Томас Генри Винтрингем: Британдық саяхатшы, тарихшы және жазушы өмірі

British politician and historian

Thomas Henry Wintringham (15 May 1898 – 16 August 1949) was a British soldier, military historian, journalist, poet, Marxist, politician and author. He was a supporter of the Home Guard during the Second World War and was one of the founders of the Common Wealth Party.

Tom Wintringham was born 1898 in Grimsby, Lincolnshire. He was educated at Gresham's School, Holt, and Balliol College, Oxford. In 1915 he was elected to a Brakenbury scholarship in History at Balliol, but during the First World War postponed his university career to join the Royal Flying Corps, serving as a mechanic and motorcycle despatch rider. At the end of the war he was involved in a brief barracks mutiny, one of many minor insurrections which went unnoticed in the period. He returned to Oxford, and in a long vacation made a visit of some months to Moscow, after which he returned to England and formed a group of students aiming to establish a British section of the Third International, a Communist party. As the party was formed, Wintringham graduated from Oxford and moved to London, ostensibly to study for the bar at the Temple, but in fact to work full time in politics.

In his later years he worked mainly in radio and film, both producing documentary and critical programmes and writing criticism. He continued to write about military history, opposing the use and development of atomic weapons and championing Mao's China and Tito's Yugoslavia over the monolithic bureaucracy of the Soviet Union. While he recognised and opposed the purges and repression that marred the achievements of the Soviet Union, he never accepted that Stalin himself was complicit or responsible for them. His later campaigns and writing were mainly centred on the formation of a 'World Guard' a neutral volunteer force (initially) to police Palestine and the partitioned India, and to be at the disposal of the United Nations. Tom Wintringham died on 16 August 1949, aged 51, after a massive heart attack while he was staying with his sister at her farm at Owmby, Lincolnshire.