A. L. Morton

(Arthur) Leslie Morton ( 4 July 1903 – 23 October 1987) was a prolific English Marxist historian. He worked as an independent scholar; from 1946 onwards he was the Chair of the Historians Group of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). He is best known for his classic A People's History of England, but he also did valuable work on William Blake and the Ranters, and for the study The English Utopia.

Morton was born in Suffolk, the son of a Yorkshire farmer. He had two siblings, a sister Kathleen and a brother Max. He attended school in Bury until he was 16 and then at boarding school in Eastbourne. He then studied at the University of Cambridge from 1921 to 1924. While there he developed friends around the Labour group notably Alan Hutt who became a prominent typographer and Ivor Montagu who was to become a film director. He encountered socialist ideas, moved towards the communist group at the university that formed around Maurice Dobb.

After college he taught at Steyning Grammar School in Sussex, where under his influence, most of the staff supported the General Strike in 1926. Dismissed as a consequence he taught for a year at A. S. Neill's progressive school, Summerhill at that time in Lyme Regis. He next moved to London to write and run a bookshop in Finsbury Circus. In 1929 he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and along with his wife, Vivien, remained a member for the rest of his life. Vivien was the daughter of the veteran socialist Thomas A Jackson.

...
Wikipedia