Denis Pritt was characterised by George Orwell as "perhaps the most effective pro-Soviet publicist in this country".
21 Facts About Denis Pritt
1.
2.
Denis Pritt was born 22 September 1887 in London, the son of a metal merchant.
3.
Denis Pritt was educated at Winchester College, which he left after four years so as to relocate to Geneva in order to learn French, with a view to joining his father's company.
4.
Denis Pritt added German to his repertoire of languages in subsequent years.
5.
Denis Pritt was admitted to the Middle Temple on 1 May 1906 and was called to the bar on 17 November 1909.
6.
Denis Pritt continued to study law in 1909, obtaining a law degree from the University of London in 1910.
7.
Denis Pritt began his legal practice as a specialist in workmen's compensation cases.
8.
Denis Pritt married in July 1914, on the eve of the First World War.
9.
Denis Pritt was made a member of the Labour Party's executive committee in 1936, remaining in that role for over a year.
10.
Denis Pritt wrote an account of this, The Zinoviev Trial, which largely supported Joseph Stalin and his first purge of the Communist Party.
11.
In 1940, Denis Pritt was expelled from the Labour Party for defending the Soviet invasion of Finland.
12.
Denis Pritt was awarded the 1954 International Stalin Peace Prize and in 1957 became an honorary citizen of Leipzig, which was then in East Germany.
13.
In 1931, Denis Pritt represented three Indian revolutionaries, Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev Thapar and Shivaram Rajguru before the Privy Council, arguing that the ordinance which had been used to establish a special tribunal to try them for the crime of murdering a policeman was ultra vires.
14.
Denis Pritt successfully defended Ho Chi Minh in 1931 against a French request for his extradition from Hong Kong.
15.
In 1933, Denis Pritt was chairman of the "International Commission of Inquiry into the Clarification of the Reichstag Fire", the so-called "London Counter-Process" to the Leipzig Reichstag Fire Process.
16.
In 1942, he initially defended Gordon Cummins but, due to a technicality, the trial was abandoned and restarted with a new jury, and Denis Pritt was replaced by another lawyer.
17.
Denis Pritt played a significant role in the Singaporean "Fajar trial" in May 1954.
18.
Denis Pritt was the lead counsel of the University Socialist Club with the assistance of Lee Kuan Yew as the junior counsel and helped the club to win the case eventually.
19.
Denis Pritt was said to have encouraged Billy Strachan, a fellow communist activist and one of the pioneers of black civil rights in Britain, to study law.
20.
Denis Pritt died in 1972 at his home in Pamber Heath, Hampshire.
21.
Denis Pritt is one of those on Orwell's list, a list prepared by George Orwell for the Information Research Department in 1949, after the start of the Cold War.