- Jim Fyrth 1918-2010
with thanks to Deborah Fyrth
Hubert James (Jim) Fyrth, who died in Torbay on 24 May 2010, aged ninety-two, was a distinguished historian and adult educator with a special interest in trade-union and labour history. His books ranged across political and cultural history of twentieth-century Britain; they included histories of [End Page 298] the Popular Front, of the Aid Spain Movement in 1930s Britain, two edited volumes on the politics and culture of postwar Britain and a remarkable memoir of his time in the British army in India at the end of the Second World War. (See list below.)
The son of a rural vet who lived in West Dorset, one of four children, Jim attended Dorchester Grammar School as a boarder, where he read H. G. Wells and Thomas Hardy and grew up — as his daughter Deborah Fyrth remembers — 'close to the countryside and the sea'; he respected the land, its plants, animals and wild life throughout his life. Jim's socialism was founded on this love of landscape and its inhabitants, his belief in a common humanity and social justice; it was also modelled on the 'Popular Front of the mind' of the thirties and wartime radicalism, and in the decades after the war it embraced shop-floor militancy, the women's liberation movement and internationalism. Jim joined the Communist Party at the time of Munich in 1938, and remained hopeful in the vision of a classless society all his life. His love of England was tempered by knowledge of the damage done by British imperialism to other parts of the world. At the end of the war, travelling through India and Malaysia, he spent a day and night of a long train journey with a young family. He remarked on the 'confidences' encouraged by living in a confined space:
They welcomed me and showed great kindness. We talked, their little boy played with me and they insisted on sharing their food with me. When the time came for me to change trains I thanked them sincerely, made my nameste and said 'Perhaps we shall meet again somewhere'. 'Yes', replied the husband, 'but you know that while you wear that uniform we can never be friends'.
(An Indian Landscape 1944-1946, 2001, p. 26.)
Jim took a first in economics at the University College of the South West, Exeter. He was only the second student to continue to a PhD subsidized by the local authority on the agreement of at least two years teaching in secondary schools (the first was W. G. Hoskins). The PhD, on the history of the Devon ports in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was interrupted by the outbreak of war. In May 1940, aged twenty-two, already an active anti-fascist since his schooldays (he met the author Sylvia Townsend Warner on an anti-Mosley demo in Dorset in May 1936), Jim was tried with his older brother Pat at the Old Bailey charged with passing on information contrary to the Official Secrets Act. Pat, an officer in the Royal Naval Rescue in Nantes, had sent Jim a copy of the French Government's leaflet prohibiting the distribution of the Daily Worker among the armed forces, which Jim then showed to one or two MPs and several members of the Communist Party. Jim, though guilty of no crime, was imprisoned for six months, his brother for twelve. Inside Jim made friends with the actor Max Adrian, who was inside for three months for soliciting in Victoria Station; [End Page 299] most of the inmates were 'poor debtors'. Max made him laugh, they worked together and talked theatre and socialism.
When Jim came out he went into war-work on the top floor of Whiteley's department store in London, making eyelets for the seams of waterproofs. He organized a branch of the trade union there, was given the sack and sent home to Dorset. After a spell living with his musical-comedy actress sister, Paddy, in Surrey, and further personal twists of fortune, he returned to London for more war-work in the old Exhibition Halls in Wembley, where...