Randall Carline Swingler MM (28 May 1909 – 19 June 1967) was an English poet, writing extensively in the 1930s in the communist interest. Early life and education His was a prosperous upper middle class Anglican family in Aldershot, with an industrial background in the Midlands and earlier aristocratic roots in Scotland. His uncle and godfather was Randall Davidson, the Archbishop of Canterbury (1903 – 1928) and he was the cousin of the writer Sir Walter Scott. He was educated at Winchester College, and New College, Oxford. He served with the British Army in Italy in World War II. His egalitarian beliefs led him to refuse a commission and he joined as a private soldier, repeatedly refusing offers of a battlefield commission. He saw action in the Italian campaign and was awarded the Military Medal. He left the CPGB in 1956. He was a founder of E. P. Thompson's The New Reasoner (from 1957). Music and literature Swingler was an accomplished flautist, playing regularly with the professional London orchestras. He was later much involved in musical collaboration as a librettist, including song cycles with Benjamin Britten (Advance Democracy, 1938), Alan Bush (The Winter Journey, 1946) and Alan Rawsthorne (A Canticle of Man, 1953). His friend John Sykes also set the four poems of Homage to John Dowland in 1957. Among several notable pieces, Swingler co-wrote Ballad of Heroes with Britten and the poet W. H. Auden and wrote a new version of the English lyrics of the Polish revolutionary song "Whirlwinds of Danger". There are settings of his verse by Arnold Cooke, Christian Darnton, Erik Chisholm, Norman Demuth, John Ireland, Elisabeth Lutyens, and Bernard Stevens. His war poetry (1935-1945), including examples such as 'Heavy Shelling at Night', 'Briefing for Invasion' and 'The Day the War Ended...' was collected in The Years of Anger, first published in 1946. Since his death, Swingler has been recognised as a central figure in communist English poetry. His biographer, the poet Andy Croft, has written that, as an editor, speaker, organiser, journalist, critic, playwright, poet, librettist, novelist and publisher, he was one of the leading figures in the cultural activities of the Communist Party. Croft has also calls him "the last of the Georgian poets" and says that his poetry "had a moral and political urgency". Swingler operated in North London, as a close associate of Nancy Cunard, sometimes lending his name. He was one