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From Socialist Review, No. 185, April 1995, p. 31.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
A Stomach for Dissent
John and Mary Postgate
Keele University Press £18
Few readers of Socialist Review will be familiar with the name Raymond Postgate. If you’ve heard of him it will either be as the joint author of the excellent history of England, The Common People, or as the founder of The Good Food Guide. This biography by Raymond’s son and his wife helps throw light on a chapter of British socialism which has long since passed by.
Born into the privileged world of Cambridge at the close of the last century, his father was a professor of Latin and Greek at the university. Raymond Postgate was won to socialism after the family moved to Liverpool where he experienced the realities of industrial capitalism and the strikes which swept the city prior to the First World War. Nothing in his upper middle class life and education could explain what he was witnessing. Postgate joined the Independent Labour Party, but his socialism was a mishmash of different ideas.
In 1915 Postgate went to Oxford University. Among his friends was a young Anglo-Indian socialist intellectual, Rajani Palme Dutt, who became a strong supporter of the Bolsheviks and the key power broker in the British Communist Party. Along with many of his friends, Postgate refused to be conscripted and was jailed as a conscientious objector.
Released from jail, Postgate responded enthusiastically to the Russian Revolution in 1917, publishing a booklet, The International During the War, which Lenin praised to H.G. Wells. The period from his release until the failure of the General Strike in 1926 is the most interesting part of this book.
Postgate had fallen in love and married the left Labour MP George Lansbury’s daughter, Daisy. Born and brought up in London’s East End, Daisy had been involved with her father and Sylvia Pankhurst in their daily agitation amongst the people of this poverty stricken area. The newlyweds came from very different backgrounds. Raymond found a job on Lansbury’s Daily Herald. When in May 1918 the Daily Herald printed documents liberated by the Bolsheviks from the Tsar’s archives, sales reached 250,000.
Yet this was still a world in which all sorts of divergent views mixed. The ‘1917 Club’ brought Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald and Communist supporters together in London’s Soho. Postgate became a founder member of the newly formed Communist Party in 1920, becoming assistant editor and then editor of its first publication, The Communist.
Reflecting the socialist world from which it was spawned, The Communist was itself a mixture of different ideas. Postgate himself remained a pacifist and could not accept the discipline of the Communist Party as it was brought more and more into line with the demands of Bolshevik organisation, so in 1922 he quit the party.
The sections of Postgate’s diary covering the General Strike are excellent. You get a feeling for the spirit of the rank and file and the militancy which dominated the East End.
Yet the failure of the General Strike marked a turning point for Postgate. Until then he had looked to a mixture of direct action and parliament to achieve change. From the General Strike onwards his sights were on parliamentary politics. The Second World War and the implementation of tight state controls strengthened Postgate’s increasingly Fabian (right-wing Labour) politics of parliamentary and municipal reform.
His founding of The Good Food Guide was centred on educating people about food – perfectly laudable but it fitted neatly with Fabian ideas.
This book is part biography and part memoir. As such it often does not throw much light on Postgate’s politics and understates his own radicalism. Throughout the book the working class features side stage.
Postgate himself recognised his own lack of contact with workers, feeling he’d only managed to build relationships with ordinary people while serving in the Home Guard during the Second World War.
Today it would be difficult to find people familiar with his writings or those of his friends like G.D.H. Cole, John Strachey, Harold Laski and H.N. Brailsford. The book is a useful introduction to a socialist world inhabited by Postgate which has been lost.
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Last updated: 3 November 2019