Cecil L'Estrange Malone

Cecil John L'Estrange Malone (born September 7, 1890 in Dalton Holme , Yorkshire , † June 8, 1965 ) was a British politician. He was the first communist MP in the House of Commons .

Life and activity

Malone was the son of Savile L'Estrange and his wife Frances Mary Malone. He was educated at Ludgrove , New Barnet and the Cordwallis School in Maidenhead , and then joined the Royal Navy in 1905 . In this he was first educated at the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth .

In the years leading up to World War I , Malone was one of the first men to be trained as naval aviators in Britain. During the war he commanded the ship HMS Ben-my-Chree , for which he was awarded the Order of the Nile. It was used in the Dardanelles and in Egypt . From 1918 Malone acted as an extraordinary representative (Special Representative) of the British Air Fleet / Department of Aviation at the Supreme War Council in Versailles.

In the British general election on December 14, 1918 , Malone ran for the anti-communist Reconstruction Society in the Leyton East constituency . He was elected to the House of Commons and was part of it until the 1922 general election on November 15, 1922 .

In 1919, Malone was one of the first British politicians to visit Russia after the 1917 revolution . Due to the blockade of the country by the Western powers at the time, he crossed the green border in a forest area in Finland on September 28, 1919 and arrived in Petrograd on September 29 . There he took part in meetings with trade unionists and then traveled by train to Moscow , where he met with Maxim Litvinov , then a leading representative of the Soviet Commissioner for Foreign Affairs (Ministry of Foreign Affairs), and with the commissioner (minister) for this department, Georgi Chicherin , met. On the mediation of these two he was allowed to accompany Leon Trotsky , the war minister of the Soviet government, in his special train on an inspection trip to Tula. During his trip through Russia he also visited factories, power stations and all kinds of cultural and government institutions. The efforts of the Soviet government and its supporters to create a completely new society impressed him very much; he left Russia as a staunch communist.

After his return to Great Britain, Malone became a committed supporter of the "Hands off Russia" campaign, which was directed against intervention by Great Britain and the other Western powers in Russia, and in November 1919 he joined the proto-communist British Socialist Party (BSP), in which he quickly took a leading position.

When the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was founded in the summer of 1920, with the BSP heavily involved , Malone joined it, making him the first communist member of the House of Commons.

In a political address he gave on November 7, 1920 at the Royal Albert Hall , he strongly demanded an end to Great Britain's participation in the Russian Civil War as an intervention force on the side of the White Army against the Soviet government. In this speech he expressed, among other things, the idea of hanging the then British Secretary of War Winston Churchill and the Foreign Secretary George Curzon on lampposts. He argued what the lives of some reactionaries would be executed to put an end to warmongering if it saved thousands of lives (“What are a few Churchills or a few Curzons on lampposts compared to the massacre of thousands of human beings? "). He was charged with sedition and sentenced to six months in prison. He was also stripped of the Order of the British Empire , which he received for his services during World War I. The Communist Party then published a pamphlet in January 1921 with the title What are a Few Churchills? with which she stood behind Malone. Malone was released again in June 1921.

After losing his parliamentary seat in 1922, Malone left the CPGB around 1923 and joined the Independent Labor Party . In the general election on December 6, 1923 and October 29, 1924 ran unsuccessfully for the Labor Party in the constituency of Ashton-under-Lyne (near Manchester).

In a by-election in the constituency of Northampton in 1928, he was finally able to return to the House of Commons, which, after his mandate was confirmed in the regular election of 1929, was a member until the 1931 General Election . Overall, Malone sat in the House of Commons for seven years between 1918 and 1931 (from 1918 to 1922 and from 1928 to 1931). In 1931, in addition to his duties as a member of parliament, he served for a few months as the private parliamentary secretary of Frederick Roberts, Minister of Pensions .

Because of his position as a prominent British communist, Malone was targeted by the National Socialist police officers in 1940 at the latest, which classified him as an important target: In the spring of 1940, the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a directory of people whom the Nazi surveillance apparatus considered special dangerous or important, which is why, in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht, they should be located and arrested by the special SS commandos following the occupation troops with special priority.

family

Malone was married to Leah Klingenstein († 1951) since 1921, with whom he had a daughter. In his second marriage, Malone was married to Dorothy Nina Cheetham († 1980) since 1956.

Fonts

• The Russian Republic , 1920.
• New China , 1926.
• Manchoukuo. Jewl of Asia , 1936. (with DMB necklace)

literature

• J. Bellamy / J. Saville: Dictionary of Labor Biography , Vol. 7 ( ISBN 0-333-33181-8 ), 1984.
• AT Lane: Biographical Dictionary of European Labor Leaders , Vol. 2, 1995, p. 608.
• Dod's Parliamentary Companion , 1920, p. 354.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry on Malone on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London).