A communist journalist who chose the scene over the party line
At a workers’ council election, hearing “we have absolutely no experience of electing people,” he thought: “So much for ‘people’s democracy.”
Peter Fryer was an English Marxist writer and journalist who sought both truth within the communist movement and international solidarity. In Hungary in 1956 he reported a workers’ and students’ uprising, but the Daily Worker censored or suppressed his dispatches, and he answered with Hungarian Tragedy. The conflict led to his expulsion from the Communist Party and contributed to the crisis that split British communism, after which he became a major historian of Black Britain.
Career Timeline
- 1942Joined the Young Communist League
- 1943–1947Reporter, Yorkshire Post
- 1945Joined the Communist Party of Great Britain
- 1948–1956Parliamentary and foreign correspondent, Daily Worker
- 1956Covered the Hungarian Revolution and wrote Hungarian Tragedy
- 1957–1959Editor of The Newsletter and founding member of the Socialist Labour League
- 1984Published Staying Power
- 2006Died in London