The University of Manchester Research Douglas Hyde (1911-1996), campaigner and journalist Document Version Accepted author manuscript Link to publication record in Manchester Research Explorer 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 Citing this paper Please note that where the full-text provided on Manchester Research Explorer is the Author Accepted Manuscript or Proof version this may differ from the final Published version. If citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version. General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the Research Explorer are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Takedown policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please refer to the University of Manchester’s Takedown Procedures [http://man.ac.uk/04Y6Bo] or contact [email protected] providing relevant details, so we can investigate your claim. 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 gifts. 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.