Tom Wintringham

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Thomas Henry (Tom) Wintringham (1898-1949) was a British soldier, military historian, journalist, poet, Marxist, politician and author. He was an important figure in the formation of the British Home Guard during the World War II, and was one of the founders of the Common Wealth Party.

Contents 1 Life 2 Bibliography 2.1 Books by Tom Wintringham 2.2 Books about Tom Wintringham 3 External links

[edit] Life

Tom Wintringham was born 1898 in Grimsby, Lincolnshire. He was educated at Gresham's School, Holt, Norfolk and Balliol College, Oxford but abandoned his university career at the outbreak of the First World War to join the Royal Flying Corps. At the end of the war he was involved in a brief barracks mutiny one of many minor insurrections that went unnoticed in the period. He returned to Oxford, and after a trip of several months to Moscow, returned to England and formed a group of students aiming to establish a British section of the Third International - a Communist Party. As the party formed Wintringham graduated and moved to London, ostensibly to study for the bar at the Temple, but in fact to work full time in politics.

In 1923 Wintringham joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. In 1926 he had a part in planning the General Strike and was sentenced to prison for sedition. In 1930 he founded newspaper the Daily Worker being one of the only named writers to publish in the paper. In writing for the party's theoretic journal Labour Monthly he established himself as the party's military expert. In LM articles and in a couple of booklets on the subject Wintringham formed the arguments against Air Assault and called for ARP precautions several years before Guernica and his arguments were the basis for the most successful of the Communist Party's wartime campaigns (that for ARP provision) and shaped government policy on this issue in the years leading up to the war. Though at the centre of CPGB organisation, he was often at odds with Party policy, believing in a communism of alliance and co-operation, rather than the dominant comintern ideology of class against class. Wintringham's ideas became party dogma when the comintern announced the 'Popular Front' - a communism Wintringham was prepared to fight for.

In 1934 he became the founder, editor and major contributor of Left Review, the first British literary journal with a stated marxist intent. Though published by Wintringham it was funded by the CPGB, but embraced writers of all shades of socialism, regardless of their party affiliations. The journal established a pattern for what was to become cultural studies.

During the Spanish Civil War, Wintringham went to Spain first as a journalist but eventually commanded the British contingent of the International Brigades. Some socialist commentators have credited him with the whole idea of "international" brigades. He also had an affair with a US journalist, Kitty Bowler, whom he later married. In February 1937 he was wounded in the Battle of Jarama. While injured in Spain he became friends with Ernest Hemingway who based one of his characters upon him. He spent some months as a machine gun instructor. When he returned to the battalion the next summer he contracted typhoid, was again wounded at Quinto in August 1937 and was repatriated in October. His later book English Captain is based on these experiences.

In 1938 the Communist Party condemned his wife as a Trotskyist spy but he refused to leave her - he quit the party instead. He came to mistrust the party's subservience to Stalin's Russia and Comintern.

Back in England, Tom Hopkinson recruited him to work for the newspaper Picture Post.

At the outbreak of World War II, Wintringham applied for an army officer's commission but was rejected. When the Communist Party promulgated its policy of staying out of the war due to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, he strongly condemned their policies. Because of the appeasement policies of prime minister Neville Chamberlain, he also regarded the Tories as Nazi sympathizers and wrote that they should be removed from office. He wrote for Picture Post, the Daily Mirror, and wrote columns for Tribune and the New Statesman.

In May 1940, after the escape from Dunkirk, Wintringham began to write in support of the Local Defence Volunteers, the forerunner of the Home Guard. On July 10, he opened the private Home Guard training school at Osterley Park, London.

Wintringham's training methods were mainly based on his experience in Spain. He even had trainers who had fought alongside him in Spain who trained volunteers in anti-tank warfare and demolitions. He also taught street fighting and guerrilla warfare. He wrote many articles in Picture Post and the Daily Mirror propagating his views about the Home Guard with the motto "a people's war for a people's peace".

The British Army still did not dare trust Wintringham because of his communist past. After September 1940 the army began to take charge of the Home Guard training in Osterley and Wintringham and his comrades were gradually sidelined. Wintringham resigned in April 1941. Ironically, despite his activities in support of the Home Guard, Wintringham was never allowed to join the organisation himself because of a policy barring membership to Communists and Fascists.

In 1942 Wintringham proceeded to found a Common Wealth Party with Vernon Bartlett, Sir Richard Acland and J. B. Priestley. He received 48% of the vote in at the Midlothian North by-election in February 1943, previously a safe Tory seat. In the 1945 general election he ran as M.P. for Aldershot, the Labour candidate standing down to give him a clear race against the incumbent Conservative M.P., his wife Kitty stood in the same Mid-Lothian constituency that he had come so close to winning two years earlier, neither were elected. After the war Wintringham and many of the founders of Common Wealth left and joined the Labour Party suggesting the dissolving of CW.

He continued to write about military history, opposing the use and development of atomic weapons and championing Mao's China and Tito's Yugoslavia over the monolithic bureaucracy of the Soviet Union.

Tom Wintringham died in Owmby, Lincolnshire in 1949.

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Books by Tom Wintringham

• War! And the way to fight against it., Communist Party of Great Britain, London, 1932
• Air Raid Warning! Why the Royal Air Force is to be doubled, Workers' Bookshop, London, 1934
• The Coming World War., Wishart 1935
• Mutiny. Mutinies from Spartacus to Invergordon., Stanley Nott, London 1936
• English Captain., Faber 1939 (also in Penguin)
• How to reform the army ('Fact No. 98'), London, 1939
• Deadlock War., Faber 1940
• New Ways of War., Penguin Special 1940
• Armies of Freemen., Routledge 1940
• Ferdinand Otto Miksche: Blitzkrieg, translated by Tom Wintringham, Faber, London, 1941
• Guerrilla Warfare., By "Yank" Levy. Foreword Wintringham.
• Peoples' War., Penguin Special 1942
• Freedom is our Weapon. A Policy for Army Reform., Kegan Paul 1941
• Politics of Victory., Routledge 1941
• Weapons and Tactics from Troy to Stalingrad., Houghton Mifflin, Boston, USA 1943, republished 1973 with Col. John Blashford-Snell ISBN 0-14-021522-0
• Your M.P. By 'Gracchus'. Gollancz 1944
• We're Going On - Collected Poems, Smokestack Books, UK, 2006

[edit] Books about Tom Wintringham

• Angus L. Calder - The Common Wealth Party 1942-1945 (1968)
• David Fernbach - Tom Wintringham and Socialist Defence (1981)
• David Margoleis - Writing the Revolution - The Left Review" (1993)
• Hugh Purcell - The Last English Revolutionary: A Biography of Tom Wintringham 1898-1949 (2004) (ISBN 0-7509-3080-2)
• Stephen Cullen - Home Guard Socialism (2006)

[edit] External links

• Tom Wintringham: His Place in History by Hugh Purcell
• Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King's College London Index summary
• The Poet of Action, Morning Star, 14 March 2006.