Harry Pollitt

For the locomotive engineer, see Harry Pollitt (engineer).
Harry Pollitt, General Secretary of the CPGB.

Harry Pollitt (22 November 1890 – 27 June 1960) was a British politician who served as the head of the trade union department of the Communist Party of Great Britain and the General Secretary of the party.[1]

Biography

Early life

Pollitt was born 22 November 1890 in Droylsden, Lancashire. He was the second of six children of Samuel Pollitt (1863–1933), a blacksmith's striker, and his wife, Mary Louisa (1868–1939), a cotton spinner, daughter of William Charlesworth, a joiner. Pollitt's parents were socialists and freethinkers and it was his mother, a member of the Independent Labour Party, who provided the youngster with his first induction into the principles and local networks of socialism. Theirs was an especially close relationship and Pollitt found in his mother both a confidante and a model of working-class dignity in the face of affliction.[1]

His own sense of injustice at family poverty, as three of his siblings died in infancy, was likewise fundamental to the strong identification with the working class that lay at the root of his political outlook. His formal education, at the local school, ended when he was thirteen. Pollitt was a boilermaker by trade and he frequently travelled around the country in this connection.

In 1915, whilst living in Southampton, he led a strike of boilermakers.

Communist union leader

In 1919 Pollitt was involved in the "Hands off Russia" campaign to protest against Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War. At the end of the war he joined Sylvia Pankhurst's Workers' Socialist Federation, which became the Communist Party (British Section of the Third International). As a member of this group he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain when it was formed in mid-1920. Pankhurst soon left the party, but Pollitt remained. He was heavily influenced by the Communist intellectual Rajani Palme Dutt and the two remained close allies for many years. From 1924 to 1929 Pollitt was General Secretary of the National Minority Movement, a Communist-led united front within the trade unions.

In 1925, he married Marjory Edna Brewer (b. 1902), a communist schoolteacher, and they had a son and a daughter. That year Pollitt was one of 12 members of the Communist Party convicted at the Old Bailey under the Incitement to Mutiny Act 1797 and one of the five defendants sentenced to 12 months imprisonment.

General Secretary of the CPGB

In 1929 the CPGB elected him General Secretary, a position he held, with a brief interruption during World War II, until 1956. He was then made Chairman of the Party, a position he held until his death four years later aboard an ocean liner carrying him home from a visit to Australia and New Zealand.[1]

In his public statements, Pollitt was loyal to the Soviet Union and to CPSU General Secretary Joseph Stalin. He was a defender of the Moscow Trials in which Stalin disposed of his political and military opponents. In the Daily Worker of 12 March 1936 Pollitt told the world that "the trials in Moscow represent a new triumph in the history of progress". The article was illustrated by a photograph of Stalin with Nikolai Yezhov, himself shortly to vanish and his photographs airbrushed from history by NKVD archivists.[2]

Pollitt also organised a protest against Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists in 1934.[3]

The Labour History Archive and Study Centre at the People's History Museum in Manchester holds the collection of the Communist Party of Great Britain. This collection includes the papers of Harry Pollitt, which covers the years 1920 to 1960.[4]

Views of World War II

In September 1939, despite the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, he welcomed the British declaration of war on Nazi Germany. When this turned out to be contrary to the Comintern line (as Rajani Palme Dutt, who succeeded him as General Secretary, had warned him it would be), he was forced to resign.[5] He was reinstated after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.

Political activities

Pollitt contested many parliamentary elections. He fought Rhondda East several times; in 1945 he was within a thousand votes of winning the seat from the Labour candidate.

Pollitt faced another crisis when Nikita Khrushchev, in his 1956 Secret Speech, attacked the legacy of Stalin. The Soviet repression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 made the crisis in the party worse, and most of its intellectual figures (including Doris Lessing and E. P. Thompson) and many ordinary members resigned. Others, for example Eric Hobsbawm, chose to stay in the Party to try to reform it. Pollitt, depressed both by physical illness (including temporary blindness) and his increasing political isolation, resigned as General Secretary and was appointed CP Chairman.

In this position, Pollitt, like many other communists around the world, became disillusioned with Khrushchev's revisionism and attacks on Stalin. "He's staying there as long as I'm alive", he said of the portrait of Stalin that hung in his living room.

Death and legacy

A USSR stamp of 1970 commemorating Harry Pollitt

Harry Pollitt died, aged 69, of a cerebral haemorrhage, after years of worsening health, while returning on the SS Orion from a speaking tour of Australia on 27 June 1960. He was cremated at Golders Green on 9 July, and was survived by his wife and two children, Brian and Jean.

In 1971, Pollitt's devotion to the Soviet cause and to international communism was acknowledged by Moscow when the Soviet navy named a ship after him. A plaque dedicated to the memory of Pollitt was unveiled by the Mayor of Tameside on 22 March 1995 outside Droylsden Library.[1] He is also ironically commemorated in the humorous song The Ballad of Harry Pollitt, which actually circulated most popularly in his lifetime. Part of the lyrics dealt with his death:[6]

Harry Pollit was a worker, one of Lenin's lads
He was foully murdered by those counter revolutionary cads
Counter revolutionary cads, counter revolutionary cads
He was foully murdered by those counter revolutionary cads!

Old Harry went to heaven, He reached the Gates with ease,
Said, "May I speak with Comrade God; I am Harry Pollitt please
I'm Harry Pollitt please, I'm Harry Pollitt please,
May I speak with Comrade God, I am Harry Pollitt please...

Secret communications with Soviet Union

In operation MASK (1934–1937), an MI5 counterspy infiltrated the party, and was for a time Pollitt's assistant and a clandestine radio operator. This allowed John Tiltman and his colleagues to crack the code and decrypt, for a few years, messages between Moscow and some of its foreign parties, such as the CPGB. They revealed the Comintern's close supervision of the Communist Party and Pollitt. Among other things, Pollitt was instructed to refute news leaks about a Stalinist purge. Some messages were addressed to code names, while others were signed by Pollitt himself. In his transmissions to Moscow, Pollitt regularly pleaded for more funding from the Soviet Union. One 1936 coded instruction advised Pollitt to publicise the plight of Ernst Thälmann, a German communist leader who had been arrested by the Nazis and who later died at Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Pollitt replied that he was 'having difficulties' getting English statesmen to make public declarations supporting Thälmann but that they promised they would speak privately with German officials in London. In one of the more amusing dispatches, Pollitt (1936) informed his Soviet contact about a recent visit to France to make campaign appearances for candidates from the French Communist Party. "At great inconvenience went to Paris to speak in the election campaign". Pollitt went on to complain that he was "kept sitting two days and comrades refused to allow me to speak. Such treatment as I received in Paris is a scandal".[7][8][9]

Publications by Harry Pollitt

Footnotes

  1. 1 2 3 4 "A Tribute to Harry Pollitt 1890 - 1960". Blue Plaques. Tameside District Council. Retrieved 5 April 2011.
  2. ↑ Redman, Joseph "The British Stalinists and the Moscow Trials", Labour Review, 3:2, March–April 1958
  3. ↑ John Mahon, Harry Pollitt: A Biography Lawrence & Wishart, Limited, 1976 ISBN 0853153272 (p. 193)
  4. ↑ Collection Catalogues and Descriptions, Labour History Archive and Study Centre
  5. ↑ John Mahon, Harry Pollitt: A Biography (p. 236)
  6. ↑ "THE LIMELITERS - HARRY POLLITT LYRICS". Retrieved 2012-01-13.
  7. ↑ West, Nigel (2005). Mask: MI5's Penetration of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Psychology Press. pp. 108 et seq.
  8. ↑ Romerstein, Herbert; Eric Breindel (1 October 2001). The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors. Regnery Publishing. pp. 86–88.
  9. ↑ Andrew, Christopher M. (3 November 2009). Defend the realm: the authorized history of MI5. Random House Digital, Inc. pp. 142, 148, 160, 176, 179, 180, 404, 1023.

References

External links

Party political offices
Preceded by
Albert Inkpin		 General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain
1929 - 1939 		Succeeded by
Rajani Palme Dutt
Preceded by
Rajani Palme Dutt		 General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain
1941 - 1956 		Succeeded by
John Gollan
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