Rupert John Cornford (27 December 1915 – 28 December 1936) was an English poet and communist. During the first year of the Spanish Civil War, he was a member of the POUM militia and later the International Brigades. He died while fighting against the Nationalists, at Lopera, near Córdoba.
Biography Rupert John Cornford was born in Cambridge on 27 December 1915, to Francis Cornford and Frances Cornford (née Darwin). His father was a professor of classics at Trinity College, and his mother was a poet and the granddaughter of Charles Darwin and Emma Darwin. Named after poet and family friend Rupert Brooke, Cornford preferred to use his middle name John. He was attracted early to left-wing politics. His brother Christopher recalled, "As young as fourteen and a half he became sympathetic to Socialism.... he explained to me the principles of the 'nationalisation of industry' and the injustices of our economic system." In 1931, Cornford joined the Young Communist League in London. In December 1932 while attending Stowe School, he won an Open Major Scholarship to study history at Trinity College, Cambridge. Rather than finish out the school year at Stowe, he opted to complete his spring and summer terms at the London School of Economics. He matriculated at King's College School, Cambridge in autumn 1933. He quickly became involved with the Cambridge University Socialist Society with his roommate and friend James Klugmann. In 1935, Cornford joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and acquainted himself with party general secretary Harry Pollitt. While at Cambridge, Cornford began a relationship with Rachel "Ray" Peters, a working-class woman with whom he had a son. A photograph of him with Peters can be found at the National Portrait Gallery, London. He later left Peters and his son for a romance with fellow student and communist activist Margot Heinemann. Together they supported the 1934 hunger marchers who passed through Cambridge en route to London. In 1936, Cornford obtained a degree in history from Cambridge. He took first class honors in Part I of the Historical Tripos and a "starred" first in Part II. Upon graduating he was awarded the Earl of Derby Research Scholarship. He was invited to stay on as a graduate student at Trinity College, but it was the summer when Francisco Franco led the Nationalist rebellion against Spain's left-wing government. Cornford turned Cambridge down and went to Barcelona in August 1936 to join the anti-Stalinist "Workers' Party of Marxist Unification" (POUM) militia that was fighting against Franco's forces. He served briefly on the Aragon front where he wrote his three best-known poems, among them the often-anthologized "To Margot Heinemann" (originally titled simply "Poem"). In September he returned to England to recruit more volunteers, including Bernard Knox, John Sommerfield, Chris Thorneycroft, and Griffin MacLaurin. With this group he travelled to Paris and then to Albacete, where they joined the International Brigades—the nucleus of what would become the British Battalion. Cornford served with a machine-gun unit of the Commune de Paris Battalion, and fought alongside a number of other British volunteers, including Esmond Romilly, in the defence of Madrid in late 1936. During the Battle of Ciudad Universitaria he was wounded in the head by shrapnel, but he refused to rest and after a brief visit to a hospital, returned to the front. In the Battle of Boadilla del Monte in December 1936, his unit for the first time faced massed German troops (who were bolstering Franco's side) and under heavy bombardment had to retreat twelve kilometres in twenty-four hours. Here, as the unit commander chosen by his men, Cornford (in the words of an English correspondent) "acquitted himself magnificently", saving many lives. Shortly after transferring to the newly formed British Battalion, he was killed in uncertain circumstances at Lopera, near Córdoba, the day after his 21st birthday. Confirmation of his death reached England one month later.
Legacy In February 1937, donations were publicly solicited for the Cornford-MacLaurin Memorial Fund (Griffith MacLaurin was another ex-Cambridge student killed in Spain in late 1936). The money raised went to the International Brigades and to British organizations aiding the Spanish Republican cause. A memorial volume dedicated to Cornford was published in 1938. Stephen Spender observed in his review of the book, "Cornford's life speaks for itself in a way that burns the imagination ... The fact that Cornford lived and that others like him still live, is an important lesson to the leaders of democracies. It shows that people will live and die and fight for democracy if it gives them the justice and freedom which are worth fighting for." In a 1942 essay, Hugh MacDiarmid labeled Cornford and Christopher Caudwell the "few inspiring exceptions" among "the leftist poets of the comfortable classes". Julian Mitchell, in his award-winning 1981 play Another Country, used Cornford as a model for the Marxist poet character "Tommy Judd".
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