The Last English Revolutionary

Spain woke me up politically. I rediscovered democracy, the power that can come from people working together when a popular front is not just a manoeuvre but a reality. *** Drawing on his political and fighting experience in the Spanish Civil War, Tom Wintringham wrote the best-seller New Ways of War - 'a do-it-yourself guide to killing people, ' but also a highly subversive call for a socialist revolution. Wintringham called for 'a People's war' and the phrase stuck. Recalling the English Civil War, he likened the Home Guard he trained in guerrilla warfare to the New Model Army, and later he helped found the Common Wealth Party, a political party in England that was more radical in some ways than Labour. His finest hour was in 1940, when he inspired his countrymen to resist invasion. After gaining exclusive access to the Wintringham archive, now in the Liddell Hart Center for Military Archives at King's College, London, historian Hugh Purcell published a biography of this 'uniquely English revolutionary' (Sutton Publishing, 2004). Working with Phyl Smith, a librarian in Wintringham's home town of Grimsby, they have since discovered a wealth of historical firsts, including the actual leaflet Wintringham wrote that led the prosecution case in the infamous treason trial of the Communist Party leadership in 1925, as well as additional evidence that, in the summer of 1936, Wintringham was already propagating the idea of an 'international legion' to fight for Republican Spain. Churchill coined his own expletive as in 'I refuse to be Wintringhamed.' Hemingway wrote his only play, Fifth Column, based on Wintringham and his lover, a supposed 'Trotskyite spy.' Photographs show Orwell and Wintringham together in 1940 training for guerrilla warfare to resist a Nazi invasion. Such was the dramatic imprint on history by this seminal figure, here revealed in an enlarged, revised, and updated edition. *** The Last English Revolutionary will prove a good read for anyone interested in British radicalism, the Spanish Civil War, leadership in battle, and the improvisation of armies. - A. A. Nofi, Strategy Page www.strategypage.com/bookreviews/813.as