Name Raymond Challinor | ||
Died January 31, 2011, Wallsend, United Kingdom Books The origins of British bolshevism, Miners' Association | ||
Raymond "Ray" Challinor (1929 – 31 January 2011) was a Marxist historian of the British labour movement, particularly in the North East of England. Initially a member of the Independent Labour Party, he was an early member of the Revolutionary Communist Party and then the Socialist Review group and was also a member of the group which succeeded it, the International Socialists. For a period in the 1960s he was a councillor in Newcastle-under-Lyme for the Labour Party through which the IS was working using entryist tactics. He later wrote an article in International Socialism on how the experience was politically dispiriting.
Born in Stoke-on-Trent, and a conscientious objector, working on the land, after the Second World War, Challinor was educated at Keele and Lancaster Universities and became principal lecturer in history at Newcastle Polytechnic. While a member of the Socialist Workers Party, he wrote his best known work, a history of the De Leonist Socialist Labour Party, The Origins of British Bolshevism (1977). He served as chairman of the Society for the Study of Labour History and president of the North East Labour History Society.