CHNN 22, Spring 2008 - School of Social Sciences

character; but we used to have weekends and get people from elsewhere, specialists in the subjects,
to come and help as tutors on these course, where we used to make a critique of the bourgeois ideas
that we were being taught on the university courses.
My tutor wanted me to stay and do research but I was determined at that time to have a period in
industry, that this was necessary for my serious work as a communist. I got a job in a factory called
the South London Screw Company, to the amusement of my friends, and I was working there and
took part in leading a strike. I always made it quite plain that I was not recommending this as an
overall course, but I felt from my own point of view, since I had had and might continue to have
responsibilities in the communist movement, that I needed to have this direct experience. In
retrospect I’m not sure it was a particularly brilliant idea, I might have done better to have stayed
and done research at Oxford. But the way I saw things at the time, I felt because I hadn’t had
industrial experience, if I was going to be involved in any serious communist leadership, that I
needed to get that experience. If by workerism you mean a conviction that the working class is the
main force and therefore working-class activities and demands have a sort of priority, that certainly
did exist. But if you mean the idea that everybody would have turn themselves into a worker, this
was not the widespread thing; and from what I can gather it was more widespread in the 1930s.
In fact, by the end of the year I had an urgent appeal made to me from the YCL leadership that I
would come and work as assistant editor with a view to taking over the editorship of Challenge. I
succumbed to this, so at the end of ’52 I became assistant editor of Challenge, and the next year
editor. It was a full-time job and I stayed on until ’58, though the last year was part-time for lack of
funds. The YCL had its offices in King Street, next door to Challenge on the first floor. The editor of
Challenge was also one of the top leaders of the YCL, so one was both a journalist, if you like, and
at the same time one of the leaders of the YCL doing a political job. It was fairly stressful in terms of
getting Challenge to bed every week on a shoestring and combining with that with the political
responsibilities; I used to have public meetings in different parts of the country, also visiting
different branches, but at the same time, with all these different commitments, and family
commitments, always the business of getting the paper to bed on a Monday. That was a real strain
that other people doing full-time work didn’t have.
T
he equivalent to the executive committee of the communist party was the national
committee of the YCL; the equivalent of the political committee was the executive
committee. Then there was the EC sub-committee which was the key one consisting
basically of the national secretary, the national organiser and the editor of Challenge. The secretary
was John Moss and the national organiser was first of all Dick Nettleton and than Gerry Cohen.
When I first came on as assistant editor there was an editor, Sid Kaufman, who had the perspective
of going to work at the Daily Worker, but who initiated me into the mysteries of printing and all
this sort of thing, laying things out. When he went and I became editor, we had another full-time
assistant editor, who’s now a Labour MP, called Robin Corbett. We also had a business manager; at
one time that was Bob Leeson. The circulation was round about 8,000 and sometimes lower.
There was very close co-operation between the national secretary of the YCL and the chairman of
the communist party youth affairs committee, who for one period was George Matthews, and later
was Bill Lauchlan, who was then the national organiser of the party. Politically of course this whole
thing blew up in ’56. The independence of the YCL was proclaimed very strongly as a general
principle up until ’56. But of course, when differences began to develop, then qualifications were
made on this total independence; it meant only total organisational independence and not political
independence. In ’56-’57, at the height of all this business, I actually prepared a document on
communist party/YCL relations in which I argued specifically why the YCL should be fully
autonomous.
1956 didn’t come as a bolt of the blue, it was amply prepared for by ’55. In ’55, Khrushchev and
Bulganin made their visit to Yugoslavia and they apologised to Tito for the slanders that had been
perpetrated in the previous period. Now since these so-called slanders involved the Rajk trial, the
Kostov trial, the Slansky trial, it was clear that the trials themselves were being called into question;
because one of the elements in those East European trials was that Tito was meant to be using
people like Rajk and Kostov in order to overthrow the people’s democratic regimes in these
countries. If these things that were supposed to have been proved by the trials were then
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