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Peter Fryer | |
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| Born | 18 February 1927 Hull, England |
| Died | 31 October 2006 (aged 79) |
| Nationality | English |
| Occupation(s) | Writer and journalist |
| Notable work | Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984) |
Peter Fryer (18 February 1927 – 31 October 2006) [1] was an English Marxist writer and journalist. Among his most influential works is the 1984 book Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain .
Born in Hull in 1927, Peter Fryer was awarded a scholarship to attend Hymers College in 1938. [1] After joining the Young Communist League in 1942, he left school in 1943 to become a reporter on the Yorkshire Post . In 1945 he became a member of the Communist Party. In 1947 he was dismissed from his job after refusing to leave the party. [2]
In 1948, Fryer joined the staff of the Daily Worker , becoming its parliamentary correspondent but also covering foreign affairs. In 1949, he reported on the show trial of the Hungarian communist László Rajk, [1] who had falsely confessed to being an agent of Tito and others. After Rajk's execution and eventual "rehabilitation" early in 1956 Fryer felt guilty about his acquiescence in the trial.[ citation needed ]
In October 1956, Fryer was sent to Hungary to cover the uprising. His dispatches, including a description of the suppression of the uprising by Soviet troops, were either heavily censored or suppressed, and he left the paper. His resignation had in fact taken place several months earlier, but he had been persuaded to serve a year's notice. He wrote a book about the uprising (Hungarian Tragedy, 1956) [1] and was expelled from the Communist Party for criticising its suppression in the "capitalist" press. Hungarian Tragedy is still in print. The most recent edition also contains some articles he completed after the book, which were published very quickly after the events he witnessed.[ citation needed ]
Fryer then became the editor of The Newsletter, [3] the journal of The Club, a Trotskyist organisation led by Gerry Healy, and with Healy was a founder member of the Socialist Labour League. He parted company with Healy, however, and was delighted when Healy's organisation expelled him in 1985. Fryer wrote a weekly column for the Workers Press, the paper of the organisation that had expelled Healy, for several years after 1985. As a socialist journalist he was inspiring and painstaking, and wrote articles about how to write for the widest political audience, later collected in his book Lucid, Vigorous and Brief (1993).
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In 1948, Fryer had covered the arrival at Tilbury Docks in Britain of HMT Empire Windrush bringing settlers from the Caribbean. [4] His interest in their experiences ultimately resulted in the writing of Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984). (Peter Fraser wrote of Fryer: "In 1981, he attended a conference on the history of blacks in Britain to deliver a paper on black musicians. He went away convinced that the larger story needed to be told.") [5] Two short related books by Fryer, originally given as lectures, are also in print: Aspects of British Black History and The Politics of Windrush.
At the time of his death Fryer was working on a study of life in Mississippi in the 19th and 20th centuries, under the working title Behind the Blues. He intended this book to rework black American history and hoped that it would be as influential as Staying Power had been. He had also just found out that he was to be honoured by the Hungarian government, in recognition of his "continuous support of the Hungarian revolution and freedom fight". [2]
He died on 31 October 2006, aged 79. [2]
Fryer was posthumously awarded the Knight's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary at a reception at the Hungarian Embassy in London. [2]
On 26 June 2023, a blue plaque (organised by the Nubian Jak Community Trust) was unveiled in Fryer's honour outside a former residence of his in Highgate, London. [6]
The Fourth International (FI) is a revolutionary socialist international organization consisting of followers of Leon Trotsky, also known as Trotskyists, whose declared goal is the overthrowing of global capitalism and the establishment of world socialism via international revolution. The Fourth International was established in France in 1938, as Trotsky and his supporters, having been expelled from the Soviet Union, considered the Communist International as effectively puppets of Stalinism and thus incapable of leading the international working class to political power. Thus, Trotskyists founded their own competing Fourth International.
The Hungarian Revolution of 1956, also known as the Hungarian Uprising, was a attempted countrywide revolution against the government of the Hungarian People's Republic (1949–1989) and the policies caused by the government's subordination to the Soviet Union (USSR). The uprising lasted 12 days before being crushed by Soviet tanks and troops on November 4, 1956. Thousands were killed and wounded and nearly a quarter-million Hungarians fled the country.
János József Kádár, born János József Czermanik, was a Hungarian Communist leader and the General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party, a position he held for 32 years. Declining health led to his retirement in 1988, and he died in 1989 after being hospitalized for pneumonia.
László Rajk was a Hungarian Communist politician, who served as Minister of Interior and Minister of Foreign Affairs. He was an important organizer of the Hungarian Communists' power, but he eventually fell victim to Mátyás Rákosi's show trials.
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The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was the largest communist organisation in Britain and was founded in 1920 through a merger of several smaller Marxist groups. Many miners joined the CPGB in the 1926 general strike. In 1930, the CPGB founded the Daily Worker. In 1936, members of the party were present at the Battle of Cable Street, helping organise resistance against the British Union of Fascists. In the Spanish Civil War the CPGB worked with the USSR to create the British Battalion of the International Brigades, which party activist Bill Alexander commanded.
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Far-left politics in the United Kingdom have existed since at least the 1840s, with the formation of various organisations following ideologies such as Marxism, revolutionary socialism, communism, anarchism and syndicalism.
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