Early life Tom Wintringham was born 1898 in
Grimsby, Lincolnshire. He was educated at
Gresham's School,
Holt, and
Balliol College, Oxford. In 1915 he was elected to a
Brackenbury scholarship in History at Balliol, but during the
First World War postponed his university career to join the
Royal Flying Corps, serving as a mechanic and motorcycle
despatch rider. At the end of the war he was involved in a brief barracks mutiny, one of many minor insurrections which went unnoticed in the period. He returned to Oxford, and in a long vacation made a visit of some months to Moscow, after which he 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 was formed, Wintringham graduated from Oxford and moved to London, ostensibly to study for
the bar at the Temple, but in fact to work full-time in politics.
Political career and the Spanish Civil War In 1923, Wintringham joined the recently formed
Communist Party of Great Britain. In 1925, he was one of the twelve CPGB officials imprisoned for
seditious libel and incitement to
mutiny. In 1930, he helped to found the Communist newspaper, the
Daily Worker, and was one of the few named writers to publish articles in it. In writing for the Communist party's theoretic journal
Labour Monthly, he established himself as the party's military expert. In
LM articles and in booklets on the subject, Wintringham formed the arguments against Air Assault and called for
air raid precautions (ARP) several years before the
bombing of Guernica. 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 the issue in the years leading up to the war. Although at the centre of the 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 form of 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. Although published by Wintringham and funded by the CPGB, it embraced writers of all shades of socialism, regardless of their party affiliations. The journal established a pattern for what was to become cultural studies. In 1935, he wrote
The Coming World War, which was published both in the UK and the USA. In it, he predicted an inevitable world war between the imperialist powers and the USSR, most likely beginning with a conflict over
Manchuria; that it would be primarily a mechanised conflict and therefore susceptible to revolutionary action by the working class. At the start of the
Spanish Civil War, Wintringham went to Barcelona as a journalist for the
Daily Worker, but he joined and eventually commanded the
British Battalion Wintringham's training methods were mainly based on his experience in Spain. He even had veterans 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 deemed Wintringham unreliable because of his communist past, and after September 1940, when the army began to take charge of the Home Guard training in Osterley, Wintringham and his comrades were gradually sidelined. Wintringham resigned in April 1941. Despite his activities in support of the Home Guard, Wintringham was never allowed to join the organisation itself because of a policy barring membership to Fascists and Communists. In 1942, Wintringham proceeded to found a
Common Wealth Party with
Vernon Bartlett, Sir
Richard Acland and
J. B. Priestley. He received 48 percent of the vote at the
Midlothian and Peebles Northern by-election in February 1943, previously a safe Tory seat. In the
1945 general election he stood in the
Aldershot constituency, the
Labour Party candidate standing down to give him a clear race against the incumbent Conservative MP. His election agent was
Mamie Woolf. His wife Kitty stood in the same Midlothian constituency that he had come close to winning two years earlier, but neither was elected. After the war Wintringham and many of the founders of Common Wealth left and joined the Labour Party, suggesting the dissolving of CW.
Later life In his later years he worked mainly in radio and film, both producing documentary and critical programmes and writing criticism. 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. While he recognised and opposed the purges and repression that marred the achievements of the Soviet Union, he never accepted that Stalin himself was complicit or responsible for them. His later campaigns and writing were mainly centred on the formation of a 'World Guard', a neutral volunteer force (initially) to police Palestine and the partitioned India, and to be at the disposal of the
United Nations. Tom Wintringham died on 16 August 1949, aged 51, after a massive
heart attack while he was staying with his sister at her farm at
Owmby, Lincolnshire. == Bibliography ==