Denzil Dean Harber

Denzil Dean Harber(25 January 1909,Streatham,– 31 August 1966) was an earlyBritishTrotskyistleader and later in his life a prominent Britishornithologist.

Denzil Dean Harber was born at 25 Fairmile Avenue,Streathamon 25 January 1909. His father was a ship's carpenter turned architect, his mother the daughter of a successful south London butcher.

During theFirst World Warthe family moved toSussex,where they lived in a succession of houses atClimping,Lewes,andEastbourneand finally at the Black Mill,OrenearHastings.

From a very early age he developed an interest in many aspects ofnatural historyincludingreptiles,butterfliesandmoths,fossilsandbirds.

Suffering from chronicasthmafrom infancy his formal education was spasmodic. He was however taught how to learn, and how to plan courses of study himself by an inspiring private tutor. Developing what became a lifelong interest in languages he taught himselfFrenchandGerman.

It is not clear how he became interested in politics, but by the end of 1926 he was reading various anti-imperialist pamphlets published by theLabour Research Department.By March 1927 he had read the first volume ofCapital.According to John McIlroy, he joined theCommunist Party of Great Britain(CPGB) in 1929.

It was undoubtedly this political interest that led him to start to teach himselfRussianand then to study Russian commerce at theLondon School of Economics(LSE). In the summer of 1932, he travelled to the Soviet Union as aninterpreterfor a Canadian journalist with the intention of settling there but was disillusioned by what he found. Returning home, he found copies of theBulletin of the Oppositionpublished in Russian by the TrotskyistLeft Oppositionin Henderson's bookshop in theCharing Cross Road.

Harber expected that the journalist who employed him would publish a full account of their visit to Russia and felt because he went as her employee it would not be right for him to publish his own, but in fact the journalist never did. However Harber did write a short report entitledSeeing Soviet Russiafor the Lent Term 1933 issue of the student journal of the LSEClare Market Reviewwhich included how he had witnessed famine in the Russian countryside and the ruin of Soviet agriculture. This is one of the very few contemporary accounts of Russian conditions written by an outside visitor fluent in Russian.

In 1932, Harber joined theCommunist League,the successor of theBalham Group,an opposition group in the CPGB and the first Trotskyist group in the country.Trotskyadvised the group toentertheIndependent Labour Party(ILP), which had just disaffiliated from theLabour Party.Trotsky believed that the group should work for a "Bolsheviktransformation of the party ".

The majority of the Communist League argued against joining the ILP in favour of maintaining an open party, but allowed thirty of its members led by Harber to form a secretive "Bolshevik-Leninist Fraction" in the ILP. This difference in orientation essentially split the party, and in November 1934, sixty Trotskyist ILPers officially formed theMarxist Group,led by Harber.

While, perhaps due to this delay and infighting, the group never achieved the influence hoped for by Trotsky, it did win new members, includingC. L. R. James.Ted Grantalso joined the organisation, having moved fromSouth Africa.By the ILP Conference of 1935, it claimed a similar strength to theRevolutionary Policy Committee,which was sympathetic to theCommunist Party of Great Britain.

However, the Harberites now left the ILP to join the Labour Party, as Trotsky urged, forming theMilitant Group.Harber later led this group into theRevolutionary Socialist League(RSL), of which he was a secretary for a time. In 1944, the RSL fused with the rivalWorkers International Leagueto form theRevolutionary Communist Party(1944-1949].

Harber was one of the British delegates to the founding conference of theFourth Internationalin Paris on 3 September 1938 and together with C. L. R. James was elected to represent Britain on the International Executive Committee.

Later that month he married Mary Whittaker, whom he had first met in theLabour League of Youth.The following year he moved with her to Eastbourne in Sussex, where he became a Co-operative Society insurance agent, a job he held for the rest of his life.

By 1937 he had revived his interest in natural history and in particular in ornithology. In Sussex he started to contribute to theSouth-Eastern Bird Report.That of 1939 records his sighting of a snow-bunting atBirling Gapnear Eastbourne on 24 September. For the next ten years he combined political activity with ornithology and his love of Chelsea Football Club.

Harber had long opposedGerry Healy,but after the Revolutionary Communist Party was dissolved in 1949 he briefly followed many of his comrades into Healy's group,The Club.However, after publishing one article in the Club's journal,Marxist Review,he abandoned active politics (though not his political beliefs) in favour of ornithology.

In 1948, the Sussex section of theSouth Eastern Bird Reportbecame an independent publicationThe Sussex Bird Reportunder the editorship of Grahame des Forges. In 1949, Harber became the report's co-editor and from 1956 its sole editor, a position he held until 1962, when he relinquished control to the newly formedSussex Ornithological Society.His and des Forges'sA Guide to the Birds of Sussexwas published in 1963.

Very early in his ornithological career, Harber had come to the conclusion that a series of rare and exotic birds, allegedly shot in an area around Hastings between 1903 and 1916 (the so-calledHastings rarities), were forgeries. In the manuscript ofA Guide to the Birds of Sussexhe and des Forges rejected them. By the time theGuidewas published, a full exposure of the forgery had been published inBritish Birds(1962, vol. 55 8 283–349).

Harber's reputation as an ornithologist increased over the years. In 1955, in an extended review ofThe Birds of the Soviet UnionforBritish Birds,he brought together his knowledge of Russian and ornithology. In 1959, he was invited to join theBritish Birds Rarities Committee,the official adjudicator of rare bird records in Britain, and in 1963 became its Honorary Secretary.

He died on 31 August 1966. Harber was survived by his wife Mary and three sons Julian, Paul and Guy.

Obituary

British BirdsVol.60 1967 pps 84-86

Selected writings

Ornithology

"Mid-Season Movements of Swifts in Sussex",British BirdsVol. 45, 1952, pp. 216–218

Special Review ofThe Birds of the Soviet Union,British BirdsVol. 48, 1955, pp. 218–224, 268–276, 313–319, 343–348, 404–410, 447–453, 505-511

"Slender-Billed Gull in Sussex",British Birds,Vol. 55, 1962, pp. 169–171

(with G. des Forges)A Guide to the Birds of Sussex,Edinburgh, 1963

Chapter on Yugoslavia inA Guide to Bird-Watching in Europe,ed. J. Ferguson-Lees, Q. Hockliffe and K. Zweeres, London, 1972

References

Politics

• Sam Bornstein and AI Richardson,Against the Stream: A History of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain, 1924-1938,London, 1986
• Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson,War and the International: A History of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain, 1937-1949,London 1986

Ornithology

• Tony Marr, "From Pagham Harbour to Denzil Harber",British BirdsVol. 96, no. 3, 2003, pp. 132–124

Specific

Archives

• Harber Archive at the Marxists Internet Archive
• Harber's papers at the Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick
• Three letters from Harber in the Trotsky archives at Harvard University

External links

• The British Section of the Left Opposition