The journalist Paul Winterton (1908-2001) became much better known after 1950 when, using the pen name Andrew Garve, he published a number of successful thrillers and detective stories. Many of these books had nothing to do with his earlier career as a newspaper correspondent in Moscow and elsewhere, but the ones that do cast an interesting light on his politics and our general view of the communist experiment.
He was the son of a left-wing journalist, Ernest Winterton, who was the Labour Member of Parliament for Loughborough from 1929 to 1931, but who also stood unsuccessfully for the same constituency in the elections of 1923, 1924, 1931 and 1935. There was a family link to Philip Spratt, a left-wing intellectual who was a founding member of the Communist Party of India in 1927, but who subsequently became an anti-communist activist. I imagine the table talk in the family would have had a strong socialist flavour.
Paul Winterton gained a B.Sc. degree from the London School of Economics in 1928, and spent the next winter travelling to Russia, where he spent some months living with a farming family in the Ukraine and learning Russian. On his return in 1929 he stood for Parliament himself, fighting Canterbury for Labour, rather a lost cause as Canterbury has hardly ever returned a non-Conservative. He joined the staff of The Economist, and three years later was taken on by the News Chronicle. He had several overseas assignments, including two more visits to Russia, as well as a spell in Palestine which gave him the background to his first novel, Death Beneath Jerusalem, published in 1938 by Nelson under the pen name Roger Bax. This was the first of several books featuring what must have been one of his hobbies, pot-holing or cave exploration. It is also a book with a good deal of political comment on the rise of Arab nationalism and the accompanying terrorist activities.
