Harry Pollitt

Harry Pollitt (22 November 1890 – 27 June 1960) was a British politician who served as the head of the trade union department of the Communist Party of Great Britain and the General Secretary of the party. He was an unrepentant Stalinist who followed instructions from the Comintern.

Pollitt was born 22 November 1890 in Droylsden, Lancashire. He was the second of six children of Samuel Pollitt (1863–1933), a blacksmith's striker, and his wife, Mary Louisa (1868–1939), a cotton spinner, daughter of William Charlesworth, a joiner. Pollitt's parents were socialists and freethinkers and it was his mother, a member of the Independent Labour Party, who provided the youngster with his first induction into the principles and local networks of socialism. Theirs was an especially close relationship and Pollitt found in his mother both a confidante and a model of working-class dignity in the face of affliction.

His own sense of injustice at family poverty, as three of his siblings died in infancy, was likewise fundamental to the strong identification with the working class that lay at the root of his political outlook. His formal education, at the local school, ended when he was thirteen. Pollitt was a boilermaker by trade and he frequently travelled around the country in this connection.

In 1915, whilst living in Southampton, he led a strike of boilermakers.

In 1919 Pollitt was involved in the "Hands off Russia" campaign to protest against Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War. At the end of the war he joined Sylvia Pankhurst's Workers' Socialist Federation, which became the Communist Party (British Section of the Third International). As a member of this group he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain when it was formed in mid-1920. Pankhurst soon left the party, but Pollitt remained. He was heavily influenced by the Communist intellectual Rajani Palme Dutt and the two remained close allies for many years. From 1924 to 1929 Pollitt was General Secretary of the National Minority Movement, a Communist-led united front within the trade unions.

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