Wyncoll Peter

Peter Wyncoll

Peter Harold Wyncoll (left speaking) was born on 24 May 1939 in Basford, Nottinghamshire. In his early teens he was precociously a member of the Young Socialists but soon joined the Communist Party, which he stayed in for the rest of his life.

Always interested in history, he had a pamphlet on Nottingham Chartism published in 1966 and a couple of years later became part of the national CP History Group.

Peter was living in Coalville in Leicestershire when he made tape recordings of a fair number of veterans of the 1926 general strike in Nottingham before he moved to Northampton in 1970.

During 1969, Peter interviewed Nottingham activists militants D.W. Mahoney, Cyril and Edith Goddard, Arthur Statham, George Hamilton, Jack Charlesworth (see separate entry), Laura Johnson, Ernie Cant (see separate entry), and Frank Treble. He collected typescript copies of documents issued by the Nottingham General Strike Committee in 1926 (including the Nottingham Strike Bulletin Nos. 1, 2, 5, 7, 9, 10, special no. 3, and 2 undated sheets from other issues).

In the early 1970s, he worked on trade union and labour history in the Longborough area, a village located midway between Cheltenham and Banbury. 

When he became an official of the National Union of Public Employees, he moved back to Nottinghamshire to work and took up his historical researches there once again. 

In 1971, well before it made its lurch to the right, Marxism Today published an article by him on 19^th century radicals in Nottingham.

Whilst continuing all the time to work for the union he took up an Open University Post-graduate Research on the History of the Labour Movement in Nottingham.

Marxism Today published an article by him in 1972 on the 1926 general strike in Nottingham.

Sadly, Peter died at a relatively young age in 1982 after an inoperable cancer set in.

Wyncoll's PhD supervisor, John Saville (see separate entry), his colleagues in NUPE, and his widow, Wendy Wyncoll,collaborated in preparing his thesis for publication and his major work “The Nottingham Labour Movement, 1880-1939”(1985) was published posthumously by Lawrence and Wishart.