The Hungarian Uprising and a Young British Communist

In this memoir Jean McCrindle – ‘born a Communist as one might be born a Christian or a Muslim' – compares the communism of her parents' generation and her own, recalls the impact in her youthful activist circles of the events of 1956, and describes the emergence in their aftermath of the Universities and Left Review, the Partisan Coffee House in Soho, and the New Left Clubs around the country.

Her close friends included Raphael Samuel, then ‘a brilliant student… [who] wouldn't take no for an answer when arguing with potential Party recruits'. Despite admiring his personal indefatigablility and enthusiasm, she was unhappy with the wooden and impenetrable language of the Party journals and the education courses she had to attend. Through Raphael and the Party she made other friends: in Oxford Peter Sedgwick, Denis Butt, Stuart Hall and Gabriel Pearson; and further afield Edward and Dorothy Thompson, Ken Alexander, Lawrence Daly, Dorothy and Jo Greenald, Ron and Dorly Meek, Dorothy Wedderburn, Royden Harrison, Michael Barratt Brown – the group around The Reasoner and then the New Reasoner whose project was a renewal of socialist politics and theory (what Thompson called Socialist Humanism), free from the Soviet Union's revolutionary and ideological dominance but also from the compromises of parliamentary Socialism.

Khrushchev's Secret Speech seemed to promise a new dawn in Soviet honesty and openness about the notorious trials of dissidents and the cult of the personality of the Stalin period. But the Hungarian Uprising eight months later, its crushing by Soviet tanks and the muddled reaction of the British Party, confirmed all her earlier doubts and pessimism. McCrindle and most of her friends left the Party; though her father stayed. She resisted the temptation to join any other small righteous sect, preferring the muddle of being a member of the Labour Party and arguing within it for the ideas she embraced – nuclear disarmament, support for Castro and African socialism, the Women's Liberation Movement, Parliamentary Socialism.