Skip to main content
Advertise Buy the paper Contact us Shop Subscribe Support us
Britain’s communist guerilla who launched the WWII ‘Dad’s Army’
A crucial part of the war effort, the Home Guard, was launched partly due to the influence of Tom Wintringham, a revolutionary communist with a passion for DIY grenades and guerilla warfare, writes MAT COWARD

WHEN he was in his nineties, former Labour leader Michael Foot was asked by the BBC how he would have reacted if Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary, had made peace with Hitler in 1940. “I’d have killed him,” said Footy. And he wasn’t speaking metaphorically.

In the run-up to the second world war, a number of unorthodox leftwingers had come to the conclusion that Britain could only win against Germany if it underwent a socialist revolution. This would inevitably involve a degree of civil war and the formation of workers’ militias.

As it turned out, of course, they were wrong. Britain remained capitalist — although forced, for the sake of efficiency and productivity, to temporarily adopt some socialistic measures — and yet successfully resisted invasion. But at the time, their views made a lot of sense to a lot of people.

Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
More from this author
Gardening / 8 February 2025
8 February 2025
MAT COWARD battles wayward pigeons in pursuit of a crop of purple sprouting broccoli
Features / 25 January 2025
25 January 2025
Despite his wealthy background and membership of a secretive aristocratic occult club, the radical politician forged an alliance with the working class to fight for democracy and free speech against the Georgian elite, writes MAT COWARD
Features / 30 December 2024
30 December 2024
MAT COWARD offers a roll call of refuseniks – some for political reasons, others for quirky reasons of their own
Features / 28 December 2024
28 December 2024
Charles Dickens was facing a return to the destitution that had blighted his childhood, and it was this which drove him to write the remarkable best-seller which changed the politics of Christmas forever, writes MAT COWARD
Similar stories
Features / 30 October 2024
30 October 2024
From aristocratic upbringing to undercover communist courier and finally respected labour historian, MAT COWARD chronicles how personal tragedy and socialist conviction shaped an extraordinary activist’s journey
Features / 22 October 2024
22 October 2024
MAT COWARD remembers the curious character of Sir Stafford Cripps, who was Winston Churchill's ambassador to the Soviet Union, with a famously eccentric diet
Features / 9 October 2024
9 October 2024
MAT COWARD takes us back 230 years to the inglorious era of George III and a treasonous plan by the London Corresponding Society, in which all was not as it seemed…
Features / 28 September 2024
28 September 2024
MAT COWARD unearths Gustav Holst’s radical roots, from meetings at William Morris’s house to pamphlet-printing and agitation with the Red Vicar of Thaxted — and laments that he is remembered today for the entirely wrong reason