Cambridge University Labour Club
In recent years, the club has hosted a number of high-profile figures including former leaders Ed Miliband, Neil Kinnock and Gordon Brown, as well as former Welsh first minister, Mark Drakeford.
Other speakers have included Angela Eagle, Harriet Harman, Hazel Blears, David Miliband, Margaret Hodge, Ed Balls, John Prescott, Tristram Hunt, Alan Johnson, Andy Burnham, Iain McNicol, David Lammy, Hilary Benn, Axelle Lemaire and Ken Livingstone.
It continued to debate with the local party and invited such speakers as G. D. H. Cole, Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, and J. C. Squire.
On 7 March 1919 a meeting was broken up and three members were forced to stand on a table and sing the national anthem before being dunked in the river by a group of veterans.
Maurice Dobb, the socialist economist, would experience the same treatment, and in 1922 CULC would be forced to relocate its premises due to its landlord's fear of attacks.
This was partly motivated by 'a considerable number of the present associates, who were not satisfied with the extremism' of CUSS and by a decline in the attendance and frequency of meetings, perhaps owing to the widespread intimidation of socialists.
It certainly retained a more radical position than most CULC members, remaining committed to 'common ownership', 'workers' control', and building a 'revolutionary working-class movement'.
Of all the 'red' speakers it invited, the most prominent was Leonid Krasin of the USSR, the People's Commissar of Foreign Trade, who could not attend in 1922 owing to the Geneva Conference.
Beginning in 1920 with Fred Bramley, Assistant General Secretary of the TUC, it was soon visited by the MPs J. C. Wedgwood, Margaret Bondfield, Ramsay MacDonald, and Ellen Wilkinson; and the academics Raymond Postgate, Joseph Needham, Harold Laski, Bertrand Russell, R. H. Tawney, and many others.
Despite its exposed left flank CULC grew rapidly and became the largest student political society by the late 1920s.
As the national party confronted the divide created by the leadership's response to the financial crisis in 1929, CULC 'feeling unwilling to tie itself officially to an apology for a Labour Government whose record it did not greatly admire', changed its name to Cambridge University Socialist Society and disaffiliated from the national Labour Party in 1930.
But it had a home in Cambridge; its economic position was shared by most members of the local party and, crucially, Alex Wood.
In December 1939, a new form of CULC was founded for those whose opinions sat closer to the national Labour Party than CUSC with regard to war.
One member, David Widdicombe, wrote an article entitled 'Against Ignorance' in the Labour Review in which he argued that the government was failing to explain its programme to the people.
He suggested that party members and MPs should 'give the flesh of ideal to the bare bones of legislation, to show towards what type of community we are progressing' and to replace 'doctrinaire socialist economic theory' with arguments based on 'efficiency and the common good'.
Practising as he preached, he proposed to set up special Sunday discussion groups open to all; they would be informal and, crucially, he was 'in favour of tea and buns'.
Although only five workers turned out in Cambridge, CULC members argued successfully that the press had exaggerated how much lorry drivers in Smithfield were paid.
On another occasion a young Peter Shore, the future cabinet minister, led a protest against the Cambridge Conservatives as they held their gala evening with the parliamentary candidate Hamilton Kerr and R. A.
Accusations of electoral malpractice were traded between the two, in what CULC's Senior Treasurer Prof Bernard Williams described as "a disagreeable and seedy affair.
Ultimately, the Cambridge Organisation of Labour Students (COLS) was formed in the summer of 1973 as a replacement for the faction-ridden CULC.
