Lionel Munby, Marxism, and Local History

Abstract

A member of the Communist Party for thirty-four years, and a key participant in the post-War Communist Party Historians’ Group, Lionel Munby (1918–2009) is not among that Group's best-known historians. Yet arguably he was more typical of its membership and outlook. A prolific author, an extra-mural department lecturer, he was committed to bringing history to a wide public, and helping ordinary people become architects of their own histories. He struggled to persuade the Group to take local and regional history seriously, and to overcome disdain for a type of history regarded as antiquarian and reactionary. Munby converted to socialism when he was a schoolboy and saw Nazi Germany at first hand. As an Oxford undergraduate, he organised the Oxford Left in the momentous appeasement by-election of 1938. This article draws on interviews with Munby, on his writings, and on the archives of the Communist Party Historians’ Group. The investigation allows us to recalibrate the preoccupations of the Group, to explore its interface with what today we call ‘public history’, and to show how one historian fused socialist theory with histories of regions, landscapes, and local communities.