too distracting. In the end, preposterously, the Comintern accused Bowler of being a Trotskyite spy and expelled her from Spain. When, on his return to London, Wintringham refused to give her up, he was thrown out of the CPGB.

He was anyway frustrated by the party's obeisance to Moscow. "Spain woke me up," he wrote in 1941. "Politically, I rediscovered democracy . . . Two bullets and typhoid gave me time to think . . . Marxism makes sense to me, but the 'Party Line' doesn't." That same year, he helped form the Common Wealth movement, which, until 1945, achieved some success pushing for a socialist future in opposition to the Churchill coalition. He was still formulating a politics to the left of the Labour Party when he died in 1949.

Something of a misfit, Tom Wintringham has been written out of the political history of 20th-century Britain: the right has preferred to forget that the Home Guard was transformed by a revolutionary, while communists have dismissed him as a renegade. As this book makes admirably clear, however, he deserves recognition not only as a Marxist expert on military matters and as a populariser of the "people's war", but as a representative of another, more radical Britain that has never materialised.

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website