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Douglas Hyde (1911-1996), campaigner and journalist

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Citation for published version (APA): Morgan, K., Gildart, K. (Ed.), & Howell, D. (Ed.) (2010). Douglas Hyde (1911-1996), campaigner and journalist. In Dictionary of Labour Biography vol. XIII (pp. 162-175). Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.

Published in: Dictionary of Labour Biography vol. XIII

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Download date:24. Sep. 2021 Douglas Hyde (journalist and political activist)

Douglas Arnold Hyde was born at Broadwater, Sussex on 8 April 1911. His family moved, first to Guildford, then to Bristol at the start of the First World War, and he was brought up on the edge of Durdham Downs. His father Gerald Hyde (1892-1968) was a master baker forced to take up waged work on the defection of a business partner. An Anglican by upbringing, he became a deeply committed Methodist on marrying Alice Emily, née Shill (1876-1961), who had been brought up as a Primitive Methodist. Politically, the family was staunchly Liberal, of the Lloyd George variety; Hyde on a later communist party questionnaire described it as ‘Radical-Nonconformist’ [Hyde disciplinary file, party registration form, 14 November 1942]. Gerald Hyde was active in the West Bristol Liberal Association, and the three children – Hyde had an older brother and a younger sister – were encouraged to take part in family discussions regarding political affairs [Hyde (1951), 7]. The memory of more prosperous days, and the pressures of respectability, may have cast a shadow [interview with Sam Apter, 1993]. Nevertheless, the nearby countryside offered opportunities for more congenial pursuits like birdnesting; and the chapel itself harboured a culture of musical performance and appreciation which Hyde recalled as one of his parents’ most precious . His mother, an accomplished organist and contralto singer, might even have joined the Carl Rosa company had it not been for her noncomformist beliefs. [Journal, January 1992; notes of conversation with Rosemary Logan, 17 December 1986.] The example of her work as a journalist was to prove still more influential. Rebelling in his teens against the ‘stifling narrowness’ of his upbringing [Hyde (1951), 7-8], Hyde’s political journey was to take him through the two great anathemas of the nonconformist conscience – communism and Roman Catholicism. At the same time, the emotional commitment to a better world that was first instilled in him in Sunday School and the Junior Wesley Guild remained discernible through his political vicissitudes. His formal education, ending just short of his fourteenth birthday, left less of a mark, and essentially Hyde was an autodidact with an avid enthusiasm for self- directed reading. By his late teens he was familiar with texts like Darwin’s Origin of Species – recommended him by a Sunday School teacher – and Descent of Man. Wrestling with the tension between the scientific tenets of agnosticism and values and motivations deriving from his religious upbringing, arguably he never fully resolved them. If on his final hospital admission form he could describe himself as an ‘agnostic Christian’, he might almost have done so decades earlier. Nevertheless, after the premature death of his older brother Norman in 1928 Hyde felt a powerful ‘Call’ to preach the word. Attending theological classes and known locally as the ‘boy preacher’, he took the pulpit in nearby village chapels, but his earnest questionings found little echo in what seemed to him very much an older generation. Hungering at once for truth and knowledge, he read widely, from Thomas á Kempis’ Imitation of Christ to the Bhagavad-Gîtâ, and attended extra-mural classes in philosophy and political economy at Bristol University. But he was just as much impressed by the speakers of diverse faiths and political hues who used to stake their pitch on the nearby downs. Three issues stood out in retrospect. One was the international outcry over the execution in August 1927 of the Italian-American anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. Another was the renewed prospect of war which registered so sharply in the popular consciousness as Hyde was reaching adulthood. Though his father had emerged unscathed after his wartime call-up into the Royal Army Medical Corps, Hyde’s memories of disfigured soldiers returning to the nearby Southmead Hospital were reinforced by an uncle’s death at the front and his mother’s anti-jingoism [interview with Sam Apter, 1993]. A third important issue, as Hyde pursued his theological studies with the object of going to India as a missionary, was the Indian nationalist movement. In the period of the Simon commission, and the reaction which this provoked in nationalist circles, this too was very much at the forefront of affairs. A series of fateful connections followed. Hyde’s first political affiliation was to the Commonwealth of India League, later the India League, which he joined in 1928 aiming to ‘Christianise’ the movement [Hyde (1951), 18]. During the same year, he also made contact with the communist-run International Class War Prisoners’ Aid (ICWPA) and the more ecumenical No More War Movement. Though Hyde’s brother had been an ILP member, they had not been close and politically there was no direct sibling influence. Instead, Hyde was recruited to the CPGB by Bill Fairman, a prominent local activist whose parents and sisters were also in the party and as a family exemplified the dense and fervent commitments which were among its greatest attractions. Bristol at that time being part of the CPGB’s South Wales district of the party, Hyde was accepted into the party by the Rhondda communist Lewis Jones, later famous as the author of Cymardy and We Live. Hyde’s regard for the dedication of such individuals was to survive the disillusionment with communism with which he became identified through his bestseller I Believed. On the other hand, it was just the issues that first drew him to communism – war, notably, and state oppression – that also provided the basis for his later revulsion from it. Towards the end of his life, when he would claim that its continuities

1 meant more to him than the break with communism, these were the sorts of issue that Hyde had in mind. Attracted to a movement showing an impatience for change conspicuously lacking in the Methodists, Hyde at first sought to reconcile the communists’ materialism with his own religious beliefs. Books like Dorothy Buxton’s Challenge of Bolshevism (1928), which from a Quaker standpoint depicted Soviet communism as a form of practical Christianity, offered some sustenance for such beliefs. Lenin’s Preparing for Revolt most certainly did not; but in Hyde’s copy there appeared in his juvenile hand a cross bearing the hammer and sickle, and the caption: ‘For God and the Workers’ Commonwealth’. In January 1930, a note of texts he intended studying still comprised exclusively religious works like What a Christian Believes and Wesley’s Sermons. The workers’ commonwealth, however, began to prove an all-absorbing commitment, both practically and emotionally; Hyde with his ‘evangelical Christian background’ came to see it ‘almost in terms of a holy crusade’ [Hyde papers, BBC World Service transcript, 18 April 1958]. ‘Zeal, enthusiasm, idealism, study, sacrifice, ceaseless activity’: all were now devoted to the cause of revolution [Hyde (1951), 35]. If the communists, as the TUC alleged, maintained a veritable ‘solar system’ of front organisations, weakness in numbers and wariness of fellow-travellers meant proliferating commitments for active supporters. As well as the No More War Movement and the ICWPA’s successor body, International Labour Defence, Hyde himself joined the Friends of Soviet Russia, and later the League of Militant Atheists. Though at first sight this appears a frenetic introduction to communist activism, Hyde’s formative party experience of the early 1930s was an isolated one. On leaving school in 1925, he had had a five years’ training as an apprentice dental mechanic, and in 1930 took up a position at Colwyn Bay. In 1933 he married Gwladys Mari Jones (1903-85), who subsequently also became a communist, and for a time they lived on a smallholding at Bryn-a-Maen, where in 1935 they had the first of their two sons. With the arrival of domestic responsibility, in the summer of 1937 Hyde moved to Northwich to take up a post remunerated, as a colleague put it, ‘more in accordance with your status and abilities’[J. Roose Williams to Hyde, n.d. but 29 June 1937]. The few years in Wales were to leave a deep impression. Gwladys came from what Hyde called the ‘pure Welsh culture’; her great uncle was a well-known bard, and Hyde himself not only became fluent in Welsh but later claimed to have a greater feeling for the smaller radical nation than for his native England [interview with Sam Apter, 1993; journal, 23 May 1982] What the experience did not provide was the opportunity for continuous direct contact with the communist movement. Thinly spread across Britain as a whole, in north Wales communism was virtually non-existent. Political commitments, as always, had to be adjusted accordingly. On the advice of the CPGB organiser R.W. Robson, Hyde recommenced his activities as a lay preacher of a pronouncedly communistic tendency. In September 1932 he received the full licence to preach in Wesleyan Methodist churches and the following summer was still listed in the directory for the Colwyn Bay and Llandudno circuit. In the absence of a local communist party, Hyde also joined the ILP, whose membership locally could be counted ‘on your fingers’ [R. Bamford, Pioneer, 17 November 1931]. Within the mainly political narrative of I Believed, it is noticeable that the period is passed over relatively briefly, through a series of personal reminiscences rather confirming the impression of a ‘lonely fight’ away from the fray [Hyde (1951), ch. 5]. Periodically travelling to England by motor- cycle, Hyde did deliver sermons at the Socialist Sunday School in Leeds and in the 1931 election he helped in the communist Leo McGree’s campaign in the Liverpool Scotland division. More consistently, he exploited opportunities for personal study usually denied communists facing more immediate pressures. He later ascribed to his having had ‘plenty of time’ for such study his knowledge of the marxist texts and other political works which as a responsible party worker continued to provide his main spare-time activity [Hyde disciplinary file, party registration form, 14 November 1942]. For a brief period Hyde also attended classes in philosophy, politics and economics at Coleg Harlech. He was to draw on this close reading of the ‘classics’ both as a well-regarded party tutor in the 1940s and in his exposés of communist doctrine in the years that followed. Sociologists used to distinguish between ‘pragmatic’ or ‘instrumental’ adherents to communism and ‘idealist’ or ‘expressive’ ones [Newton (1969)]. Hyde’s religious background and theoretical bent meant that he was very much one of the idealists. In later years he would stress the enduring distinction between recruits of his own generation, who joined ‘to make a revolution’, and the CPGB’s later popular front enrolments [interview with Kevin Morgan, 1993]. The dramatic character of his own de-conversion from communism may have been one of the results. In I Believed, reflecting the intensity of his immediate revulsion, even the worthiest communist causes were depicted as instruments of the coming revolution. By the same token, for the 1930s’ communist who did still believe, the tawdriest manoeuvres were dignified by the same prospect. Doubtless Hyde’s

2 preoccupation with the ultimate rationale of revolution also reflected the chiliastic aspect of his religious formation, and he later recalled the compelling utopianism of the hymns of his childhood:

this belief that Christians were working or should be working, to ‘bring round the age of gold when peace shall all over the earth its ancient splendours fling’ and when ‘nations with nation, man with man, unarmed shall live as comrades free’ [Journal, 31 January 1982].

In a speech at the time of the united front, he described himself as one who ‘lived for his Socialism’ and believed in its triumph in his own day and generation: ‘One who believes that only alternative is extermination. That S[ocialism] is the one ray of light & hope in a mad world of darkness & despair.’ [Speech notes, late 1930s.] From such a perspective, the popular front approach of the late 1930s, which for other communists proved so formative, was for Hyde a mere tactic, even a ruse. Or so at least he described it in retrospect. Even so, it was the broadening out of communist politics that offered him the scope for a more continuous and effective political engagement. In particular, the humanitarian cause of anti-fascism provided the perfect link with the liberal and nonconformist traditions of North Wales. Hyde by this time had discovered a congenial collaborator in the Welsh-speaking writer and activist J. Roose Williams. By the time he left the area in 1937 their work had borne fruit in a North Wales district of the CPGB, with Williams as its first secretary. Hyde’s own main sphere of activity was in Spanish Medical Aid. This was a non-party body, chaired by Megan Lloyd George, but with Hyde the communist, in classic front organisation fashion, acting as its secretary. By all accounts, he was effective, even inspirational in this role, and according to Williams ‘rescued from chaos’ the Welsh Ambulance fund [Williams to Hyde, 29 June 1937]. After one of his meetings, in the stone-quarrying village of Penygroes, a local quarryworker, George Fretwell, took the more dramatic step of volunteering for the International Brigade [Williams et al (1996), 66-7]. In I Believed Hyde suggested that the point of the Brigade was to master ‘the art of insurrection’ for domestic use; he also described the setting up a North Wales Basque Children’s Home as little more than a party manoeuvre [Hyde, (1951), 59, 63]. Such sources need to be read in the context of Hyde’s later disillusionment; and it is hard to believe that they captured the most compelling aspects either of Fretwell’s commitment, as a Labour Party member who died at Jarama, or of Hyde’s own. Tendentious uses of his account as that of a ‘CPGB agent’ steeped in cynicism would certainly have dismayed him [Stradling (2004), 29, 36-9, 195]. The contemporary observation of a local newspaper was that ‘Mr Hyde’s efforts for these children … cannot be measured by ordinary standards of “work”’ [Colwyn Bay Town Talk , 2 July 1937]. Initially maintained from Northwich, the same commitments continued to earn the unabashed admiration of non-communist collaborators [e.g. J. Wesley Jones to Hyde, 18 August 1937]. Hyde himself was to recall this as ‘not only the most memorable, and personally satisfying, but also the best part of my life’ (Fyrth, 1986, 305]. At loggerheads with his employer, in early 1938 Hyde moved to Woking in Surrey, initially still working as a dental technician. Although this, he later recalled, was another ‘“backward”’ area [Hyde (1951), 64], the fledgling Labour parties of the Home Counties for this very reason offered a fruitful field for communist activity. Indeed, with the promotion of this work from 1937 almost a fifth of CPGB members held dual membership of the Labour Party, including fractions in virtually every London divisional party [Morgan et al (2007), 131]. As one of these undercover members, Hyde helped produce a local Labour Party monthly, the Atom, first appearing in October 1938; and when he was sacked from his paid employment because of his writing activities, the Atom’s publisher, Tom Gittins, appointed Hyde ‘editor-manager’ of a local news-sheet he was launching, the Southall and District Weekly Journal. One of the Atom’s supporters was the writer Rex Warner, who had taught in the same Alexandria school as Gittins and who in Hyde’s recollection was ‘to all intents and purposes’ a CPGB member [interview with Kevin Morgan (1993)]. Other supporters, doubtless, were the local Labour activists who announced their defection to the CPGB after the endorsement of Sir Stafford Cripps’s expulsion at the June 1939 Labour conference. Following swiftly afterwards, the Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939 deeply disturbed many of these contacts. ‘To hell with both your uncles – Uncle Joe and Uncle Adolf’, was Warner’s one-line message to Hyde and Gittins [interview with Kevin Morgan (1993)]. Hyde, conversely, took the pact in his stride. Indeed, in contrast to many communists of a popular front formation, it was the CPGB’s initial willingness to support the war that troubled him. He therefore welcomed the intervention of the Comintern and wrote later of his ‘relief’ at the subsequent revival of ‘old’ Leninist slogans of turning imperialist war into civil war [Hyde (1963), 15; also Morgan (1989), ch. 5]. As leading communists were conscripted, or found their way into reserved occupations, Hyde also made the decisive move of his political career, when he was recruited to the

3 staff of the Daily Worker at the beginning of January 1940. Exempted from military service on medical grounds, it was at the Worker that there unfolded the main chapters of his party life as described in I Believed. Initially Hyde was employed as London organiser in the paper’s circulation department. However, continuing staff upheaval meant that he was always earmarked for journalistic responsibilities. Even as a schoolboy he had had ambitions in this direction, and these later found precocious expression in occasional contributions to the Bristol Labour Weekly. Subsequently Hyde seized any opening for freelance journalism, and Gittins in later testimonials commended his efficiency as an editor-manager. With banning of the Worker in January 1941, Hyde was one of those made responsible for the maintenance of an illegal publishing apparatus; and he helped keep intact the paper’s network of industrial contacts through the weekly bulletin Industrial and General Information. He was also adept at getting stories into the mainstream press, and at one point had almost daily contact with the Daily Mirror’s ‘Cassandra’, William Connor, whose copy so infuriated Churchill. When the ban on the Worker was lifted in September 1942, Hyde was almost its only surviving journalist not to have been called up or found work in industry. William Rust as editor provided continuity of direction and political oversight; Allen Hutt, a recruit from the News Chronicle, added Fleet Street experience and a genius for layout. Hyde’s contribution, as the paper’s news editor, was to assist in the training of younger journalists while maintaining the paper’s unique network of worker correspondents. He also found his vocation as a campaigning journalist, initially in the wartime ‘battle for production’ and subsequently as the driving force in the paper’s campaign against the far right. The release of fascist internees and emergence of a number of fascist-leaning groupings provided a significant catalyst. Immediately after the war Hyde was to give invaluable support to ‘The 43 Group’, established at the beginning of 1946 as a militant anti-fascist grouping of Jewish ex- servicemen and women. The group was committed to the physical disruption of fascist activities, and the CPGB officially kept its distance. Nevertheless, Hyde made a large contribution to the launching in July 1947 of the group’s monthly broadsheet, On Guard, and contributed a good deal of its content under the pen-name Ralph Jeffries, derived from the names of his sons [see Hyde to Jeffrey Bernard, 7 May 1947; Beckman (1992), 94]. One aspect of the work was to have fateful consequences. As recounted in I Believed, Hyde was directed to expose the fascist tendencies of Roman Catholic intellectuals and in 1943 ran a series of articles attacking the Weekly Review. This was a successor to G.K.’s Weekly expounding the distributist ideas associated with G.K. Chesterton, his brother Cecil and the still active Hilaire Belloc. When his articles resulted in a series of libel writs, Hyde prepared his ground by studying the paper in greater depth, and discovered there a medievalist sensibility that resonated strongly with his own deepest cultural yearnings. A key influence in this respect was William Morris. Hyde had been introduced to Morris as a teenager by the veteran Bristol ILPer Harry Whitchurch. As a communist he had returned to him for a warmer and more human vision of communism which at the same time nurtured and validated his passion for plainsong, William Langland and the Gothic religious architecture marvellously represented in his native West Country. For the communist, this was a personal space to be kept apart from immediate political concerns. In the Weekly Review, on the other hand, Hyde discovered the attempted reconciliation of medievalist aesthetics with a strand of Catholic social thinking that now seemed closer to them in spirit. A significant contemporary influence was Hilary Pepler, co-founder with Eric Gill of the Ditchling community, and with the exception of his instructor Hyde’s first real Catholic contact. Pepler’s funeral in 1951 was to be Hyde’s first Catholic funeral, and the connection meant much to him [Hyde to Conrad Pepler, 14 April 1981]. Through the past and present literature of distributism, then enjoying a brief revival, he learnt that communism was not the only possible alternative to modern commercial values, nor, he eventually concluded, the most compelling one [Hyde (1951), 193-4, 228]. In March 1948, after months, indeed years of mounting disquiet, he publicly broke all ties with the communist party. Four months later, in July 1948, he began a series of articles on economic issues for the distributists’ magazine the Register (late Weekly Register), which continued until March 1950. The prospect of a Soviet Britain had receded. The trompe-l’oeil revolutions of the new people’s democracies failed to deceive. Reports of the advancing Red Army did not suggest that a higher stage of humanity was emerging under socialism. In the years that followed, Hyde’s misgivings were to be tragically confirmed by the execution, following the notorious Slansky show trial, of the economy minister Ludwig Freund, who as a refugee in wartime London had worked alongside Hyde on the Daily Worker [interview, n.d.; Hyde papers, Hyde to Peter Kearney, 7 July 1990]. There were no secrets here requiring revelation; any more than the fall from a window of Czechoslovakia’s foremost liberal Jan Masaryk, which so shocked Hyde in March 1948, needed a Khrushchev speech to make the headlines. That Hyde, unlike most of his colleagues, was receptive to such impressions, betrayed a

4 deeper disillusionment and weariness with party life. Already at the end of the war, physically exhausted by its demands, he had given up party lecturing and tutoring. With time freed up, he once more took the opportunity to read. It was not, however, to the ‘classics’ that he turned, but to distributism, the farming press and the renewed fascination of the soil [Hyde (1951), 213]. There were other, more personal considerations. The relatively bohemian atmosphere on the Daily Worker, strongly brought out in I Believed, may have been one. With the break-up of his first marriage in the early part of the war, Hyde had begun living with Carol Johnson née Robertson. A CPGB member since 1938, Carol was a politically compatible partner who was also well-read in the ‘classics’ and had functioned as a party tutor and local cadres leader [Hyde disciplinary file, Carol Hyde, party registration form, 10 November 1942]. Born in New Zealand in 1912, she had had a traumatic though materially comfortable childhood. Effectively abandoned by her father after her parents separated, she was brought up in England by an aunt and uncle, acquiring their name and a home environment she was to describe as one of ‘upper class consciousness & Fabianism’ [party registration form]. Prior to joining the CPGB, Carol had already experienced a difficult first marriage and after a series of sexual liaisons within the party was yearning for a more stable relationship when she met Hyde. Hyde for his part had never entirely thrown off the mores of his nonconformist upbringing, and had not been comfortable with the Daily Worker’s culture of social drinking. The church seemed to offer, not just a political alternative, but a moral framework in which to bring up the couple’s two children, born in 1942 and 1947. The importance to them of these issues can be gauged by one of the pamphlets Hyde wrote after leaving the CPGB, Communism and the Home. Published by the Catholic Truth Society, the pamphlet vigorously defended traditional Catholic thinking on the sanctity of family relationships. It also described communists’ children as often loveless and neglected, as their mothers’ sought release from home life and ‘“the servitude of the kitchen”’. Communism, Hyde went on, was ‘the sum total of all the heresies, wrong ideas and false notions that people have had for generations, exaggerated and elevated to a philosophy and way of life’. Catholicism, conversely, valued domestic life as ‘the primary cell of human society’ and the key to both sanity and sanctity. [Hyde (1950), 15-16.] It proved a cruel awakening to the hollowness of such phrases when the couple found it impossible under church law to secure the annulment of Carol’s earlier marriage and hence the recognition of their own. Carol had adopted Hyde’s name by deed poll in 1943, when the CPGB was pressurising leading members to regularise their relationships. Their relationship, moreover, was known to millions through I Believed, and the frontispiece to the British edition showed Hyde with his daughter Rowena. Five years’ effort, including an appeal to the Vatican itself, nevertheless proved unavailing, and at the church’s direction they lived together as ‘brother and sister’ for nearly twenty years. The break-up of what should have been their marriage was one result. With understandable bitterness, Carol came to reject the church in which she had invested so much hope and trust. That Hyde’s break with communism took place over several years suggests that the CPGB’s surveillance of its members was less intrusive than is sometimes suggested. Though ‘cadre’ autobiographies were elsewhere used as instruments of a more intensive control [Pennetier and Pudal (1995)], none survives for Hyde after 1942, though he was engaged in highly sensitive work bringing him into contact with the party’s avowed political enemies. Far from having no personal spaces unaccounted for, he visited the nearby Catholic chapel of St Etheldreda’s – a rare medieval survival in central London – both before and after his daily stints at the Worker office. After Hyde broke with communism, it was put about that he was driven to this by criticism of his personal deficiencies [Fred Pateman, Daily Worker, 18 January 1951]. Privately, however, the CPGB secretary Pollitt had described him as ‘a remarkably hard worker’ who had never given ‘the slightest indication of any disagreement with our Party and its policy’; it was not, Pollitt insisted, ‘carelessness on our part that enabled him to have the position on the paper that he did’. [LHASC, Hyde disciplinary file, Pollitt to Sean O’Casey, 3 June 1948.] Pollitt had already been under fire for his lax approach to security; his defensiveness was understandable. Unlike such nearly contemporaneous cases as those of Claud Cockburn and J. B. S. Haldane, Hyde’s was a high-profile break with communism which from the start generated a huge publicity and continued to do so for years to come. His ‘autobiography of a former British communist’, published in Britain in January 1951, provided a document of Cold War disillusionment in communism with which perhaps only The God that Failed bears comparison. On its first appearance in Britain – shortly after the original American edition – I Believed was selling some three thousand copies daily [Times, 25 January 1951]. Hyde’s case against communism was never just a negative one, and the complexities of his allegiances were to become much clearer over time. Nevertheless, as almost overnight he emerged onto the international stage, it was as the Catholic convert whose indictment of his former creed symbolised the divisions of the Cold War. This, as Hyde later put it, was an age of polemic, and between the

5 Christian and the communist it seemed to him in I Believed to be ‘war to the death’. Far from denying the communists’ dedication and self-sacrifice, Hyde acknowledged the integrity of their original motives. This only made more disastrous their corrupting materialism and the systematic dissimulation of their revolutionary objects which he described as a ‘deliberate and total of the public’ [Hyde (1951), 57]. Another of his early pamphlets, Communism from the Inside, made extensive reference to the classical canon of Marxism-Leninism. The roots of communist ills were traced, not just to Lenin and Stalin, but to Marx and especially Engels – for the latter’s Origin of the Family was a particular target. In their place, as Sean O’Casey complained, Hyde cited not only Morris but Cardinal Newman and Thomas More [LHASC, Hyde disciplinary file, O’Casey to Pollitt, 2 June 1948.] More broadly still, in the final pages of I Believed he registered his thorough scepticism regarding secular notions of progress, and his belief that in religious values alone lay hope of meaning in an age of ‘atomic madness’ [Hyde (1951), 299]. One attraction of Catholicism was that its international scope and universalist doctrine alone bore comparison with the appeals of communism. Still a CPGB member, Hyde’s first, anonymous contribution to a Catholic paper had evoked the celebration across of Europe of the same religious rites and ceremonies, even to the very language that was used, as the one real prospect of the ‘universal harmony’ that had otherwise proved so elusive. It was, he proposed, precisely this ‘Catholicism of the Catholic Church’ that met the greatest need of his disillusioned generation [Hyde (1951), 264; also ‘Interview with Douglas Hyde’, Columban Intercom, April 1984]. By the same token, the church was an international force in the ‘battle of ideas’, and Hyde one of its most effective champions. Immediately after his defection, Pollitt complained of how the Catholic press made a ‘tremendous song and dance about him’ during the 1948 Italian election that marked one of the first and most significant electoral tests of the Cold War [Pollitt to O’Casey, 3 June 1948]. The same year Hyde published the first of a series of books and pamphlets, the majority in some way addressing the threat of communism, which for the next twenty years appeared at intervals of barely a year or so. Most famous, of course, was I Believed. Hyde had undertaken to write an autobiography with the encouragement of the Catholic intellectual Malcolm Muggeridge in 1949. It was one of the characteristic genres of the early Cold War and already in Britain there had appeared accounts like Fred Copeman’s Reason in Revolt (1948) and Charlotte Haldane’s Truth Will Out (1949). Hyde’s, however, was of a different order of success, not just in Britain but internationally, and with reprints and translations achieved a circulation of over a million in its first decade [Catholic Times, 1 December 1961]. This, moreover, was just one item of a prolific output. A weekly column in the Catholic Herald, begun in 1951, appeared without fail for twenty years. At the end of 1950, Hyde was also taken on by the Observer on a weekly retainer; and it was as the Observer’s correspondent that in 1954 he reported on the Korean war, while also researching the work in Korea of Catholic missionaries [see Hyde (1955b)]. For a time, his weekly syndicated column appeared in Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Malta and the Netherlands. Lecturing tours took him to universities, seminaries and military colleges in every continent. For fifteen years, from 1953 to 1967, these included a six-week tour of the USA under the auspices of the University Speakers’ Bureau. From 1949 he was a member of the anti-totalitarian Sword of the Spirit, later renamed the Catholic Institute for International Relations, and initially sat on its executive. Three times he attended the Catholic Rural Life Conference in Latin America. From 1961 to 1973 he gave an annual course in London to future African Catholic lay leaders. From Nato colleges to the Volunteer Missionary Movement, Hyde took to heart the scriptural precept of casting his bread upon the waters [journal, 28 May 1993]. As late as 1974, he wrote to his accountant that ‘government organisations, radio and TV still tend to get in touch expecting me to be able to pontificate about any and every part of the world’. As during the Spanish war, his activities could not be measured by conventional standards; and as peripatetic journalist, lecturer, political consultant and campaigner, his effectiveness in such varied roles would not have been possible without his ‘secretary-cum-research worker-cum-guide-philosopher and friend’, Rosemary Paine (later Logan), who worked with him from 1957 [Hyde to John Waldron, 29 October 1972]. The impression he at first gave audiences was of an absolute condemnation of communism [Columban Intercom, April 1988]. Polemic as opposed to dialogue was the essence of the Cold War, and Hyde was to observe in retrospect that ‘the Communists and Pius XII between them gave us little option but to fight’ [Hyde to John Waldron, 13 September 1978]. Even on his earliest break with communism, he urged the need for a positive alternative rooted in Christian values. Influenced by Catholic social thinking and increasingly involved in activities in the developing world, he supported missionary groups in smaller-scale, voluntary initiatives such as the establishment of credit unions. Later he vested considerable hope in the ‘Christian revolution’ of Chile’s President Frei, whose programmes of agrarian reform and ‘Chileanisation’ seemed to offer a socially progressive ‘answer to Communism’ independent of great-power politics [Universe and Catholic Times (4 June and 16 July

6 1965)]. Even the defeat in 1954 of the ‘Huk’ or Hukbalahap rebellion in the Philippines, with whose sequel Hyde became closely involved, owed something to the constructive reforms introduced during Ramon Magsaysay’s presidency (1953-7). Hyde consistently laid particular stress on questions of land reform, and as late as 1968 had high hopes of the ‘Social Action Year’ launched by the Catholic president Marcos in the Philippines [manuscript article for The Far East, 21 August 1968]. Still into the 1960s, his Peaceful Assault (1963) and United We Fall (1964) showed continuing scepticism regarding the ostensibly more conciliatory methods by which, he argued, the communists pursued their unchanging object of the conquest of power and world domination. The underlying assumption was that communism, though not necessarily its individual adherents, was so ‘intrinsically evil’ that the human spirit must revolt against it [Hyde (1957a)]. By this time, however, polemic and the battle of ideas were increasingly giving way to dialogue, or the possibility of dialogue. A decisive factor had been the election in 1958 of the more liberal and ecumenical Pope John XXIII, whose convocation of the second Vatican Council and issuing of the encyclical Pacem in Terris (1963) set a radically different agenda of engagement between believers and non-believers. Crucially, this met with a ready response in some sections of the communist movement, shaken by the 1956 Khrushchev revelations and subsequent Sino-Soviet split. Having consistently warned against communist front activities, Hyde now urged that the communists’ commitment to work with others should be taken at face value [Hyde (1965); Hyde, ‘Dialogue with the communists?’, Universe and Catholic Times, 17 September 1965]. His involvement in such activities in Britain was limited by his international commitments. Nevertheless, Hyde was an early supporter of the Christian Marxist ‘dialogue’ and became a member of the sub-committee set up on the issue by the East-West Committee of the British Council of Churches. In 1968, along with Paul Oestreicher, he was one of three church representatives at meetings with members of the CPGB’s political bureau. Later, in 1975, he initiated an abortive attempt at Catholic-communist dialogue, in which James Klugmann took the lead for the communists. In place of the two-camps approach of the Cold War, Hyde increasingly stressed the divided character of both church and communist movement, whose most progressive elements were in each case defined precisely by the willingness to engage with each other. For Hyde this was also something of a personal rapprochement, and it was notably with communists of his own generation, rather than the New Left, that the Marxist-Christian dialogue was pursued [see Andrews (2004), 81-3]. Paradoxically, it was with open-minded party loyalists like Jack Cohen, rather than with the Daily Worker colleagues who in 1956 followed him out of the party, that Hyde now established the closest relations. Hyde’s Dedication and Leadership, published in 1966, gives an indication of his changing attitudes. Professedly this dealt with the communists’ exemplary qualities, rather than their negative ones, and described a willingness to sacrifice and sense of moral purpose that many Christians lacked [Hyde (1966), 22-4]. It was communism, moreover, which answered the yearning for a sense of ‘oneness’ with one’s fellows which had Hyde sought, but seemingly sought in vain, in the church [Hyde (1966), 55]. Hyde had never lent much credence to the emphasis on neuroticism and maladjustment of much Cold War literature on communism [see e.g. Almond et al (1954)]. Now he stressed that communists were not ‘some different brand of human beings’, but were exceptional only in their dedication to their cause [Hyde (1966), 15-16]. If this was still a ‘bad cause’ attracting ‘good men’ [Hyde (1966), 148), the good increasingly was set against the bad: which in any case was a step away from the language of ‘evil’. Politically, this presented far more difficult issues than the relatively straightforward appeals of communism and anti-communism. In earlier periods, Hyde reflected, there had been little ambiguity or uncertainty as to the rightness of one’s cause: ‘one didn’t have to spend half one’s time debating with oneself whether one’s integrity was threatened’ [Rosemary Logan, notes of conversation with Hyde, 19 June 1972]. Increasing moral complexity was most dramatically illustrated by Hyde’s work with political detainees. Dating from 1957-8, according to Hyde’s estimate over the next fifteen years these activities led to the release of some forty-three such prisoners on their agreeing to renounce communism or the armed struggle. The earliest and internationally the best known of them was the former Hukbalahap ‘supremo’ Luis Taruc, whom Hyde first contacted in November 1957, but who was released by Marcos only after fourteen years’ imprisonment, and personal consultation with Hyde, in 1968. Mostly the activities took place in what in 1963 became the Malaysian federation, whose legitimacy Hyde upheld against allegations by Indonesia of neo-colonialism [Hyde (1965)]. Here the most prominent example was Lim Chin Siong, secretary general of the Barisan Socialis movement in , one of 113 left-wing activists imprisoned under the notorious ‘’ intended to pave the way for federation in February 1963. Conditions were brutal: according to one British official, the authorities’ initial policy was to keep ‘hard core detainees’ in indefinite solitary confinement ‘as experience showed that after about eighteen months this brought about the

7 psychological changes necessary for rehabilitation’ [ cited Tim Harper ‘Lim Chin Siong and the “Singapore Story’ in Tan and Jomo (2001), 44). Hyde’s approach was to engage in personal discussion with the detainee, to build up understanding and to strip away communist attachments as he had come to see beyond his own. Not infrequently he was rebuffed, and no possibility existed of a meeting of minds. Where there was some readiness to engage, this was a painstaking process, and Hyde calculated that in total he spent some two years working in Asian detention camps. In his own estimation this was perhaps the most important chapter in his lifetime’s work. In later years he would recall his deep satisfaction when a prisoner was released, and in his notes for a television documentary in 1993 he linked this with the early memory of Sacco and Vanzetti. There were certainly parallels with the intending missionary of his youth; as Hyde wrote in relation to Taruc, his first ambition was ‘to get him out of the Communist Party, if he was still in it; if he was already out … to win him completely away from Communism’ [Hyde, foreword to Taruc (1967), xii]. The difficult issue, in the balance of effectiveness and integrity, was that of his relationship with the authorities. In the late 1950s Hyde had established close links with the South East Asia Treaty Organisation, and it was visiting the Philippines as chairman of SEATO’s Psychological Subversion Committee that he had his first opportunity to visit Taruc. He also established good relations with the Malaysian Special Branch and ‘psychological operations’ community, again indispensable to his gaining access to the prisoners. Controversy over his activities centred in particular on the conditionality of any terms of release, including not only constraints on movement and communication but a requirement to repudiate the communist party on the part of activists who in many cases were not even communists [Enche’ K. Karam Singh, house of reps, 23 January 1962, cols 3533-5. In 1966 Hyde was offered a two-year contract by the Malaysian government but declined – reluctantly, and ‘after many wakeful nights and much heart-searching’ – on the grounds that his independent status was integral to the effective performance of such tasks. It also allowed him greater freedom in pushing what seem to have been his mounting concerns regarding the policy of indiscriminate detention. Publicly, Hyde had continued to uphold the superior material and spiritual achievements of the free world against the more sedulous of its enemies. For the authorities, the release of detainees could prove an important source of political capital and their statements were deployed in a dirty propaganda war [see for example NA FCO 24/1158, open statement of Voon Kwok Hung, 1 March 1971, published 6 March 1971]. At a far more sophisticated level, Hyde was responsible as editor for Taruc’s personal story He Who Rides the Tiger: a conversion narrative like Hyde’s own, and one similarly intended as a work of restitution and exposure. It revealed, he said, the mixture of ‘dedication, idealism, weaknesses, nastiness, intrigue, and cruelty – and … sheer evil’ of communism as experienced by Taruc. It sent a warning to any who thought they could ride the ‘tiger’ of the united front. [Hyde, foreword to Taruc (1967).] But it also spelt out the futility and inhumanity of torture and atrocities as the instruments of counter-insurgency. Here Hyde was moved by the disastrous example of the war in Vietnam, which he visited on several occasions. The troubles in Northern Ireland were another catalyst for more radical views. Hyde’s interest in Ireland dated from as far back as 1950, when he was approached as a possible anti-partition candidate, and with the resurfacing of violence in 1956-7 he had worked with Cardinal D’Alton on the ‘D’Alton Plan’ for a united Ireland. In 1970-1 he spent a year as Dublin correspondent of the Universe, offering scathing assessments of British policy in the North, and more particularly of the introduction of internment without trial [Universe, 13 and 20 August 1971]. The defence of western values was proving no simple matter. In 1972, martial law was imposed in the Philippines. In 1973 Frei’s Christian Democrats supported the CIA-backed coup against the Allende government. The war in Vietnam went from atrocity to atrocity. Conviction of the need for better alternatives hardened. In Hyde’s Roots of Guerrilla Warfare (1968) and especially in his Communism Today (1972) there came renewed emphasis, not on the evils which communism represented, but on the evils which it claimed to address, and on which its cogency as alternative depended. It was again in Malaysia that there came the opportunity to engage with these issues in more practical fashion. In the state of Sarawak in eastern Malaysia, the Malays who dominated the federation comprised only a fifth of the population and communism as a result had something of the character of an ethnic mobilisation. After protracted delays, the first state elections had been held in the summer of 1970, and an unlikely coalition established between the Moslem Bumiputra party, which had the confidence of the Malaysian authorities, and the ‘communist-penetrated’ SUPP, which Hyde himself by this time privately supported. The result was the defection of the SUPP left wing, the disillusionment of ‘many of the middle of the road Chinese’ and the renewal of armed struggle by the Sarawak Communist Organisation. Abdul Rahman Ya’kub, the controversial Bumiputra chief minister, expressed the desire for ‘a man trained in pyschological warfare who could sit back and work up things which might throw the Communists off balance’. Hyde, who had renewed his contact with security

8 personnel in the capital Kuching, appeared to fit the bill. Though the government in Kuala Lumpur demurred at official British involvement, Hyde’s contribution was a different matter, and British officials noted that the Malaysians ‘could well afford to pay for this themselves, and … invite him direct’. [NA FCO 24/482, G.L. Duncan, British high Commission, Kuala Lumpur, to A.L. Southorn, FCO South West Pacific Department (SWPD), 21 March 1969; FCO 24/818, R.D. Clift, British High Commission, Kuala Lumpur to J.G. McMinnies, Foreign Office Information Research Department, 9 April 1970; telegram, ‘Lewis’ to FCO on ‘Sarawak Security Situation’, 18 September 1970; FCO 24/1158, D.F.B. Le Breton, SWPD, to McMinnies, 8 March 1971; D.P. Aiers, SWPD, to A.A. Duff, British High Commission, Kuala Lumpur, 25 March 1971; FCO 24/1443, ‘Politics and insurgency in Sarawak’, background paper, 5 October 1972.] Precisely how this came about is unclear; but in 1972, while remaining based in London, Hyde was appointed a personal adviser to Ya’kub and in this capacity urged a more sophisticated conception of counter-insurgency that sought to minimise provocations like the curfew, mass detention and language discrimination. The strategy bore fruit two years later in the ending of the guerrilla war under Operation Sri Aman, described by Hyde in a SEATO journal as ‘an insurgency in retreat’ [South-East Asian Spectrum, July 1974, 26-37]. In the same period, he also drew up proposals for Mrs Bandaranaike, prime minister of Ceylon, which on the foundation of the state of Sri Lanka in 1972 led to the release of five thousand detainees and an extensive rehabilitation programme. Setting out his views and experiences in an article entitled ‘The counter-productivity of violence’ in 1976, Hyde described how the brutality of detention regimes, in Indonesia, Vietnam and Brazil, only served to stiffen or extend resistance to its perpetrators. The root cause of violence, he suggested, lay with the oppressor, not the oppressed. The government’s success in Sarawak was due its switching to a ‘political-cum-socio-economic’ strategy from a predominantly military one. His experience in Sri Lanka, where at Mrs Bandaranaike’s invitation he had personally visited the over-crowded detention camps, told a similar story. [Clergy Review, January 1976, 8-13.] Politically, such activities nevertheless remained contentious. According to one detainee, Dr Lim Hock Siew [interview], it was in 1972-3 that the authorities in Singapore abandoned the insistence on repentance as a condition for release. Scores of detainees seized under Operation Coldstore were at last restored to freedom; some however remained in custody. One was the Malaysian labour journalist Said Zahari; another was Lim Hock Siew himself. Both were falsely alleged to be communists. Both later expressed their outrage that Hyde should have visited them in detention. Zahari in his memoirs acknowledged his gentle and pleasant manner but described him as ‘a self-styled anti-Communist psychological-warfare expert … [who] had made his services available, for big money, to reactionary anti-Communist Asian governments’ [Zahari (2001), 211]. Lim Hock Siew also described Hyde as a and ‘chief salesman of anti-communism’ and laid particular stress on the idea of a ‘foreigner’ assisting a reactionary regime in the of political rights to opposition activists. Hyde’s private advice to the authorities was that non-communist prisoners had nothing to confess and that their continued detention defied both reason and natural justice. They were not, however, released until 1979, and within the security context there were therefore significant distinctions both of approach and motivation. C.C. Too of the Malaysian Psychological Warfare Branch thought Hyde too inclined to stress the communists’ ‘ideological motivation’, resulting in an overestimation of the communist threat and an inferiority complex on the part of the police [NA FCO 24/818, R.D. Clift, British High Commission, Kuala Lumpur to J.G. McMinnies, Foreign Office Information Research Department, 9 April 1970]. When in London Hyde prepared a report on the treatment of detainees for the fanatically anti-communist Brian Crozier’s Institute for the Study of Conflict, the meeting ended stormily [see Hyde, journal entry, 28 May 1993]. As Hyde nevertheless appreciated, where legal opportunities for communist activity were slim or non-existent, a policy of dialogue through confinement was regarded by many left-wing critics as a form of ‘’ [see undated cuttings in LHASC, Hyde disciplinary file]. Hyde himself had at one time used such language freely. Communist ‘’ had thus itself been characterised as brain-washing, even in the form of his own party classes [Hyde (1957a)]. Now he used more measured terms in spelling out the rationale for his own activities in a private letter in October 1972:

I have taken the line that brainwashing is immoral, whichever side practises it … But I have taken the view that if a man has been in detention for years and I discover that, with time to think, he has had growing doubts about his beliefs or the methods he has used, then there is little point in his remaining in detention. … Often, particularly where a man has been in for, say, 10 years without trial, it is a question of breaking a deadlock by finding a formula which makes his release possible without loss of face by either detainee or government. I happen to have the trust of both and so can break that deadlock. [Hyde to John Waldron, 28 October 1972.]

9 Hyde thus recalled his opposition to the idea that release should be conditional on prisoners turning informer. More fundamentally, he held that the relinquishment of armed struggle could only finally be achieved by addressing its causes, through the promotion of reforms which former guerrillas could themselves engage with. In Britain at least, his views and associations were by this time closer to his former party comrades than to the dominant forces in the church. Disillusionment with the latter intensified with the election in 1978 of Pope John XXIII, whose Polish conditioning and Cold War realpolitik Hyde felt unfitted him for the leadership of a world church. From the start, Hyde had been attracted by liberation theology, and by the early 1980s he described it as a ‘life-raft’ and almost his sole reason ‘for still being willing to think of myself as a Catholic’ [Hyde to David Shinnick, 1 February 1983; Hyde to Peter Hebblethwaite, 3 August 1984]. As the Vatican’s conservative ascendancy continued unabated, and radicals in the church were systematically marginalised, even this in the end proved no longer sufficient. No statement was made comparable with his break with communism in 1948, and Hyde repeatedly encountered both communists and Catholics who continued to identify him with the positions of I Believed. Nevertheless, he reacted indignantly when approached about a possible film of his life by the anti-communist ‘Blue Army’ [journal, 20 January 1982] and he declined to produce a sequel to the volume he had written on Don Orione in the 1950s. When the copyright of I Believed reverted to him in 1975, he blocked further printings of what he regarded as a document of primarily historical interest. Its plundering by writers like Chapman Pincher, and the whole ‘literary spy-hunting boom’, filled him with disgust [journal, 16 September 1987]. The sequel Hyde planned might have provided a salutary correction to some Cold War mythologies. It was not, however, to be completed. In 1980 Hyde suffered the first of a series of angina attacks and was henceforward restricted to occasional reviews and short articles. Their flavour can be judged from the full-blooded ‘Christian case against Capitalism’ which he contributed to the Jesuit review The Month in November 1980. The following year, Hyde declined to contribute to a collection entitled Why I am still a Catholic, observing that he was hardly sure any longer that he was – or at best was hanging on ‘by the skin of my teeth’ [Hyde to Robert Nowell, 26 October 1981]. For the remainder of his life, such reflections found a regular outlet only in the daily journal he began keeping in 1982. If Hyde was an agnostic Christian, the political brokers in the Vatican, his first entry commented, were ‘to all intents and purposes, practical atheists’ [Journal, 1 January 1982]. Disillusionment by this time was complete. Ceasing to regard himself as a practising Catholic, Hyde concluded that anti-communism, like communism itself under Stalin, had proved to be worse than the evil it was meant to overcome [Hyde to Fr John Medcalf, 29 November 1988]. There were many disappointments in his final years. Retreating insurgency in Sarawak gave way, not to small-scale, sustainable development, but to systematic deforestation and the incursion of the multinationals. Bong Kee Chok, the guerrilla leader released under Operation Sri Aman, was said to have become a millionaire. [Journal, 13 February, 1989.] Initial optimism regarding Gorbachev’s reform communism gave way to disappointment as it ended with a ‘whimper’ [Journal, 8 October 1992; Hyde to Phil Piratin, 16 September 1991]. Hyde’s own political views were best reflected by the Green Socialist Network, largely comprising veteran communists; and amidst the general pessimism of the time he also found inspiration in Ralph Miliband’s Socialism for a Sceptical Age [journal, 19 and 21 February 1995]. Most of all, he turned to Morris, and remained a member of the William Morris Society, as he had been almost since its formation in 1955. Where others saw only the break in his life, Hyde affirmed the continuity of the values to which he had been committed [Hyde to Rev. Michael Gedge, 19 April 1991]. More than anyone, it was Morris who exemplified those values. ‘For myself, at my age’, Hyde wrote a year before his death, ‘I’ll contine to keep me eye on the distant goal. The dream was and is a worthy one. It wasn’t all a nonsense. William Morris’s vision will still be mine.’ [Journal, 8 October 1995.] The short twentieth century, which was also the long Cold War, was a political minefield through which neither party, church nor country offered any certain path. As this lesson became inescapable, Hyde in his final years repeatedly pondered the issues of personal conduct which it posed. In 1988, he reflected in his journal on the death of Bill Fairman, the Bristol plumber who had introduced him to communism, and who, though subsequently expelled from the party, spent his last years tending Marx’s grave in Highgate cemetery. Catholics, Hyde came to believe, had no conception of the idea of integrity as socialists like Fairman understood it: ‘the special sort of integrity which takes the form of an unshakeable adhesion to a belief in a cause and of translating it into its practical application to every aspect of life … [so] that there are some things on which one will not compromise no matter how one’s position, or stand, may be misunderstood or misrepresented’ [journal, 14 December 1988]. Consciously or subconsciously, Hyde must surely have intended an analogy with his own life. In the tributes he regularly paid to passing party comrades, it was precisely the quality of

10 integrity that he most often mentioned; but it was also this quality of integrity, he had argued in his exposures of communism, that could justify acts of national treachery, personal deceit or political murder [Hyde (1957a)]. Like many in a troubled century, Hyde had learnt the hard way: that good men serving tarnished causes, and causes diminished by those who served them, was both the irony and the tragedy of his time. Douglas Hyde died in hospital on 19 September 1996, of unexpected complications from a simple infection. His funeral was a secular one. The music included Allegri’s Miserere and Paul Robeson’s recording of Joe Hill. The readings included Brecht and the Welsh poet Idris Davies. A later memorial meeting at the LSE, organised by the Socialist History Society, was largely attended by former party comrades, and concluded with the climax of Shostakovich’s Leningrad symphony. Hyde would certainly have approved. As he wrote in one of his journal entries [23 August 1993]: ‘I’m glad I was born when I was (even though this has been an atrocious century) & that the Communism of my early years in the Party was a politics of hope, of dedication & commitment – which is what I still believe it might & should be.’

Writings: (1) Books and pamphlets: Communism from the Inside (1948); From Communism towards Catholicism (1948); The Answer to Communism (1949; revised and enlarged edn 1951); Communism and the Home (1950); I Believed. The autobiography of a former British communist (1951); Communism at Work (1953); The Press and the Party (1953); Red Star Against the Cross. The pattern of persecution (adapted from François Dufay, L’Étoile contre la croix) (1954); Crisis in Vietnam (1955a); One Front Across the World (1955b); The Mind Behind New (1956); The Battle of Our Time (1957a); God’s Bandit: the story of Don Orione, ‘Father of the Poor’ (1957b); Pulling Our Weight (1961); Communism in Asia (1963); The Peaceful Assault: the pattern of subversion (1963); United We Fall. The tactic of the united front (1964); ‘Process of change’ in C.C. van den Heuvel (ed.), The Challenge of Coexistence (1965); Confrontation in the East (1965); Dedication and Leadership: learning from the communists (1966); foreword to Luis Taruc, He Who Rides the Tiger: the Story of An Asian Guerilla Leader (1967); The Troubled Continent: a new look at Latin America (1967); ‘The catalyst: Douglas Hyde’ in Bernard Dixon (ed.), Journeys in Belief: eighteen writers describe how they changed their basic convictions (1968); The Roots of Guerrilla Warfare (1968); Communism Today (1972); The Rehabilitation of Detainees. A personal account (1972a); Rehabilitation. A critical evaluation of the Rehabilitation effort of the Government of Sri Lanka (1972b); (2): Journals, periodicals and newspapers. For most of his life Hyde wrote regularly for a succession of newspapers and periodicals. Regular signed contributions will be found in the following journals: Daily Worker (1942-8); World News and Views (1941-8); On Guard (‘43 Group’) (1947-8); Register/Weekly Register (1948-50); Observer (from 1951); Catholic Herald/Catholic Times/The Universe (weekly column, 1951-71); Encyclopedia Yearbook (entries under own name and pen-name ‘Ralph Jeffries’, 1952-68); The Month (Jesuit ‘review of Christian Thought and World Affairs’; contributes ‘Douglas Hyde’s Notebook’ 1977-81); Asian Affairs (journal of Royal Society for Asian Affairs; book reviews 1970-93). He also contributed regularly to The Tablet (‘International Catholic Weekly’), Jesuit Missions and The Far East (Columban Missions) as well as a wide range of US and international Catholic periodicals.

Sources: (1) MSS: Papers of Hyde’s, including the journal Hyde maintained in the last fifteen years of his life, are in the possession of his former researcher and secretary, Rosemary Logan. The author is indebted to Rosemary and Pat Logan for information and copies of documents, which unless otherwise stated derive from this source. Responsibility for the interpretations presented here is nevertheless the author’s alone and a fuller account will require extensive research in church and public archives, both in Britain and internationally. Among archival sources consulted there is a small communist party disciplinary file on Hyde in the Labour History Archive and Study Centre, Manchester. Papers relating to Hyde’s activities in South East Asia have been identified in the National Archives (mostly in FCO 24). (2) Oral interviews: interviews (in private possession) with Kevin Morgan (25 August 1993); with Sam Apter (10 November 1993); also interview with Dr Lim Hock Siew (n.d.), Oral History Centre, National Archives of Singapore. A transcript of Hyde’s talk to the CPGB Historians’ Group, ‘Preparations for illegality’, was published in Our History Journal 14 (October 1989).

Gabriel Almond et al, The Appeals of Communism (1954); Kenneth Newton, The Sociology of British Communism (1969); Jim Fyrth, The Signal was Spain (1986); Kevin Morgan, Against Fascism and War. Ruptures and continuities in British communist politics 1935-1941 (1989); Steve Parsons, ‘Communism in the professions: the organisation of the British Communist Party among professional

11 workers 1933-1956’ (Warwick PhD, 1990); Morris Beckman, The 43 Group. The untold story of their fight against fascism (1992); Francis Beckett, Enemy Within. The rise and fall of the British Communist Party (1995); Kevin Morgan, ‘The Communist Party and the Daily Worker 1930-56’ in Andrews et al, Opening the Books in Geoff Andrews, Nina Fishman and Kevin Morgan, eds, Opening the Books. Essays on the social and cultural history of the British Communist Party (1995); Chris Williams, Bill Alexander and John Gorman, eds, Memorials of the Spanish Civil War (1996); Tan Jing Quee and Jomo K.S., eds, Comet in Our Sky: Lim Chin Siong in History; Said Zahari, Dark Clouds at Dawn: a political memoir (2001); Geoff Andrews, Endgames and New Times: the final years of British communism 1964-1991 (2004); Robert Stradling, Wales and the Spanish Civil War: the dragon’s dearest cause? (2004); Claude Pennetier and Bernard Pudal, ‘Communist prosopography in France: research in progress based on French institutional communist autobiographies’ in Kevin Morgan, Gidon Cohen and Andrew Flinn (eds), Agents of the Revolution. New biographical approaches to the history of international communism in the age of Lenin and Stalin (2005); Kevin Morgan, Gidon Cohen and Andrew Flinn, Communists in British Society 1920-1991 (2007)

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