Bethan

Robin Page Arnot was born at Greenock on the Clyde on 15 December 1890, the grandson of a Chartist and son of John Arnot, a self-educated journalist who became editor of The Greenock Telegraph. Following elementary school and seven years at the Greenock Academy, Arnot received a scholarship to study in the Faculty of Arts at Glasgow University, specialising in Ancient Greek. Having already joined the Greenock branch of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) in 1907, he became actively involved in socialist politics in Glasgow through the University Fabian Society and was instrumental in the establishment of the University Socialist Federation in 1912.

Arnot left Glasgow for London in the spring of 1914 to join the Fabian (later Labour) Research Department (LRD) as a researcher, the central subject under analysis being control of industry. Following the resignation of G D H Cole, he was appointed Secretary, a post which he was to retain until 1927 (he remained on the Executive Committee of the Labour Research Department for over fifty years) and which brought him into close contact with members of the trade union and labour movements. Political divisions did not take long to emerge within the Labour Research Department between Collectivists and Guild Socialists. The latter counted Arnot, G D H Cole and William Mellor as adherents and were influenced by the climate of industrial militancy in pre-war Britain.

Following the outbreak of the First World War, Arnot's political convictions led him to resist military service - he was characteristic of many of his contemporaries on the Left in being a simultaneous member of the Social Democratic Federation, the Fabian Society and the Independent Labour Party (ILP). He had also recently participated in the establishment of the National Guilds League. He attempted to evade conscription in May 1917 not as a pacifist, but as a revolutionary socialist. He was however eventually charged with refusal to obey military orders and sentenced to two years' hard labour [see DAR/2/1-12 for Arnot's letters during his imprisonment]. Arnot married his first wife Leila Ward on 1 January 1916 and they had one daughter, Barbara. It was during and after the war that Arnot began to develop his specialist knowledge of the miners in Britain and the history of their trade unions. The miners' evidence to the Sankey Commission in 1919 was largely his work, summarised in the publication by the Labour Research Department of Facts from the Coal Commission (1919). Arnot also composed a number of articles under the nom de plume of Jack Cade during this period, dealing with various aspects of trade unionism [DAR/1/12].

The Russian Revolution in November 1917 exerted a profoundly radical influence on Arnot's political development. He was nominated as a delegate of the grouping of Guild Socialists (recently renamed Guild Communists) to the founding conference of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1920, an event which took place above Cannon Street station in London [see DAR/6/1]. It was soon after joining the Party that he was given the opportunity in 1921 to travel to Latvia, Estonia and the fledgling Russian Soviet state, attending the first congress of the Red International of Labour Unions in the Kremlin [see DAR(2)/2/21, 27, 35 for Arnot's memoirs on this]. Arnot served on the Executive Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain between 1924 and 1938 and acted as a British representative to the Communist International (Comintern) throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

The 1920s were a period of intense political activity for Arnot. In 1920 he became director of the Labour Publishing Company Limited and a year later was instrumental in the establishment of the journal Labour Monthly, remaining on the editorial board thereafter and becoming Associate Editor in 1941. He also performed an editorial role for the Communist Party of Great Britain's publication the Daily Worker until the 1950s and 1923-4 participated in the Communist Party of Great Britain's takeover of the Labour Research Department. In mid 1925, industrial relations began to deteriorate within the British coal industry, following the mine-owners' unilateral suspension of the national wages agreement with the miners. Arnot took a continuing interest in events, urging greater preparedness on the part of the miners and the wider trade union movement, to counteract the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies (OMS) set up by the government in September 1925. This official body anticipated a future general strike and was seen as a manifestation of 'legal fascism' by the CPGB. However the OMS was accompanied by the appointment of a Royal Commission to investigate the coal crisis, upon which the trade union movement set its hopes for a settlement. In October 1925, Arnot was imprisoned for a second time, following the arrest of the entire Communist Party of Great Britain executive under the Incitement to Mutiny Act of 1797 [see DAR/2/13, 14 for Arnot's correspondence during his second period of imprisonment]. Arnot was released however, with six other members of the executive, the following April and was thus able to play an important role during the General Strike which finally broke out in May 1926. On 1 May, Arnot travelled to County Durham to address a May Day meeting in Chopwell and, perceiving the need to co-ordinate the strategy of the unions at a local level if the strike was to have any chance of success, he remained in Tyneside to draw up a plan of campaign with local trade unionists. The practical outcome was the formation of the Northumberland and Durham General Council and Joint Strike Committee, a body which attempted to mirror the official structure of the Civil Commissioner. Arnot sat on the General Council and Joint Strike Committee as a representative of the Labour Research Department and remained in Newcastle until 17 May 1926. His experiences formed the basis for the publication by the Labour Research Department of The General Strike, May 1926: its origin and history (1926).

His departure from the secretaryship of the Labour Research Department in 1927 left him free to travel abroad on behalf of the Communist Party of Great Britain- of particular note during this period was his participation in the Comintern debates in Moscow in the late 1920s on the nature of and appropriate communist reaction to fascism. Alongside Harry Pollitt and R Palme Dutt, Arnot subscribed to what later became the Comintern orthodoxy on the subject, namely the theory of 'class against class' and the labelling of social democratic parties as 'social fascists'. [Documentation of Arnot's work within the Communist International during this period has not survived.]

On his return to settle in London, he soon became active as a member of the Marx Commemoration Committee, formed on the initiative of the Labour Research Department to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Karl Marx's death in 1883 [see DAR(2)/11/1-6, 159 for details of the establishment of the Marx Memorial Library]. The work of the committee led to the establishment of a Marxist Library and Workers' School and Education Centre, which opened its doors at 37A Clerkenwell Green on 30 October 1933. Known simply as the Marx Memorial Library, this institution was an attempt to counteract the recent burning of books in Germany (including works by Marx, Engels and Lenin), through education and the collection of Marxist-Leninist literature. Arnot was appointed as the first Principal of the Library, a post which combined the development and teaching of courses in Marxist political and economic theory and which principally occupied his time until 1947. It was during this period at the Library that Arnot married a second time, on 11 October 1935, to Olive Budden, a volunteer worker at the Labour Research Department in the early 1920s and fellow founder-member of the Communist Party.

Greeting Arnot on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday in 1950, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Harry Pollitt, described him as 'a fighter for the cause of socialism for over forty years, a tireless propagandist and one who has played a leading part in all the work and activity of our Party since its inception.' It was at this point in his life that Arnot retired from full-time work on Labour Monthly in order to pursue his occupation as an historian. Appointed as the official historian of the miners' trade unions in 1925 [see DAR/3/1], he had already undertaken extensive research for what was to prove his life's great work, the five volume history of the Miners' Federation of Great Britain (MFGB) (Allen & Unwin, 1949-79). This was accompanied by more detailed studies of the Scottish Miners' Federation in 1955 and the South Wales Miners' Federation in 1967.

In the early 1950s Arnot became increasingly engaged in the debate surrounding the political legacy of William Morris, (the late-Victorian poet, craftsman and socialist). Within the Communist Party there was felt to be a need to rescue Morris from predominant myths about his political ideals and incorporate his particular vision of socialism into the Communist Party of Great Britain's propaganda. As an established authority on Morris, Arnot became a focus for such activity in London, speaking on the subject at Communist Party of Great Britain branches [see DAR(2)/12/1] and publishing a series of previously unknown Morris letters to Reverend John Glasse in Labour Monthly. Arnot was however one of a number of Communists and others on the Left, (including Graeme Shankland, Stanley Morison and Andrew Rothstein), who considered that some more permanent form of commemoration of Morris was necessary. A meeting was consequently arranged (see [DAR(2)/12/3] for Arnot's correspondence leading up to the meeting) in October 1953 at Morris's former home, Red House, Bexleyheath in Kent to discuss future plans. The outcome was a decision to establish the William Morris Society, as a forum for the exchange of ideas and a means to spread knowledge of Morris's life and work more widely. Arnot acted as a committee member of the Society throughout the 1950s and 1960s, a role which allowed him a decisive influence on its early development. In terms of Arnot's writings, 1964 saw the completion of a longstanding project to revise his 1934 pamphlet William Morris, a vindication, with the publication of William Morris: the man and the myth, an extended commentary on both the Glass letters and Morris's letters to John Mahon.

In September 1956 the Executive Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain made a decision 'to proceed with the preparations for the publication of a history of the Party' [DAR/6/1]. An Editing Commission was appointed to oversee the project, chaired by Harry Pollitt, and it was decided that Arnot should be responsible for writing the history. The project was however soon derailed by the pressure of Arnot's existing commitments as official historian of the miners' unions and lack of co-operation within the party. By mid 1957 the scope of the original plans had been scaled down to a series of articles, of which Arnot was to contribute a piece on the foundation of the party. The fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution in 1967 provided a diversion for Arnot from his research into the miners' history - he published two books in that year on the subject, namely A short history of the Russian Revolution and The impact of the Russian Revolution in Britain.

Although Arnot began the process of compiling his memoirs in 1968, it was a task too onerous for a man of 78 years of age and hence one which never progressed beyond the mid-1920s in scope [DAR(2)/2/5-36]. The successive drafts and transcripts of taped reminiscences were never published. Arnot continued to be a committed member of the Communist Party of Great Britain until his death on 18 May 1986. Writing his obituary in the Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, Professor John Saville characterised Arnot as 'a man who for some eighty years remained a socialist and whose ideas and ideals of his early years were still fresh and lively up to within about two years of his death...'.

From the guide to the Papers of Robin Page Arnot, 1880 - 1979, (Hull University Archives)