Miscellaneous non-party organisations

Catalogue record

Notes

CP/ORG/MISC. From virtually the year of its foundation, the CPGB sought to promote its objects through a variety of 'front' and ancillary organisations. Some were sections or affiliates of international movements, like the British section of the Red International of Labour Unions, later the National Minority Movement. Others were more specific to Britain, like the National Unemployed Workers' Committee Movement, founded in 1921, and dropping the 'committee' from its title at its sixth conference in 1929. In either case, communist control or direction was meant to be ensured by organised fraction work. Communists in particular would take on the crucial and often unalluring role of secretary, while non-communist supporters were usually employed in a more public or honorific capacity. Even in what were by no means 'front' organizations it was very often communists who were readiest to take on such onerous and usually unremunerated positions. It is easy for those familiar with the party's formal organisational precepts to overstate the degree of its control over its members' activities. Certainly, as the decades wore on, if party activists took on leading positions in broader organisations, it was often simply because it was a part of their identity as communists that they should do so. The deposit of an organisation's records in the CPGB archives does not therefore have to imply 'control' by the CPGB, though it does certainly demonstrate the key organisational role played by communist officers.

One result of this is that important collections relating to broader movements and organisations are often to be found in the papers of the individual communists who animated them. Notably these include the important materials relating to the NUWM in the Wal Hannington papers, while Ivor Montagu's papers provide insights into a wide range of movements over several decades, notably including the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR, from its foundation in the 1920s to the 1980s. There are also papers relating to the British Workers' Sports Federation deposited by its secretary, George Sinfield.43

Other files relating to non-party organisations appear to have been deposited by individuals who cannot now be identified or to have been separated from their personal papers. Among the organisations and movements covered are the People's Convention; a CPGB-sponsored vehicle for campaigns against the wartime coalition and for a 'people's government' in 1941-2; the British Youth Peace Assembly, a broad youth campaign again set up at the instigation of communists in the late 1930s; the Left Book Club, including some local materials; Artists for Peace, an initiative postdating the break-up of the Artists International Association in 1953; the Paul Robeson Petition Campaign of the 1950s; the CPGB publishers, Lawrence & Wishart; Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, one of support groups set up during the miners' strike of 1984-5. Papers of the Welfare League of India should be read alongside the personal deposit of Glyn Evans's papers, while there is also a minute book of the Openshaw branch of the British Socialist Party, partly in Harry Pollitt's hand.

The commitment to a form of peace politics is one that crops up again and again, and the most substantial of these holdings is that for the British Peace Committee, active from 1949 as an affiliate of the World Peace Council. Catalogued as CP/CENT/PEA, this sequence also includes materials relating to a variety of local peace campaigns, often sponsored or even dominated by communists but rarely promoted under the CPGB's own official auspices.