Denis Nowell Pritt,QC (22 September 1887 – 23 May 1972) was a Britishbarrister and left-wingLabour Party politician. Born inHarlesden,Middlesex, he was educated atWinchester College and theUniversity of London.

Denis Nowell Pritt
Pritt acting as a foreign observer at the trialin absentia ofHans Globke in East Germany, 1963
Member of Parliament forHammersmith North
In office 14 November 1935 – 3 February 1950
Preceded by	Fielding Reginald West
Succeeded by	Frank Tomney
Chairman of theLabour Independent Group
In office May 1949 – 23 February 1950
Preceded by	Office established
Succeeded by	Office abolished
Personal details
Born	(1887-09-22)22 September 1887 Harlesden, Middlesex
Died	23 May 1972(1972-05-23) (aged 84) Pamber Heath, Hampshire
Nationality	British
Political party	Labour (1918–1940)
Other political affiliations	Labour Independent Group
Alma mater	University of London
Profession	Barrister

A member of the Labour Party from 1918, he was a defender of theSoviet Union. In 1932, as part ofG. D. H. Cole's NewFabian Research Bureau's expert commission of enquiry, he visited the Soviet Union, and, according toMargaret Cole, "the eminentKC swallowed itall".^[1] Pritt was expelled from the Labour Party in March 1940 following his support of theSoviet invasion of Finland.^[2]

Pritt was characterised byGeorge Orwell as "perhaps the most effective pro-Soviet publicist in this country".^[2]

Pritt was born 22 September 1887 in London, the son of a metal merchant.^[3] He was educated atWinchester College, which he left after four years so as to relocate toGeneva in order to learnFrench, with a view to joining his father's company.^[3] Following his time inSwitzerland, Pritt moved again to expand his linguistic knowledge, working in a bank inA Coruña,Spain, and improving hisSpanish.^[3] Pritt also added German to his repertoire of languages in subsequent years.^[3]

Pritt was admitted to theMiddle Temple on 1 May 1906 and wascalled to the bar on 17 November 1909.^[4] He continued to study law in 1909, obtaining a law degree from theUniversity of London in 1910.^[3] He began his legal practice as a specialist inworkmen's compensation cases.^[3]

He married in July 1914, on the eve of theFirst World War.^[3] During the war, he joined the postal censorship department in the British War Office. Following the war, Pritt returned to legal practice as a successful lawyer working in the field ofcommercial law.^[3]

AConservative in his earliest years, Pritt moved steadily leftward politically, joining theLiberal Party in 1914 and theLabour Party in 1918.^[3] Following a failed1931 campaign for Parliament as a Labour candidate inSunderland, Pritt was elected as a LabourMember of Parliament (MP) forHammersmith North in1935.^[3] Pritt was made a member of the Labour Party's executive committee in 1936, remaining in that role for over a year.^[3]

In 1936, he attended the firstMoscow Show Trial, known as theTrial of the Sixteen. He wrote an account of this,The Zinoviev Trial, which largely supportedJoseph Stalin and his firstpurge of the Communist Party.^[5]

In 1940, Pritt was expelled from the Labour Party for defending theSoviet invasion of Finland.^[6] His bookMust the War Spread? sympathized with the Soviets and led him to be greatly disliked by the Labour Party elite during and after the war.^[7] After 1940, he sat as an Independent Labour member, and at the1945 general election was re-elected in Hammersmith North under that label gaining a 63% share of the vote against official Labour and Conservative candidates.^[8] In 1949 he formed theLabour Independent Group with four otherfellow travellers, includingJohn Platts-Mills andKonni Zilliacus, who had also been expelled from the Labour Party for pro-Soviet sympathies. At thegeneral election of 1950, all the members of the Labour Independent Group lost their seats. By this time, Pritt's opposition to theCold War andNATO had made him an "unpopular figure" in Britain.^[5]

Pritt was awarded the 1954International Stalin Peace Prize and in 1957 became an honorary citizen ofLeipzig, which was then inEast Germany. East Germany also awarded him the GoldStern der Völkerfreundschaft (Star of People's Friendship) in October 1965.

In 1931, Pritt represented threeIndian revolutionaries,Bhagat Singh,Sukhdev Thapar andShivaram Rajguru before thePrivy Council, arguing that the ordinance which had been used to establish aspecial tribunal to try them for the crime of murdering apoliceman wasultra vires. The appeal was rejected, and the three men were executed byhanging within a month of their trial on 23 March 1931.^[9] Pritt successfully defendedHo Chi Minh in 1931 against a French request for his extradition fromHong Kong. In 1933, Pritt was chairman of the "International Commission of Inquiry into the Clarification of the Reichstag Fire", the so-called "London Counter-Process" to the Leipzig Reichstag Fire Process. In 1942, he initially defendedGordon Cummins but, due to a technicality, the trial was abandoned and restarted with a new jury, and Pritt was replaced by another lawyer. Cummins, then a serving member of theRoyal Air Force, was known in the press as theBlackout Ripper and was accused of murdering four women, mutilating their bodies and attempting to murder two others. The defence was unsuccessful, a subsequent appeal was dismissed and Cummins was hanged in June 1942.^[10]

Pritt's most high-profile case, which he lost, was defending theKapenguria Six, a group of Kenyan political figures accused in 1952 of links with theMau Mau:Jomo Kenyatta,Bildad Kaggia,Kung’u Karumba,Fred Kubai,Paul Ngei andAchieng Oneko. In this case, Pritt worked with a team of African, Indian and Afro-Caribbean lawyers includingAchhroo Ram Kapila,H. O. Davies,Dudley Thompson andFitz Remedios Santana de Souza.^{[citation needed]}

Pritt played a significant role in theSingaporean"Fajar trial" in May 1954. He was the lead counsel of theUniversity Socialist Club with the assistance ofLee Kuan Yew as the junior counsel and helped the club to win the case eventually.^[11] From 1965 to 1966, he was Professor of Law at theUniversity of Ghana.^[5]

Pritt was said to have encouragedBilly Strachan, a fellow communist activist and one of the pioneers of black civil rights in Britain, to study law.^[12] Strachan then went onto be elected the President of Inner London Justices' Clerks' Society, and became an expert in laws regarding adoption, marriage, and drink driving.

Pritt died in 1972 at his home inPamber Heath,Hampshire.^[5] Denis Pritt Road inNairobi, Kenya is named after him.

Pritt is one of those onOrwell's list, a list prepared byGeorge Orwell for theInformation Research Department in 1949, after the start of theCold War. The list was officially published in 2003, but had circulated before then. It listed notable writers and others whom Orwell considered to be sympathetic to the Soviet Union. In the document, Orwell noted that Pritt was "almost certainly underground Communist", but also a "Good MP (i.e. locally). Very able and courageous".^[13]

To read online copies seeInternet Archive

• Light on Moscow (1939)
• Must the War Spread? (1940)
• Federal Illusion (1940)
• Choose your Future (1940)
• The Fall of the French Republic (1940)
• USSR Our Ally (1941)
• India Our Ally? (1946)
• Revolt in Europe (1947)
• A New World Grows (1947)
• Star-Spangled Shadow (1947)
• The State Department and the Cold War (1948)
• Spies and Informers in the Witness-box (1958)
• Liberty in Chains (1962)
• The Labour Government, 1945–1951 (1963)
• Neo-Nazis, the Danger of War (1966)
• Autobiography
  • From Right to Left (1965)
  • Brasshats and Bureaucrats (1966)
  • The Defence Accuses (1966)

• Hansard 1803–2005:contributions in Parliament by Denis Pritt
• Catalogue of the Pritt papers held at LSE Archives
• Works by or about Denis Pritt at theInternet Archive