Aviation pioneer and war hero, Liberal MP and crusader against communism, Lieutenant-Colonel Cecil John L’Estrange Malone was also the UK’s first official Communist member of parliament.
As his fancy name hints, Malone (1890-1965) was not born into a naturally communistic stratum. His father was a posh clergyman, and his uncle was the Earl of Liverpool. And indeed, for a long time his life unfolded in conventional fashion, if rather more excitingly than most.
He joined the Royal Navy as a teenager and was sent to Dartmouth for officer training. By 1911, Malone was specialising in the new field of aerial warfare and during World War One he captained seaplane carriers, taking place in several historic firsts.
He ended the war with an OBE, and a posting as the top air force man in the Supreme War Council. With such a distinguished military career it wasn’t hard for Cecil to win election to parliament at the 1918 general election. He stood in Leyton East as a Coalition Liberal and became known for his opposition to socialism and communism as a leading member of the right-wing Reconstruction Society.
And then something odd happened. In autumn 1919 Malone took part in a tour of socialist Russia. There he met trades unionists and senior communist politicians. By the time he returned home, he was an enthusiastic Bolshevik.
Many seasoned reds felt that Cecil’s 180 degree conversion owed more to emotion than intellect, and his subsequent career probably confirms that. Of course, that didn’t prevent him being passionate about his new cause. He became active in Hands Off Russia campaigns, and joined the British Socialist Party, which was an unambiguously revolutionary group. In 1920 the BSP became one of the founding members of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and Malone – elected as a Liberal two years earlier – became one of the CP’s most publicly recognisable speakers, and its sole member of parliament.
At a rally in the Albert Hall, London, on 7th November 1920, Cecil Malone made the remark for which he was to be remembered. Arguing that during a revolutionary crisis the working class had the right to defend itself from bourgeois counter-revolutionaries, and that this might necessitate the execution of some leading enemies, he asked the audience: “What, my friends, are a few Churchills or a few Curzons on lampposts compared to the massacre of thousands of human beings? What are a few Churchills or Curzons against the wall, compared to the bombing of harmless Egyptians in Egypt, compared to the reprisals in Ireland?” (Winston Churchill was Secretary of State for War; Lord Curzon was Foreign Secretary).
Malone was arrested for sedition under the Defence of the Realm Act and sentenced to six months in prison. The legalese under which he was charged is worth quoting in part: “an evil disposed person and not of good fame and a disturber of the peace.” In a full flourish of the comical pettiness for which the British Establishment is legendary, his OBE was removed. Now, that is what I call “cancelled.”
He remained an MP, but jail seems to have produced another change in his world view and he left the Communists. His slow drift to the right wing of the labour movement culminated in 1931, when he served as a very junior member of the second Labour government. Later that year, he lost his seat at the general election. He’d finished with politics, or it had finished with him, or both. In the 1930s Malone listed his occupation as travel agent. As far as public life was concerned, he never troubled the scorers again.
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Sources:
Granite and honey by Kevin Marsh & Robert Griffiths (Manifesto Press, 2012)
https://genealogyreviews.co.uk/reviews/article/the-pilot-mp-and-communist-pioneer/
https://grahamstevenson.me.uk/2008/09/19/colonel-cecil-malone-mp/
https://tinyurl.com/Ray-Wilson
https://membersafter1832.historyofparliamentonline.org/members/4907