William Mellor (journalist)

William Mellor
Born1888 (1888)
Died1942 (aged 53–54)
NationalityBritish
Occupation(s)Editor of the Daily Herald.
First editor of Tribune.
Known forFounding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB).
Conscientious objector during WWI.
For other people named William Mellor, see William Mellor (disambiguation).

William Mellor (1888–1942) was a left-wing British journalist.

Mellor was born in Crewe, where his father was a Unitarian clergyman. He attended Willaston School, an establishment set up to provide education for the sons of impoverished Unitarian ministers.[1] He then went on to Exeter College, Oxford.

A Guild Socialist during the 1910s, Mellor worked closely with G. D. H. Cole, founding the National Guilds League with him in 1915.[2] He joined the Daily Herald in 1913 as a journalist, and was imprisoned during the First World War as a conscientious objector, returning to the Herald on his release.[3]

He was a founder-member of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920, but resigned in 1924. He became editor of the Herald in 1926, succeeding George Lansbury when the Trades Union Congress took over the paper, and was fired in 1930 soon after Odhams Press took half-ownership with the TUC. He was the first editor of Tribune 1937–38, but was sacked after falling out with Stafford Cripps over the latter's proposal for a Popular Front of socialist and non-socialist parties against fascism. For the last ten years of his life, though married with a family, he conducted an affair with the young Barbara Castle.[4]

  1. ^ "Willaston School Nantwich - Willaston Web". www.willastonweb.co.uk. Willaston Web. Retrieved 21 May 2021.
  2. ^ Geoffrey Foote, The Labour Party's political thought: a history, Routledge, 1986, p. 107
  3. ^ Martin Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain, 1914–1945 : the defining of a faith. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1980. ISBN 0198218826 (p.47).
  4. ^ Andrew Rosthorn (24 July 2014). "How Cyril Smith Outwitted Barbara Castle in the Strange Case of the Paedophiles at the Home Office". Tribune. Retrieved 2 September 2014.