George Douglas Cole

George Douglas Cole was born in 1889 and educated at St. Paul's School and Balliol College, Oxford. At university he was active in the Fabian Society and his activities brought him to the attention of Sydney Webb who arranged for Cole and his contemporary at Cambridge University, Clifford Allen, to become members of the Fabian Society Executive.

A fellow member of the executive, Beatrice Webb, commented: "I often speculate about G. D. H. Cole's future. He interests me because he shows remarkable intensity of purpose. He has a clear-cutting and somewhat subtle intellect. But he lacks humour and the bonhomie which springs from it, and he has an absurd habit of ruling out everybody and everything that he does not happen to like or find convenient. He and Sidney (Webb) irritate each other. Cole indulges in a long list of personal hatreds. The weak point of his outlook is that there is no one that he does not like except as a temporary tool; he resents anyone who is not a follower and has a contempt for all leaders other than himself." Beatrice's comments were influenced by the fact that Cole had rejected her political views and had left the Fabian Society.

Cole became the leader of what became known as Guild Socialism. This movement advocated workers' control of industry through the medium of trade-related guilds. Other supporters included William Mellor, J. A. Hobson, Frank Horrabin, Wilfred Wellock, R. H. Tawney, Leonard Hobhouse and Samuel Hobson. This group formed the National Guilds League in 1915 and Cole published his books on the subject, The World of Labour (1913) and Self-Government in Industry (1917).

One of his early followers was Cyril Joad: "In all this activity our leader was G. D. H. Cole.... Cole's Socialism in those days-for all I know, it has been so ever since - was what it is customary to call Left Wing. Already he was finding the Fabian Society timid and slow; soon he was to break away from it... Meanwhile he advocated a new militancy in labour disputes, urged that workers should strike in and out of season."

During the First World War Cole became active in the peace movement. He was a conscientious objector and during his campaign against conscription, met Margaret Postgate. The couple married in August 1918. They moved to Oxford where Margaret taught evening classes and worked part-time for the Labour Research Department. She gave birth to Janet Elizabeth Margaret (February 1921) and Anne Rachel (October 1922). Cole became Labour correspondent of the Manchester Guardian and after the publication of several books, including Guild Socialism Restated (1920), William Cobbett (1925) and Robert Owen (1925), Cole was appointed as Reader in Economics at University College.

In 1926 they gave support to the miners during the General Strike. They were regular visitors to the home of Beatrice Webb. She wrote in her diary on 5th September: "G.D.H. Cole and his wife - always attractive because they are at once disinterested and brilliantly intellectual and, be it added, agreeable to look at - stayed a weekend with us and later came on to the T.U.C. Middle age finds them saner and more charitable in their outlook... He is still a fanatic but he is a fanatic who has lost his peculiar faith... despite a desire to be rebels against all conventions, the Coles are the last of the puritans."

Cole was on the left of the Labour Party and was a strong critic of Ramsay MacDonald, the British prime minister. After the 1931 General Election, Cole wrote: "We have been beaten, no doubt, thoroughly, devastatingly, overwhelmingly beaten... But all the same the predominant feeling in my mind, and in the minds of most of those whom I meet, is not depression, but rather elation and escape."

In 1931 Cole created the Society for Socialist Inquiry and Propaganda (SSIP). This was later renamed the Socialist League. Other members included William Mellor, Charles Trevelyan, Stafford Cripps, H. N. Brailsford, D. N. Pritt, R. H. Tawney, Frank Wise, David Kirkwood, Clement Attlee, Neil Maclean, Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, Alfred Salter, Jennie Lee, Harold Laski, Frank Horrabin, Ellen Wilkinson, Aneurin Bevan, Ernest Bevin, Arthur Pugh, Michael Foot and Barbara Betts. Margaret Cole admitted that they got some of the members from the Guild Socialism movement: "Douglas and I recruited personally its first list drawing upon comrades from all stages of our political lives." The first pamphlet published by the SSIP was The Crisis (1931) was written by Cole and Bevin.

According to Ben Pimlott, the author of Labour and the Left (1977): "The Socialist League... set up branches, undertook to promote and carry out research, propaganda and discussion, issue pamphlets, reports and books, and organise conferences, meetings, lectures and schools. To this extent it was strongly in the Fabian tradition, and it worked in close conjunction with Cole's other group, the New Fabian Research Bureau." The main objective was to persuade a future Labour government to implement socialist policies.

Cole arranged for Ernest Bevin to be elected chairman of the Socialist League. However, the following year, the Independent Labour Party members insisted on Frank Wise becoming chairman. Cole wrote later, "as the outstanding Trade Union figure capable of rallying Trade Union opinion behind it I voted against... but I was outvoted and agreed to go with the majority". Cole attempted to persuade Bevin to join the Socialist League Executive, but he refused: "I do not believe the Socialist League will change very much from the old ILP attitude, whoever is in the Executive."

Ben Pimlott argues that Cole was the main figure in the Socialist League. "The Socialist League was socialist first and radical second; like the ILP and the CP its approach was fundamentally utopian... In this respect Cole, the effective founder of Guild Socialism, was the major figure. In spite of his tactical differences with the League, his intellectual influence remained strong. He played a large part in the formulation of the League's policy document, Forward to Socialism; he continued to deliver lectures to, and write pamphlets for, the League; and several of his former SSIP colleagues remained on the National Council." Cole used his position to promote the idea of workers' control of industry.

In April 1933 G.D.H. Cole, R. H. Tawney and Frank Wise, signed a letter urging the Labour Party to form a United Front against fascism, with political groups such as the Communist Party of Great Britain. However, the idea was rejected at that year's party conference. The same thing happened the following year. Although disappointed, the Socialist League issued a statement in June 1935 that it would not become involved in activities definitely condemned by the Labour Party which will jeopardise our affiliation and influence within the Party."

Harold Wilson was one of Cole's students at Oxford University. In a letter to his parents in May, 1935, he commented: "G.D.H. Cole's discussion classes are very good. About eight or ten of us in his room on settees while he offers cigs, sits down, smokes, gases and stops for discussion. It's rather good to put questions to a man like him." Wilson later recalled: "I had long held G.D.H. Cole in high regard and found this closer contact with him most congenial. He was a good-looking man, of medium height with a good head of hair, and most attractive in speech and address, except for the manner of his lectures. I had attended a number of them, which he delivered at great speed, eyes down, without a single note. His special subjects were economic organization and history, and he concentrated on these."

In 1936 the Conservative government in Britain feared the spread of communism from the Soviet Union to the rest of Europe. Stanley Baldwin, the British prime minister, shared this concern and was fairly sympathetic to the military uprising in Spain against the left-wing Popular Front government. Leon Blum, the prime minister of the Popular Front government in France, initially agreed to send aircraft and artillery to help the Republican Army in Spain. However, after coming under pressure from Baldwin and Anthony Eden in Britain, and more right-wing members of his own cabinet, he changed his mind.

In the House of Commons on 29th October 1936, Clement Attlee, Philip Noel-Baker and Arthur Greenwood argued against the government policy of Non-Intervention. As Noel-Baker pointed out: "We protest with all our power against the sham, the hypocritical sham, that it now appears to be." Cole and Jack Murphy, the General Secretary of the Socialist League also called for help to be given to the Popular Front government.

Stafford Cripps was another advocate for an United Front: "Up till recent times it was the avowed object of the Communist Party to discredit and destroy the social democratic parties such as the British Labour Party, and so long as that policy remained in force, it was impossible to contemplate any real unity... The Communists had... disavowed any intention, for the present, of acting in opposition to the Labour Movement in the country, and certainly their action in many constituences during the last election gives earnest of their disavowal." Aneurin Bevan added: "It is of paramount importance that our immediate efforts and energies should be directed to organising a United Front and a definite programme of action."

In 1936 the Socialist League joined forces with the Communist Party of Great Britain, the Independent Labour Party and various trades councils and trade union brances to organize a large-scale Hunger March. Aneurin Bevan argued: "Why should a first-class piece of work like the Hunger March have been left to the initiative of unofficial members of the Party, and to the Communists and the ILP... Consider what a mighty response the workers would have made if the whole machinery of the Labour Movement had been mobilised for the Hunger March and its attendant activities."

On 31st October, 1936 the Socialist League called an anti-fascist conference in Whitechapel and discussed the best ways of dealing with Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. Over the next few months meetings were held. The Socialist League was represented by Stafford Cripps and William Mellor, the Communist Party of Great Britain by Harry Pollitt and Palme Dutt and the Independent Labour Party by James Maxton and Fenner Brockway.

Stafford Cripps was the main supporter of a United Front in the Socialist League: "The Communist Party and the ILP may not represent very large numbers, but all of us who have knowledge of militant working-class activities throughout the country are bound to admit that Communists and ILPers have played and are playing a very fine part in such activities... Just as unity has wrought wonders in Spain, inspiring and encouraging the Spanish workers with a heroism past all praise, so in our, as yet, less arduous struggle it can give new life and vitality."

Although Cole was seen as a major figure on the left, Beatrice Webb believed that he had moderated his opinions. In a diary entry on 20th July 1936 she wrote. "Our old friends the Coles came for the night; middle-aged and thoroughly stabilized in all their relationships, endlessly productive of books, whether economic and historical treatises or detective stories, mutually devoted partners and admirable parents of their promising children, they lead their little troop of admiring disciples along the middle way of politics, rather to the right of the aged Webbs - a curious commentary on the world-be revolutionary guild socialist movements of the second decade of the twentieth century."

The United Front agreement won only narrow majority at a Socialist League delegate conference in January, 1937 - 56 in favour, 38 against, with 23 abstentions. The United Front campaign opened officially with a large meeting at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester on 24th January. Three days later the Executive of the Labour Party decided to disaffiliated the Socialist League. They also began considering expelling members of the League. Cole and George Lansbury responded by urging the party not to start a "heresy hunt".

Arthur Greenwood was one of those who argued that the rebel leader, Stafford Cripps, should be immediately expelled. Ernest Bevin agreed: "I saw Mosley come into the Labour Movement and I see no difference in the tactics of Mosley and Cripps." On 24th March, 1937, the National Executive Committee declared that members of the Socialist League would be ineligible for Labour Party membership from 1st June. Over the next few weeks membership fell from 3,000 to 1,600. In May, Cole and other leading members decided to dissolve the Socialist League.

In 1944 Cole was promoted to the post of professor of social and political theory at Oxford University. A long-time member of the Fabian Society, Cole served both as chairman (1939-46 and 1948-50) and president (1952-57).

George Douglas Cole died in 1959.

Primary Sources

(1) C. E. M. Joad, Under the Fifth Rib (1932)

In all this activity our leader was G. D. H. Cole. He had recently published The World of Labour, the first book of its kind on the subject, which speedily became a standard work. Cole's Socialism in those days-for all I know, it has been so ever since-was what it is customary to call Left Wing. Already he was finding the Fabian Society timid and slow; soon he was to break away from it and become, with S. G. Hobson, the joint originator of Guild Socialism. Meanwhile he advocated a new militancy in labour disputes, urged that workers should strike in and out of season, if only because of the salutary training and the added class consciousness that came of striking, and became the protagonist of what was called "The New" or "The Industrial Unionism". The distinctive feature of The New Unionism was its tendency to regard strikes not merely as devices for raising wages or shortening hours, but as levers to undermine capitalist society. When the undermining process was sufficiently advanced, the last and greatest strike would effect its downfall.

(2) Ben Pimlott, Labour and the Left (1977)

The Socialist League was socialist first and radical second; like the ILP and the CP its approach was fundamentally utopian. It accepted as an article of faith that unemployment was an endemic feature of capitalism. William Mellor prefaced his proposals for a short-term programme by means of which Labour could tackle unemployment with the note: "The plans out-lined are not presented as a cure of this scourge of capitalism. Socialism alone can change compulsory Unemployment into remunerated leisure, with the machine as a servant, and effective demand equal to productive capacity." Thus non-socialist planning could at best - when carried out by a Labour Government with genuine socialist intentions - bring a temporary alleviation, pending the transition to socialism. At worst, when carried out by a capitalist government, it reinforced the control of industry by capitalist and financial interests, at the expense of the workers.

The latter possibility was especially abhorrent because of the strong Guild Socialist background of the League. In this respect Cole, the effective founder of Guild Socialism, was the major figure. In spite of his tactical differences with the League, his intellectual influence remained strong. He played a large part in the formulation of the League's policy document, Forward to Socialism; he continued to deliver lectures to, and write pamphlets for, the League; and several of his former SSIP colleagues remained on the National Council. Two of these, Mellor and Horrabin, central figures in the League, had a particularly strong Guild Socialist background. Both had been members of the Labour Research Department group of Guild Socialists with Cole in the early twenties. Mellor had been a Guild Socialist delegate at the Foundation Conference of the CPGB. It was therefore not surprising that the Socialist League put a very strong emphasis on workers' control, or that it put up an intense resistance to any scheme for industry which seemed to negate it.

(3) Beatrice Webb, diary entry, (14th February, 1915)

I often speculate about G. D. H. Cole's future. He interests me because he shows remarkable intensity of purpose. He has a clear-cutting and somewhat subtle intellect. But he lacks humour and the bonhomie which springs from it, and he has an absurd habit of ruling out everybody and everything that he does not happen to like or find convenient. He and Sidney (Webb) irritate each other. Cole indulges in a long list of personal hatreds. The weak point of his outlook is that there is no one that he does not like except as a temporary tool; he resents anyone who is not a follower and has a contempt for all leaders other than himself.

(4) Margaret Postgate married Douglas Cole in 1918. In her book, Growing Up Into Revolution, published in 1949, Margaret described her her husband's compulsive need to write.

Douglas, besides being a first-class lecturer and teacher, and rather unexpectedly one of the best chairman of committee I have ever known, is a natural writer almost to the point of disease. Sit him down anywhere, in practically any surroundings, lovely or squalid, still or moving - even put him to bed with a cold - and he will immediately start writing as though a plug had been pulled out, whereas an ordinary person would read a book, look at the view, or talk to his neighbours; it is this urge to write, and to write continually almost without need to correct, which distinguishes him from almost all other human beings.

(5) Beatrice Webb, diary entry (5th September, 1926)

G.D.H. Cole and his wife - always attractive because they are at once disinterested and brilliantly intellectual and, be it added, agreeable to look at - stayed a weekend with us and later came on to the T.U.C. Middle age finds them saner and more charitable in their outlook. Cole still dismisses this man or that with "I hate him," but it is the remnant of a mannerism, for he no longer means it. He is still a fanatic but he is a fanatic who has lost his peculiar faith... despite a desire to be rebels against all conventions, the Coles are the last of the puritans."

(6) Harold Wilson, letter to his parents (May, 1935)

G.D.H. Cole's discussion classes are very good. About eight or ten of us in his room on settees while he offers cigs, sits down, smokes, gases and stops for discussion. It's rather good to put questions to a man like him.

(7) Harold Wilson, Memoirs: 1916-1964 (1986)

I had long held G.D.H. Cole in high regard and found this closer contact with him most congenial. He was a good-looking man, of medium height with a good head of hair, and most attractive in speech and address, except for the manner of his lectures. I had attended a number of them, which he delivered at great speed, eyes down, without a single note. His special subjects were economic organization and history, and he concentrated on these. I was left to teach economic theory, not the area I preferred.

I took to spending most Tuesday and Wednesday evenings with him, helping with copy for and proofs of his articles for the New Statesman and Nation. When the work was finished, he used to pour out for each of us a glass of Irish whisky, which he preferred to Scotch. On one of these occasions he was celebrating his fiftieth birthday. He announced that he had made a resolution, to foreswear all reading of books and concentrate on writing them. He was already publishing at least one a year in addition to his other writings. For the most part they were highly topical and dated rather quickly but some, particularly those on economic history, have survived.

It was G.D.H. Cole as much as any man who finally pointed me in the direction of the Labour Party. His social and economic theories made it intellectually respectable. My attitudes had been clarifying for some time and the catalyst was the unemployment situation. I had seen it years before in the Colne Valley, with members of my class jobless when they left school. My own father was still enduring his second painful period out of work. My religious upbringing and practical studies of economics and unemployment in which I had been engaged at Oxford combined in one single thought: unemployment was not only a severe fault of government, but it was in some way evil, and an affront to the country it afflicted.

(8) Beatrice Webb, diary entry (20th July, 1936)

Our old friends the Coles came for the night; middle-aged and thoroughly stabilized in all their relationships, endlessly productive of books, whether economic and historical treatises or detective stories, mutually devoted partners and admirable parents of their promising children, they lead their little troop of admiring disciples along the middle way of politics, rather to the right of the aged Webbs - a curious commentary on the world-be revolutionary guild socialist movements of the second decade of the twentieth century.