Humphrey Slater

Who was Humphrey Slater?

Humphrey Richard "Hugh" Slater was a British author and painter.

Brought up in South Africa, he attended the Slade School of Art in the mid-1920s, and exhibited an abstract painting at Lucy Wertheim's gallery, a leading London gallery. The painter William Coldstream considered him "a very gifted and rare artist".

Getting involved in anti-Nazi politics in Berlin in the early 1930s, he joined the Communist Party and in 1936 he went to fight in the Spanish Civil War as Chief of Operations for the International Brigades.

Back in England, in 1940 he helped Tom Wintringham set up the Osterley Park training centre which taught guerilla warfare and street fighting for the Home Guard, before being drafted into the regular army as a private. The public outcry led to questions being asked in Parliament and an article in the US magazine TIME.

He was editor of the short-lived magazine Polemic.

The MGM film Conspirator, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Robert Taylor, was based on his novel The Conspirator.