John Saville

John Saville born "Orestes Stamatopoulos" (2 April 1916 – 13 June 2009) was a Greek-British Marxist historian, long associated with Hull University. He was an influential writers on British Labour History in the second half of the twentieth century, and also known for his multi-volume work, the Dictionary of Labour Biography, edited in collaboration with others.

He was born Orestes Stamatopoulos in 1916, in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire to Greek parents. He took the surname Saville from his mother's second husband, and was brought up in Romford.

He won a scholarship to Royal Liberty School in London and went on to study at the London School of Economics, where he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and met his soon-to-be wife, Constance (née, Saunders). He was an active member of the CPGB until 1956 and also fought in the Second World War in India. Called up in 1940, he had the leftwing equivalent of a good war: "I had several large-scale quarrels with authority, although I was a good and efficient soldier". Against the party line, he refused to take a commission, but advanced rapidly from anti-aircraft gunner to gunnery sergeant major instructor and regimental sergeant major, engaged in political work wherever he went - especially, from 1943 to 1946, in India.

Whilst in India, Saville met Nehru and leaders of the Muslim League and his friendship with Indian communist students in Britain, all from establishment families, opened most anti-imperial doors, reinforced his own firm, but no longer uncritical, convictions. (Unlike him, Constance had never accepted the Moscow-imposed party line of 1939-41, which followed the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact). The cold war, particularly frozen during the years of the Korean War and McCarthyism, made it easier to maintain them.

He soon became a pillar of that remarkable assembly of talents, the Communist Party Historians' Group ("intellectually my lifeline"), and also of the Hull Communist party and its associated organisations, while building a double expertise in 19th-century British economic history and labour history.

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