David Crook

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For the World War II British fighter pilot, see David Moore Crook.

David Crook
Born(1910-08-14)14 August 1910
Communist Party of China
Spouse
​
(m. 1942)​
Children3
Military career
AllegianceInternational Brigades
Battles/warsSpanish Civil War

David Crook (14 August 1910 – 1 November 2000) was a British communist who spent most of his life teaching in China. A committed

Second World War and the Chinese Civil War, the couple stayed in China and taught English.[1]

In 1959, the Crooks published Revolution in a Chinese Village, Ten Mile Inn

Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) called Revolution a "seminal work, which has been bringing the achievements and challenges of the Chinese agrarian revolution to life for English-speaking readers since 1959."[5] Crook died at 90 after spending his last five decades in China, his political beliefs largely unshaken despite five years' imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976).[6]

Early life and education

Crook was born in London in 1910. "My father was a Jewish cockney Royalist, raised in the East End of London, by immigrant parents who fled Czarist Russia to avoid anti-semitism and conscription into a pork-eating army," wrote Crook in his autobiography.[7] Crook was educated at Cheltenham College and graduated from Columbia University in 1935 where he participated in protests on campus against Nazi Germany.[8][4]

International communist

After being wounded on his first day at the front in Spain, he was returned to a hospital in

Trotskyites, a group which included George Orwell. Crook later expressed regret for his part in the crushing of the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM).[9]

The NKVD then sent him to China. There he taught English at

Trotskyite whose arguments in fact began to convince him. Crook proceeded to Chengdu and was there when it was bombed by the Japanese. While there he met his future wife, Isabel Brown, daughter of Canadian missionaries.[10]

Hitler's invasion of Russia in June 1941 ended Crook's fling with Trotskyism. Upon his return to England, Crook re-joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and joined the Royal Air Force, then married Isabel. During the war, he worked for British intelligence throughout Asia and contacted local communist movements.[11]

Life in China

After studies at the University of London, the Crooks returned to China to teach English in a rural school that trained staff for the foreign service of the future government. They observed and participated in the land reform movements carried out by the Chinese Communist Party in North China villages and produced a "thick description" which they published in their widely cited Ten Mile Village (1959).[12] They entered Beijing with the victorious Communists at "Liberation" in 1949 and for the next forty years, the Crooks taught at the Peking First Foreign Languages Institute (now the Beijing Foreign Studies University).[13]

Despite his long-time loyalty to the

Qincheng prison."[15]

Crook was convinced by reading George Orwell, on whom he had spied in Spain in the 1930s.

feudalism, cannot be accomplished quickly and easily, without setbacks and mistakes. But I am confident that by the end of this century - which with a bit of luck I may live to see ... this China, which Isabel and I love, which has become our second homeland, will be creating a strong socialist society, and in the course of its modernization will strive to avoid the evils, suffering, ugliness and injustice which have beset modernization elsewhere."[17]

Personal life

Crook had three children with his wife, Isabel. Crook died in Beijing in 2000. One of his sons, Paul Crook, has given extensive interviews about his experience growing up as a foreigner in China during the Cultural Revolution.[18]

Notes

  1. ^ Hampstead Heath to Tian An Men – The autobiography of David Crook
  2. ^ London: Routledge & Paul, 1959; reprinted: New York: Pantheon Books, 1979
  3. ^ London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1966
  4. ^ a b "David Crook A communist who fought against Franco, spied for Stalin and wrote a classic book on change in China" (Obituary) Delia Davin The Guardian, Sunday 17 December 2000
  5. ^ Review: Ten Mile Inn by David and Isabel Crook Proletarian Online 51 (December 2012)
  6. New York Review of Books
    .
  7. ^ unpublished online autobiography.
  8. ^ "Columbia College Today". www.college.columbia.edu. Retrieved 12 February 2022.
  9. ^ In a Valley Called Jarama
  10. ^ "Spain to China – Agent to Educator (1938–41)," Crook, Hampstead Heath to Tiananamen
  11. ^ Back to Britain and into the R.A.F. (1941–42) Crook, Hampstead Heath to Tiananamen
  12. ^ Julia Strauss, "Rethinking Land Reform," in Mechthild Leutner, ed. Rethinking China in the 1950s. (Münster; London: Lit; Global, 2007. p. 25.
  13. ^ Bloomsbury Square to Taihang Mountains (1946–47) Crook, Hampstead Heath to Tiananmen
  14. ^ Tom Buchanan, East Wind: China and the British Left, 1925–1976 (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 184
  15. ^ "Man of the people," Lin Qi China Daily Updated 10/20/10
  16. ^ Ballad of Beijing Gaol (1967–73) Crook, Hampstead Heath to Tiananmen
  17. ^ Tian An Men Testimony (1989–90) Crook, Hampstead Heath to Tiananmen
  18. ^ "Growing up a foreigner during Mao's Cultural Revolution". BBC News. 27 September 2011. Retrieved 18 February 2021.

Further reading

Publications

External links
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