George Derwent Thomson ( ga, Seoirse Mac Tomáis; 1903 in

Dulwich Dulwich (; ) is an area in south London, England. The settlement is mostly in the London Borough of Southwark, with parts in the London Borough of Lambeth, and consists of Dulwich Village, East Dulwich, West Dulwich, and the Southwark half of ...

London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...

– 3 February 1987 in

Birmingham Birmingham ( ) is a city and metropolitan borough in the metropolitan county of West Midlands in England. It is the second-largest city in the United Kingdom with a population of 1.145 million in the city proper, 2.92 million in the West ...

) was an English classical scholar,

Marxist Marxism is a Left-wing politics, left-wing to Far-left politics, far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a Materialism, materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand S ...

philosopher, and scholar of the

Irish language Irish ( Standard Irish: ), also known as Gaelic, is a Goidelic language of the Insular Celtic branch of the Celtic language family, which is a part of the Indo-European language family. Irish is indigenous to the island of Ireland and was ...

Classical scholar

Thomson studied Classics at

King's College, Cambridge King's College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Formally The King's College of Our Lady and Saint Nicholas in Cambridge, the college lies beside the River Cam and faces out onto King's Parade in the centre of the city ...

where he attained First Class Honours in the

Classical Tripos The Classical Tripos is the taught course in classics at the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge. It is equivalent to Literae Humaniores at Oxford. It is traditionally a three-year degree, but for those who have not previously studied ...

and subsequently won a scholarship to

Trinity College, Dublin , name_Latin = Collegium Sanctae et Individuae Trinitatis Reginae Elizabethae juxta Dublin , motto = ''Perpetuis futuris temporibus duraturam'' (Latin) , motto_lang = la , motto_English = It will last i ...

. At TCD he worked on his first book, ''Greek Lyric Metre'', and began visiting Na Blascaodaí in the early nineteen-twenties. He became lecturer and then Professor of Greek at

University College Galway The University of Galway ( ga, Ollscoil na Gaillimhe) is a public research university located in the city of Galway, Ireland. A tertiary education and research institution, the university was awarded the full five QS stars for excellence in 201 ...

. He moved back to England in 1934, when he returned to King's College, Cambridge, to lecture in Greek. He became a professor at

Birmingham University , mottoeng = Through efforts to heights , established = 1825 – Birmingham School of Medicine and Surgery1836 – Birmingham Royal School of Medicine and Surgery1843 – Queen's College1875 – Mason Science College1898 – Mason Univers ...

in 1936, the year he joined the

Communist Party of Great Britain The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was the largest communist organisation in Britain and was founded in 1920 through a merger of several smaller Marxist groups. Many miners joined the CPGB in the 1926 general strike. In 1930, the CPG ...

. Thomson pioneered a Marxist interpretation of

Greek drama Ancient Greek theatre was a theatrical culture that flourished in ancient Greece from 700 BC. The city-state of Athens, which became a significant cultural, political, and religious place during this period, was its centre, where the theatre was ...

. His ''Aeschylus and Athens'' (1941) and ''Marxism and Poetry'' (1945) won him international attention. In the latter book he argued a connection between the

work song A work song is a piece of music closely connected to a form of work, either sung while conducting a task (usually to coordinate timing) or a song linked to a task which might be a connected narrative, description, or protest song. Definitions and ...

and

poetry Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings i ...

; and that pre-industrial songs were connected to

ritual A ritual is a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, actions, or objects, performed according to a set sequence. Rituals may be prescribed by the traditions of a community, including a religious community. Rituals are characterized, b ...

. Thomson befriended, and was an important influence on

Alfred Sohn-Rethel Alfred Sohn-Rethel (4 January 1899 – 6 April 1990) was a French-born German Marxian economist and philosopher especially interested in epistemology. His main intellectual achievement was the publication of ''Intellectual and Manual Labour: A C ...

and his theory of the genesis of occidental thought in

Ancient Greece Ancient Greece ( el, Ἑλλάς, Hellás) was a northeastern Mediterranean civilization, existing from the Greek Dark Ages of the 12th–9th centuries BC to the end of classical antiquity ( AD 600), that comprised a loose collection of cult ...

through the invention of coining.

Connections with the Blasket Islands

He first visited ''Na Blascaodaí'' (the

Blasket Islands The Blasket Islands ( ga, Na Blascaodaí) are an uninhabited group of islands off the west coast of the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, Ireland. The last island to hold a significant population, Great Blasket Island, was abandoned in 1954 due ...

) off the west coast of Ireland in 1923. Mac Tomáis, as he quickly became known to the islanders, had attended rudimentary Irish classes at a branch of

Conradh na Gaeilge (; historically known in English as the Gaelic League) is a social and cultural organisation which promotes the Irish language in Ireland and worldwide. The organisation was founded in 1893 with Douglas Hyde as its first president, when it emer ...

in London before he went to Cambridge. When he arrived on the island, he immersed himself in the language. In six weeks of walking around, talking with

Muiris Ó Súilleabháin Muiris Ó Súilleabháin (; 19 February 1904 – 25 June 1950), anglicised as Maurice O'Sullivan, was an Irish author famous for his Irish-language memoir of growing up on the Great Blasket Island and in Dingle, County Kerry, off the western ...

and others, Mac Tomáis achieved near complete fluency in the language. He spent several years with the people of the islands studying their language, history and culture. He maintained a special study of the now extinct community in Ireland, in which he perceived elements of surviving cultural resonances with historical society prior to the development of private property as a means of production. He became a champion of the Irish language. He had a role in the publication of the memoirs of Muiris Ó Súilleabháin, ''Fiche Bliain Ag Fás'' (''Twenty Years Growing'') in 1933. The introduction to Ó Súilleabháin's autobiography by

E. M. Forster Edward Morgan Forster (1 January 1879 – 7 June 1970) was an English author, best known for his novels, particularly ''A Room with a View'' (1908), ''Howards End'' (1910), and ''A Passage to India'' (1924). He also wrote numerous short stori ...

can also be attributed to Thomson. When he applied for the new position of lecturer of Greek in NUI Galway in 1931 he, in the words of Richard Roche, 'astonished the interview board with a flow of Blasket Irish' and was awarded the post.

Communism

In 1951, he was the only member of the Communist Party's Executive Committee to vote against the Party's programme ''The British Road to Socialism'', because "the dictatorship of the proletariat was missing". He also served on the Party's Cultural Committee. The Chinese revolution of 1949 had a profound effect on him and led to differences with the British Communist Party, from which he eventually drifted. He never lost his political beliefs. He was committed to

working class education Working class education is the education of working-class people. History Prior to the 19th century, education for most members of society was elementary and only an elite received advanced education. This was intended to provide members of each ...

, including giving lectures to factory workers at Birmingham's Austin car plant. He also maintained a special affection and support for the '' Morning Star'' in his later years. Thomson authored three popular expositions on Marxism published by the China Policy Study Group in the early 1970s. ''From Marx to Mao Tse-tung: A study in revolutionary dialectics'' (1971); ''Capitalism and After: The rise and fall of commodity production'' (1973); and ''The Human Essence: The sources of science and art'' (1974). He is also the author of ''Marxism and Poetry'' (1945).

Family

Thomson married Katherine, daughter of Hugh Fraser and Jessie Stewart.

Notes

References

*'' Morning Star'', 5 February 1987 {{DEFAULTSORT:Thomson, George Derwent English communists Alumni of King's College, Cambridge Communist Party of Great Britain members People from Dulwich Alumni of Trinity College Dublin Academics of the University of Birmingham English classical scholars Marxist theorists Academics of the University of Galway 1987 deaths 1903 births 20th-century English philosophers