What do Paul Robeson, Vera Lynn, Michael Redgrave, George Bernard Shaw, Maxine Audley, ‘Mrs Dale’s Diary’, Arthur Askey and Lionel Bart all have in common? No, they didn’t feature in ITV’s recent ‘Twenty One Years of Entertainment’. These rather unlikely companions were people who at some time or another found themselves sucked into Unity Theatre’s orbit.

The ‘class against class’ policies overturned at the 1936 Comintern’s seventh congress gave way to ideas of a united left to fight the main enemy – fascism. The Peace Ballot campaign in Britain produced well over ten million votes for disarmament. Popular Front strategies dominated oppositional politics and an unprecedented cultural movement with Unity at its epicentre mobilised around the left. A new attitude towards the middle classes developed, ‘especially the intellectuals who were no longer seen as the infected bearers of bourgeois poison.’ The Reds, evidently, were like the Greens de nos jours.

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