After Our Time folded in 1949, Hobday moved to Bristol to work for Keesing's Contemporary Archive. In 1950, he married Inez Gwendolen Beeching. Over the course of the next decade, he became involved in a campaign to democratise the Communist Party, but left in 1957 after the Soviet invasion of Hungary. From the 1960s onward Hobday became more engaged in writing poetry, and less involved in the communist politics of his youth.