In 1930, a stern, working-class Londoner named William Rust was appointed as the first editor of the Daily Worker, the newspaper of the Communist Party of Great Britain. He was only 27 but he had solid credentials. Besides writing for the Workers’ Dreadnought, a newspaper produced by the suffragette campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst, Rust was an early member of the CPGB and had suffered for the cause. Five years earlier, he and 11 other activists had been charged with violation of the Incitement to Mutiny Act 1797, accused of distributing “seditious communist literature”.
Rust went to prison for a year but the experience did not weaken his beliefs, and his two spells as editor of the Daily Worker marked the paper’s golden age. When he returned to the role in 1939, after a seven-year period in which he represented the CPGB in Moscow and the Daily Worker in Barcelona during the Spanish civil war, it was selling 40,000 copies on weekdays and 80,000 at weekends. After the Second World War, he spoke of turning it into “a front-rank national newspaper with a circulation of 500,000 copies daily”, and he oversaw the move to a new office on Farringdon Road in the City of London. When in 1948 the first editions came off the press in William Rust House, a “torchlight procession of 20,000 supporters” carried him “shoulder-high to Clerkenwell Green, where he auctioned the first two copies for £45 each” – or so CPGB history says.
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