Communists exist in the popular imagination, if at all, as marginal conspiratorial groups fomenting violent revolution and, while the Soviet Union still existed, working as its agents. 

Novels like the James Bond thrillers helped perpetuate such images. In terms of who communists actually were or are, what they have done and how they have behaved, the majority will know very little if anything.

Many would probably laugh out loud if it were suggested to them that communists and communism have had tangible affects on their lives. 

Would an ardent countryside rambler, for instance, know that it was a brave Manchester communist, Benny Rothman, who led the first mass trespass on Kinder Scout in the Pennines in 1932, paving the way for the present-day right of access to the countryside which we all now enjoy? He also remained a life-long campaigner on nature conservation issues.

Communists were active and played prominent roles in so many areas of life, that I can only focus on the main ones. Apart from the trade union movement, the party’s chief focus, communists played particularly prominent roles in the world of the arts and literature, particularly from the 1930s onwards. 

Many of the big names from that period, if not members themselves, collaborated or worked closely with communists: Benjamin Britten with communist librettist Randall Swingler; Christopher Isherwood based Sally Bowles, in his classic Goodbye to Berlin, on the Daily Worker’s film critic Jean Ross; communist physicist JD Bernal appears as a figure in CP Snow’s novel The Search; and the writer JB Priestley, among many other leading personalities from the cultural world, actively supported the Daily Worker.

Unity Theatre, founded by communists in London, nurtured many thespians and writers who went on to become leading figures in the theatrical world. 

They include actors Michael Gambon, Bob Hoskins, Alfie Bass, Warren Mitchell and Bill Owen, the playwright Ted Willis, film director Ken Hughes and Walter Lassally, later renowned as an Oscar-winning cinematographer.

There are also many amusing anecdotes in connection with communists. Jimmy Gibb, a versatile and accomplished pianist who played at the Proms, Wigmore Hall and abroad,was a prominent member of the Communist Party until he resigned in 1956, after the Soviet invasion of Hungary.

Gibb shared a piano teacher with the future Queen, sang Beethoven on the D-Day crossing to France and spent many years teaching at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He used to wonder whether his piano teacher, Mabel Lander, ever suspected how many of her pupils were communists. While she was giving lessons to the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret she was also teaching Jimmy.

According to him, at one point there were so many musicians in the party that “it got around the profession that it was not a good thing to be outside the party if you wanted to get on, so they put me on a cadre committee to vet musicians who were applying to join the party!” It was, he thought, the only time in history when membership of the Communist Party was dependent on passing an audition.

Ian Fleming appropriated communist architect Ern Goldfinger’s name for the villain Auric Goldfinger in one of his James Bond novels. Fleming had been annoyed by the pre-war demolition of cottages in Hampstead, removed to make way for Goldfinger’s house. This was Fleming’s way of exacting revenge and may go someway to explain his visceral hatred of communists.

In an attempt to solve the huge shortage of housing in the country following the second world war, in which nearly four million houses had been destroyed or damaged, the government saw high-rise buildings as a solution and Goldfinger rose to prominence as a designer of tower blocks.

He was one of several leading architects who were communists. Goldfinger himself was Hungarian-born, moving to Britain in the 1930s, when he became a key member of the architectural Modern Movement. During his stay in Paris in the ’20s he was, like his fellow comrade Bertold Lubetkin, strongly influenced by Le Corbusier. 

After the war, Goldfinger was commissioned to build new offices for the Daily Worker and he also built Alexander Fleming House in south-east London for the Ministry of Health.

A new militancy was arising in the country during the 1930s, which also had an impact on students. There was an increasing awareness, particularly among left-wing and radical sections of the population, of the dangerous rising tide of fascism and the urgent need to counter it. 

As an example of the new mood, at the Oxford Union debate in 1933, a motion: “This house refuses to fight for king and country” was carried — to the horror of the Establishment. And in 1939 Oxford elected its first communist president, Philip Toynbee, the son of historian Arnold Toynbee, and many of its students turned to communism in those years. 

At the end of 1934, a British delegation of 90 students attended an international student congress against war and fascism in Brussels and every British university was represented at this meeting. 

The party students returning from it were full of determination to build a democratic student movement against war and fascism that would extend beyond the socialist society groupings and would include Christian and Liberal students and those belonging to the League of Nations Union. That generation of students produced a whole number of leading and radical academics and professionals who remained in the Communist Party long after the war.

Despite the British party’s lack of resources, the ruling elite certainly from the ’30s onwards, clearly feared a left-wing dominance of cultural and intellectual life. And it is certainly true that the party attracted many artists and writers. As a response, many were placed under regular surveillance and often blacklisted.

Trade unions remained, though, the central battleground, but where communists had influence right-wing Labour and trade unions leaders became alarmed. In December 1947 a circular from Morgan Phillips, secretary of the Labour Party, sent to every affiliated organisation, stated: “Now is the time to go on a great campaign against communist intrigue and infiltration inside the labour movement.” 

But this campaign actually backfired. Shortly afterwards there were elections for the Birmingham Trades Council executive, and in the end more communists were elected onto the committee than before and there was an all-time record attendance of 257 delegates.

Malcolm MacEwen in his autobiography The Greening of a Red perhaps best expresses what I’ve tried to demonstrate in the pages of this book: “I would not have written my story if my purpose had merely been to add to the number of confessions by former communists. 

“The world has been drenched with stories, true and false, honest and mischievous, about the crimes, mistakes and inefficiency of communism.

“But there is a dearth of information about the real life of the Communist Party, and about the contribution that communists have made to the progress and liberation of humanity — not least by paying the highest price for resisting Franco in Spain, defeating Hitler, frustrating American imperialism in Asia and opposing military dictatorships — and, I might add, contributing in all likelihood the largest number to Stalin’s purges.”

Britain’s Communists: The Untold Story, price £9 + £2.50 p&p from morningstaronline.co.uk or by phone: (020) 8510-0815