The Editorial Board of Past and Present
Willie Thompson (1939-2023) Socialist Historian on the Communist Party Historians Group
Willie Thompson died earlier this week, a distinguished socialist historian and activist. In recent years he was a leading figure in the Socialist History Society, formerly the Communist Party Historians Group.
I had discussions and exchanges with Willie down the years. They were always friendly even if our perspectives didn’t always meet. On occasion I shared a platform with him, for example, a 2014 meeting on the legacy of Tony Benn at Conway Hall.
I’m sure there will be many tributes and appreciations. Below is a piece I wrote in 2020 on the CP Historians which provides a link to Thompson’s definitive piece on the Group
The Editorial Board of Past & Present
I am not now and have never been a CP member. In fact I’m a lifelong anti-Stalinist. As the former Daily Worker journalist Peter Fryer, who left the party in 1956, noted at one of the meetings after the CPGB wound itself up in 1991, if the CP had ever got power in Britain I’d quite probably be in jail, if not dead.
My late father Graham, born on Clydebank was a member, and growing up in Muswell Hill in the 1960s and 1970s, obtaining a copy of the Morning Star was not a problem. The area had one of the largest CP memberships in the country.
I always found it a strange mixture of reports of industrial struggles and details of the supposed glorious advance of socialism in Russia.
It’s fair to say I think that the CPGB had some impressive episodes in its history and some very much less than impressive ones, to put it mildly.
Anyway, enough of the preamble. I write history focused columns in the Morning Star these days and have done for 15 years or so. The world changed after 1989 and when the Soviet Union no longer existed to defend, common ground was to be found in that many members of what became the CPB had a much better grasp of Marxism, its theory and practice, than much of the rest of the left. This was a recipe for a degree of peaceful co-existence.
So while I was never a CP member as a socialist historian I was associated with the CP History Group which became in 1991 the Socialist History Society.
A decent summary of the historians history by Willie Thompson is here:
A good number of the publications of the CP History Group after 1956 are now digitised and free on line:
http://banmarchive.org.uk/collections/shs/index_frameset1.htm
As Thompson notes the CP Historians managed to avoid too much direction from King St (the old Covent Garden HQ of the CPGB) because they did mostly pre-C20th English history which didn’t interest Russia much.
That allowed them to be instrumental in founding the journal Past and Present
Eric Hobsbawm’s call after 1956 for the reconstituted group to ‘become historians of the present too’ must be seen in that context. He did indeed follow the point himself although whether interventions like the Forward March of Labour Halted will stand the test of time remains to be seen.
Again as Thompson notes many of the significant works of Marxist history after 1956 were written by former members of the Historians Group. One thinks of E P Thompson, John Saville, Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton and others, all of whom I knew to one degree or another and all except for Thompson spoke at London Socialist Historians meetings in later life.
One historian I knew well and did some work with was the late Brian Manning who was a student of Christopher Hill and a leading historian of the English Civil War:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Manning_(historian)
The London Socialist Historians Group which I continue to convene stands of course to a very modest amount on the shoulders of those who became known as the ‘British Marxist Historians’. One thing we took from the Group in particular was to involve non-academic historians and understand that their contributions are at least as important as those who are officially employed as academics.
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