Peter Fryer - Hungarian Uprising

Hungarian Uprising

In October 1956 he was sent to Hungary to cover the uprising. His dispatches, including a description of the suppression of the uprising by Soviet troops, were either heavily censored or suppressed. He left the paper; his resignation had in fact taken place several months earlier, but he had been persuaded to serve a year's notice. He wrote a book about the uprising (Hungarian Tragedy, 1956) and was expelled from the Communist Party for criticising its suppression in the "capitalist" press. Hungarian Tragedy is in print; the most recent edition also contains some articles he completed after the book, which was published very quickly after the events he witnessed.

Fryer then became the editor of The Newsletter, the journal of The Club, a Trotskyist organisation led by Gerry Healy, and with Healy was a founder member of the Socialist Labour League. He parted company with Healy and was delighted when Healy's organisation expelled him in 1985. Fryer wrote a weekly column for the Workers Press, the paper of the organisation which had expelled Healy, for several years after 1985. As a socialist journalist, he was inspiring and painstaking, and wrote articles about how to write for the widest political audience, later made into a book called Lucid, Vigorous and Brief (1993).