Douglas Hyde (2) (1911–1996)

Douglas Hyde came from a Methodist background. After hearing Wal Hannington speak on the executed Sacco and Vanzetti, he joined the International Class War Prisoners’ Association in 1927. Hyde joined the Communist Party at the age of 17 and moved to North Wales while looking for work as a dental technician. Eight years later, he moved to London where he joined the Woking Labour Party in order to secretly recruit members to the Communist Party. He joined the Daily Worker as journalist. After being exempt from military service for medical reasons, Hyde found himself being given editorial responsibilities. When the January 1941 ban on the paper was imposed, Hyde was given the job of setting up an underground press and a distribution system for an illegal newspaper. He gave literally hundreds of Marxist education classes for the Party and was the London District’s “tutor of the year” in 1940. The strains that came with the cold war saw a former friend, fellow Communist and wartime staffer on the Daily Worker, Ludwig Freund, who had become Czechoslovakia’s economy minister, executed for espionage. Hyde’s disillusionment came out in a desire to be inducted into the Catholic church, which he did whilst still working for the Daily Worker. In 1948, a Party member saw him leaving church after receiving mass and Hyde resigned as news editor of the Daily Worker and from the Communist Party. His action was blown up out of all proportion by the media of the day, which had a field day. His 1951 best-seller, “I believed”, became a key ideological weapon against the Communist Party.