John Cornford

Rupert John Cornford (27 December 1915 – 28 December 1936) was an English poet and communist. He was the son of Francis Cornford and Frances Cornford (née Darwin), and was a great-grandson of Charles Darwin and Emma Darwin. He was a member of the International Brigades and died while fighting fascism during the Spanish Civil War, at Lopera, near Córdoba.

He was born in Cambridge, and named after Rupert Brooke, who was a friend of his parents, but preferred to use his second name. He was educated at Stowe School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He began writing poetry at the age of fourteen, strongly influenced by Robert Graves and W. H. Auden, and as a schoolboy argued fiercely about poetry with his mother, a member of the more sedate "Georgian" group whose most famous representative was A. E. Housman. He spent a year in London studying at the London School of Economics and becoming a speaker and organizer for the Young Communists. Back in Cambridge as an undergraduate, reading history, he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. He was two or three years younger than the group of Trinity College communists including Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby and James Klugmann.

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