David Guest (communist)

David Guest (1911 – 28 July 1938) was a Communist British mathematician and philosopher who volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War and was killed in Spain in 1938.

Biography

Guest was the son of Leslie Haden-Guest, 1st Baron Haden-Guest. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1929 and studied from 1930 to 1931 in Göttingen in Germany, where he became involved in anti-Nazi politics, and joined the Communist Party at Cambridge in 1931.

He became the head of a cell that included John Cornford, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Victor Kiernan and James Klugmann. This enabled dons such as Maurice Dobb and John Bernal to take a back-seat. It was claimed that David Guest would "stride into hall at Trinity wearing a hammer and sickle pin in his lapel."

After leaving Cambridge he lectured in mathematics and worked for the Communist party, even teaching in a secondary school for English-speaking children in Moscow.

In 1938 he left work as a lecturer at University College in Southampton to volunteer for the International Brigade fighting in Spain. He wrote of his decision:

Today we have certainly entered a period of crisis, when the arguments of 'normal times' no longer apply, when considerations of most immediate usefulness come in. That is why I have decided to take the opportunity of going to Spain.

On 28 July 1938 during the Battle of the Ebro David Guest was killed on Hill 481 at Gandesa by a sniper as he read a newspaper.

After his death, notes he had made while lecturing at the Marx Memorial Workers' School were published as A Text Book of Dialectical Materialism in 1939.

Publications

• Guest, David, (1939) A Text Book Of Dialectical Materialism, Lawrence And Wishart (republished as Lectures On Marxist Philosophy (1963))

External links

• Works by or about David Guest in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

Further reading

• Guest, Carmel Hayden (1939) David Guest - A Scientist Fights For Freedom 1911-1938, Lawrence and Wishart.