Fred Douglas
Douglas was a prominent Communist from Edinburgh and the assistant secretary of the National Unemployed Workers’ Committee Movement in the early 20s. (The featured image is of a 1933 NUWM demonstration in Edinburgh.)
He posed questions for the movement in an article in Communist Review in 1935 and two years later was associated with the multi-author Eleventh Hour Questions,the outcome of the deliberations Editorial Committee of the Scottish Peace Council.
In July 1937 Douglas was charged along with the famous Scottish Nationalist Wendy Wood (Gwendolen Cuthbert) of disrupting a Fascist meeting in the City
Edinburgh CP published a 14-page pamphlet by Douglas in 1940 “Zero Hour for the Forth”. While a 93-page Scottish Communist Party pamphlet of his on the Scottish Tories came out in 1945.
A sometime contributor to the Daily Worker, Douglas appears to have broken with the Communist Party during the Cold War and for reasons of money.
In 1951, Douglas was paid by US government bodies to write an assault on “British agents of the Cominform”, complete with financial and organisational aid for sales in newsstands and the setting up of a dummy publishing house.
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