Raymond Challinor

Raymond "Ray" Challinor (1929 – 31 January 2011) was a distinguished 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 on the Labour Party ticket in which party IS was then resident, later writing 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 classic history of the 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.

Selected works/articles

• Alexander MacDonald and the miners (1968)
• The Miners' Association: a trade union in the age of the Chartists / with Brian Ripley (1968)
• The Lancashire and Cheshire miners (1972)
• The Origins of British Bolshevism (1977)
• John S. Clarke: parliamentarian, poet and lion-tamer (1977)
• Working class politics in North East England (co-edited with Maureen Callcott)
• A Radical Lawyer in Victorian England. WP Roberts and the Struggle for Workers Rights (1990)
• A new harmony?: Robert Owen's visit to Newcastle in 1843 (1990)
• The struggle for hearts and minds : essays on the Second World War (1995)
• "Military Discipline and Working Class Resistance in World War II", in What Next? (2000)
• "The Red Mole of History", in Socialist Review (2001)

External links

• Raymond Challinor Internet Archive
• Obituary by Stan Newens in the Guardian
• Obituary by John Charlton in Socialist Worker
• Obituary in Newcastle Evening Chronicle.
• "Ray Challinor on Harry McShane", in Revolutionary History
• Ray Challinor and the 1965 Courtauld Strike by Ian Birchall
• A Labour Historian of the Old School: Raymond Challinor Remembered by John McIlroy, Labour History Review (76, no.2) (2011)
• A "Trot of the milder persuasion": Raymond Challinor's Marxism by Christian Hogsbjerg, International Socialism (141) (2014)