25 Facts About Tom Wintringham

Thomas Henry Wintringham was a British soldier, military historian, journalist, poet, Marxist, politician and author.

Tom Wintringham was a supporter of the Home Guard during the Second World War and was one of the founders of the Common Wealth Party.

Tom Wintringham was educated at Gresham's School, Holt, and Balliol College, Oxford.

Tom Wintringham returned to Oxford, and in a long vacation made a visit of some months to Moscow, after which he returned to England and formed a group of students aiming to establish a British section of the Third International, a Communist party.

In 1923, Tom Wintringham joined the recently formed Communist Party of Great Britain.

In LM articles and in booklets on the subject, Tom Wintringham formed the arguments against Air Assault and called for air raid precautions several years before the bombing of Guernica.

Tom Wintringham's arguments were the basis for the most successful of the Communist Party's wartime campaigns, that for ARP provision, and shaped government policy on the issue in the years leading up to the war.

At the start of the Spanish Civil War, Tom Wintringham went to Barcelona as a journalist for the Daily Worker, but he joined and eventually commanded the British Battalion of the International Brigades.

Tom Wintringham had an affair with a US journalist, Kitty Bowler, whom he later married.

Tom Wintringham spent some months as a machine gun instructor.

Tom Wintringham came to mistrust the party's subservience to Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union and Comintern.

Back in England, Tom Wintringham Hopkinson recruited him to work for the magazine Picture Post.

On returning from Spain, Tom Wintringham began to call for an armed civilian guard to repel any Axis invasion, and as early as 1938 he had begun campaigning for what would become the Home Guard.

Tom Wintringham taught the troops tactics of guerrilla warfare, including a movement known as the 'Monkey Crawl'.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Tom Wintringham applied for an army officer's commission but was rejected.

Tom Wintringham wrote for Picture Post, the Daily Mirror, and wrote columns for Tribune and the New Statesman.

In May 1940, after the escape from Dunkirk, Tom Wintringham began to write in support of the Local Defence Volunteers, the forerunner of the Home Guard.

Tom Wintringham even had veterans who had fought alongside him in Spain who trained volunteers in anti-tank warfare and demolitions.

Tom Wintringham wrote many articles in Picture Post and the Daily Mirror propagating his views about the Home Guard with the motto "a people's war for a people's peace".

The British Army determined that Tom Wintringham was unreliable because of his communist past.

Ironically, despite his activities in support of the Home Guard, Tom Wintringham was never allowed to join the organisation itself because of a policy barring membership to Fascists and Communists.

In 1942, Wintringham proceeded to found a Common Wealth Party with Vernon Bartlett, Sir Richard Acland and J B Priestley.

Tom Wintringham received 48 percent of the vote at the Midlothian and Peebles Northern by-election in February 1943, previously a safe Tory seat.

Tom Wintringham continued to write about military history, opposing the use and development of atomic weapons and championing Mao's China and Tito's Yugoslavia over the monolithic bureaucracy of the Soviet Union.

Tom Wintringham died on 16 August 1949, aged 51, after a massive heart attack while he was staying with his sister at her farm at Owmby, Lincolnshire.