Born on this day in 1931, the heroic revolutionary faces a dangerous new wave of White House aggression. We must treat his birthday as a rallying cry to resist the illegal siege of Cuba, writes ROGER McKENZIE
Latest editorial
Geoffrey Pyke, Britain’s brilliant anti-fascist inventor
MAT COWARD looks at the personal ideology of a man as concerned with the psychology of inventing as with inventing itself, whose ideas about education – and contributions to the war effort against the Nazis – live on
The ice-based building material ‘pykrete’ narrowly missed deployment in WWII, though both have a fanbase in the modern scientific community
[Office of Stategic Services/ Creative Commons]
RAMZY BAROUD decries the rats of Gaza, the rodent and human type. Both abound as profiteering from tragedy reaches obscene levels
When gas company bosses gorged on assets, the GMB union fought back with the help of a 20-stone saddleback sow. MAT COWARD tells the story
JOHN REES looks at why the June 20 international anti-war conference is such a vital initiative
ROGER McKENZIE highlights how health workers in DRC are struggling to contain a deadly Ebola outbreak in a region already suffering conflict, aid cuts and a legacy of imperialist degradation
Associate Professor BUI QUANG TUAN explains how modernisation and growth are helping to unlock new foreign investment in the Vietnamese economy
ON February 23 1948, the inventor Geoffrey Pyke was reported dead at his home in Hampstead by his landlady. He had clearly committed suicide, aged 54, though no-one was precisely sure why.
It was a tragic end to a life which had contained a great deal of achievement — and a great deal of pain. Obituaries noted his almost unparalleled importance as a thinker (“one of the greatest geniuses of his time”), his lack of public recognition and his eccentricity.
At the start of the first world war, Pyke had come up with the brilliant idea of becoming an undercover journalist for a British newspaper — in Berlin. At that time, the British secret service had failed to insert any of its agents into Germany, and Pyke didn’t speak German, so the odds weren’t really on his side. In October 1914, despite his forged US passport, he was arrested within a few days.
Similar stories
MAT COWARD tells the story of the eccentric founder of a short-lived but striking experiment in ‘vital democracy,’ who became best known for giving away his estate to the nation
The heroism of the jury who defied prison and starvation conditions secured the absolute right of juries to deliver verdicts based on conscience — a convention which is now under attack, writes MAT COWARD
‘Honest’ Tom Wharton’s 1682 drunken rampage through St Mary’s church haunted his political career, but his satirical song Lillibullero helped topple Catholic James II during the Glorious Revolution, writes MAT COWARD
While an as-yet-unnamed new left party struggles to be born, MAT COWARD looks at some of the wild and wonderful names of workers’ organisations past that have been lost to time