Winifred Langton
British communist, internationalist and activist
Winifred "Win" Langton (20 May 1909 – 7 March 2003) was a British communist, internationalist and activist.
Family
Langton was born in 1909 in Plaistow, East London, as one of six children. In the 1902 smallpox epidemic three of her elder siblings had died.
Her mother was Adelaide Knight (1871–1950), a working class suffragette with a physical disability, member of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) and founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). Her father was Donald Adolphus Brown (1874–1949), the son of a Guyanese naval officer and an English mother. He worked as foreman at the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich. He took his wife's surname and became known as Donald Knight. She later wrote a book about her parents called Courage and reflected that she learned to fight from her mother and to care from her father.
Langton was educated at Bostal Lane School in Abbey Wood then won a scholarship to Kingswarren School in Bexleyheath. She left Kingswarren School aged 16 as she encountered discrimination and "I was being educated to become a snob."
Activism
Langton was an activist from an early age and a member of the Young Communist League and CPGB. In the 1920s she started selling the CPGB newspaper Workers Weekly in Woolwich, then marched in 1925 with workers to HM Prison Wandsworth to protest at the imprisonment of the communist leaders who were held there.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q133314774. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1909, 2003, 1902 and 1871.
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This entry incorporates text from “Winifred Langton” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.