CHNN 22, Spring 2008 - School of Social Sciences

a major factor in his decision, on moving house in 1982, not to install a telephone. Nonetheless, he
was generous with his time and knowledge to any serious scholar who approached him.
The emergence of glasnost in the USSR under Gorbachev, and the greater historical honesty it
brought, excited Monty greatly, even though he was rightly pessimistic about the USSR’s overall
prospects. Following the collapse of the USSR and the historical experiment it represented, he
continued to rethink the Soviet historical experience. One of his last significant published articles,
in 1997, wondered whether the alternative of a ‘homogeneous socialist government’ propounded by
the left mensheviks and others in 1917 might have led to a better outcome in Russia. It was a
tragedy that ill-health during his last five years prevented him from developing his ideas further.
Francis King, Socialist History Society
An interview with Monty Johnstone
This interview with Monty Johnstone was carried out by Kevin Morgan in 1999 as
part of the Communist Party Biographical Project. A sound recording of the full
interview, along with all other interviews carried out as part of the project, is held in
the National Sound Archive of the British Library.
I
was born on 20 November 1928 in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire. My parents had lived in
Scotland but came down two months before I was born. My father had been an army officer
reaching the rank of major in the First World War. He was very conservative in outlook and
completely non-intellectual. My mother on the other hand came from a different background. Her
father was a well-known writer and journalist, John Foster Fraser, who first hit the headlines with
a book Round the World on a Wheel. With two others he’d ridden round the world on a bicycle,
where he met my grandmother when he was going through the United States; so I’m in fact a
quarter American, a point which I used to stress when people accused me of being anti-American.
My grandfather wrote a whole number of other books, including three on Russia; and my mother
was certainly more intellectually interested, although, like most women in that position at that
time, she didn’t go to university. She tended to be leftish-oriented. In 1940, under the influence of
Patrick Hamilton’s wife, she actually came out in favour of a People’s Government, whatever that
meant, at the time of the People’s Convention.
My mother in that part of the war was put in charge of the voluntary ambulance services and one of
the women who was a volunteer ambulance driver was apparently Patrick Hamilton’s wife. In 1945,
when we were living in Paddington, she canvassed for the Labour Party, and as a matter of fact, I
used to have much more bitter political rows and arguments wth my mother than with my father!
That often happens in terms of nearness; my father was prepared to accept in a fairly tolerant sort
of way my being a communist, whereas my mother disputed all the points all along the line. My
father realised he couldn’t do much about it and he liked the quiet life and let it stay. He was away a
lot of the time. Having been in the army during the First World War, and then having retired, or
whatever you do from the army, come the Second World War when he was considerably older, he
volunteered and they put him in the air force. He had inherited some money from an uncle of his
which he lived on basically.
I was at a preparatory school in Oxford, a place called the Dragon School, which I supposed you’d
call liberal-progressive: a mixture actually of liberal-progressive and, in some of the subjects,
traditional. I was there till thirteen and then subsequently I was at Rugby School where I was
awarded a senior scholarship. Already when I was at the Dragon in Oxford, I joined the YCL at the
age of twelve in 1941. I can recall having already been sympathetic to communism; for instance, I
was very upset when the Daily Worker was banned in 1941, so even before the entry of the Soviet
Union into the war I was sympathetic towards the communist party and communist ideas.
Clearly the whole pro-Soviet atmosphere after the Soviet Union came into the war in June 1941 did
help to reinforce this, although the ideas were there before – it wasn’t just a question of joining in
’42-’43, in the Stalingrad period. I can even remember, it must have been in August ’41, going
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