Clio's Lives
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North London.11
The most-defining feature of Samuel’s early upbringing was communist
politics, which dominated every aspect of his young life. This communist
childhood was the subject of some of his most powerful pieces of historical
writing, in particular his series of essays on ‘The Lost World of British
Communism’ published in the New Left Review during the mid-1980s.
Historian and ex-communist John Saville criticised the essays, arguing
that Samuel’s communism was of a highly particular, even peculiar, kind,
far from representative of a broader experience:
I do not deny the validity of Raphael Samuel’s own personal history,
especially in his younger days … The historian in him, however, might have
acknowledged that it was a very unusual story, typical of some, perhaps
many, Jewish comrades but not in any way relevant to the working-class
militants who were joining the Communist Party at the time that Raphael
was growing up in the 1940s.12
Saville may have intended this remark as a criticism but, in fact, this was
the point that Samuel was making in the ‘Lost World’ essays, rejecting the
idea that any sort of uniform experience of communist politics actually
existed, that it always entailed a close and complex relationship with other
11 Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Samuel, Raphael Elkan (1934–1996)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
12 John Saville, Memoirs from the Left (London: Merlin, 2003), 9.
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factors. His own experience was not only that of a Jewish comrade, but
also that of a child brought up by a single mother during the war years on
the home front. Above all, it must be understood as a communism shaped
and mediated by the values implied by Popular Front politics.
In 1935, at the seventh international congress (a meeting of all the
national communist parties), Georgi Dimitrov, the General Secretary of
Comintern, announced the official transition towards a policy of Popular
Front to be effective immediately amongst all the national branches of the
party. The Popular Front replaced the previous policy of ‘Class Against
Class’ (1928–35) in which the respective parties followed a narrowly
prescribed class politics at the exclusion of those who did not pursue this
line.13 In adopting this policy in 1928, the CPGB had differentiated itself
from the British Labour Party (BLP), the political arm of the British left,
by rejecting all gradualist approaches to socialism and aggressively asserting
a view of class interests as clear, unified and utterly incompatible with one
another.14 The switch to the Popular Front had been prompted in part by
the catastrophic fate that had befallen the Communist Party of Germany.
As a result of the ‘Class Against Class’ line, the German party had become
so isolated that they had been incapable of opposing Adolf Hitler’s attacks
against them. They had subsequently been wiped off the German political
spectrum and rendered powerless.15 Now Dimitrov urged the respective
national branches of the Communist Party to collaborate, not just joining
forces with other left-wing or centrist political groups such as the British
Labour or Liberal parties, but also showing a willingness to cooperate
with any social or cultural group who were opposed to fascism. He also
stressed the importance of reclaiming national histories for the political
13 Matthew Worley, Class Against Class: The Communist Party in Britain Between the Wars (London: I.B. Taurus, 2002).
14 See: David Cannadine, ‘The Twentieth Century: Social Identities and Political Identities’, in Cannadine, Class in Britain (London: Penguin, 2000), 126–44; Stuart Macintyre, A Proletarian Science: Marxism in Britain 1917–1933 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1986). See also Ross McKibbin, Classes and Culture: England 1918–1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), doi.org/ 10.1093/
acprof:oso/9780198206729.001.0001. McKibbin argues that the perceived tranquillity of England’s interwar (1918–39) social order gravely underestimates the degree of social antagonism that lay below the surface.
15 Jim Fyrth, ‘Introduction: In the Thirties’, in Fyrth, ed., Britain, Fascism and the Popular Front (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1985), 9–29; Kevin Morgan, ‘The Communist Party and the
Popular Front, 1935–1938’, in Morgan, Against Fascism and War: Ruptures and Continuities in British Communist Politics, 1935–1941 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 33–55.
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left. Invocations of a lost ‘national’ past were a key feature cutting across
fascist rhetoric, a tactic that had proved gallingly effective as a form of
psychological propaganda.
Amongst the CPGB, there had always been some uneasiness with the
deeply isolationist implications of the ‘Class Against Class’ policy, so the
notion of a united or Popular Front was greeted with relative consensus
amongst the party’s membership.16 Despite the shift in stance, however, the
Labour Party remained mistrustful of the CPGB and rejected all overtures
towards a united front.17 The CPGB was, however, more successful in its
engagement with the public sphere. One implication of the change was
that the party became more attractive to radically inclined intellectuals,
writers and artists. Once viewed with hostility as inherently bourgeois,
the party now softened its stance, seeing them as important potential
weapons in the battle of ideas.
Another fruitful area for the party was its association with the numerous
grassroots initiatives that emerged during this period, initiatives from
which it would previously have remained aloof. One example of this was
the Left Book Club (LBC), run by the charismatic editor Victor Gollancz,
which, whilst never explicitly affiliated to the CPGB, harboured strong
communist sympathies. Intent upon revitalising an ailing popular left-
wing movement, the LBC became one of the most effective methods
of circulating left-orientated literature to a wide audience.18 Similarly,
communists were also able to collaborate in campaigns such as Aid in
Spain (Samuel later recalled that it was her frustration with the Labour
Party’s position on the Spanish Civil War that first turned his mother
further towards the radical end of the political spectrum).19 For a Jewish
family such as Samuel’s, another important dimension of this increased
appeal was the party’s strong opposition to all forms of fascism and active
campaign against former MP Oswald Mosley and the British Union of
Fascists (BUF). Whilst Britain was never in the grip of state fascism as
Spain, Germany and Italy were, the BUF’s hostility towards migrant
16 Matthew Worley, ‘Comrade Against Comrade: The CPGB in Crisis’, in Worley, Class Against Class, 116–54. James Eaden and David Renton argue that as early as 1931 the Communist Party line had been in transition. James Eaden and David Renton, The Communist Party of Great Britain since 1920 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 50, doi.org/10.1057/9781403907226.
17 Morgan, ‘The Communist Party and the Popular Front’, 35–6.
18 Paul Laity, ‘Introduction’, in Laity, ed., Left Book Club Anthology (London: Victor Gollancz, 2001), ix–xxxi.
/> 19 Samuel, The Lost World, 66.
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communities, including Jewish ones, in the name of a selective vision
of the national past was enough to provide a chilling glimpse into the
implications of fascist politics.
In September 1936, the BUF attempted to march through Cable Street
in East London where a significant proportion of the population were
Jewish. Angry protestors confronted the BUF, resulting in a pitched street
battle and the abandonment of their planned march.20 The CPGB took
a considerable role in organising the protest, offering those frustrated
with what was perceived by some as indecisiveness on the part of Anglo-
Jewish community leaders (often divided amongst themselves on matters
of both politics and religion) an assertive alternative form of leadership.21
As Samuel’s uncle, the scholar and historian Chimen Abramsky, said later,
‘if you were for democracy Communism was the place to go’.22 Strategically,
the CPGB’s switch proved successful, resulting in a substantial increase in
its membership, peaking during the war at 56,000.23 It was not, however,
without tension, creating, amongst the membership, a dualistic, even
conflicting, set of demands on both their thought and loyalties. For some,
such as Palme Dutt, the party’s arch theoretician, this policy of inclusivity
and alliance risked obscuring or undermining class as the key political
category of analysis or critique.24 This concern was further emphasised
following the outbreak of the Second World War when class divisions
were increasingly overridden by invocations of a British nation unified in
defiance of a common enemy.
There was also the question of the relationship to the Soviet Union.
On the one hand, the party sought to identify with indigenous
political traditions, united by a common commitment to democracy,
but at crucial moments it showed an enduring allegiance to Moscow.
It refused to condemn communist suppression of anarchist factions in
20 Nigel Crosby, ‘Opposition to British Fascism 1936–45’, in Crosby, Anti Fascism in Britain (London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 2000), 42–80.
21 David Cesarani, ‘Who Speaks for British Jews?’, New Statesman, 28 May 2012, 23–7. See also James Eaden and David Renton, ‘The Zig Zag Left 1928–39’, The Communist Party of Great Britain since 1920, 58; Raphael Samuel, ‘Jews and Socialism: The End of a Beautiful Friendship?’, The Jewish Quarterly, 35:2 (1988), 8–10.
22 Ada Rapaport-Albert, ‘Chimen Abramsky Obituary’, The Guardian, 19 March 2010. Samuel’s mother Minna was also an ‘implacable opponent of Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts’. Paul Conway,
‘Minna Keal 1909–1999’, www.musicweb-international.com/keal/ (accessed 19 June 2014).
23 Noreen Branson, ‘Appendix I Communist Party Membership’, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain 1931–1951 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1997), 252.
24 See, for example, Rajani Palme Dutt, ‘Intellectuals and Communism’, Communist Review (September 1932), 421–30.
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the Spanish Civil War, its newspaper, The Daily Worker, defended the
Moscow trials and the party as a whole complied with the implications
of the Nazi Soviet Pact (1939), switching to a policy stance of imperial
war in August 1939, only returning to a position of ‘social patriotism’
following the Soviet Union’s entry into the war in June 1941. It must
be stressed that Samuel would have understood this only indirectly at
the time of its actual happening. He was four-and-a-half when the party
line changed following the Nazi–Soviet pact in August 1939, six-and-
a-half when it changed back in June 1941. Unlike the older members
of his family, and several of his contemporaries, Samuel was ‘born into’
communism. Later, as a historian and left-wing intellectual, he would
become aware of the broader political and conceptual contexts in which
this was situated. It was first received, however, as a child. Saville’s critique
of the ‘Lost World’ essays as an ‘incoherent personal sociology’, might,
in another light, be more rewardingly seen as communism from a ‘child’s
eye view’, encountered not as a theory of political economy that carried
consequences for the daily lives of adherents but in terms of a series of
direct, firsthand experiences and perceptions.25
In the first place, Samuel’s communism was a real family affair. Not only
his mother but, in total, 13 members of his extended family, including
aunts, uncles and cousins, were actively involved in the CPGB, or in the
respective national equivalent in the country in which they lived. If not
actual members, many were supportive of radical political positions.26
As a result, continuous political activity was ‘normal’, infused within his
day-to-day life and domestic spaces. Political meetings were conducted in
the living room, fellow comrades looked after him after school, political
leaflets adorned the kitchen table, and his mother knitted white-ribbed
socks intended for use by the Red Army.27 It shaped his child’s play through
learning the names of Russian towns, marking out the military positions
of the Red Army on a map and singing Russian songs, and had all the
qualities of an intriguing imaginary world with its own secret language,
a pantheon of heroic figures and legends, and even its own promised land
(the Soviet Union).28 In all these ways, Samuel became attuned to politics
as part of normal everyday life.29
25 Saville, Memoirs from the Left, 9.
26 Samuel, The Lost World, 63. Some members of Samuel’s family lived in France, others in America.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid., 59–62.
29 Ibid., 61, 66.
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This youthful communism also furnished him with an early ethical
framework for judging his behaviour and that of others. This hinged
around an absolute antithesis to anything resembling individualism
(the defining trait of bourgeois culture), the centrality of collectivism and
the paramount importance of sustained political education and activity.30
All of this carried firm implications for how to behave both amongst
comrades and non-comrades, and provided a structure for how to behave
in both public and private.31 To this extent, Samuel would later say that
communism provided him with a ‘complete social identity’ that had even
greater significance for a child in the dark and confusing times of the
war on the home front. Like many other city children, he was evacuated
to the countryside (Buckinghamshire) and sent to a boarding school
(Long Dene). Here, separated from his family and social network for the
first time, his burgeoning sense of communist identity carried reassuring
connotations of the home he had left behind.32 As he grew older, advancing
towards more complex forms of abstract thinking, Marxism certainly
provided him with a conceptual framework and explanation of the world.
In his own words:
Marxism, or what we called Marxism, reinforced this cosmic sense.
It dealt in absolutes and totalities, ultimates and finalities, universals and
organic wholes … As
a political economy, it showed us that capitalism
was a unified essence … As a science of society, if offered itself as an all-
embracing determinism, in which accidents were revealed as necessities,
and causes inexorably followed by effects. As a mode of reasoning, it
provided us with a priori understandings and universal rules – laws of
thought which were both a guide to action and a source of prophetical
authority.33
However, the important point here is that initially his communism had
been non-theoretical. It had been primarily social and behavioural.34
An important early influence on him was Minna, his mother. Born
Minnie Nerenstein on 22 March 1909 in East London, she was raised in
a deeply religious household with Yiddish as her first language. She was
30 Ibid.
31 The second of Samuel’s essays ‘Staying Power’ focuses on the ways in which this ethical framework was constructed, transmitted and reproduced amongst the wider membership. Samuel, The Lost World, 77–156.
32 Samuel, The Lost World, 67–8.
33 Ibid., 49.
34 On communism as providing a ‘total identity’, see Thomas Linehan, Communism in Britain: From Cradle to Grave 1920–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).
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a bright child, winning a scholarship to Clapton Country Secondary
School run by Mrs Harris, a progressive Fabian Socialist. She proved
herself to be a talented musician and her talent took her to study at the
Royal Academy of Music. Minna was forced to quit her music studies in
order to help run the family business following the death of her father
Jacob in 1926. Following her marriage to Barnett and their move to
Hampstead Garden, she soon found the genteel environs of ‘The Suburb’
claustrophobic after the bustle of the East End.35 Politics offered Minna
activity and intellectual stimulation. She joined the Hampstead Garden
Suburb Labour Party, becoming secretary of the women’s group. Together
with Barnett, she formed a committee for refugee children from Germany,
throwing herself wholeheartedly into the venture, seized and driven by
the urgency of the situation. Barnett, a far less effusive personality, drew
back at this whirlwind of activity, causing a rift to open up between the