Jim Fyrth 1918-2010

Hubert James (Jim) Fyrth, who died in Torbay on 24 May 2010, aged ninety-two, was a distinguished historian and adult educator with a special interest in trade-union and labour history. His books ranged across political and cultural history of twentieth-century Britain; they included histories of the Popular Front, of the Aid Spain Movement in 1930s Britain, two edited volumes on the politics and culture of postwar Britain and a remarkable memoir of his time in the British army in India at the end of the Second World War. (See list below.) The son of a rural vet who lived in West Dorset, one of four children, Jim attended Dorchester Grammar School as a boarder, where he read H. G. Wells and Thomas Hardy and grew up – as his daughter Deborah Fyrth remembers – ‘close to the countryside and the sea’; he respected the land, its plants, animals and wild life throughout his life. Jim's socialism was founded on this love of landscape and its inhabitants, his belief in a common humanity and social justice; it was also modelled on the ‘Popular Front of the mind’ of the thirties and wartime radicalism, and in the decades after the war it embraced shop-floor militancy, the women's liberation movement and internationalism. Jim joined the Communist Party at the time of Munich in 1938, and remained hopeful in the vision of a classless society all his life. His love of England was tempered by knowledge of the damage done by British imperialism to other parts of the world. At the end of the war, travelling through India and Malaysia, he spent a day and night of a long train journey with a young family. He remarked on the ‘confidences’ encouraged by living in a confined space: They welcomed me and showed great kindness. We talked, their little boy played with me and they insisted on sharing their food with me. When the time came for me to change trains I thanked them sincerely, made my nameste and said ‘Perhaps we shall meet again somewhere’. ‘Yes’, replied the husband, ‘but you know that while you wear that uniform we can never be friends’. (An Indian Landscape 1944-1946, 2001, p. 26.)

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