text:
John McIlroy
Thomas Gerard (Gerry) Healy (1913-1989): Trotskyist Leader
Source: Keith Gilbert and David Howell (eds), Dictionary of Labour Biography, Volume 12, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2005, copyright (c) Professor John McIlroy. Reproduced here with the permission of Professor John McIlroy. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
Gerry Healy was born in Ballybane, County Galway, Ireland on 3 December 1913. His parents, Michael and Margaret Mary Healy, eked out a living as small farmers on the bleak west coast. His hard early years, his father's desertion and his Catholic education marked him for life. When he was 14 he went to England with his sister and subsequently he became a seaman. His sister's early death from tuberculosis led him to break with his past and around 1931 he joined the Young Communist League (YCL). His much publicised recollections of his father's death at the hands of the Black and Tans, of acting as a Comintern courier and quitting the Communist Party (CPGB) after disputation with Harry Pollitt over the USSR's role in Spain, have left no trace on the historical record. In a near-contemporary comment and letter, he states only that he had been a member of the YCL, that he had spent 'several years in the CP' and that his political development was 'amateurish' (Archer Papers, Militant Group Aggregate, 14 November 1937; MRC, Deane Papers, A41(11), Healy to J Deane, nd [1941]).
Healy first enters history in 1936 as a member of the Westminster branch of the CPGB. The following year he was recruited by Jock Haston, who exercised a lasting influence on him, into the Militant Group, one of Britain's three small Trotskyist organisations. In August 1937, nominated by Denzil Harber and seconded by John Archer, Healy became a member of the group's Paddington branch. He was soon known for that combination of organisational energy and theoretical naïveté that would endure throughout his career, and he quickly experienced the first of the numerous splits that would stud his political trajectory. In the face of unsubstantiated allegations about his misappropriation of trade-union funds in his native South Africa, Ralph Lee led his supporters out of the Militant Group to establish the Workers' International League (WIL). Healy joined the new organisation and endorsed its decision to remain outside the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL), the newly-unified Trotskyist organisation, and thus outside the Fourth International, founded in September 1938.
The WIL had only 50 members before the 1939-45 war. But its emphasis on activism, going directly to the workers and breaking with the propagandist traditions of earlier Trotskyist organisations, as well as the opportunities small-group politics offered, appealed strongly to Healy. He was a firm supporter of the WIL's attempt to combine Labour Party entrism with work in the trade unions. And he approved of its increasing emphasis on the latter as Labour Party activism declined during the war. He was successively editor of the group's duplicated journal, Searchlight, and the more sophisticated Youth for Socialism, and was briefly National Organiser and later Industrial Organiser.
In the late 1930s temporary work setting up advertisement displays, punctuated by periods of unemployment, enabled him to travel. His success in winning recruits to the WIL in Liverpool and Scotland was appreciated. But the same could not be said of his domineering, choleric temperament and self-centred Manichean view of the world, which were already observable by those who knew him in the 1930s. From the start Healy's conspiratorial approach was far from comradely. As early as 1937 he was raising the question of police informers in the Trotskyist movement. He called the RSL, the WIL's opposition, 'swine... agents of the lowest order... a bastard organisation'. His competitor as the organising dynamo of the WIL, Millie Lee, was 'a little intriguer... Jock licks her boots'. His puritanical fury at her liaison with Jock Haston contrasted with his own future tendencies; his use of the issue inside the group was indicative of his future methods (MRC, A40 (47), Healy to Deane, nd [1940]; A41(2), Healy to Deane, nd [January 1941]).
No match politically for the WIL's leaders – Haston, Lee, Andrew Scott and Ted Grant – and temperamentally incapable of working collectively with them, Healy was drawn to conflict and factionalism. When a section of the WIL leadership moved to Dublin in 1939 to avoid possible state suppression, Healy quarrelled with his comrades and was sent back to London. In 1940 he was removed as National Organiser for engaging in factional activity aimed at changing the group's constitution. The following year, in his only alliance with Ted Grant, he attempted to organise young members of the WIL against Haston, who argued that the group's line on the war, with its demands for workers' self-organisation in the Army and Home Guard, was making concessions to patriotism. His early attempts at opposition were compromised by a series of impulsive resignations. In February 1943 he forfeited most of his credibility when he threatened to resign and join the ILP in the midst of a dispute over the establishment of a national rank-and-file movement. He was expelled from the WIL. Although he was later readmitted, he was excluded from its leading committees.
On 13 December 1941 Healy married Betty Russell, the 25-year-old daughter of a South London estate agent. Betty, who was working as a shorthand typist in the Ministry of Aircraft Production, had been expelled from the CPGB a year earlier because of differences over the war. She subsequently joined the WIL and acted as a leader of its fraction work in the ILP. During the war, Healy worked at the Hoover factory in Tottenham and the Park Royal Coachworks, part of the London Aircraft Production Consortium, as well as training briefly as a draughtsman. He was active in the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU). Surveillance reports from CPGB informants in the Trotskyist movement convincingly described him as: 'An extreme individualist... Very vain, hot-headed and touchy... Good demagogic speaker... Has considerable personal following.' (CP/CENT/ORG/12/1, NMLH)
The last comment was somewhat exaggerated. Healy, smarting at his demotion in the WIL, became in Haston's words 'a professional oppositionalist'. He was adept at exploiting the grievances and inexperience of those who were disaffected with the organisation. But he was distrusted by the majority and found it difficult to discover a compelling issue, given the WIL's relative success in wartime conditions (A43(50), F Ward to Deane, 4 February 1943; A43(165), Haston to Deane, 11 November 1943). Hitherto a critic of James P Cannon, the leader of the American Socialist Workers' Party (SWP) which anchored the Fourth International, Healy now executed a volte face. He latched on to the International's demand that the WIL reverse its 'nationalist deviation' of 1938 and fuse with the British section, the RSL, a demand he had long opposed. However in September 1943 the International accepted that the policy of a fused organisation would be decided by majority vote. This ensured the dominance of the WIL, whose membership now approached 400 and far exceeded that of the RSL. Healy was once more a factionalist without a platform.
The International leadership and Cannon's man in Britain, the Time magazine correspondent Sherry Mangan, were determined to install leaders of their own choice in the new, 500-strong Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), launched in March 1944 as a result of the fusion of the two main Trotskyist groups, the WIL and the RSL. Cannon's original pretender, John Lawrence, leader of the SWP-supported group in the RSL, preferred a full-time party post in Wales. The leadership of the Fourth International turned to Healy. They sponsored him to head a minority faction inside the RCP that challenged the policies of the party's General Secretary, Jock Haston. For the next 15 years Healy's enthusiasm for American popular music and films, as well as American Trotskyist literature, was complemented by hero-worship of Cannon – an Irish-American from Rosedale, Kansas, and veteran of the International Workers of the World and the Communist Party – and pedestrian emulation of his persona, politics, platform manner and writing style.
The RCP was initially largely united in predicting an impending capitalist collapse, revolutionary opportunity and thus the need for an open party. Postwar realities prompted rethinking. The Trotskyist movement worldwide was divided into those who attempted to comprehend economic and political change and those who clung to Trotsky's catastrophic prewar predictions. Mentored by Cannon, Healy was conspicuously in the latter camp. As British capitalism revived, he claimed that it was hurtling towards oblivion. As the Labour government nationalised basic industries, he insisted that reforms were impossible. The coming cataclysm, he argued after a brief flirtation with the ILP, necessitated total entry into the Labour Party. There was no time to build an open party. The workers were turning to Labour in search of revolutionary solutions and a fermenting Labour left wing was already reaching beyond reformism.
Healy was backed not only by the SWP but also by the leaders of the International in Paris, Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel, who brushed aside the arguments of the RCP leadership. The latter argued that capitalism was moving into a temporary boom, that the workers supported Labour's reforms and that no organised left, still less a revolutionary current, was emerging in the constituencies. When the British leadership resisted the demand for total entry, Cannon and Pablo determined to remove it. In September 1947 the International leadership split the RCP, recognised two British sections and blessed the minority's entry into the Labour Party.
Healy's organisational acumen now came into its own. Using contacts made by members of the entrist organisation, 'the Club', inside the London Labour Party, he convinced Jack Stanley (General Secretary of the Constructional Engineering Union) and subsequently Tom Braddock (MP for Mitcham) to put money into the Labour Publishing Society, and later into a printing company, John Stafford Thomas, which from December 1948 brought out an entrist paper, Socialist Outlook. This was edited by Lawrence, who had belatedly joined the minority, and appeared first as a monthly then as a fortnightly. It drew on contributions from left-wing MPs such as Ronald Chamberlain, Harold Davies and Ellis Smith, and less frequently from Bessie Braddock, SO Davies, well-known party activists such as Fenner Brockway and Frank Allaun, and prominent trade unionists such as Jim Figgins, Bernard Dix and Ernie Roberts.
Further cover for the Club was provided by the Socialist Fellowship, which was launched by Ellis Smith MP, its first President, in June 1949. With Healy's supporter Fred Emmett as Secretary, Braddock as Vice-President and Lawrence on its Executive, the Club animated Socialist Fellowship groups in the constituencies. But Socialist Outlook's support for the Soviet Bloc in the Korean War ensured that most left-wing MPs and erstwhile supporters kept their distance. The Socialist Fellowship was now heavily dominated by Trotskyists and their presence and influence were more obvious. It was banned by the Labour Party Executive in April 1951, although Socialist Outlook initially escaped proscription.
The RCP collapsed in June 1949, squeezed out by the successes of Labour in Britain, Stalinism in Eastern Europe and China, and the CPGB's Cold War left turn on the industrial front. Healy became the acknowledged leader of British Trotskyism. The 150 or so remaining RCP members were instructed to join the Club and enter the Labour Party. They outnumbered Healy's supporters. But an atmosphere of triumphalism, intimidation and disdain for dissent among Club members, as well as demoralisation on the part of the newcomers, ensured that within months only a handful of the latter remained. The rest of the supporters of the RCP leadership retired from revolutionary politics or laid the foundations for the groups led by Tony Cliff and Ted Grant. Socialist Outlook developed as a deep entry paper. Its analysis was underpinned by predictions of economic catastrophe and world war. Centrally, it embraced the 'two camps' theory of the Cominform. In the decisive struggle between imperialism and Stalinism, it stood critically with the Soviet bloc, although the criticism was muted and oracular. This was sometimes justified by deference to Braddock and Stanley, who were to varying degrees idiosyncratic fellow-travellers of Stalinism. The attempt to 'clarify' Bevanism sometimes produced the optimistic verdict that this current was oscillating between reform and revolution: if pushed hard enough, Bevan and his followers would create socialism through parliamentary means. This in turn was justified by the need to talk the language of the left-wing constituency activist.
The irony was that the Club was now attempting to create the centrist current on whose prior existence its entry had originally been predicated. It attained influence in only a handful of constituencies and areas: St Pancras, Norwood, Streatham, Leeds and Salford. It had a vocal presence in Birmingham, Exeter, Leicester, Nottingham and Edinburgh. From 1948, Labour Party conferences were enlivened by the colourful contributions of Trotskyist delegates, whose numbers could run into double figures. Healy's defence of Konni Zilliacus at the 1949 conference was particularly effective. But there were clear limits: Healy and Lawrence were both refused endorsement as parliamentary candidates. Only Karl Westwood at Richmond, Surrey, in 1950 and John Archer at Scarborough and Whitby in 1955 stood in general elections in the Labour and, surreptitiously, Trotskyist interest; the most the Club ever had in local government was nine Labour councillors.
With fewer than 100 members, this still represented a tremendous achievement. But nationally it was a drop in the ocean, attained by hyperactivity spurred on by the perceived imminence of a capitalist crisis, a practice that restricted recruitment. Although he described himself variously as a 'journalist' or 'commercial agent', from the late 1940s Healy was a full-time politician, paid by his members and the SWP. Directing operations from his home at 77 Sternhold Avenue, Streatham, he was immersed not only in the business and political affairs of the Club, but also in a wide range of time-consuming labour movement activities. He was Chair of the Streatham constituency party and his ward party, the constituency's election agent in 1950 and 1951, a council candidate and a delegate to the party conference in 1949-51, as well as campaigning for adoption as a parliamentary candidate and playing an organisational role in the AEU. However in the spring of 1953 he was forced with the utmost reluctance to turn his attention to wider political horizons.
From 1950 both Healy and Cannon had accepted almost without question Pablo's theorising of a coming war between the two camps, a war that, in conjunction with growing radicalism in the colonial world, would erupt into revolutions led by the Stalinist parties. They would produce societies in transition from capitalism to socialism, lasting for several centuries. At the World Congress of the Fourth International in August 1951, Healy had voted for this perspective. Given the strength of the Labour Party in Britain he had not had to confront its practical, for some unpalatable, implications: in countries with strong Communist parties, Trotskyists should enter them. When in 1952 Pablo had suspended the leadership of the French section for refusing to endorse this tactic, he had had Healy's active support. Problems had only arisen when a group of Pablo's American supporters, led by Bert Cochran and George Clarke, had taken issue with Cannon in the SWP.
Since the war, Healy had happily served two masters, Cannon and Pablo, while retaining practical autonomy on his own turf. Until 1953 he had been a Pabloite. Now he was faced with an unpleasant choice. Impelled by organisational considerations, Cannon confronted Pabloism which – he suddenly discovered – undermined the raison d'être for Trotskyist parties, except as cheerleaders for hitherto counter-revolutionary Stalinism. Under pressure Healy attempted prevarication and conciliation, registering no objections to Pablo's document, The Rise and Fall of Stalinism, despite an understanding with the Americans that he would do so. He wanted to avoid a split. He openly sided with the SWP only when Pablo's determination and sponsorship of an alternative leadership around Lawrence became threatening. His attitude towards Pablo passed in a few weeks from respect and liking to 'physical revulsion'. His more intense and longstanding political, financial and personal dependence on Cannon won the day.
A messy factional fight followed. Lawrence and his supporters were expelled from the Club. Healy, who wanted an emergency World Congress to be held, was swept along by the SWP's insistence on a split and the formation of a new International Committee of the Fourth International. Any clarification of the political issues was prevented by Healy's bitter struggle with Lawrence and Braddock over ownership of the printing and publishing operation. Healy gained control of the paper and the printing press but his victory was pyrrhic. The affair had attracted unwelcome attention and Socialist Outlook was proscribed. Bevan, seconded by Richard Crossman, unsuccessfully moved the reference back of this decision at the Labour Party National Executive in July 1954. Despite widespread support from the Labour left and protests from 119 constituency parties, it ceased publication after the reference back of the Executive's decision – moved with passion by Jennie Lee – was defeated by 4,474,000 votes to 1,596,000 at the 1954 Labour Party conference. The consequent expulsions from the party were largely limited to London. But divested of half its members, who had gone with Pablo, the Club was reduced to competing with Lawrence in writing for the Tribune and selling it.
Healy's one success in this barren period lay in the trade-union field. Around 1950 the Club recruited a number of influential dockers in London and Merseyside, and established a rank-and-file paper, The Portworkers' Clarion. Resentment against the Transport and General Workers Union and a desire to break away from it was strong in the Northern ports. Healy now provided leadership and organisation for the initiatives on Humberside and Merseyside, which resulted in thousands of dockers leaving the TGWU in the autumn of 1954 to join the National Amalgamated Stevedores and Dockers. His relations with the far from radical NASD leaders under Dickie Barratt were close and he even spoke at mass meetings of 'the blue union'. His ambition to take the struggle of Bevanism into the industrial wing of the movement – the TGWU leaders under Arthur Deakin were amongst the Labour Party left's most strident opponents – ignored hard facts, particularly the power that the TGWU wielded in the TUC and the latter's visceral opposition to breakaways. The Trotskyists gained important positions in the NASD in Birkenhead, Liverpool and Manchester and played a significant role in developing the union's strategy. But the result was a debacle. After the defeat of the NASD's strike for recognition in May 1955, the union's leaders broke with Healy. They subsequently attempted to return their new recruits to the TGWU, which even before the election of Frank Cousins as General Secretary in May 1956 was moving to the left. Among the results of the exercise were non-unionism on Merseyside, protracted litigation and the weakening of Healy's base in the ports.
In contrast, the events of 1956, Khrushchev's Secret Speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Russian Communist Party, the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and the consequent turmoil in the CPGB marked Healy's finest hour. Backed by a new printing press and plates of Trotsky's writings provided by the SWP, Healy travelled the country to hold intense and often convincing discussions with ex-CPGBers and dissident members. An early and indispensable collaborator was Peter Fryer, who had been the Daily Worker's correspondent in Budapest. Fryer typified many of those who, disillusioned with Stalinism, had turned to the Trotskyists in search of a purer Leninism.
Together with Fryer, Healy intervened in the April 1957 CPGB Special Congress, producing a daily bulletin that became the Newsletter, edited by Fryer. It had a significant influence in the socialist forums that had been organised to discuss the crisis of 'official communism'. For many, Healy's critique of Stalinism was compelling. His attitude at that time was restrained, constructive, almost exemplary: 'This is the season for reading books, not burning them... Let us have no label-sticking in advance... Let us get rid of demagogy. Don't put anybody on a pedestal. Read and study. Examine every point of view.' (Newsletter, 10 May 1957) The Labour Review, which Healy had produced infrequently in the early 1950s, was relaunched as a discussion journal and the result in terms of recruitment was impressive. Some 200 former CPGB members replenished the ranks of the Group, as the entrist organisation was now called.
It could not last, and Healy's fundamentalism and impatience soon reasserted itself. The decline of Bevanism, the sobering aftermath of Labour's second successive general election reverse in 1955 and the advent of Gaitskell as party leader intensified the unfavourable climate for Trotskyist permeation of the Labour left. On the other hand, a small increase in industrial action affirmed for Healy the possibility of economic cataclysm and revolution. The 1958 strike at the Shell-Mex site on London's South Bank, in which the Group's leading trade unionist, the experienced ex-CPGB activist Brian Behan, played a central role, paved the way for an impressive national rank-and-file conference, with some 500 delegates. Healy's new delusions of grandeur were accompanied by demands from former CPGB militants for an open party that could relate directly to union activists, and by increased pressure from the Labour Party, with calls for the National Executive to investigate Healy's activities in Streatham.
In February 1959 he formed the Socialist Labour League (SLL), an open organisation that grandiosely demanded the right to affiliate to the Labour Party. The consequences were predictable. The SLL and its newly-adopted paper, the Newsletter, were proscribed by the Labour Party Executive and experienced Trotskyists who had spent a decade building a presence in the Labour Party were unceremoniously bundled out. When the Streatham party refused to exclude Healy it was dissolved and reorganised. He received the news of his expulsion in a personal letter from Labour's General Secretary, Morgan Phillips, in late 1959.
Healy railed against the Labour Party's lack of democracy and its intolerance. Inside the SLL he replicated the expulsions. A dogmatist who was incapable of sustained, creative political thinking, he was now faced with people with minds of their own. While he sometimes showed surprising awareness of his own shortcomings as a political thinker and his reliance on others for political ideas – for many years he continued to take advice from his erstwhile bitter antagonist, Jock Haston – he was not prepared to allow parvenus to challenge his hard-won grip on the organisation. When challenged his vulnerability made him go for the jugular. If the primitive politics of eternal crisis could not ensure domination, Healy could draw on the administrative methods and personal manoeuvrings that were by now second nature to him. Between 1959 and 1961 Fryer, the translator and historian Brian Pearce, 'the Stamford Faction' which included CND pioneer Peter Cadogan, Ken Coates, the educationalist John Daniels, the faction led by Brian Behan incongruously supported by the philosopher Alasdair McIntyre, the group around the old Club member Bob Pennington and the brain surgeon Chris Pallis were all expelled.
The SLL emerged as a sect in which Healy was ascendant. Peter Fryer observed at the time that the SLL demonstrated 'the rule of a clique, the General Secretary's personal clique'. He noted that Healy 'will not tolerate free discussion any more than John Gollan'. He remarked on Healy's growing obsession with infiltration by the security services, which was used to justify his personal control and methods and was bred of lack of political confidence, and on his slandering and attempts to isolate those whom he saw as a threat: 'I have enough on Pennington to get him sent down for seven years... [He] could be a police agent... Behan is a primitive Irish peasant... he is trying to take over... A is quite mad – he beats his wife.' (Fryer, 1959, 11-12) Celia Behan criticised Healy's ownership of the SLL's assets and documented the growth of spy mania, threats of physical assault and Healy's rages. There was 'a whole hour during which Cde Healy shouted and raved... he kicked the wall and banged on it with his fist. He said I had no right to criticise him, that he had been 30 years in the movement.' (Behan, 1960, 9)
In his relations with his members, Healy was capable of blending insight and understanding with bullying and intimidation. He was capable of circumscribing his crisis-mongering, as he did in his fight with Behan. There were minor achievements. The rank-and-file conference was followed by a National Assembly of Labour, which was less successful but still attracted prominent militants. Healy organised opposition to racist attacks on black workers in London and recruited a small group of Nigerians and black steelworkers. Initially he was able to take advantage of the CPGB's opposition to unilateralism and the resolution on nuclear disarmament moved by Vivienne Mendelson at the 1957 conference, which had galvanised debate in the Labour Party, although the energy with which supporters sloganised 'Ban the Bomb! Black the Bases' was handicapped by Healy's critical support of the Russian 'Workers' Bomb'.
In essence the theoretically impoverished SLL became the bearer of a messianic politics of anger and consolation in the face of revitalised capitalism, improved living standards, a debilitated left and the ideological weakness of orthodox Trotskyism. The fundamental problem that produced sectarianism and isolation was the contradiction between capitalist stability and active revolutionary politics. In boom-time Britain the SLL was sustained by the unevenness of prosperity, the lure that 'apocalypse tomorrow' briefly held for a small minority of young people, hyperactivity, temporary and relatively successful projects, the demonising of all competing left-wing tendencies, and the dependency on Healy of key activists who identified him as the only person capable of organising the members, raising funds and keeping the operation afloat. However, some claimed that 'Healy's heart... is not in socialism at all; but in his print-shop which he loves as a peasant lusts for land' (Cadogan, 1960).
In the early 1960s his main concerns were work with young people and changing international alignments. The SLL's membership, recorded as 600 at its foundation, had quickly halved. The launch of the resurrected Labour Party youth section changed matters. Healy's supporters in the Labour Party Young Socialists (LPYS), organised around the paper Keep Left, brought a stream of recruits into the League. By 1963 the SLL controlled the LPYS Executive and its membership was heading towards the thousand mark. The new members were largely inexperienced workers who had been attracted to Keep Left by its socials, dances, football matches and demonstrations, its doomsday economics and its raw, rebellious élan. As the Labour leadership took counter-measures, Healy repeated his experience with the adult party, pulling out his supporters and establishing his own Young Socialists.
This final withdrawal from the Labour Party bolstered the SLL's world of toy-town Bolshevism and its burn-out routines of countless meetings, serial demonstrations, relentless paper selling, remorseless recruitment targets and revivalist summer camps. The stern prohibition on joint initiatives, even fraternisation, with other political groups to avoid 'contamination' strengthened the SLL's isolation from working-class institutions. This was reinforced by growing international seclusion. Since 1953 the International Committee of the Fourth International had marked time. There had been only one World Congress, held in Leeds in 1958. The approach had essentially been one of federalism and peaceful coexistence. Initially this had suited Healy and Cannon, as well as the French leader, Pierre Lambert: it had left each of them relatively unimpeded in their own national zone of influence. When the Committee had made some progress, as in Latin America, Healy had demonstrated little interest, failing to reply to correspondence or correctly remembering the names of Trotskyist caudillos in the faraway Andes.
Despite his persistent protestations of internationalism, Healy was politically Anglocentric and personally had little time for foreigners. But in New York internationalism was stirring. The discussions on unity between the Mandel-Pablo Fourth International and the SWP posed a new, if small, threat to his control of British Trotskyism. Disdaining unity with the tiny group of British 'Pabloites' and conquering his personal anxiety about a breach with the Americans, he did his best to derail the move for reconciliation. When the two organisations came together in 1963 to form the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, Healy was left out in the cold, with only the French and Hungarian sections for comfort. He demonised the new International and his imprecations against 'Pabloite revisionism' intensified as the years went by. Cannon washed his hands of Healy, and Healy became an even more coarse caricature of Cannon.
There were two consolations: a new headquarters in Clapham High Street and a new printing plant. The Healy who confronted the Wilson administration with the advice to 'bring down the Labour government' was becoming a distinctive, even mythic figure, familiar – if only by repute – to generations of labour movement activists. Five foot five inches tall, squat, bald and with the countenance and temperament of a bulldog, he glared suspiciously at a hostile world through black-rimmed glasses with what Brian Behan termed 'the little sore eyes of a new-born pig'. He worked an 18-hour day and travelled over 1000 miles a week to supervise all aspects of his organisation. He devoured cakes and spy stories and his consumption of drink increased. Betty Healy, fully engaged in bringing up two children, was no longer politically active and the marriage was not happy. These years of the Young Socialists saw the growth of the sexual predatoriness that would finally bring about his downfall.
Politically, Healy produced old wine in new bottles. He fed his members on a diet of dogma – the SLL embodied the one true faith. As the economic boom peaked, Healy saw only impending slump, the death of reformism and the ripening of a pre-revolutionary situation. The SLL put forward the slogan, 'Make the left MPs fight!', but it had nobody left in the Labour Party to attempt the task. It boycotted the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign once it was clear that it would not be allowed to use it simply as a vehicle to denounce Stalinism. It distributed a leaflet at the October 1968 Grosvenor Square demonstration, explaining 'Why the Socialist Labour League is not marching'. Walled off from new developments, the SLL ended the decade in internal triumph and splendid isolation. In 1969 the Workers Press, 'the world's first Trotskyist daily paper', was unveiled. The SLL's split with its French co-thinkers in 1971 – overtly over the revolutionary programme, the need to rebuild the Fourth International and the role of the Trotskyists in Bolivia, but fundamentally over the refusal by Healy and Lambert to qualify their autonomy – reduced Healy's International Committee to a rump.
But he still had what were, or at least in the world of small-group politics, important successes. These were achieved by painstaking personal investment and brought in recruits who related to the General Secretary rather than the SLL. From 1967 he built a showcase industrial branch in the Cowley Assembly Plant of the British Motor Corporation (later British Leyland) in Oxford. This was based on a group of leading convenors and shop stewards politically nurtured by Healy and constituted an important bridgehead into industrial struggles. The following year the classes he conducted for actors, writers, producers and directors began to bear fruit. The classes were a tribute to Healy's skills as propagandist, showman and exploiter of middle-class insecurities, and produced a flow of recruits and hard cash, plus entrée into Equity and the Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians. Encouraged by the writer Jim Allen, a Club member in the 1950s, significant figures in the entertainment industry, including Stuart Hood, Tony Garnett, Ken Loach, David Mercer, Frances De La Tour and Corin Redgrave, entered the orbit of Healyism.
As Trotsky remarked, a clock that has stopped is still right twice a day. The waning of the economic boom and growing militancy in Britain suggested that at long last, at the eleventh hour, a recalcitrant world and its workers were aligning themselves with Healy's persistent vision. Inspired by the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement, international monetary problems and the big strikes of 1972, in November 1973 Healy transformed the SLL into the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP). For its leaders, the struggle for power now seemed to be firmly on the agenda. But the new organisation was far from a party. Although the WRP claimed 7000 adherents, the majority were paper members, activated only for the rallies, pageants and pop concerts that became a hallmark of the organisation. The life of real activists was dominated by the incessant demands of selling the daily paper, signing up new recruits, raising cash and organising party events. The WRP's leverage in the labour movement was negligible. Its lack of political influence was illustrated by the derisory votes accorded its candidates in the 1974 and 1979 general elections. Its membership was increasingly middle class, as personified by the actress Vanessa Redgrave, who joined the party in 1973 and attributed all her subsequent political and artistic growth to Healy's influence.
The WRP's trade-union arm, the All Trade Unions Alliance, was little more than a party front. Healy's national following in the unions was marginal, albeit highly visible and strident. In 1974 the WRP received a blow from which it never recovered when the Oxford car-workers, led by Alan Thornett, were expelled. In this dispute the issue of the WRP's undemocratic internal regime was intertwined with criticism of the consequences of Healy's intoxication with the oil crisis and his prognostication of a military dictatorship or 'socialism now'. Finding this approach impossible to apply in the unions, the opposition urged a return to the more traditional fundamentalism of Trotsky's 1938 transitional programme and a critical orientation towards workers' support for a Labour government. The expulsion of more than 200 active members confirmed the nature of Healy's tyrannical control. His use of violence, openly discussed on the left since the beating of an American SWP supporter, Ernie Tate, in 1966, an incident that finally snapped Isaac Deutscher's always limited toleration of Healy, was now confirmed in relation to his own members.
Healy's talents, organisational dynamism, oratory, ability to convince young people and dispense to his members both the brutal and the benign, had been the keys to his political control of his party. But he was now over 60 years of age and his powers were declining. His competitors, the International Socialists and the Militant Group, were surpassing him. Financial pressures were intensifying. As his energy dissipated he increasingly escaped into a world of gobbledygook, paranoia and political opportunism that transcended his earlier tendencies in this direction. As long ago as the 1940s, unable to answer Haston's compelling factual analysis, Healy had accused him of 'empiricism'. In the break with the French in 1971 he had conveniently insisted that the method of dialectical materialism, as opposed to some formal programme, constituted the heart of revolutionary politics. He now reinvented himself as a fully-fledged charlatan Professor of Philosophy, inducting WRP members at the party's College of Marxist Education into quack dialectics. Those who had the patience to decipher Healy's essays discovered much that was unintelligible and some that derived from Stalinist brochures on the subject, such as the Progress Publishers' Dictionary of Philosophy, which was considerably indebted for its sensible sections to Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy.
In similar fashion, Healy's earlier obsession with security – when Fryer had left the SLL, Healy had claimed he was having the ports watched – now blossomed into full-blown psychosis. In 1974 the leadership of the WRP's American satellite, the Workers League, was purged on the ground that it had been infiltrated by CIA agents. The following year Healy initiated an investigation into Security and the Fourth International. This expensive operation concluded, on the most dubious evidence, that the veteran American Trotskyist Joseph Hansen was a long-term double-agent of the FBI-CIA and GPU-KGB, and that the current leadership of the SWP was made up of agents whose controllers had been recruited by Hansen when students at Carleton College, Minnesota.
When the WRP's membership dropped to around 2000 the professionally printed Workers Press was closed down, to be replaced by the Newsline, produced by WRP members in Runcorn. But long-term solutions were necessary and Healy's eyes turned to the Middle East. In 1975-76 he established contact with the PLO and the Libyan regime of Colonel Gaddafi. Healy visited Libya, Kuwait and the Gulf states, trading financial subventions for political advocacy. An incomplete accounting showed that between 1977 and 1983 the WRP received donations totalling more than £1 million, most of it from Libya, Kuwait, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, the PLO and Iraq. Together with tribute exacted from the WRP's satellites in the International Committee, this kept Healy buoyant. The price was eulogistic political support for the despotic regimes of Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein and the Arab sheikhs.
The WRP leadership indulged in ostentatious expenditure, including the creation of an apparatus of more than 90 full-timers, lavish printing facilities, expensively produced videos, a chain of youth training centres and Healy's opulent lifestyle. Despite the WRP's disastrous election attempts, the membership was kept going on well-worn scenarios of general strikes and civil war, with the decisive choice between fascism and the WRP always lying just around the corner. Healy stepped down as General Secretary months before his sixty-fifth birthday to take charge of cadre training. He was replaced by his long-time lieutenant Mike Banda, but he still pulled the strings.
In January 1977 he achieved the remarkable feat of briefly uniting the warring tribes of Trotskyism. From all over Europe and America they gathered en masse in London unanimously to condemn Healy's campaign against Hansen and the SWP. Shrugging off opprobrium from Trotskyists from Iceland to Venezuela, as well as CLR James, Tamara Deutscher, Raya Dunayevskaya and Ken Coates, for some at least, Healy stole the show with a typically dramatic entrance, although he was refused the right to speak. In 1978 the WRP attracted further unwelcome publicity when Healy became embroiled in a libel case against the Observer, arising from revelations by the actress Irene Gorst about her treatment at the College of Marxist Education, which had prompted a police raid on the college in 1975.
By 1983 financial problems were again looming. Healy suffered a serious heart attack and his vigour was sapped. Renewed intervention in the Labour Party through support for the Labour Herald and the left-wing local government opposition to the Thatcher government achieved little. The failure of the 1984-85 miners' strike plunged the WRP into terminal crisis. For the first time in decades, organised dissatisfaction with Healy's leadership developed as part of the widespread demoralisation among the members. There was a chain reaction. Revelations surfaced of Healy's sexual abuse of at least 26 women members over a sustained period. On 19 October 1985 the 71-year-old Healy was expelled from the WRP by the unanimous vote of the Central Committee.
As the WRP fragmented and re-fragmented he spent his remaining years as the figurehead of the tiny Marxist Party established by the Redgraves. He had never been adept with a pen. Starting with the Americans George Novack and Sam Gordon in the 1950s, he had relied on ghost writers. Yet he continued to publish work on dialectics. He travelled to Greece and Spain, lecturing to a dwindling band of disciples. He also visited Russia, where he pronounced that Gorbachev's perestroika reforms were the harbinger of Trotsky's long-awaited political revolution. He died in St Thomas' Hospital, Lambeth, London on 14 December 1989.
For four decades Healy was part of the furniture on the British left. He associated with its leading figures, ranging from Konni Zilliacus and the Bevanites to Ken Livingstone, an enduring admirer. His former followers were legion, indeed they came to challenge disillusioned Communists as the biggest party of the left. A philistine whose favourite television programmes were Dynasty and Dallas, he was portrayed in plays – Laurence Olivier played John Tagg, modelled on Healy, in Trevor Griffiths' The Party at the National Theatre – and novels, for example as Frankie Hood in Tariq Ali's Redemption. He was a powerful orator, a successful organiser, an accomplished showman and, for some, a compelling socialist propagandist. He remained a primitive Marxist, schooled only in dogma, which in times of trouble, and suitably cloaked in dubious philosophical formulations, he was pragmatically prepared to discard. Although he was capable of composed, meticulous political work, as in 1956-57, sooner or later he always surrendered to his impulsive, impatient temperament, his political short-termism and his drive for organisational control. To claim that he sustained an important political tradition in difficult times is to beg the essential political question of exactly what tradition he sustained. In his long journey from Stalinism to Trotskyism to cultism he abused his limited gifts and betrayed those who placed their trust in him. He did more than anybody else in Britain to discredit Trotskyism, as an alternative to Stalinism.
Articles in Youth for Socialism, The Torch (Dublin), Socialist Appeal, Socialist Outlook, Tribune and Newsletter
Pamphlets include The Way to Socialism in Britain (1952), Hands Off the Arab People (1956), Stop the Tory War – Throw Them Out (1956), Stalinism Unmasked: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Hungary (1957), Workers' Defence Squads for Notting Hill (1958), Our Answer to the Witch-Hunt and Our Policy For Labour (1959), After Scarborough, The Battle Begins (1960), Plan to Beat the Tories (1961), Problems of the Fourth International (1966), No Laws Against Trade Unions (1967), Studies in Dialectical Materialism (1982), Leninism 58 Years On (1982) and Materialist Dialectics and the Political Revolution (1990)
I: MSS
Deane Papers, Harber Papers, Purdie Papers, Tarbuck Papers, MRC, University of Warwick
Haston Papers, Harber Papers, University of Hull
Communist Party Archive, NMLH
P Fryer, 'An Open Letter to Members of the SLL', Internal Bulletin of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International, December 1959
C Behan, 'Appeal Against Suspension From the Socialist Labour League', SLL Internal Bulletin, 5 June 1960
Internal Bulletins of the Group, SLL and WRP, 1957-84 (in author's possession)
T Polan, 'The SLL: An Autopsy', International Socialists internal document, 1970 (mimeo in author's possession)
II: Books and Articles
Solidarity, By Their Words Ye Shall Know Them (1960)
P Cadogan, 'Has the Socialist Labour League a Future?', Socialist Leader, 25 January 1960
Anonymous, 'The Disunity of Theory and Practice: The Trotskyist Movement in Britain since 1945', nd, c1964, reprinted in Revolutionary History, 6, 2/3 (Summer 1996)
B Behan, With Breast Expanded (1964)
E Mandel, Marxism vs Ultra-Leftism (1967)
T Whelan, The Credibility Gap: The Politics of the SLL (1970)
C Slaughter (ed), Trotskyism Versus Revisionism, six volumes (1974-75)
SWP (USA), International Secretariat Documents, 1951-1954, four volumes (New York, 1974)
T Griffiths, The Party (1974)
The Battle for Trotskyism: Documents of the Opposition Expelled from the Workers Revolutionary Party (1974)
D Widgery, The Left in Britain, 1956-1968 (Harmondsworth, 1976)
SWP (USA), Healy's Big Lie: The Slander Campaign Against Joseph Hansen, George Novack and the Fourth International (New York, 1976)
M Jenkins, Bevanism: Labour's High Tide (Nottingham, 1979)
WRP, Security and the Fourth International, Volume One: How the GPU Murdered Trotsky (1981)
J Callaghan, British Trotskyism: Theory and Practice (Oxford, 1984)
S Bornstein and A Richardson, Against the Stream: A History of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain, 1924-1938 (1986)
S Bornstein and A Richardson, War and the International: A History of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain, 1937-1949 (1986)
A Thornett, From Militancy to Marxism (1987)
E Shaw, Discipline and Discord in the Labour Party (Manchester, 1988)
T Ali, Redemption (1990)
D North, Gerry Healy and His Place in the Fourth International (Detroit, 1991)
B Pitt, 'The Rise and Fall of Gerry Healy', Workers News, series (1990-91)
V Redgrave, Vanessa Redgrave: An Autobiography (1991)
H Ratner, Reluctant Revolutionary: Memoirs of a Trotskyist, 1936-1960 (1994)
T Wohlforth, The Prophet's Children: Travels on the American Left (New Jersey, 1994)
C Lotz and A Feldman, Gerry Healy: A Revolutionary Life (1994)
T Brotherstone and G Pilling (eds), History, Economic History and the Future of Marxism: Essays in Memory of Tom Kemp (1996)
B Hunter, Lifelong Apprenticeship: The Life and Times of a Revolutionary (1997)
J McIlroy, 'Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned: The Trotskyists and the Trade Unions', in J McIlroy, N Fishman and A Campbell (eds), British Trade Unions and Industrial Politics: The High Tide of Trade Unionism, 1964-79 (Aldershot, 1999)
Other information and papers from J Archer, B Behan, B Buitekant, D Gibson, B Hunter, A Jennings, B Pitt
IV: Obituaries
Guardian, 18, 22, 28, 30 December 1989
Daily Telegraph, 19 December 1989
Independent, 21 December 1989
The Times, 23 December 1989
Writers Index
Arthur Essex Edgeworth Reade (1902-1971): Communist, Trotskyist, Labour Party Candidate, National Labour Activis by John McIlroy
Arthur Essex Edgeworth Reade (1902-1971): Communist, Trotskyist, Labour Party Candidate, National Labour Activist
Source: Keith Gilbert and David Howell (eds), Dictionary of Labour Biography, Volume 11, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2003, copyright © Professor John McIlroy. Reproduced here with the permission of Professor John McIlroy. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
Arthur Reade was born at 24 Bolton Street, Piccadilly, London, on 22 January 1902. His father, Essex Reade – an international banker of independent means – came from an Anglo-Irish background and had strong professional connections with Latin America. Reade's mother, Sheelah Chichester, was a granddaughter of the Earl of Galloway. Reade's early life was spent in London and at two summer residences: Wrotham Rectory in Kent and a house near Shillingstone in Dorset. After his father's death in 1908 he travelled in Europe with his mother and sometimes stayed with his aunts in Suffolk. He attended Gibbs Preparatory School in Sloane Street, London, and Stonehouse Preparatory School in Broadstairs, Kent. In 1915, when he was 13 years old, he was sent to Eton, where at the end of the war he encountered 'the queer revolutionary feeling of the time' recorded by his contemporary, George Orwell, who remembered 'it was all the fashion to be a Bolshie as people then called it'. He experienced a range of socialist ideas through the radical Eton Political Society, fostered by the young Earl De La Warr (Orwell, 1937, 129-30; Smith, 1969, 137-39).
Reade's subsequent studies at the University of Strasbourg in 1919-20 brought him into contact with the revolutionary unrest that had swept through Germany to Alsace-Lorraine. At that time he took his first steps in journalism with articles for the Daily Mail. On his return to London, attendance at labour movement meetings reinforced his growing commitment to the left, and when he went up to Worcester College, Oxford, in October 1920 to study history he already regarded himself as a socialist. With the zeal of the neophyte, he was soon playing a prominent part in the University Labour Club and the smaller, more radical Socialist Society. By January 1921 he was editor of a journal, The New Oxford, which was associated with the Labour Club. He was also moving from adherence to the Independent Labour Party (ILP) towards identification with direct action and the politics of the infant Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB).
Reade was always a rebel. His new allegiance was sustained by the intense social conflicts in Britain after the cataclysm of 1914-18, by the extremes of affluence and oppression he witnessed in London and Suffolk, by the romance of the Russian Revolution and by his fierce opposition to Britain's role in Ireland. He was influenced by the Communists he met through the University Socialist Federation (USF), which had come under the control of the CPGB through the efforts of Rajani and Clemens Palme Dutt and of Mary Moorhouse – former Guild Socialist, friend of Ellen Wilkinson and Comintern courier. He was particularly close to Charles Gray, the brilliantly precocious Secretary of the Oxford Socialist Society who was studying history at Balliol and who had been influenced by his predecessor as Brackenbury Scholar at the college, the young Communist Andrew Rothstein. Reade also worked with two Cambridge undergraduates and lifelong members of the CPGB: Allen Hutt and Maurice Dobb, to whose journal, Youth, he contributed a regular 'Oxford Letter'.
Black Friday (15 April 1921, when the leaders of the railway and transport unions retreated from industrial action in support of their partners in the Triple Alliance – the locked-out miners) was a key event in Reade's conversion to Communism. Without consulting his comrades in the Labour Club, he put together an issue of The New Oxford that in rich invective attacked the trade-union and Labour Party leaders for their role in Black Friday and asserted that Communism offered the only viable future for British workers. In the consequent furore Reade resigned the editorship and proclaimed his intention to produce a Communist journal for students that would completely eclipse The New Oxford.
The Free Oxford burst like a firecracker over the university in the long, hot summer of 1921. Reade's rustication for failing his exams simply provided him with more time to devote to the journal. Its six issues, which ran into 1922, took up university matters and scathingly criticised the administration of the Vice-Chancellor, Lewis Richard Farnell, an unbending Victorian who had been in Oxford since the 1870s, latterly as Rector of Exeter College. There were poems and criticism from the future CPGB member Edgell Rickword, the Queens College student and published novelist Louis Golding, and the future novelists and short-story writers Richard Hughes and AE Coppard. The political coverage was largely 'party line', with contributions from two ornaments of the Communist International – Karl Radek and Eugen Varga – and the leader of the Red International of Trade Unions, Alexander Lozovsky. Nearer home, there were controversial articles by the socialist clergyman Conrad Noel and the ethical socialist Edward Carpenter, as well as pugnacious debates with the former Liberal and soon to be Labour MP Arthur Ponsonby, and the partisan of the Russian revolution Gerald Gould of the Daily Herald.
The Free Oxford had an instantaneous and extensive impact. It was sold in all British universities and on the continent, and even reached the United States. Reade – a striking figure, powerfully built, six feet three inches tall and with a luxuriant red beard and a strong attachment to the corduroy trousers, clay pipes and heavy beer drinking that were de rigueur for 1920s Bohemians – was lionised by the small university left. Like several of his Eton and Oxford contemporaries, he was gay in his youth. He eagerly embraced an active social life and delighted in disregarding convention. He was criticised and lampooned in the mainstream student journals, Cherwell and Isis. He was also under police surveillance as a dangerous revolutionary and soon attracted the hostile attention of the Vice-Chancellor. Farnell opposed all student political activities, but considered socialism to be particularly abhorrent and Bolshevism quite beyond the pale. He had recently banned Labour Club meetings that were to be addressed by George Lansbury and Bertrand Russell. Appalled by The Free Oxford's advocacy of 'Russian Bolshevism, the Red Terror, obscene licentiousness and the bitterest class hatred... gross insults against the authorities', Farnell bludgeoned the Worcester College dons into submission (Farnell, 1934, 297). Reade was sent down from the university in December 1921 while Gray, who received greater support from his tutors at Balliol, was rusticated for two terms.
Partly because of Reade's flair and his extensive press contacts, the expulsion stimulated a media storm. The Daily Herald declared Oxford 'home of the inhumanities'; for the Daily Express Farnell was a 'modern Canute'; for the Saturday Review he was the architect of 'a modern inquisition'; and for the Daily News he was the perpetrator of 'an academical pogrom'. Publications as different as the Spectator and the Manchester Guardian followed the Evening Standard in regretting the Vice-Chancellor's overreaction to 'merely youthful exuberance', praising Reade as 'a young man not yet 21, willing to undergo any sacrifice for his principles' (Manchester Guardian, 18 and 24 January 1922).
A statement by the officers of the Oxford Union and three of the four political societies condemned Farnell and attracted wide publicity. The Chancellor of the university, Lord Curzon, wrote to The Times to disavow any responsibility. Reade received messages of support from the CPGB leader Arthur MacManus, and from Harry Pollitt, although the proletarian party itself, which was somewhat uneasy about such a bourgeois issue, did little openly to campaign on the question. The tempest quickly subsided and 19-year-old Reade was left to pick up the pieces.
He spent the next year working as a freelance journalist, writing poems – one appeared in Oxford Poetry 1922 – and an unpublished novel, studying Marxism and attempting unsuccessfully to resurrect The Free Oxford and pay off its debts. Inside the party he was a junior member of Palme Dutt's faction, which, disaffected with the existing leadership, espoused a more thoroughgoing Bolshevisation of the CPGB. As an aide-de-camp of the party's leading intellectual, Reade was involved in a wide range of party work. In 1923 he shared in the Herculean and unpaid labours on the party paper, the Workers Weekly, and Dutt's Labour Monthly, which were soon to break his mentor's health. There is no mention of Reade in the official party history, Forging The Weapon: The Struggle of the 'Labour Monthly', 1921-1941, but it is clear from the papers of Robin Page Arnot (who together with Dutt and the foreign editor of the Daily Herald, WN Ewer, shared control of the Monthly), from the memories of the London party activist Arthur Siffleet who recalled Reade as Dutt's 'right-hand man', and from the Young Communist League leader Harry Wicks that Reade succeeded Joan Beauchamp as the journal's business manager in early 1924. By that time he was a member of the party's London District Committee and served as its training officer, running classes across the South-East.
Reade had always intensely admired Trotsky as a man of action and military genius, a coruscating polemicist and a brutal political thinker. Of course this was far from unusual in the young CPGB, particularly among youths and intellectuals. 'Trotsky', Reade had remarked in The Free Oxford, 'whether as leader of the Red Armies or as the brilliant and biting controversialist, gives the revolution its inspiration.' He had mused with awe: 'Perhaps our imagination is dazzled by the grandeur of Trotsky's attitude.' (The Free Oxford, 26 November 1921, 4) Crucially he was no conformist, and unlike many in the CPGB he read widely, scouring not only the official Communist press but also socialist journals from France, Germany and the United States. In this context he studied the controversy over the Left Opposition, which developed in Russia from late 1923.
Reade tested out his ideas in classes he conducted for the Young Communist League (YCL). He also acquired background information from a first-hand source. A chance encounter with Andreychine – a supporter of the Russian opposition who worked in the Soviet delegation in London, which was headed by Trotsky's close friend, the Bulgarian Bolshevik Christian Rakovsky – led to Reade being briefed in depth on the political situation in Russia. In November 1924, on instructions from the International and on the basis of a statement drafted by its representatives in London, the CPGB leadership condemned unread Trotsky's preface to his 1917, The Lessons of October, which was seen as reopening the controversy. They went on to declare their 'implicit faith' in the International and the Russian party leadership. Reade came out as their solitary vocal opponent.
Others were uneasy. The London District Committee could not see the need for urgency and objected to the Political Bureau and the Party Council condemning Trotsky before more information was available and the matter had been discussed in the districts. At the London Aggregate called in response to this mild dissension, a motion to adjourn until more information was available was defeated by the relatively narrow margin of 81 votes to 65. Only Reade spoke out. In the face of the thunder of the party's big guns – JT Murphy, Andrew Rothstein and Page Arnot – he moved an amendment to the leadership resolution. In this Reade not only endorsed the London District's criticism of the Party Council's condemnation of Trotsky on the basis of inadequate information, but also went much further: he expressed emphatic solidarity with the Left Opposition in their fight in the Russian party against bureaucracy, as well as congratulating their supporters in the French, German and other parties. The Russian leaders and the International, he argued with ardour, had suppressed Trotsky's arguments while Lenin's dying criticism of the leadership troika – Kamenev, Zinoviev and Stalin – had vindicated Trotsky's blistering aspersions on their political qualities. Reade justified his position with lengthy quotations from the international socialist press and from Lenin's testament. However the CPGB's almost uniform adherence to orthodoxy – a tendency that already distinguished it from Communist parties in many other countries – won out. Reade's resolution was heavily defeated, attracting on different estimates 10 or 15 votes.
Reade immediately became persona non grata with the party leadership. While those who had been audacious enough to request more information attracted opprobrium – 'they have a terrible deal to learn before they become real Communists' (Workers' Weekly, 23 January 1925) – Reade was singled out for denouncement. He was dismissed as a romantic and a Bohemian; he had failed to overcome his Eton and Oxford background and had demonstrated his 'anti-party attitude' by reading Lenin's testament. He was removed from the District Committee by the Political Bureau and pressure was put on branches that asked him to speak. He was also refused permission to visit Russia and subjected to petty harassment. In April 1925 his appeal to the Control Commission was rejected in a report that also questioned whether he should be allowed to remain in the party. That same month he was dismissed from his post on the Labour Monthly. He was barely 23 years of age but his career in the CPGB was over. There was negligible support for his views in the party and at its 1925 Congress Trotskyism was irrevocably pronounced a political deviation and disease.
Reade was the first British Communist to call himself 'a Trotskyist' when forcefully dissociating himself from those he regarded as Trotsky's non-Communist admirers – such as Morgan Philips Price, Raymond Postgate and Frank Horrabin – around the Plebs journal and Lansbury's Labour Weekly (Plebs, 17, 8 August 1925). Apart from arguing his case inside the CPGB, he made no attempt to develop an organised opposition, which in the circumstances would almost certainly have been an impossible task. His influence endured only through the youthful party activist and future Trotskyist Harry Wicks, who attended his classes and never forgot his arguments. Although he remained a party member until 1928, Reade's Bohemian side reasserted itself. He spent much of the next three years travelling in the Balkans and Greece with Charles Gray, living in Athens with Evelyn Waugh's 'friend of the heart' Alastair Graham, developing his interest in Hellenism and Greek politics and discussing Trotskyism with the Russian consul in Athens. Reade's biography of the Greek political titan Venizelos was almost completed, but like so much of his writing it was never published. The interest in Albanian history and politics that his travels stimulated in him was consummated only in articles for the Daily Mail.
Reade's inheritance, finally acquired after litigation against his mother, was quickly dissipated on travel, stock exchange speculation and an exuberant social life, whereupon he returned to the path of respectability. In 1928 he joined the Labour Party, where the MacDonald leadership smiled on new middle-class recruits. Reinvented in the Douglas Fairbanks / Oswald Mosley mould and active in the ILP, he was selected to fight the Abingdon division of North Berkshire in the 1929 general election. This was a scattered farming constituency and Conservative-held seat. On what was for Labour tough terrain, Reade mounted an imaginative and popular challenge under the banner 'Reade for Merry England'. In the first fortnight of his campaign he spoke at 63 meetings, setting up his platform in towns on market days or simply motoring up to village greens and orating from the wingboards of his car. The Reading Mercury noted that 'Mr Reade has a pleasing, far-reaching voice and has attracted good audiences', while the North Berks Herald reported that, 'All the candidates found it difficult to get a hearing with perhaps the exception of Mr Reade.' (Reading Mercury, 18 May 1929; North Berks Herald, 31 May 1929) He expounded the ILP's plans for the nationalisation of mines and better old-age pensions, and advocated increased government support for farmers, guaranteed prices and better wages for farm labourers. The old Reade also spoke out in favour of reversing Baldwin's hostile policy towards the Soviet Union and declared his opposition to all forms of censorship. Reade was personally congratulated by MacDonald on his performance.
Abingdon, Berkshire, 1929: electorate – 36,758, turnout – 80.8 per cent
RGC Glyn (Conservative) – 14,094 (47.4 per cent)
EA Lessing (Liberal) – 11,896 (40.1 per cent)
AEE Reade (Labour) – 3,712 (12.5 per cent)
Majority – 2,198 (7.3 per cent)
Labour needed lawyers and Reade a living, so in January 1930 he joined the Inner Temple and spent the next three years reading for the Bar. However he clashed with Arthur Henderson at the 1929 Labour Party conference over the Executive's control of candidates' election addresses, and as the crisis of 1931 developed he resigned from the Labour Party. In The Fascist Movement in Britain (1972), Robert Benewick states that Reade joined Mosley's New Party, which was launched in March 1931 and initially possessed a small constituency on the Labour left. It has proved impossible to assign specific authority to this statement or to obtain corroboration for it, apart from a vague and confused reference by Reade's old pupil in the Young Communist League, Harry Wicks. On Reade's own account, he rejoined the Labour Party only to become disillusioned once more with its stance on rearmament and the threat of fascism. By 1936 the politically volatile Reade had once again defected from the Labour Party. This time he decamped to MacDonald's National Labour Group, where he was reunited with an old contemporary, the Earl De La Warr, and two figures who had influenced him in his early days at Oxford, Kenneth Lindsay, MP for Kilmarnock, and Malcolm MacDonald, MP for Ross and Cromarty and Secretary of State for the Dominions.
Having broken with MacDonald twice (in 1921 and 1931), Reade had come full circle. But his past still intruded. In 1934 Farnell published his memoirs, An Oxonian Looks Back, in which he injudiciously raked over the ashes of The Free Oxford affair. Flexing his muscles as a newly-qualified barrister, Reade issued a writ for libel. Farnell subsequently died, but the matter was settled to Reade's satisfaction by the removal of the offending passages from the text, the payment of his costs and, in response to Farnell's dislike of Germans, a small sum in damages to a charity that helped Germans to study in British universities.
Reade practised as a member of the Central Criminal Bar and subsequently the South-Eastern Circuit Bar and the London Sessions Southside. A chance encounter with Harry Wicks in Kleinfelds, a Bohemian pub in Soho frequented by a variety of Communists, fascists and the polymath magician Aleister Crowley, led to a renewed interest in Trotsky. In the face of the Moscow trials, Reade wrote supportively to The Times and The Spectator and at greater length in the National Labour press. He also provided legal advice to the Committee for the Defence of Leon Trotsky. Unlike his fellow barristers DN Pritt and Dudley Collard, who shamelessly whitewashed the show trials, he remained a critic of Stalinism. But this evolution had taken him far from Marxism. While he retained his old identification with the leader of the Russian revolution and creator of the Red Army, it was as 'an old-fashioned bourgeois believer in individual liberty' that he declared, 'I should be proud to do anything I properly can to secure justice for Leon Trotsky who I regard as the most superb warrior in the cause of the working people in modern history' (Reade to Wicks, Haston papers, University of Hull, DJH18/4, 2 December 1936).
Reade had matured as a man of the centre. Rejecting the class war, describing himself as a radical social reformer and praising the tradition of teamwork for which the National Government stood in Britain, he became Secretary of the Inns of Court branch of the National Labour Group and prospective parliamentary candidate for East Bristol – Stafford Cripps' constituency and a stronghold of the Labour left. Lacking coherence and the resources and will to build a new party, National Labour remained a small, disparate ginger group. During its brief existence its members ranged from extinct volcanoes of the left, such as the former Communist JT Walton Newbold, through experienced politicians in new incarnations, such as the pioneer of the University Socialist Federation, absolutist conscientious objector and former Chairman of the ILP, Clifford Allen, now Lord Allen of Hurtwood, to the declining but resilient Jimmy Thomas. For Reade it was another lost cause. The 1940 general election never came. National Labour was increasingly a small fig-leaf for Conservative rule, and not surprisingly it failed to survive the war.
Another curious incident occurred in 1938, when three articles signed 'Arthur Reade' appeared in the British Union Quarterly, a journal of the British Union of Fascists. Attributed to an Englishman resident in Italy, they criticised the dark designs of international finance, praised Nordic racial consciousness, depicted communism as a Jewish creation and sought to appropriate William Morris for national socialism. As Reade was in England at that time and was relatively prominent as a National Labour candidate, writing in its press and signing articles and documents 'Arthur EE Reade', it is unlikely that he authored these pieces, particularly in light of the views expressed. Nonetheless this matter, as with so much about Reade, is intriguing. His restlessness and appetite for adventure certainly remained unimpaired. Agitated by Munich, he joined the Officers' Emergency Reserve. When he was not called up he enlisted in the army in spring 1940 and was soon promoted to sergeant. A year later, after much string-pulling and circumvention of his MI5 file, he joined the intelligence services. He was appointed to the infant, unorthodox Special Operations Executive (SOE) in the Mediterranean and eventually became head of administration. Caught up in the Byzantine politics of the Rustum Buildings (the SOE headquarters in Cairo), he fell foul of the notorious Brigadier Mervyn Keble, who designated his vendetta 'Operation Oxford'.
Quite improbably, for he was over 40, a poor swimmer and had no experience of marine sabotage, and moreover knew the true identity of most active SOE agents, Reade was chosen by Keble to blow up the damaged HMS York, which the Germans were trying to refloat in Suda Bay. Reade duly landed on Axis-occupied Crete in November 1942, but his mission proved impossible. One of his experienced colleagues later recalled: 'The Brigadier must have known that the suicidal enterprise was doomed in advance to failure, so I could only conclude that he was less interested in destroying a top-priority target than in getting rid of a junior officer with whom he was on bad terms.' (Fielding, 1954, 106) Reade saw action in Crete before a furious Keble ensured he was sent back to England in disgrace. However a nine-month wrangle and protracted representations by Cripps and Philip Noel Baker MP resulted in his exoneration and promotion to major.
Reade's war ended in Germany, where he worked for the War Crimes Commission until the end of the 1940s. His rootlessness and wanderlust continued: he spent 1950-53 as a resident magistrate in Kenya and then practised as a barrister in another of the decade's trouble spots, Cyprus, before retiring to Jersey in 1963. He died on 12 December 1971, leaving an estate valued at £3417.
Reade was married twice – to fellow barrister Bettina Morel in 1934, and to Cynthia Fowler, a lecturer in English literature, in 1948. Each marriage produced three children, but one child from each marriage died young. Reade was a flamboyant, mercurial, generous, caring character whose political impulsiveness was reflected in shifting allegiances, which was more common than is often thought in the first four decades of the twentieth century. He had his share of bad luck, and political stamina was not one of his virtues; he found it difficult to reconcile his appetite for life, laughter, wine, song and convivial company with the austere demands of political discipline. He will be best remembered for the events of 1924-25. His Daniel-like, prescient indictment of the degeneration of the revolution in Russia still stands in impressive contrast to the silences, apologetics and complicity in despotism of successive generations of Communist intellectuals.
Articles in the Daily Mail, The New Oxford, The Free Oxford, Youth, Workers' Weekly, Labour Monthly, The News-Letter, The Challenger
Palme Dutt Papers, Hutt Papers, Communist Party Archive, NMLH
Page Arnot Papers, Haston Papers, University of Hull
Oxford University archives, Bodleian Library
Pollard Papers, Bodleian Library
Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI), Moscow
II: Newspapers and Periodicals
North Berks Herald, 1929
Oxford Mail, 1929
Reading Mercury, 1929
British Union Quarterly, April, July, October 1938
III: Other
AEER, 'Trotskyism, etc', Letters, Plebs, 17 (8 August 1925)
CH Gray, 'Albania and Italian Imperialism', Plebs, 19 (4 April 1927)
Labour Party, Report of the 29th Annual Conference, The Dome, Brighton, September 1929 (1929)
MP Ashley and CT Saunders, Red Oxford: A History of the Growth of Socialism in the University of Oxford (Oxford, 1933)
LR Farnell, An Oxonian Looks Back (1934)
George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)
X Fielding, Hide and Seek (1954)
B Pearce, 'Early Years of the Communist Party of Great Britain' (1958), in M Woodhouse and B Pearce, Essays on the History of Communism in Britain (1975)
B Pearce, 'The Last Years of the University Socialist Federation', Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, 4 (Spring, 1962) 45-46
G Smith (ed), The Letters of Aldous Huxley (1969)
R Benewick, The Fascist Movement in Britain (1972)
M Davie (ed), The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh (1976)
M Upham, The History of British Trotskyism to 1949, unpublished PhD dissertation (Hull, 1980)
I MacDougall (ed), Militant Miners (Edinburgh, 1981)
J Mabro, 'I Ban Everything': Free Speech and Censorship In Oxford Between the Wars (Oxford, 1985)
S Bornstein and A Richardson, Against the Stream: A History of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain 1924-1938 (1986)
A Beevor, Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (1991)
N West, Secret War: The Story of SOE (1992)
H Wicks, Keeping My Head: The Memoirs of a British Bolshevik (1992)
J McIlroy, 'New Light on Arthur Reade: Tracking Down Britain's First Trotskyist', Revolutionary History, 8:1 (2001) 2-48
J McIlroy, 'The Young Manhood of Arthur Reade', in J McIlroy, K Morgan and A Campbell (eds), Party People, Communist Lives (2001)
IV: Personal Information and Papers
Julian and Viola Reade
Keith Gildart
David Howell
Brian Pearce


삶을 풍성하게 해줄 반려동물ㆍ반려식물ㆍ반려악기 당신의 선택은?
카카오T 앱으로 김포공항 주차장 이용이 더 편해진다!
한국공항공사는 항행안전시설 성능점검 드론시스템(DIVA, Drone for ILS/VOR Analyzer)을 개발하고 지방 공항과 무선표지소에서 시범운용을 거쳐 상용화에 성공했다. 공사는 국토교통부의 '국토교통산업 경쟁력 창출을 위한 드론사업 활성화 정책'에 따라 지난 2016년부터 항행안전시설용 드론시스템 자체 개발을 추진해왔다. 항공기의 안전비행을 유도하기 위한 항행안전시설은 무선전파를 방사하기 때문에 사람이 지상에서 측정하는 기존 방식으로는 한계가 있다. 반면 드론시스템은 실제 항공기의 항로를 따라 점검하기 때문에 측정값의 정확도가 높아져 항공안전이 보다 강화되는 효과가 있다. 공사는 2022년까지 항행안전시설 성능점검 드론시스템(DIVA)을 전국 공항 및 무선표지소의 항행안전시설 운영현장에 도입할 예정이다.
Korea Airports Corporation (KAC) developed Drone for ILS/VOR Analyzer (DIVA), pilot tested it at regional airports and directional beacon sites, and succeeded at commercializing it. KAC has developed drone systems for Navigational Aid since 2016 in tandem with the "Drones Business Activation Policy for Creation of Competitiveness in the Land Transport Industry" of the Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport. Because Navigational Aid emit radio waves for the safe journey of planes, there were limitations to the existing method of a person measuring on the ground. However, drone systems check along the route of planes; thus, the measured values are more precise, and aviation safety is enhanced. The corporation plans to introduce the DIVA at all airports nationwide and at sites where they operate Navigational Aid of directional beacons.
한국공항공사는 3월 13일 중소벤처기업부가 주최하는 '2017년 주요기업 지속가능경영 실태조사'에서 8년 연속 최고등급 AAA를 받았다. 공사는 일자리창출과 사회공헌, 윤리·청렴, 환경경영을 비롯한 사회적 책임 노력에서 높은 평가를 받았다.
Korea Airports Corporation (KAC) acquired the "AAA," the highest grade, for the eighth consecutive year in a factual survey of the "2017 Korean Business Ethics IndeX Sustainability Management" (KoBEX SM) organized by the Korean Ministry of SMEs and Startups, on March 13. KAC was highly evaluated for its social responsibility efforts made, including job creation, social contribution, ethics and integrity, and eco-friendly management.
한국공항공사는 3월 9일 <열린혁신위원회>를 출범했다. 시민단체를 비롯한 각계각층의 지혜를 모아 국민의 눈높이에 맞는 공공서비스를 제공하기 위해 공사의 '열린혁신 기본계획'을 수립, 혁신과제를 발굴·추진하고 민간 협력 방안을 심의하고 조정하게 된다.
Korea Airports Corporation (KAC) launched the "Open Innovation Committee" on March 9. The committee will gather valuable opinions from various sectors of society, including civic groups, and will draw up a "basic plan for open innovation" of the corporation in order to provide better public services that are catered to people's needs. In addition, it will discover and pursue projects for innovation, as well as deliberate and adjust measures for cooperation with the civic sector.
한국공항공사는 3월 30일 환경부와 저공해자동차 보급 활성화를 위한 상호협력 업무협약을 체결했다. 이에 5월부터 저공해차량은 전국공항 주차장에서 인증스티커 없이도 주차요금을 할인받을 수 있다.
Korea Airports Corporation (KAC) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for mutual cooperation with the Korean Ministry of Environment to vitalize the supply of low-pollution vehicles, on March 30. Low-pollution vehicles can get discounts even without certifying stickers when parking at parking lots of airports nationwide from May this year.
한국공항공사는 3월 19일 2018 평창 동계올림픽 및 패럴림픽 기간 중 양양공항의 원활한 운영과 여객서비스, 올림픽 홍보 등의 공로가 있는 동무면세점, 팔방에프앤비, 롯데백화점, 한국공항 등에 특별감사패를 수여했다.
KAC gave special appreciation plaques on March 19 to the Dongmoo Duty Free Shop, Palbang F&B, Lotte Department Store, and the Korea Airport Service, among others, for their contribution to the smooth management and passenger services at Yangyang International Airport and for publicizing the Olympic Games during the PyeongChang 2018 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games.
제주국제공항은 국가안전대진단 기간인 3월 22일 공항을 이용하는 여객들에게 올바른 승강기 이용 문화를 알리고 안전사고를 미연에 방지하기 위한 대국민 승강기 안전캠페인을 실시했다. 행사에는 한국승강기안전공단, 제주도청, 제주시청 관계자 40여명도 함께 참여했다.
Jeju International Airport launched an elevator safety campaign for the public to spread a proper elevator usage culture among passengers using the airport and prevent any accidents, on March 22 during the 2018 Nationwide Safety Diagnosis period. About 40 officials from the Korea Elevator Safety Agency, the Jeju Special Self-Governing Provincial Government, and the Jeju Municipal Government also participated in the event.
대구국제공항의 해외노선이 확대됐다. 세부노선이 주 6회에서 7회로, 홍콩노선이 주 3회에서 7회로 늘어났다. 오키나와, 오사카 노선은 각각 주 4회에서 5회, 주 11회에서 14회로 늘어났으며, 신설된 블라디보스토크 노선은 주 3회 운항한다.
Daegu International Airport expanded its international routes. Its routes to Cebu and Hong Kong have increased from six to seven times and three times to seven times a week, respectively. In addition, routes to Okinawa and Osaka have increased from four to five times and 11 to 14 times a week, respectively. A new route to Vladivostok will operate three times a week.
청주국제공항은 2020년까지 약 900억 원을 투입해 국내선 여객터미널을 증축하고, 주차 빌딩과 항공유 저장소 신축, 계류장 확장 등의 사업을 추진해 여객 300만 시대를 준비한다는 계획이다.
Cheongju International Airport plans to invest about KRW 90 billion until 2020 to enlarge the terminal for domestic flight passengers, build a parking lot building and jet fuel storage, and expand the mooring lot to prepare for the era of 3 million passengers.
무안국제공항은 3월 16일 제73회 식목일을 기념해 '숲속의 전남 만들기'라는 슬로건으로 무안군 해제면 대사리 일원에서 청렴 식수 행사를 진행했다. 무안군 공무원, 지역사회단체 등 200여 명이 참여해 1,05ha에 편백 1,575여 주를 심었다.
Muan International Airport held a tree planting event on March 16 to pledge integrity and commemorate the 73rd Arbor Day in Daesa-ri, Haeje-myeon, Muan-gun, under the slogan "Making the South Jeolla Province a forest province." About 200 participants, including civil servants of Muan-gun County and representatives of local community groups, planted 1,575 cypress trees on a 1,05 ha-large area.
광주공항은 주차장 혼잡을 완화하기 위해 제1·제2주차장을 통합하고 구내 도로 일부를 주차장으로 편입해 주차공간을 확대했다. 또한 대중교통을 이용한 공항 접근성을 높이기 위해 버스 노선 증설(시내 1, 광역 1)도 추진 중이다.
Gwangju Airport integrated Parking Lots 1 and 2 and expanded the parking space by turning some road areas into a parking lot to alleviate congestion in the parking lots. In addition, it is working to add new bus lines (one intra-city and one out-of-city) to make the airport more accessible to public transportation.
광주공항은 3월 27일 광주지방경찰청, 광산경찰서와 '대테러 상황 대비 유관기관 합동훈련'을 실시했다. 이번 훈련은 초동대응과 처리단계별 조치 상황을 점검하고 경찰과의 대테러 협력체계를 강화하기 위해 추진되었다.
Gwangju Airport held a "joint training with relevant organizations to prepare against terrorism" with the Gwangju Metropolitan Police Agency and Gwangju Gwangsan Police Station on March 27. The training entailed checking the state of initial response measures and handling at each stage, as well as enhancing the system for cooperation against terrorism with the police.
3월 7일부터 8일까지 개최된 '2018년 아시아 항공교육훈련 심포지엄(AAETS)'이 성공적으로 막을 내렸다. 24개국에서 600여 명이 참가하는 등 큰 관심을 끌었으며, 심포지엄의 규모나 수준면에서 큰 호평을 받았다.
The "2018 Asian Aviation Education and Training Symposium" (AAETS) was successfully held on March 7 and 8. About 600 people from 24 countries worldwide participated in the symposium, drawing much attention. The symposium was highly praised for its scale and quality.


The Bible teaches that baptism is a symbol - an outward expression of an inward decision.
It illustrates Christ's death, burial, and resurrection.
The Bible teaches that every person who has believed in Christ should be baptized. Baptism does not save or wash away sins. It is an outward expression of your decision to accept Christ. It demonstrates that you already believe. If you have accepted Christ and never been baptized, you should choose to be baptized as soon as you can.
You will be introduced to the congregation by the pastor. A question about your profession of faith may be asked requiring your response. For example, "Do you profess Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?" At the end of your testimony the pastor will indicate for you to fold your arms and plug your nose (if you wish). For the baptism, he will say something like this: "(Your name), upon your profession of faith in Jesus Christ as your Savior and Lord we baptize you in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit." At that point you will be laid backwards into the water and then immediately brought back up out of the water.
Please wear dark, modest clothing that can get wet. Other items you will need to bring include dry clothes, a towel, and any other needed toiletries for the remaining part of the service.
Please feel free to contact the church office at 765.362.5494 if you have any remaining questions or concerns.


text:
Q: How to manage the creation and deletion of temporary files I'm adding code to a large JSP web application, integrating functionality to convert CGM files to PDFs (or PDFs to CGMs) to display to the user.
It looks like I can create the converted files and store them in the directory designated by System.getProperty("java.io.tmpdir"). How do I manage their deletion, though? The program resides on a Linux-based server. Will the OS automatically delete from /tmp or will I need to come up with functionality myself? If it's the latter scenario, what are good ways to go about doing it?
EDIT: I see I can use deleteOnExit() (relevant answer elsewhere), but I think the JVM runs more or less continuously in the background so I'm not sure if the exits would be frequent enough.
I don't think I need to cache any converted files--just convert a file anew every time it's needed.

A: You can do this
File file = File.createTempFile("base_name", ".tmp", new File(temporaryFolderPath));
file.deleteOnExit();

the file will be deleted when the virtual machine terminates
Edit:
If you want to delete it after the job is done, just do it:
File file = null;
try{
   file = File.createTempFile("webdav", ".tmp", new File(temporaryFolderPath));
   // do sth with the file
}finally{
   file.delete();
}

A: There are ways to have the JVM delete files when the JVM exits using deleteOnExit() but I think there are known memory leaks using that method.  Here is a blog explaining the leak: http://www.pongasoft.com/blog/yan/java/2011/05/17/file-dot-deleteOnExit-is-evil/
A better solution would either be to delete old files using a cron or if you know you aren't going to use the file again, why not just delete it after processing?

A: From your comment :

Also, could I just create something that checks to see if the size of my files exceeds a certain amount, and then deletes the oldest ones if that's true? Or am I overthinking it?

You could create a class that keeps track of the created files with a size limit. When the size of the created files, after creating a new one, goes over the limit, it deletes the oldest one. Beware that this may delete a file that still needs to exist even if it is the oldest one. You might need a way to know which files still need to be kept and delete only those that are not needed anymore.
You could have a timer in the class to check periodically instead of after each creation. This solution is tied to your application while using a cron isn't.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Home Reviews TCL iFFALCON F2 Smart TV Review: A Bang for Your Buck Smart...
TCL iFFALCON F2 Smart TV Review: A Bang for Your Buck Smart TV
This post has been sponsored by TCL.
Varun Mirchandani -
Last Updated: July 2, 2018 1:36 pm
A couple of months ago, if you were to be in the market looking for a TV under 20,000 INR, you'd be compromising a lot and would have to end up settling for a small screen size at HD-Ready resolution, and absolutely no smart features. While Xiaomi's offerings might have been the cause of a revolution in this price segment, bringing forth flagship features at attractive prices, it is TCL's iFFALCON range that has truly set the bar high for other manufacturers out there. Their latest product, the TCL iFFALCON F2, which is available for measly Rs. 20,000, comes feature packed with a 40-inch Full HD display along with the company's smart OS. But is the product actually as good as the company claims it to be? Let's find out as we take an in-depth look at the TCL iFFALCON F2 40-inch Smart TV:
TCL iFFALCON F2 Specifications
Before we begin, let's take a quick look at the specs of the TCL iFFALCON F2 TV:
Display Technology LED
Screen Size 99.8 cm (40 inches)
Refresh Rate 60 Hz
Item model number 40F2
Dimensions 75 mm x 520 mm x 520 mm
Image Contrast Ratio 6000:1 (Static)
Screen Shape Flat
Audio Wattage 16 Watts
Smart TV Yes
Operating System iFFALCON
App Store iFFALCON App Store
Android Support No
Screen Mirroring T-Cast
Media Share nScreen
CPU Dual Core A9
GPU Dual Core Mali
HDR Compatible No
3D Capable No
Now that we've got the specs out of the way, let's dig into the actual review of the television.
Right off the bat, the TCL iFFALCON F2 features a slim nano bezel design that runs alongside the frame of the panel. Owing to the low price, the body includes a plastic frame, but don't get me wrong, it still manages to give the device a pretty premium look. The design follows a minimalistic approach with minimalistic bezels.
While one might argue that a silver-tone or a metallic finish bezel might have been more appealing, it is practically nitpicking, and the TV looks just as good and premium with the standard plastic black nano bezels.
The bundled stand is something I personally didn't really approve of. Made out of cheap plastic, the stand, despite being sturdy enough to hold the TV, does look pretty cheap. Thankfully though, it does its job quite well, and thanks to the huge size of the display, you'd barely even see the stand.
All in all, the build quality of the TCL iFFALCON F2 is pretty darn good. It follows the current market trend of offering a nearly bezel-less design and manages to do it while looking quite premium.
Ports and Connectivity
Connectivity is a major area of concern for most users out there, and TCL understands that. In fact, the TCL iFFALCON K2A is one of the rare few television sets out there to offer practically every port one would expect from their display unit, and that too, in abundance.
The right side of the device houses the point for the AC adapter to be connected. Apart from that, there isn't anything else on the right-hand side of the TV.
Talking about the left side, the TCL iFFALCON F2 has kept its design language pretty similar to its other offerings. It has a USB 2.0 port, followed by a 3.5mm headphone jack, two HDMI ports, and finally a USB 3.0 port. The HDMI 2 port supports ARC, that is, Audio Return Channel. This can be used to hook up your home theater system or sound system as an alternative to the TV's inbuilt speakers.
While these ports should be enough for most users, TCL has made sure not to miss out on anything. The TCL iFFALCON F2 has a compartment on the rear side as well, which houses a plethora of ports, namely, 1 more HDMI port, a LAN port, a cable/antenna port, and the various component and A/V ports. It also features a SPDIF port that can be used to transmit digital audio.
As far as connectivity is concerned, the TCL iFFALCON F2 puts most competing TVs to shame by offering just about every port that a consumer might demand, and then some.
For me, the picture quality on a television set is probably the most important point of judgment. I mean, you can always get a soundbar if the sound is low, and you can always get attachments for making your TV smarter, but the display is the main thing on a TV. Thankfully, TCL understands the importance of the display and has included a great panel for your viewing.
Competing with the other HD ready displays, the TCL iFFALCON F2 offers a Full HD display with a resolution of 1920x1080p. The pictures on the display are sharp and detailed while boasting of a high color gamut. The color reproduction is great, and the refresh rate of 60Hz ensures smooth playback of videos.
The spec sheet of the TCL iFFALCON F2 reads out a LED panel, thanks to which the blacks look really deep. Additionally, the TV also offers a whopping high native contrast ratio of 6000:1, which sets it a class apart, and allows it to compete with TVs way ahead of its price bracket.
A 40-inch display would probably fit nicely in your living room, for the whole family to watch. As such, the 178-degree viewing angle on the display should allow everyone to easily enjoy the content while sitting in any corner of the room. In my opinion, the picture quality on the iFFALCON F2 is pretty darn good and competes with the best in the business.
While most televisions in this price range are usually good for average use, the F2 can be used for watching movies and playing games all alike without the user worrying about any lack of quality.
My, oh my, was this the biggest shocker of the iFFALCON F2. Okay, so the device packs in a 16W speaker, which should be just enough, right? But man, is this thing a sound monster or what!? I've never used a TV before that was as loud as the F2, especially in this price bracket.
Working with Beebom has allowed me to feast my eyes and ears with a plethora of TVs, but the major let down has always been the sound department. The audio is either too cranky or too loud with imbalanced levels. But then came the iFFALCON F2, and boy, do I love the speakers on this thing.
The speakers on the F2 are loud enough to easily cover every corner of your room, without any loss in quality. The TV also features just the right balance of Total Harmonic Distortion (THD), which provides a great level of balance between the sound levels. Highs, lows, and even the mids – all sound great on the TV. The only slight complaint some might have is that the volume gets a bit too cranky at levels higher than 80%, but I reckon anyone would actually have to push things that far.
While budget TVs almost come with an invisible sticker saying "External sound system needed", the iFFALCON F2 should prove to be enough for the majority of users out there.
Unlike other TVs in this same price range, the iFFALCON is indeed a smart TV. Now, while it doesn't come with support for Android TV (or any Android apps for that matter) as one would expect, it does pack in the iFFALCONE Launcher, which should be pretty good for most users.
For most users, the point of Smart TV is to watch content from live streaming services such as YouTube and Netflix and browse content on the web using their TV. Well, if that's what you're looking for, the iFFALCON F2 should satisfy your needs, since it comes with dedicated apps for YouTube and Netflix pre-installed. Heck, the remote even has a dedicated Netflix button for easy access to streaming giant's services. Additionally, the iFFALCON F2 also comes with support for T-Cast, which allows you to use your smartphone as a remote for the television, a feature that some users might fancy.
Now, I won't go as far as to compare it with Android TV, since Google's OS is light years ahead of the iFFALCONE Launcher. That being said, the Smart OS on the iFFALCON F2 should be enough for most users, and puts it right in line with the Xioami Mi TV 4A, a device that stays in the same price bracket, and similar to the F2, doesn't support Android TV or Android Apps.
So, now that we've covered all the specs and smart features, it's time to see how the iFFALCON F2 fares up in real-world tests. If I had to describe the performance of the TV in a couple of words, I'd say that it performs way better than how you'd expect it to.
The overall video performance of the iFFALCON F2 is absolutely great and more than justifies its price tag. In fact, the picture quality is so good, that when you turn off the lights and just concentrate on the display panel, you won't be able to differentiate the iFFALCON F2 from a television double its price.
While the TV doesn't have support for 4K or HDR, both our PS4 Pro and Xbox One X gaming consoles ran pretty well on the TV. The colors looked great, and the 60Hz refresh rate ensured that we were able to game without encountering any frame drops. Additionally, the Micro Dimming feature works pretty well too.
Even the Smart Features on the TV are a treat to use. Having tried Xioami's Patchwall OS, I can definitely feel the experience is a lot smoother on the iFFALCON F2. Yes, Patchwall is still quite advanced as compared to the iFFALCONE Launcher, but then again, for most users, the barebones ideology of the iFFALCONE should be more than sufficient.
TCL iFFALCON F2: Worth It?
Available at a price tag of just 20K, the TCL iFFALCON F2 is an absolute steal. Going up against the Mi TV 4A, the iFFALCON F2 might be a couple of inches smaller, but it does seem to offer great value for money. It comes equipped with all the bells and whistles and manages to compete with the big dogs in the market. The lack of Android TV might be a deal breaker for some, but hey, it supports a majority of TV-oriented apps like YouTube and Netflix, so you won't be missing out on a lot at the end of the day.
Sound is loud and clear
Excellent Value for Money
Lacks Android TV
Smart Features are limited
Buy TCL iFFALCON F2 Smart TV from Flipkart: (Rs. 19,999)
SEE ALSO: TCL iFFALCON K2A 4K TV Review: A Great Mi TV 4 Alternative
TCL iFFALCON F2 Review: A Great Budget Smart TV
All things considered, the TCL iFFALCON F2 offers a complete package. The huge 40-inch display offers great picture quality coupled with an immersive sound experience. The lack of Android TV is easily compensated by the bundled iFFALCONE launcher, which should satisfy the needs of most users. In my opinion, the F2 manages to check all the boxes and offers a plethora of features for a very low price tag.
On the whole, the TCL iFFALCON F2 offers a complete package. The 40-inch display offers great picture quality coupled with an immersive sound experience. The lack of Android TV might seem like a dealbreaker to some, but the bundled iFFALCONE launcher should satisfy the needs of most users. All in all, the F2 manages to check all the boxes and offers a great value for money.
iFFALCON F2
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