1. Rupert John Cornford was an English poet and communist.
18 Facts About John Cornford
1. 2.
John Cornford died while fighting against the Nationalists, at Lopera, near Cordoba.
3.
Cornford was the son of Francis Cornford and Frances Cornford, and was a great-grandson of Charles Darwin and Emma Darwin.
4.
John Cornford was born in Cambridge, and named after Rupert Brooke, who was a friend of his parents, but preferred to use his second name.
5.
John Cornford was educated at King's College School, Cambridge, and at Stowe School, where at the age of sixteen he won an Open Major Scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, matriculating in 1933.
6.
John Cornford took first class honours in Part I of the Historical Tripos and a starred first in Part II.
7.
John Cornford spent a year in London studying at the London School of Economics and becoming a speaker and organiser for the Young Communists.
8.
John Cornford was two or three years younger than the group of Trinity College communists including Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby and James Klugmann.
9.
John Cornford had previously been in a relationship with a Welsh woman, Rachel Peters, with whom he had a child, James Cornford, later adopted by John's parents.
10.
John Cornford served with a machine-gun unit of the Commune de Paris Battalion, and fought alongside a number of other British volunteers in the defence of Madrid through November and December 1936, including Esmond Romilly.
11.
The fact that John Cornford lived and that others like him still live, is an important lesson to the leaders of democracies.
12.
John Cornford's poem Full Moon At Tierz is a literary expression of the anti-fascist cause.
13.
John Cornford had changed his allegiance but not his emotions.
14.
British critic Stan Smith, in his essay "'Hard As the Metal of My Gun': John Cornford's Spain", undertakes a detailed reading of "Full Moon at Tierz" that brings out its complexity and ambivalence.
15.
John Cornford believes that the new policies of the Communist International will be tested in practice:.
16.
John Cornford is a passionate lover and a passionate warrior: these qualities are held in perfect psychic balance.
17.
John Cornford served as an advisor to David Clark after the Labour Party was returned to government in 1997, but when Clark's advocacy for a strong freedom of information law was rejected by Cabinet, both men resigned.
18.
James John Cornford was survived by four children and his wife.