William Mellor

William Mellor (born July 20, 1888 in Crewe , † June 8, 1942 in London ) was a British journalist.

Life and activity

Mellor was a son of the Unitarian clergyman William Mellor. He was educated at the Klemetary School and the Willaston School in Cheshire . After he briefly was preparing at Manchester College on the spiritual career, he studied after he had lost his religious faith, at Exeter College of Oxford University . Politically, he joined the Independent Labor Party. After a brief activity from 1912 to 1913 as secretary at the Fabian Research Department, he became a journalist. From 1913 he was part of the editorial team of the Daily Herald .

During World War I , Mellor was opposed to an involuntary military recruitment introduced by Britain in 1916. He refused to join the army, justifying this by saying that the war was not being waged to defend any country or for democracy, but to assert the conflicting financial interests of the big capitalists of the various European great powers; there is no reason for the common people to participate in it. He was temporarily in custody. After his release he returned to the Daily Herald , where he held the title of industrail editor for the next few years . As a journalist, Mellor distinguished himself in the post-war period by opposing Great Britain's intervention in the Russian Civil War from 1918 to 1922.

In 1920 Mellor took part in the founding of the Communist Party of Great Britain , but withdrew from it in 1924.

In the 1920s Mellor developed into one of the most prominent left-wing journalists in Great Britain: after he was appointed deputy editor of the Daily Herald in 1922 , he became the editor of this newspaper on August 26, 1926 as successor to Hamilton Fyfe . The background for the change in management and the appointment of Mellor, which was mainly operated by Ernest Bevin , was the takeover of the newspaper by the British Trade Union Congress. Under Mellor's direction, the Herald was redesigned in the following years in a way that appealed to the masses in order to increase its circulation. Mellor understood this as a combination of journalistic educational work with attractive packaging. The number of images was increased and the spectrum of content in the Herald was supplemented by human interest stories.

In 1930 Oldham Press took over 50 percent of the Herald and Mellor was dismissed as editor. Instead he became Associate Editor of Oldham Press (assistant Managing Editor)

In the British general election of 1935, Mellor ran in vain for a seat in the House of Commons, the British Parliament: He ran for the Labor Party in the Enfield constituency, but was defeated. In the parliamentary election planned for 1940, but canceled as a result of the outbreak of war in 1939, Mellor was intended as a candidate for the Labor Party for the constituency of Stepney.

From 1937 to 1938 Mellor was the first editor of the newly founded weekly newspaper Tribune , but was dismissed from this post due to a disagreement with Stafford Cripps : Mellor was in the Tribune for the establishment of a Popular Front of the Labor Party with the Independent Labor Party and the Communists as a counterweight to it entered the fascist regimes, which were growing in power in Europe at the time.

At the end of the 1930s, the National Socialist police officers classified Mellor as an important target: In the spring of 1940, the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a directory of people whom the Nazi surveillance apparatus considered particularly dangerous or important, which is why they should be in the case A successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht should be located and arrested by the occupying troops following special SS commandos with special priority.

Mellor died in 1942 as a result of an operation he had undergone for a stomach ulcer .

family

Mellor had been married to Helena Edna Thompson since 1919, with whom he had a son.

Fonts

• The Meaning of Industrial Freedom , 1918.
• Direct Action , 1920.
• The co-operative Movement and the Fight for Socialism , 1933.

literature

• The Labor Who's Who 1927, p. 150.
• Who was who: a companion to Who's Who. Containing the Biographies of those who Died during the Period , 1967, pp. 785f.

Web links

• Sketch for William Mellor at Spartacus Net