Bernard Emile Vivian Burns was a British communist, economist, translator and author as an active member of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
Early life and family
Emile Burns was born in Basseterre, St Kitts, on 29 November 1889, the son of James Patrick Burns, the Treasurer and Harbour Master of St. Kitts and Nevis. He had three brothers, Cecil, Robert and Alan, and one sister, Agnes. As a child, he and other boys would often swim out to the ships that were too big to come into the harbour, black and white boys played and swam together. However, once they reached their teens they were no longer allowed to play together. Burns attended Trinity College, Cambridge to study economics. While there, he met Elinor Enfield, and the two married in Nottinghamshire in 1913. Their first daughter, Susannah, was born 11 September 1914, and Marca was born on 4 January 1916. At this time Emile Burns was working for Cunard, but was also serving on a national committee enquiring into poverty, which had been set up by Eleanor Rathbone, and which published Equal Pay and the Family: A Proposal for the National Endowment of Motherhood. The family moved to London sometime after April 1918 but prior to the end of World War I.
Politics
Emile and Elinor were both members of the Independent Labour Party, Emile joining the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1921, followed by Elinor in 1923. Emile found work as the secretary of the Labour Research Department, except during the UK general strike, when he worked as propaganda secretary of the St PancrasTrades Council. Emile was a supporter of the London busmen's movement in the 1930s, and edited its newspaper, The Busmen's Punch. In 1935, he was elected to the CPGB's executive, ultimately serving for more than twenty years. He held many positions within the party, most focusing on cultural or educational activity, including a spell as head of the party's propaganda department. He spent a period as editor of the Communist Review, and was later editor of the World News. In the early 1950s, he did much of the preparation work for the party's new programme, the British Road to Socialism. Burns translated both political and non-political writings from Russian, France and German into English, including Friedrich Engels' Anti-Dühring, and parts of Karl Marx's Theories of Surplus Value. He wrote works of his own including Handbook of Marxism, What is Marxism and Introduction to Marxism, successive basic explanations of Marxism.
