Cornford was the son of Francis Cornford and Frances Cornford (née Darwin), and was a great-grandson of Charles Darwin and Emma Darwin. He was born in Cambridge, and named after Rupert Brooke, who was a friend of his parents, but preferred to use his second name. His younger brother Christopher grew up to be an artist and writer.
Cornford was educated at King's College School, Cambridge,[1] Stowe School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He began writing poetry at the age of fourteen, strongly influenced by Robert Graves and W. H. Auden, and as a schoolboy argued fiercely about poetry with his mother, a member of the more sedate "Georgian" group whose most famous representative was A. E. Housman. He spent a year in London studying at the London School of Economics and becoming a speaker and organiser for the Young Communists. At Cambridge as an undergraduate, reading history, he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. He was two or three years younger than the group of Trinity College communists including Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby and James Klugmann.
Another Cambridge student, who would play a major part in his life, was Margot Heinemann, a fellow Communist. They were lovers and he addressed poems and letters to her. He had previously been in a relationship with a Welsh woman, Rachel (Ray) Peters, with whom he had a child, James Cornford, later adopted by John's parents. A photograph of Peters and Cornford can be found at the National Portrait Gallery, London.[2]
From 1933 he was directly involved in Communist Party work in London, and became associated with Harry Pollitt, the General Secretary of the CPGB.[3]
In August 1936, shortly after the start of the Spanish Civil War, he travelled to Barcelona and joined the POUM militia, serving briefly on the Aragon front where he wrote his three most famous poems including the often-reprinted "To Margot Heinemann" (originally simply entitled Poem).[4] The following month he returned to England, where he recruited twenty-one British volunteers,[5] including Bernard Knox, John Sommerfield, Chris Thorneycroft and Griffin Maclaurin.[6] With this group he travelled to Paris and then on to Albacete, where they joined the International Brigades—the nucleus of what would become the British Section. He served with a machine-gun unit of the Commune de Paris Battalion, and fought alongside a number of other British volunteers in the defence of Madrid through November and December 1936, including Esmond Romilly.[7] Having transferred to the recently formed British Battalion, he was killed in uncertain circumstances at Lopera, near Córdoba.[8]
