John Saville (1916-2009)

Courtesy of the University of Hull.

John Saville was one of the most important Marxist historians of the postwar period. Unlike many of his generation he remained unflinching in his commitment to the traditions of the British and European Left which shaped him, while remaining a rigorous scholar of the economic and social history of Britain and Europe.

He was born John Stamatopoulos in Lincolnshire, the son of a Lincolnshire woman, Edith Vessey, and a Greek man who was called up into the Greek army and killed in 1916. His mother remarried in the early 1920s and John grew up in south London with his mother and stepfather, a master tailor, whose name he subsequently took. In 1934 he won a scholarship and a place at the London School of Economics (LSE), to study economics. In his autobiography Memoirs from the Left Saville claims he did very little work in his first two years but made up for it working sixteen hours a day in his third and duly earned an outstanding First. Equally important though was Saville's conversion to Communism at this time. From a sporting and essentially non-political background he found himself at the LSE, 'mixing with students who were politically on the Left, middle of the road Labour to communists'.¹ To Saville it seemed natural, given Labour's record of betrayal in 1931, that the rising menace of fascism at home and abroad could only be met by a new and more vigorous left party, and the only party which filled that role was the Communist Party. Having joined he became an activist, taking part in most of the major London political movements of the mid and late 1930s. He casually remarks in his memoirs that Cable Street 'was my last political activity until after finals, although I very occasionally took a day off, as when the hunger marchers arrived in Hyde Park…'.²

Despite his brilliant First, Saville did not get the hoped-for and expected research fellowship at LSE. After a spell as a volunteer with the Union of Democratic Control he got a job with the Dictaphone Company and then, in 1939, as an economist with British Home Stores. Throughout this period he remained an activist in the Communist Party and especially in the National Unemployed Workers Movement (NUWM). In 1940 he was called up, and despite his degree, was not considered officer material. In Liverpool docks as the German raids began he was a member of an anti-aircraft battery, firing 'pretty well every night' in the winter of 1940-41.³ Offered officer training he refused repeatedly, despite instructions from the Party, remaining a sergeant in the artillery for the duration. In his memoirs he defends his decision on political grounds, but adds that the person who really suffered from it was his partner since 1936, Florence Saunders, who after their marriage in 1943 and the birth of their first child lived on a sergeant's spousal allowance rather than an officer's.

In 1943 – as, he insists, the result of a cock-up – he was sent to India instead of to France, and there he was to remain until 1946. He immediately made contact both with the comrades of the Communist Party of India (CPI) and with the Congress Party. His spare time was spent in political discussion with them and with Party members in the British forces. At the end of the war he had an educational leave, spent on party work in Bombay and Karachi, then in the Bombay Transit Camp on the way home was a keen supporter of the Bombay 'forces parliament'. With the war 'over' he became involved in agitation in the RAF to get demobbed. However, what he took most from India was, as he often said, a deep love of the country and contacts with the CPI and Congress which produced a stream of visitors to Hull for many years. He also got a first-hand understanding of the realities of imperialism and a deep disgust that Labour was unlikely to do...