Arthur Leslie Morton
Arthur Leslie Morton, the eldest of three children of Arthur Spence Morton (1871–1945), a Tory-voting tenant farmer, and his wife Mary Hannah Lampray (1868–1944) was born in Suffolk on 4th July 1903. Arthur - always known was Leslie - progressed from King Edward VI Grammar School in Bury St Edmunds to Eastbourne College, a minor public school. During this period he was deeply influenced by the writings of John Ruskin and developed strong views about the degradation of cultural life under industrial capitalism. (1)
Morton went up to Cambridge University, where he met fellow students Ivor Montagu, Maurice Dobb and J. D. Bernal and together they joined the University Labour Club. After Cambridge, he taught at Steyning Grammar School in Sussex, where to the astonishment of the Governors, most of the staff supported the General Strike in 1926. This resulted in him being sacked and he eventually got a job teaching at Summerhill, the progressive school run by A. S. Neil. (2) He met his first wife, Bronwen Florence Dorothy at the school and they married on 4th December 1928 and had a son, Nicholas. (3)
People's History of England (1938)
In 1928 Morton joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and took part in the Hunger Marches of 1934 and served on the board of The Daily Worker. He acted as the "owner" of the paper at a time when personal liability applied in libel cases, threatening jail since the paper had no money! (4) “Much of our work was concentrated in the area lying in the angle of Hornsey Road and Seven Sisters Road, we canvassed all the streets in the area and tackled the Campbell Road, said to be the poorest street in the district and the one where people lived in the worst conditions." (5)
In 1937 Morton left to concentrate on what was published the next year by Victor Gollancz as People's History of England (1938). Published in May 1938 as the ‘monthly choice' of the then-booming Left Book Club (LBC) . "Dispatched to around 40,000 LBC members, it was critically acclaimed and immediately popular. A crystallization of popular-front cultural politics, it also transcended its moment. Widely translated, it has seldom been out of print since." (6)
Christopher Hill argued that the book provided a "broad framework" for the group's subsequent work in posing "an infinity of questions to think about". (7) for Eric Hobsbawm, it would become a model in how to write searching but accessible history, whereas for Raphael Samuel, who first encountered the book as a schoolboy, it was an antidote to "reactionary" history from above. According to Ben Harker: "Morton was an inspiration for a rising generation of Marxist historians who would come to dominate their respective fields." (8)
Communist Party Historians' Group
In 1946 several historians who were members of the Communist Party of Great Britain, that included Christopher Hill, E. P. Thompson, Raphael Samuel, Eric Hobsbawm, A. L. Morton, John Saville, George Rudé, Rodney Hilton, Dorothy Thompson, Dona Torr, Edmund Dell, Victor Kiernan and Maurice Dobb formed the Communist Party Historians' Group. (9) Francis Beckett pointed out that these "were historians of a new type - socialists to whom history was not so much the doings of kings, queens and prime ministers, as those of the people." (10)
Eric Hobsbawm has argued that: "The main pillars of the Group thus consisted initially of people who had graduated sufficiently early in the 1930s to have done some research, to have begun to publish and, in very exceptional cases, to have begun to teach. Among these Christopher Hill already occupied a special position as the author of a major interpretation of the English Revolution and a link with Soviet economic historians." (11)
John Saville later recalled: "The Historian's Group had a considerable long-term influence upon most of its members. It was an interesting moment in time, this coming together of such a lively assembly of young intellectuals, and their influence upon the analysis of certain periods and subjects of British history was to be far-reaching. For me, it was a privilege I have always recognised and appreciated." (12)
In 1952 members of the group founded the journal, Past and Present. Over the next few years the journal pioneered the study of working-class history and is "now widely regarded as one of the most important historical journals published in Britain today." (13)
As Christos Efstathiou has explained: "Most of the members of the Group had common aspirations as well as common past experiences. The majority of them grew up in the inter-war period and were Oxbridge undergraduates who felt that the path to socialism was the solution to militarism and fascism. It was this common cause that united them as a team of young revolutionaries, who saw themselves as the heir of old radical." (14)
Morton continued to publish books and The English Utopia appeared in 1952. The book analysed the idea of utopia in English culture from the Middle Ages to the present. Morton 's central claim was that utopian writers had contributed to "the great river of the movement for socialism". (15) However, one critic suggested that his discussion of socialist pioneer William Morris and the anti-communist George Orwell "in the same frame of reference caused disquiet" in the Communist Party of Great Britain. (16)
Khrushchev's de-Stalinzation Policy
During the 20th Party Congress in February, 1956, Nikita Khrushchev launched an attack on the rule of Joseph Stalin. He condemned the Great Purge and accused Joseph Stalin of abusing his power. He announced a change in policy and gave orders for the Soviet Union's political prisoners to be released. Pollitt found it difficult to accept these criticisms of Stalin and said of a portrait of his hero that hung in his living room: "He's staying there as long as I'm alive". Khrushchev's de-Stalinzation policy encouraged people living in Eastern Europe to believe that he was willing to give them more independence from the Soviet Union. (17)
In Hungary the prime minister Imre Nagy removed state control of the mass media and encouraged public discussion on political and economic reform. Nagy also released anti-communists from prison and talked about holding free elections and withdrawing Hungary from the Warsaw Pact. Khrushchev became increasingly concerned about these developments and on 4th November 1956 he sent the Red Army into Hungary. During the Hungarian Uprising an estimated 20,000 people were killed. Nagy was arrested and replaced by the Soviet loyalist, Janos Kadar. (18)
Most members of the Communist Party Historians' Group, supported Imre Nagy and as a result, like most Marxists, left the Communist Party of Great Britain after the Hungarian Uprising and a "New Left movement seemed to emerge, united under the banners of socialist humanism... the New Leftists aimed to renew this spirit by trying to organise a new democratic-leftist coalition, which in their minds would both counter the 'bipolar system' of the cold war and preserve the best cultural legacies of the British people." (19)
As John Saville pointed out: "I still regard it as wonderfully fortunate that I was of the generation that established the Communist Historians' group. For ten years we exchanged ideas and developed our Marxism into what we hoped were creative channels. It was not chance that when the secret speech of Khrushchev was made known in the West, it was members of the historians' group who were among the most active of the Party intellectuals on demanding a full discussion and uninhibited debate." (20)
Francis Beckett, the author of Enemy Within: The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party (1995) argues that those who left were a greater lost of the CPGB than its leaders could ever bring themselves to admit. (21) Over 7,000 members of the CPGB resigned over what happened in Hungary. One of them, Peter Fryer, later recalled: "The central issue is the elimination of what has come to be known as Stalinism. Stalin is dead, but the men he trained in methods of odious political immorality still control the destinies of States and Communist Parties. The Soviet aggression in Hungary marked the obstinate re-emergence of Stalinism in Soviet policy, and undid much of the good work towards easing international tension that had been done in the preceding three years. By supporting this aggression the leaders of the British Party proved themselves unrepentant Stalinists, hostile in the main to the process of democratisation in Eastern Europe. They must be fought as such." (22)
Unlike most members of the Communist Party Historians' Group, Morton refused to resign from the Communist Party of Great Britain. Other books by Morton include Socialism in Britain (1963), World of the Ranters: Religious Radicalism in the English Revolution (1970), The British Labour Movement, 1770-1920 (1973), Freedom in Arms: Levellers' Writings (1976), The Life and Ideas of Robert Owen (1978) and a study of William Blake, entitled, The Everlasting Gospel (1982).
Leslie Morton died on 23rd October 1987.
Primary Sources
(1) A. L. Morton, The English Utopia (1952)
He (William Morris) began, therefore, to enquire into the nature of this freedom, to study the history of those times and societies in which it seemed the most to be found and to ask why it was so lacking in the bourgeois democracy of nineteenth-century England. Above all he studied the literature and life of Northern Europe in its heroic age, and in Iceland he found the nearest approach, perhaps, to a free society that the world had yet seen. Quickly he grasped the essential fact that Icelandic freedom was the result of the relative absence of class divisions, and, once he had realised that freedom meant the abolition of classes, he was on the road to conscious socialism. Morris was a man passionately in love with the classless society, determined to seek and ensue it by all possible means: it was in Marxism that he found the road, thereby escaping the heartbreak and frustration which DH Lawrence suffered in our own time in attempting the same quest without the essential clue. Morris loved the past, and understood it better than Lawrence did, but he never made the mistake of trying to return to it. When he visited Iceland it was to gain knowledge and strength for the struggle, not to escape from the present. He knew that the classless society of the future could only emerge from what actually exists and be reached through the conflict of classes, that is to say, through revolution.
That is why, though he called himself a socialist when speaking in general terms, he liked to use the word communist to define precisely the kind of socialist he was. He used the word not in a pleasantly antiquarian way, but precisely, with a full understanding of its implications. In the 1880s these implications were mainly two – both highly disreputable. First, a communist was an upholder of the deeds of the Paris Commune, then a matter of recent history and an object of terror to the bourgeoisie as the great example in practice of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Morris never tired of defending the Commune and glorifying its memory. Secondly, a communist was one who accepted the teachings of Marx as expounded in The Communist Manifesto. So much nonsense has been written about Morris that it is still necessary to emphasise the point that he was a Marxist as he understood Marxism – always remembering that at this date much of the important work of Marx and Engels was not available to English readers, and that in practice English socialism was still in the early growing stages, making many blunders from lack of the experience, English and international, which is now at our disposal. Those who deny Morris the name of Marxist do so either because they are so ignorant of Marxism that they cannot recognise it as it appears in his writings, expressed, often, in his very individual style, or because they have formed a preconceived notion of Morris in defence of which they are prepared to distort the plain meaning of what he actually wrote and said.
He began, therefore, to enquire into the nature of this freedom, to study the history of those times and societies in which it seemed the most to be found and to ask why it was so lacking in the bourgeois democracy of nineteenth-century England.
He was a Marxist, too, in the sense that accepting its principles he understood no less the need for practical work. From 1883, when he joined the Democratic Federation, to his death in 1896, he gave his time, energy and money without stint to the cause of socialism. It received the best of his writings during these years, but he took his full share also in the hard, routine activities of the Movement, as well as in the, for him, far more unpleasant internal controversies with which the Movement was torn. To give an account of all this, or of the history of the Movement at this time, would be out of place here even if space permitted it. It need only be said that in the decade before News From Nowhere England was shaken by the crisis accompanying the ending of its world monopoly, that it was a decade of mass unemployment and unemployed struggles, that the trade-union movement was revitalised under a largely socialist leadership and that socialism itself, in its modern form, began to make headway here, at first in the hands of small sects, but indirectly influencing wide masses of workers.
In all this ferment Morris played a central part, and it is the events of this decade which form the background of News From Nowhere. If it is richer in content than all earlier utopias this is because it was written, not in isolation, but as a part of the actual struggle by one who was both a scientific socialist and a great poet. Morris’ is the first Utopia which is not utopian. In all its predecessors it is the details which catch our attention, but here, while we may be dubious about this detail or that, the important things are the sense of historical development and the human understanding of the quality of life in a classless society.
(2) Ray Watkinson, Arthur Leslie Morton (1987)
Arthur Leslie Morton was born on the fourth of July, 1903, son of a Yorkshire farmer who on his marriage with Mary Hannah Lampray the year before, had leased Stanchils Farm near Bury St. Edmunds. Leslie was the first child, followed by Kathleen and Max.
He went to the King Edward VIth Grammar School in Bury until in his sixteenth year he was sent to boarding school in Eastbourne; from there in 1921 he went up to Cambridge University, where he met as fellow students AlIen Hutt, later a distinguished typographer, and Ivor Montagu, no less distinguished a film-maker. All three joined the University Labour Club.
After Cambridge, he taught at Steyning Grammar School in Sussex, where to the astonishment of the Governors, most of the staff supported the General Strike in 1926, fraternising with local railwaymen. Not, therefore, to his astonishment, he was out of work the next year. Moving back to Suffolk, he taught at A. S. Neill's famous Summerhill
school, but after a year moved to London, to write, to keep a bookshop near Finsbury Circus; and now he joned the Communist Party, of whose later-founded History Group he was Chairman for over thirty years. Five years later, he joined the staff of the Daily Worker, reporting, reviewing, sub-editing, and he wrote from time to time for the paper until his death. But in 1937 he left to concentrate on what was published the next year by Victor Gollancz as A People's History of England, enormously influential at the popular level for which it was so exactly written.Moving back to Leiston with his second wife Vivien, they became much involved in local politics, helping to write, illustrate and sell the lively monthly Leiston Leader. Leslie spent most of his war (1939-45) in the Royal Artillery; not blasting his way in triumph across Europe, but labouring on construction sites in the Isle of Sheppey, rising to the
dizzy height of Lance-bombardier, and somehow never getting transferred, in the last months of the war, to the Army Education Corps.Demobilised, in Leiston he became a member of the Urban District Council, taught once again at Summerhill, and took courses for the Workers' Educational Assocation, who e local Chairman he was. But now he began on a long-cherished project, The English Utopia. It was published in 1952 by Lawrence and Wishart who had taken over A People's History in 1964. To work on it, he and Vivien moved to the twelfth-century Old Chapel in Clare - where the countryside still looked much as it had done to Gainsborough and Constable.
Leslie was a foundation menber of the William Morris Society, and took an important part in the re-examination of Morris that has gone on since the 1950s. In 1968 and 1972 appeared two volumes edited by him, Three Works by William Morris, and Political Writings of William Morris, both of which have been translated into many languages and
more than once re-issued in English - a reminder that, great as has been his contribution to studies of our native history, deeply rooted as he was in his own particular native place as was his admired Morris, Leslie was also and always a true citizen of the world. He played a long-continuing part in Adult Education, both with his People's History and as writer and lecturer, especially for the WEA; but he had also a great influence on fellow historians, and many younger scholars have owed him a debt - Thompson, Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, and our President Asa Briggs. In this he has been a worthy heir of John Richard Green, who worked with Morris in the EQA and was the first to conceive of our history as the history of ordinary people.Most of this bald account has been culled from the volume of essays published in honour of his seventy-fifth birthday under the title, Rebels and Their Causes. What remains to say is what was richly experienced by all who met him - how generous and genial this modest man was: of nobody could it more justly be said, in round Victorian
phrase, - to know him was to love him.
(3) Graham Stevenson, A. L. Morton (19th September, 2008)
(Arthur) Leslie Morton was born on July 4th 1903 at Bury St Edmunds into a farming family. From 1921, he studied at Cambridge, where he was one of the group that formed around Maurice Dobb (see separate entry). Morton joined the Communist Party in 1929 and remained a member all of his life, along with his wife, Vivien, the daughter of T A Jackson (see spearate entry for Jackson).
A teacher for a time at A S Neill's school, Summerhill, he was one of a group of London left-wing intellectuals of the 1930s. His friends at that time included AL Lloyd and Maurice Cornforth (see separate entries). In 1932 and 1933 he was involved in a debate with F R Leavis.
He took part in the Hunger Marches of 1934 and was the Daily Worker correspondent for the East Anglia contingent, also serving on the editorial board of the paper in this period. He acted as the `owner’ of the paper at a time when personal liability applied in libel cases, threatening jail since the paper had no money!
During this period, he was a member of the Holloway Group of Islington Communist Party, which had headquarters in a disused workshop in Andover Yard, just opposite the Hornsey Road Baths. “Much of our work,” he was to recall, “was concentrated in the area lying in the angle of Hornsey Road and Seven Sisters Road, we canvassed all the streets in the area and tackled the Campbell Road, said to be the poorest street in the district and the one where people lived in the worst conditions.” [Letter from Morton to History Workshop Autumn 1980’]
Morton was a prolific English Marxist historian. His 1938 `A People's History Of England, published by the Left Book Club, was adopted quasi-officially as the Communist Party’s national history, and went through later editions on that basis. For a time during the early part of the Second World War, he was the full-time district organiser of the Party’s East Anglia district and was chair of the district committee for many years. It was not always an easy task yet Leslie Morton did not easily give up.
Rotten eggs were still floating in the pond at Belchamp Walter, in Essex, after attempts to break up a Communist Party meeting broke on the last Sunday evening in August. Morton was thrown from the platform onto the road and the local paper claimed that it was only police action in stopping the meeting that prevented serious violence emerging. [Thanks to MW: August 29th 1950 Suffolk & Essex Free Press]
The assailant, one Mr F. Pearson, found a leaflet advertising the meeting, which had been slipped under the door of his house at North Waver. Pearson showed the paper to his friend Archie Cameron of Crows Farm who declared it has got to be stopped, so with Mick and Jim Butler they rallied 20 supporters and went to the pond where the meeting was held. When Morton and his comrades arrived, the speaker stood on the lowered boot of a car. Archie Cameron walked up to him and grabbed him by the hand and laid him out with a punch so that he fell on his back in the road. Max Morton, A L Morton’s brother (of Paines Manor, Pentlow) rushed up to help but was stopped by Fred Pearson. A L Morton gamely resumed his place on his `platform’ and tried to begin again when the police advised them to end the meeting.
Morton worked mostly as an independent scholar; for a time in the 1940s he was closely associated with the Historians Group of the Communist Party. He is known also for work on William Blake and the Ranters, and for the study `The English Utopia’.
Morton was one of the group of leading communist historians invited to Moscow in 1954/5, with Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm and the historian of ancient history, Robert Browning (see separate entries for all).
Morton took part in the Peoples’ March for Jobs in the 1980s and died in 1987 at his home, The Old Chapel Clare, in Suffolk at the age of 84.