Organisation Department

Catalogue record

Notes

CP/CENT/ORG. From its inception in 1943, the records of the CPGB's national Organisation Department provide an especially revealing perspective on the Party's inner workings. Among its responsibilities were the maintenance of membership and cadre records, internal discipline and liaison with the districts, for all of which an extensive documentation was preserved. Materials of a highly personal, sometimes libellous nature have been excluded from the copying project. Notably this excludes the short party autobiographies to which only restricted access is available on grounds of privacy and data protection. Abundant materials nevertheless survive relating to deviations of a more public or political character. These include files on outbreaks of internal unrest involving 'rotten elements' like the novelist Edward Upward and the future Labour MP Eric Heffer, and the oversight extended by the CPGB to other left-wing groups, which most certainly did not accept its right to maintain such records. The Party's interest in Trotskyism was particularly assiduous in the war years, when members were exhorted to Clear out Hitler's agents for advancing policies not dissimilar to the CPGB's own a year or two earlier.39 Along with detailed reports on Trotskyist and ILP activities are copies of internal minutes and documents, particularly of the Workers' International League, which may not be accessible elsewhere. In 1943 the party also started to compile record sheets on prominent leftists, a handful of which survive. This unhealthy obsession led on occasion to actual violence against Trotskyist paper-sellers. Even so, in the post-war years, the same struggle was generally confined to what were described as 'political methods', culminating in the formation of an almost cerebral 'Trotskyism Study Group' in the 1970s. The Organisation Department files also provide an important source for activities at district level. Just as national party records had at one time been sent to higher bodies in Moscow, copies of district minutes and reports in the early post-war decades were sent to the national organiser who, if conscientious enough, filed them with relevant correspondence and supporting papers.