DURING World War II there was an electoral truce between the main British parties. When a by-election arose, only the party already holding the seat would put up a candidate. The others would stand aside. They were, after all, all members of the same coalition government.

Not everyone accepted this idea. Wasn’t there a danger that national unity, concentrating on the war effort, and temporarily suspending class struggles could drift, almost without being noticed, into a more permanent withering of democracy?

An odd collection of left-wing dissidents came together in 1942 to form the Common Wealth group, which said it stood for common ownership, morality in politics, and “vital democracy” — by which it meant democracy which was active, participatory, and central to every part of life, to industry as well as to Parliament; “a democracy which is a living freedom, not dead, formal or buried in red tape.”

Syndicalists, social democrats, socialists, reformers and radicals joined forces in Common Wealth, which is arguably the most successful attempt ever in Britain to create a libertarian socialist party.

Its founders included the socialist writer and broadcaster JB Priestley, the independent communist Tom Wintringham, and a Liberal MP named Sir Richard Acland, who brought to Common Wealth his Forward March movement, a born-again Christian crusade with socialistic policies.

Acland, a 15th baronet, had been born in 1906 into a landed Devon family which, for all its wealth and status, was full of Liberal politicians and social reformers. Having undergone a dramatic conversion to Christianity his views became increasingly radical and egalitarian, and by the 1940s he was a well-known writer and speaker. Though never making much impression in Parliament — where he was widely viewed as an ineffective oddball — he was much better as a public orator and gained quite a following.

Common Wealth supported socialist candidates in a number of wartime by-elections, and ended the war with four MPs. All but one lost their seats in the 1945 general election, and by the end of the ’40s the party had effectively vanished. It continued as a pressure group until 1993, though when it finally dissolved itself few still remembered its existence.

Among Common Wealth’s unique elements was its adoption of the “executive-sensory nexus” theory, based on the belief that the left and right areas of the human brain separately governed logical and intuitive thought respectively. For this reason, the party’s executive committee, its day-to-day decision-making body, was shadowed by a “sensory committee” in charge of long-term development.

Acland’s most famous act occurred in 1943, when as an advocate of land being publicly owned he signed over his family’s vast estates to the National Trust. One of the biggest bequests the Trust has ever received, this unsurprisingly caused a national sensation.

After the war most of the Common Wealth leadership, including Acland, joined the Labour Party and Acland served as a Labour MP from 1947-55. He resigned from Labour over its support for nuclear weapons, and stood in the same constituency as an independent. But having won with 55 per cent of the vote in 1951, as the Labour nominee, he now came third with 13 per cent, the Tory candidate beating Labour into second place.

He never returned to Parliament, but his activism never stopped. He was a founding member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and along with other Common Wealth veterans developed policies on devolution, industrial common ownership, and environmentalism.

When he lost his seat in the Commons, Acland became a teacher of maths, science and religious instruction at a London grammar school. He told reporters at the time that he hoped to “slide in quietly as plain Mr Acland,” so that “I might get a week or two to settle in before somebody comes up to me and says: Oi, my dad says you must be the same bloke…” This produced an indignant reader’s letter in one paper: “My son goes to a London grammar school. I have never heard him call anyone ‘Oi’ or ‘bloke’.”

He and his wife returned to their former stately home, Killerton House, in 1959 — but this time they were living in a flat at the back. The National Trust had leased the place as a hall of residence to a teacher’s training college, where Acland had become a lecturer.

Former students remember that Sir Richard and Lady Anne would sometimes come downstairs to the bar to complain about the noise, and always ended up joining the partying.

By the time he died, on November 24 1990, Acland was remembered only as the man who gave his house to the National Trust; his political career seems to have been forgotten. In the very month of his death he appeared in the press, fighting one last campaign. It was not one likely to win him many admirers, however: his cause was defending the continuation of stag hunting on National Trust land.

He was an eccentric toff, there’s no denying that, but that didn’t stop him doing some highly useful work throughout his life. And he certainly had a way with words.

In 1941 he wrote this: “It must surely be admitted that within the realm of economic organisation there are only two major possibilities. Either the great resources of a country can be owned by private individuals, or they can be owned by all individuals in common. It is most important that anyone who vaguely hopes for some third alternative should sit down and write out in black and white what that alternative can be. Otherwise he should accept my contention that there are only these two alternatives.”

Generations of centrists have searched for that mythical third way; it has yet to be found.

You can sign up for Mat Coward’s Rebel Britannia Substack at www.rebelbrit.substack.com for more strange strikes, peculiar protests, bizarre boycotts, unusual uprisings and different demos.