  He saw London through socialist eyes. The streets ‘are full of beggars’, he wrote to his cousin Hugh Teague: ‘blind men, paralytics, pavement artists, organ grinders, Welsh miners’. He gave the Red salute to the miners (who were fleeing in their thousands from devastating unemployment in Wales) and found they returned it ‘with great gusto’. The previous year he described his ‘thinking on social questions’ as owing ‘a great deal’ to the Trotskyist writings of Auckland philosopher William Anderson and also to the writings of the Marxist-Leninist thinker Sorel, whose essays he translated at Roquebrune. He said he learned more from Sorel ‘than from any other Marxist theoreticians’. Like Sorel, he saw the importance of ‘the substitution of a “producer-mentality” for an “employee-mentality” among the workers’: England’s problems, Prior said, included the ‘servility of the English masses’ and ‘their almost unbounded willingness to “keep their place”’.