Thomas Henry Wintringham was born 1898 in Great Grimsby, Lincolnshire. The Wintringham's were a prominent local family, running a large lumber yard (known as 'Wints') and solicitors firm Grange and Wintringham(which still exists). A local school and road were named after them, and the family home stood on the site, and probibly incorporated some original features of the mediaeval abbey (sadly demolished in the 1970's - now Abbot's Way). The brief biographical sketch in one of his most successful books said:

The author was born in 1898 in a house of solid Victorian brick in a town of solid Victorian prosperity. The prosperity was not elegant; in fact, it stank a bit of fish. I absorbed from my parents, nonconformists in religion, liberal in their outlook on life, a tradition of non-political radicalism.

He was sent to Gresham's a progressive private school Norfolk owned by the Fisherman's Company, where amongst his friends and contemporaries were W.H.Auden, Cedric Belfrage, Bejamin Britten, Erskine Childers, James Klugmann, Donald MacLean, Ben Nicholson, Lord Reith, Wilfred Roberts, Roger Simon, and Stephen Spender - a heady mix of artists and politicians to be. At Gresham's he edited the school paper, wrote poetry and developed a passion for mechanics and military history, finally winning the Brackenbury scholarship to Bracenose College, Oxford.

The Great War

He gave up his place at Bracenose to fight in the First World War - declining a commision and joining the Royal Flying Corps. Motorcycle despatch rider, Kite-Balloon division.

At the end of the war he was involved in a brief barracks mutiny one of many minor insurrections that went unnoticed in the period. Eventually impatiently walking out of the RAF without waiting for his final demobilisation papers.

The Communist Party

1926 General Strike prison.

Workers Weekly

In 1930 along with PD he founded newspaper the Daily Worker being one of the only named writers to publish in the paper.

ARP

In writing for the party's theoretic journal Labour Monthly he established himself as the party's military expert. In LM articles and in a couple of booklets on the subject Wintringham formed the arguments against Air Assault and called for ARP precautions several years before Guernica and his arguments were the basis for the most sucessesful of the Comunist Party's wartime campaigns (that for ARP provision) and shaped government policy on this issue in the years leading up to the war.

The Left Review

In 1934, having published a number of poems and stories both in party newspapers and elsewhere, he was given the job of organising the Writer's International (British Section), the literary vanguard of the coming revolution. Having organised their founding conference and been elected to the position of treasurer, he became the founder, editor and major contributor to WI's monthly publication Left Review, the first British literary journal with a stated marxist intent.
Though published by Wintringham it was funded by the CPGB, but embraced writers of all shades of socialism, regardless of their party affiliations. The journal established a pattern for what was to become cultural studies.

The Popular Front

Though at the centre of CPGB oranisation, he was often at odds with Party policy, believing in a communism of alliance and co-operation, rather than the dominant comintern ideology of class against class. Wintringham's ideas became party dogma when the comintern announced the 'Popular Front' - a communism Wintringham was preparerd to fight for.

Spanish Civil War

At the outbreak of the A882902 Spanish Civil War, Wintringham went to Spain accompanying a group of Amubulances to aid the loyalist cause, as the Daily Workers and labour Monthly's military correspondent he was the obvios chioce of chaperone, allowing him to report back on the progress of the war both for the papers and to the party and comintern. Commanded the British ballalion of the International Brigades. Hugh Slater and Hugh Purcell credit him with the initial idea of "international" brigades.

Whilst in Spain he met and had an affair with a US journalist, Kitty Bowler, a freind of Martha Gelhorn and Lee Miller. In February 1937 he was wounded in the Battle of Jarama. While injured in Spain he became friends with Ernest Hemingway whose only play 'The Fifth Column' is based upon an amalgum of Hemingway's relationship with Gellhorn and Wintringham's with Kitty. As in the play the Stalinist party accused Kitty of being an American adventurer and a Trotskyist spy.

In recuperation he contracted typhiod and during the delay returning to the front he spent some months at the NCO's school at Pozorrubio as a machine gun instructor.

He returned to the British Battalion on August 15th, just hours before the brigade were ordered to the front. Peter Daly was commander, and Tom was attached to XV Brigade Staff. The Battalion had suffered a devastasting blow just weeks before, being reduced to just 38 men at the battle of Brunete. was again wounded at Quinto with a bullet shattering his shoulderblade, the wound became infected and Tom was repatriated in November 1937.

On his return to England he was given an ultimatum by the party to choose between Kitty and membership - he chose Kitty. His book English Captain was one of the first published accounts of the conflict by someone who served in the war, and is widely regarded as the best personal memoir of a British IBer, it sold well in it's 1939 hardback printing and was reissued by Penguin in 1941, but has sadly been out of print since then.

Fact / Tribune
Returning home, weak from his wounds, Tom's position with the party had become untenable and the Party sought his expultion. Though his personal views had often varied with the prevailing party line in the past, he had always accepted party disipline. However on the suject of Kitty, he felt the party had no dominion, being a personal and not a political matter. For the party this was the last straw. Though Wintringham fought this decision his separation from the party was sealed back in Spain when he refused to abandon Kitty, and series of appeals to the CPGB and Comintern returned the same decision. Though he continued to act in his role as publisher for Writiers International and allied publications until his official expultion from the party in 1938, his effective party membership ended with his return from Spain. With his excommunication came the end of the Left Review - Wintringham had been too central to the magazine for the CP to continue to support it.

However the circle of writers Wintringham had fostered within Writers International now reciprocated, and Tom began writing in publications started by ex-Left Review writers, for Raymond Postgate's Fact he produced a key pre-war monograph How to Reform the Army, Tribune

War - PP / DM


Home Guard / Osterly Park

Upon the inception of the Local Defence Volunteers (LDV) Wintringham used his postition at Picture Post to

1941 Commitee.

In 1941 Wintringham became part of the left wing 1941 Committee - a think tank brought together by Picture Post owner Edward Hulton, and their 'star' writers Wintringham, J.B. Priestly, Tom Driberg, members of Mass Observation contributors.

India / China

Politics of Victory

Common Wealth

Common Wealth was founded in July 1942 by the alliance between the 1941 commitee - and the neo-Christian Forward March movement led by liberal M.P. Richard Acland. The party disagreed with the electoral pact established with other parties in the wartime coalition.

Initially chaired by Priestley, he stepped down after just a few months, unable to reconsile himself with the politics of Acland - who as a sitting M.P. had undue influence within the party. Wintringham was Priestley's natural succsessor but demurred to Acland despite very real political differences between them. He received 48% of the vote in at the Midlothian North by-election in February 1943, previously a safe Tory seat. In the 1945 general election he ran as M.P. for Aldershot, the labour candidate standing down to give him a clear race against the incumbent Conservative M.P., his wife Kitty stood in the same Mid-Lothian constituency that he had come so close to winning two years earlier, niether were elected. After the war Wintringham and many of the founders of Common Wealth and their only sitting MP, Ernest Millington,left and joined the Labour Party suggesting the dissolving of CW.

He was briefly the radio critic for the New Statesman in September-October 1947.

He continued to write about military history, opposing the use and development of atomic weapons and championing Mao's China and Tito's Yugoslavia over the monolithic beuracracy of the Soviet Union.

Tom Wintringham died unexpectedly in Owmby, Lincolnshire in 1949 whilst haymaking.

Having left the Communist Party and critisised Soviet Policy he was written out of the offical history of the Communist Party of great britian and the International Brigades, as a communist he was also written out of the govenments offical histories of the Home Guard, Civil Defense and Military Strategy. His 'retirement' from public life and early death meant he became a largely forgotten figure though a smattering of academic works on him seek to keep his memory alive.