The Left Book Club by Ian Bloom

When I realised, early in 1986, that it was 50 years since the Left Book Club was formed, as a sporadic collector of these books, I thought, a reflective piece in the 'New Statesman', the LBC's spiritual home, on its 12-year publishing history, would be appropriate. Thankfully, so did the editors. My article appeared May 1986 exactly as I submitted it - except they got my name wrong! They attributed it to "Ian Holm." The next week, they published my letter of rebuke, in which I reported that the fine actor had agreed that if I didn't appear at the National Theatre, he wouldn't be credited with authorship of my articles. Again, the magazine printed the letter as I wrote it. This time, they attributed the wrong post code to me. After that, I gave up on them.

At the time I wrote this piece, almost 40 years ago, I was a practising solicitor in central London. Prior to that, I had been a publisher, book reviewer and feature writer. Nowadays, I’m long retired as a lawyer, and operate as a freewheeling legal consigliere. LBC, Talk TV and other radio and tv stations interview me regularly on a wide range of media law topics. Among other interests and appointments, I’m a Trustee of The Orwell Society.

On 29th February 1936, an unusual double-page advertisement appeared in the New Statesman and Nation. It was headed Important Announcement and the first paragraph read as follows:

Messrs Victor Gollancz have organised and will shortly launch ‘The Left Book Club’ for the service of those who desire to play an intelligent part in the struggle for World Peace and a better social and economic order and against Fascism.

The advertisement (repeated in the News Chronicle a week later) invited the public to send a postcard to the publishers for further details. The response astonished Victor Gollancz. When the first two LBC books were published 50 years ago on 18th May 1936, membership of the Club stood at 9,000. Ten weeks later, it had doubled to 18,000. By December 1936, it had doubled again to 36,000.

The Club was formed by Gollancz following the failure of London publishers a year earlier to support a proposal made by the communist booksellers, The Workers' Bookshop, to John Strachey for a club which would choose and then offer to its membership, suitable left-wing books from any publisher's catalogue. Victor Gollancz, a successful general list and fiction publisher since 1927, when he founded his own company, was dissatisfied with ...the invisible barrier across which it was almost impossible to get progressive literature into the hands of the general public.

He invited Strachey and Harold Laski to join him on the selection Committee. Laski, he wrote in the first issue of The Left Book News (later The Left News), the Club's monthly magazine, is a member of the Labour Party: Mr Strachey is in broad sympathy with the aims of the Communist Party: and I am interested in the spreading of all such knowledge and all such ideas as may safeguard peace, combat Fascism and bring nearer the establishment of real Socialism. The implication, it seems, was that the selectors were a well-balanced trio.

The initial scheme was to commission (or occasionally reprint) and sell to Club members each month for 2/6d (twelve and a half pence) a book of left-wing interest. However, the immediate success of the Club (the first of its kind in England) led Gollancz to offer members several series of optional choices. In those hectic pre-war years. the LBC made available thirty-six Additional Books; twenty-five Educational Books; five Pamphlets; five Reprints of Classics; twenty Supplementary Books and eleven Topical Books as well as the obligatory monthly choice.

The books, bound in limp orange cloth covers from September 1936 and dark red boards two years later, were distributed nationally through booksellers. Gollancz could never have afforded the expense of maintaining thousands of small accounts or risk angry booksellers boycotting his general list.

The extraordinary success of the Club owed much to Victor Gollancz's enthusiasm. In 1936, Gollancz, then aged 43, was, according to Strachey, a ... Capitalist and Socialist: man of the world, and latter-day saint: Jew and Christian: rationalist and theologian: rebel and traditionalist. Even his fellow left-wing publishing rival, Frederic Warburg, called him ...the 'king-pin' of the cultural and political activities of the United Front, a demon of energy, capable, trustworthy and possessed of so overwhelming a belief in the righteousness of his opinions as to bear a recognisable resemblance to the ancient Hebrew prophets.

Gollancz wrote the club's publicity material and bombarded members with recruiting leaflets and potential members with enrolment forms which offered various alternative membership schemes. He encouraged, through The Left News, the remarkable growth of local and vocational groups, formed initially to consider the monthly choice, but which often developed into general political discussion centres.

Between 1937 and September 1939, he organised a speakers' circuit for some of the best-known Club authors (including Arthur Koestler, JBS Haldane and Konni Zilliacus) to tour England and talk about their books. He also ran major annual rallies in London, which filled the Albert Hall, and dozens of smaller rallies throughout the country. Lloyd George, Laski, Strachey, Aneurin Bevan, Jennie Lee, Stafford Cripps, Harry Pollitt, the Communist Party leader, Hewlett Johnson, the 'Red' Dean of Canterbury and AS Neill of Summerhill were among the travelling circus of LBC speakers.

Gollancz's relentless activity does not, of course, by itself explain the growth of the LBC, which peaked at 57,000 members and 1,200 different groups in every part of the UK, in April 1939. The national and international political climate was, after all, unique in the later 1930's.

In the autumn of 1935, Italy invaded Abyssinia. Six months later, Hitler moved into the Rhineland. The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 and coincided with the election of Leon Blum's Popular Front Government in France. In Britain, the Jarrow Crusaders were on the march and although the worst years of the Depression may have passed, Stanley Baldwin and (from May 1937) Neville Chamberlain, led a National Government which had no effective domestic policy for reducing unemployment or combating poverty and no meaningful foreign policy for opposing Hitler. There was, however, very little parliamentary opposition. Both the Labour and Liberal parties had recently split: both were crushed in the 1935 General Election.

The Left Book Club did not create these conditions in which an organised, extra-parliamentary, left-wing cause could flourish, but it did exploit them successfully, to the discomfort of the Labour Party, which disapproved of the LBC's acceptance of Communist support.

Between May 1936 and August 1939, the Club published almost 150 different titles. The two most popular subjects were the Soviet Union (15 uncritical volumes) and the Spanish Civil War (eight books, all endorsing the Republican cause). Some of the more durable selections from those years included an early choice, Walls Have Mouths, by Wilfred Macartney (September 1936), a personal account of the horrors of prison life which led to some immediate humane reforms; Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China (October 1937; David Daiches's Literature and Society (January 1938) and, of course, in March 1937, The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell.

Gollancz published it with a disclamatory preface and subsequently wrote in The Left News: I may confess now that the selectors chose this book with some trepidation, as there was so much in it that they personally found repugnant. The previous month, Laski had disassociated himself from the book. It is, in fact, an emotional plea for socialism, addressed to comfortable people, On the evidence, when the facts make them feel uncomfortable, charity seems to act as a sufficient anodyne. They rarely go further...At bottom, I am not sure that Mr Orwell's kind of socialist would be prepared to pay the price of socialism. And I think he would not pay it...

Orwell had his revenge with his next novel, and criticised the West Bletchley revolutionaries at an LBC discussion group discussion in Coming Up For Air.

As war became more likely, Victor Gollanc's sense of mission became more urgent and almost desperate. I have lived ... he later wrote in his autobiography, with a horror, the sort of horror that goes about with a man and never leaves him, of two abominations ... poverty and war. During the Munich crisis in September 1938, Club members circulated two million copies of his leaflet opposing appeasement. Two months later, eight million more leaflets were despatched on the crisis in Spain. The day after Czechoslovakia was occupied by Hitler in April 1939, half-a-million leaflets arguing for the need for collective security were sent to the local groups for onward distribution.

The Nazi-Soviet Pact of 23rd August 1939 and the declaration of the Second World War eleven days later, split the club selectors. Gollancz and Laski supported the war immediately, but Strachey opposed it for six months, only breaking with the Communists when the Low Countries were invaded. Ironically, the divided leadership led to the Club's first criticism of the Soviet Union, when Leonard Woolf's Barbarians at the Gate (November 1939) was published. Woolf resisted Club pressure to soften his attach and his book outraged the influential Communist Club members. Unfortunately for Gollancz, Hewlett Johnson's unrestrained praise of life in the Soviet Union, published the next month as Soviet troops invaded Finland, simply provoked the non-Communist members.

Although the Club lost its central purpose (the prevention of world war) on 3rd September 1939, it continued for another nine years as an educational book club, largely shorn of its rallies, seminars and holiday excursions to the USSR for the really committed. It survived resignations from disillusioned members, the disruption of the local groups by call-up into the services and the problems of the erratic distribution of books in wartime. Membership fell to 36,000 in April 1940 and then to 10,000 in December 1941, although the Soviet defence of Stalingrad led to an increase to 18,000 in 1942. The optional series were abandoned and the single monthly choice was now much more likely to reflect the mainstream Labour Party viewpoint than to echo the Communist Party line.

But even before the end of the war, Victor Gollancz was losing interest in the Club. His restless conscience was such that within a few years, he would throw his enormous energy into other causes such as the campaign for the abolition of hanging and CND. The Left News was discontinued in March 1947 and the Club's last selection, GDH Cole's The Meaning of Marxism, was published in October 1948 with a print run of 6,750.

By then, those causes for which the Club had struggled were either abandoned or no longer existed. Indeed, the alliance with the Soviet Union only came when the Club had largely lost its Communist members in the middle of a war it had been formed to prevent.

Nevertheless, in a sense the Club was successful. It attracted some of the best writers, most eminent scientists and most respected politicians to its banner and it was a very remarkable publishing phenomenon. It provided valuable and educative literature which was widely read, and which contributed, along with various Penguin titles, to the debate about the nature and expectations of British society after the war. Indeed, many believed that the Club's activities contributed to the Labour Party's victory in 1945 when eleven Labour MPs were returned who were also LBC authors and six, including Clem Attlee, sat in government.

And in the end, although it may well have been a largely middle-class movement, which was too closely associated with the Communist Party for its own good, and which failed to penetrate the trade unions, or win over the Labour Party until the war began, it remained the only organisation to publish on any scale serious left-wing titles in the 1930's.

Some of these titles were appallingly naive (particularly those that described life in the Soviet Union). Some were simply ephemeral and others just boring. But a surprising number were well-researched and remain readable today, and one or two are of enduring value.

While almost every second-hand bookseller has a selection of LBC books with their distinctive Stanley Morrison designed 'bottle-top' badge, punched into the front covers, symbolically just left-of-centre, about half-a-dozen titles are virtually unobtainable today and another 20 are extremely scarce. So, although the books only cost 2/6d (12 and a half pence) each, even at the end when this was a wildly uneconomic price, any collector who possesses all 257 titles (including five pamphlets) published by the Left Book Club between May 1936 and October 1948 has a small, if by now somewhat dusty, fortune resting on his or her bookshelves.

© Ian Bloom 1986 -2024