Nan Caplan – Breaking the Fetters

Comrades: Anatole Naumovich Kaminsky (Part Two).

The second of two pictures of Anatole Kaminsky in his MI5 file.

Anatole Naumovich Kaminsky married Bob Stewart’s daughter Annie at some point during 1933. This is an overview of what I found in his security file when I visited the National Archives last year and any inaccuracies are my own. This post concerns information the British secret services gathered on him during his brief visits to Britain while the details of his arrest and execution can be found in ‘Comrades: Anatole Naumovich Kaminsky (Part One)’. Ultimately, this is all the information I have found out about Kaminsky but I would love to know more.

Anatole Naumovich Kaminsky first arrived in the United Kingdom on the 10^th September 1930. Sailing from the Hook of Holland and docking at Harwich, it’s likely that it was his first visit or, at least, he had never caught the attention of the security services before. His arrival records state that he was 23 years old, a Russian national and that he carried a Soviet passport. His proposed address in the UK was given as “Arcos, London”. Arcos was the All-Russian Co-operative Society – the organisation which oversaw Anglo-Soviet trade. Three years before, its Hampstead headquarters had been raided by the British authorities and evidence of espionage uncovered. The whole affair had been a cause celebre and the relationship between Britain and the Soviet Union, always palpably frosty, had cooled somewhat as a consequence. Kaminsky came in on a six month visa and was employed as a commercial secretary. It’s clear from the outset that the security services were intending to keep an eye on him.

Initial investigations found that Kaminsky was much more than a secretary. In a letter dated 27^th March 1930 Captain Guy Liddell, then of Special Branch, wrote to Oswald Allen Harker in MI5 with the following information:

Dear Harker,

Application was made a short time ago in Moscow for a visa for Anatole Naumovitch KAMINSKI, born 1907. This man who was then secretary of the Scientific Technical Section of the Society for the Promotion of Cultural Relations with Countries Abroad in Moscow, was coming here as a secretary to Arcos. Preliminary enquiries through SIS show that he is a scientist and is in touch with military scientific men in the “Revoyensoviet”. He has also been working in the Osoaviachim. He is a full member of the VKP (b).

KAMINSKI arrived her on the 10th September and proceeded to 81, Kensington Gardens Square, W.

The involvement with the Osoaviachim was of particular concern as that was the society concerned with the construction of military aircraft and chemical warfare research. There is little else in the file at this point other than establishing links with the director of Arcos Vladimir Belgoff and his wife Sophie. There was a request to intercept all mail at the Belgoff’s address 14 Tenterden Drive in Hendon and it looks like Kaminsky might have been staying with them for a time.

I assume Kaminsky left the UK sometime in March 1931 due to the length of his visa. However, he made a return visit in December of that year as part of The Trade Delegation of the USSR in Great Britain and, this time, he was listed as a “consulting economist”. Shortly after this on the 7^th January 1932, he appeared in a news story in the Daily Mail. Despite the snideness of the journalist remarking on Kaminsky’s “broken English” the economist’s assurances that his activities are strictly business and nothing whatsoever to do with intelligence gathering are spectacularly unconvincing.

Transcript of The Daily Mail article from 1932 Anatole Kaminsky’s MI5 file.

ARCOS IMPUDENCE.

Demands to British Firms.

An impudent letter which British firms have received recently from Arcos is making them wonder what secret object the Soviet trade organisation in this country is pursuing under the disguise of innocent business relationships.

The letter explains that Arcos is anxious to “tabulate information on industrial and technical lines concerning their production and general characteristics of distinguished British firms, with whom we have commercial relations, to be placed upon record for reference when deciding orders for the forthcoming year.”

It proceeds: “We ask you especially to give technical information in detail such as measurements, size and capacity of machines.” It demands information “in detail” and not “under general headings” and instructs that replies should be sent “in triplicate.”

Then follows a questionnaire, half of which could be filled in from ordinary business books. It includes such questions as dividends paid, if any, from 1926 to 1931 and number of work people employed.

‘Comrade’ A. KAMINSKY, of the economic department of Arcos, is responsible for this piece of effrontery. He had little explanation to offer yesterday when asked by a Daily Mail reporter what was the object of this so-called business inquiry. “Just to assist us in making purchases,” he answered in broken English.

When it was suggested to him that the replies would be useful for the secret archives of Moscow, ‘Comrade’ KAMINSKY gave his favourite answer: “Oh, no, you make big mistake, just business purposes only.”

Kaminsky came to the attention of the security services again in January 1933 when he arrived in the UK on a short term visa only valid for a few months. It stated that he was returning to the same post, however, during this time, it was his personal life rather than the professional which interested MI5. It is likely that this was when he married Bob Stewart’s daughter Annie, my father’s Aunt Nan. There are several enquiries about this and it is confirmed by Superintendent Canning of Special Branch in May of that year.

“In reference to the enquiries which you were recently good enough to have made regarding Annie Walker STEWART (301/MP/2860), it has just been reported from a source which is I think reliable, that this woman is married to a Russian called KAMINSKY.”

Of course the security services were already interested in Bob Stewart for his roles in the covert finance of the CPGB, his time as the British representative to the Comintern and his associations in Ireland. They also clearly considered Annie and her older brothers William and Rab to be persons of interest due to their links to Arcos and it is likely that all three had some involvement, however slight, in Bob’s underground activities.

Although Annie’s marriage to a Soviet official who seemed to be rising through the ranks would have ensured the security services attention it seems the pair did little to attract it. The next mention of Kaminsky is from March 1934 when the passport office is extending his visa and its confirmed that, “This alien has not come under notice.”

Nevertheless, MI5 still tracked Kaminsky’s movements and gathered information on him. There’s a record that on March 4^th 1934 there was a lecture at the “London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The lecturer was to be A. KAMINSKY, Soviet Economist, of the First Moscow State University, and the subject to be ‘The Second Five Year Plan.’” Also that year MI5 received intelligence that Kaminsky was “the real power behind Arcos” and that he was “either married to or living with Nan STUART, the daughter of the Clydeside Communist.” One hopes the agent who drafted that memo was slightly more knowledgeable about potential threats to the nation than they were about Scottish geography. Bob was a Dundonian – not a Glaswegian. It’s likely they were confusing Bob with Willie Gallacher.

By October 1935, Anatole and Annie had moved to Moscow although they were in regular contact with the family back in London. Being so far away Annie would have been eager for news from home and, in the files, there is an intercepted letter from Bob dated the 8^th October. The security services were mostly interested in the references to Harry Pollitt, the head of the CPGB and his wife Marjorie. However, the letter is largely domestic. Bob’s wife Margaret is ‘in the tub’ and Bob is taking the opportunity to write to their daughter. There is some news of ‘Bill and family’ – my grandfather, grandmother and my dad – baby Robin- who would have been two years old at the time. There’s some gossip about Rab, Bob’s middle child and his new girlfriend. The anecdote about them singing makes me smile as when I met his daughter Linda for the first time last year she remarked that what her father loved above all else was music. Towards the end there’s some talk of knitting and this is because Annie would have been pregnant at the time with my father’s cousin Greg. Bob and Margaret were eagerly awaiting their second grandchild.

Part of the letter from Bob Stewart to Annie and Anatole. (1935).

Dear N & N again,

Your letter arrived a couple of hours ago and we three enjoyed its contents. So very glad to know that you are both so well. This seems to be washing night. Rab balked and hopped off to bed, mother is now in the tub. While the old man, like the dutiful father he is, sits down to write this letter straight away lest tomorrow he should be too busy in other directions. The new situation is imposing duties that cannot wait as you will readily appreciate. We are well in health. Rab walks fairly comfortably now and is on the hunt for a job. Mother is all right again and of course the old man is the XXXX-XXXX-XXXX or thereby.

We were glad that you remembered our Welsh friends who are really the most excellent comrades. I hope you will be successful in helping them out. Very glad that P____ is going to help you get numbers? Tolia has many things to do and maybe he is modest about his own comfort. We were so glad to get his picture cards from way down South to find that his writing arm was still in good order. I gave Harry your message- he says it’s between you and Marjorie whom I saw a day or two ago. She is looking and feeling very well as is Jean who played merry hell when I couldn’t play with her any longer. We have not seen Bill and family for a fortnight but they are all well and Robin has had more photographs taken. Everyone likes to take his picture and he quite likes it. We have now got a big one of him and all the lady visitors are taking him for a walk -he is so lovely to look at they say.

We have had numbers of visitors recently among them XXXX’s auntie who is much interested in you but more in Rab who needs to help with the printers of whom we have now quite a few. We had Tom Wilson and C____ up for tea and we had a young girlfriend from a distance staying the weekend. She and Rab sang all our favourites till the wee sma’ oors. It was delightful. She reminded mother very much of you although her singing was a vast improvement on yours. She went away home overwhelmed by the kindness of your mother which is not unusual. We also had a visit from one of the numerous Clark family who want me to share with you the joys of the children’s movement at home. I don’t remember his first name he’s got a job in some club or hotel down Leatherhead way – not much of a job but better than idleness. Yes! We read in your XXXX all about the XXXX expansion of trade and the XXXX values brings to you all. It’s a remarkable achievement and opens the door to new XXXX. It’s a consolidation of brilliance compared to the darkening skies elsewhere. The centre the world’s attention is now on Africa and as you’ll see by the British XXXX there is a lack of confusion and in some cases XXXX XXXX in our movement. It’s an acid test that will reveal much base metal. Probably you will have seen Jane ‘ere you get this. I hope she will benefit from her sojourn in your country. Hope to get some of your orders shipped in the course of the next fortnight if I’m not called away! I notice the knitting needles being used here and no doubt you’ll be pleased with the result – the other fittings may not be so easy to get but will have a good try on the first fine day. I think that’s all I’ve got to say at this time except that the weather is as wet as you have had it. Even as we are all bearing up – always cheered up when your letters come along. All the same I could have sat in on mothers celebration and I think Rab’s teeth were watering when I thought of what he could have done had he been around. I don’t know if I told you that Jimmy B had a XXXX XXXX badly and has been under medical care for three weeks. He seems to have got over the worst but it is a XXXX XXXX blow as he had to cancel all engagements and new ones will not be easy to get. Cheerio- it’s bedtime.

Love from all to you all,

Dad.

(I’ve used XXXX when I can’t make out the Bob’s handwriting.)

Greg was born in Moscow in early 1936 and, in the summer, Annie took him to London so that everyone could be introduced to the latest addition to the family. Anatole stayed behind in the Soviet Union but wrote regularly. MI5 intercepted the following letter from him addressed to Annie and their son. The letter has all the hallmarks of the new parent – concern, pride and love. However, just over a year later Anatole’s brother, Grigory, was arrested and executed in Stalin’s purges, setting in motion his own imprisonment and eventual murder.

Letter from Anatole Kaminsky to Annie Stewart. (1936).

17^th June 1936

Dearest Nan and XXXX

Last night I received your long letter and felt very happy that you are managing well. It was nice to hear that calm and sunny weather made your journey bright and not a difficult one.

A few days ago I got your note from the sea and Dad’s ‘epistle’. It makes a pleasant reading to find out that old people and the whole family are taking such a keen interest in our wee sonny. I think he already succeeded to prove that he is a thoroughly good boy and deserves all the love and care bestowed upon him. As to his ??? on the face I think it will go away after some fresh fruit and vegetable diet of his milking cow – (Sorry to use zoo terms!)

Have a complete rest, change over to fruit eats and drinks and don’t take troubles of any kind. I don’t give anymore advice is as you have very good advisers around you with lots of experience gained during a long life. The only remark will be the main thing is to develop regular habits a good regime.

Anatole

According to his file, Anatole made one more visit to the United Kingdom. Beforehand, the Soviet Ambassador Ivan Maisky wrote to the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden to request a visa so Kaminsky could attend trade negotiations.

M. Maisky, Ambassador of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in Great Britain, presents his compliments to His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and has the honour to request a visa for M. Anatole Kaminsky who is a financial expert, and is coming to this country to take part in the financial negotiations which are going on between the Trade Representative of the USSR in London and the Board of Trade.

As his presence here is urgently required, M. Maisky would be obliged if the instructions granting him a visa could be telegraphed to Moscow at the Embassy’s expense.

11th of July, 1936.

The Rt. Hon. Anthony Eden, MC, MP,

Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.

Anatole Naumovich Kaminsky arrived in Britain from Amsterdam by aeroplane on or around the 1^st August 1936 and was recorded as an “Economic Advisor to the USSR Trade Delegation.” An unconditional landing was granted. This is the last record I can find of Kaminsky in the MI5 files until 1956 when, after Khruschev’s speech denouncing Stalin, Annie and her teenage son, Greg found out exactly what had happened to him after his arrest by the NKVD in June 1938.

Alan Stewart.

Comrades: Anatole Naumovich Kaminsky (Part One).

Where to begin? It’s a troubling, ultimately tragic part of the story and some of it is truly inexplicable. Perhaps the best way to deal with it is to set out the information as simply as I can.

What we knew was this. At some point in the early 1930s Bob Stewart’s daughter, Annie (my dad’s Aunt Nan) married a ‘Russian’ and they went to live in Moscow. We didn’t know his name nor had we ever seen a photograph of him. At some point Nan gave birth to a baby boy – my dad’s cousin Greg. Soon after this Nan’s husband was killed in Stalin’s purges. Nan fled with their infant child back to London. Information about her husband was almost impossible to come by. I have no idea how they managed to escape. In the years that followed, Nan remarried, had two more children and remained a member of the Communist Party until 1956.

For me, all of this was rather abstract. Dad had a lot of family somewhere out there but was rarely in contact with them. Until recently, apart from visits to my grandfather when I was a toddler, the only other person I’d ever met from my father’s side was Greg. That was at my brother’s wedding just over a decade ago. I only spoke to him briefly as I was on best man duties. All I can really remember is how strange it was to be speaking to somebody who bore such a strong resemblance to my dad and yet was someone who was to all intents and purposes a complete stranger. I never made the effort to remain in touch. I wish I had.

After my father died, I started reading through the security files on Bob Stewart that the National Archives had digitised and put online. Trying to find glimpses of who he was before he was our dad. To begin with, I knew very little about the Communist Party or our family. I tended to focus on the later files as during that period MI5 weren’t simply intercepting Bob’s post and tailing his movements but bugging his offices and tapping his phone. Rather than squinting at spidery 1920s handwriting and trying to work out what it all meant I could easily read the transcripts of conversations and, through their voices, almost begin to get to know these people who were long gone.

I started looking at the files collected during 1956. The year that Nikita Khrushchev gave a speech condemning the crimes of Stalin and the first official recognition about what had gone on in the decades before. At this time Nan was living in a large house in North London with her family and also her father who was nearing eighty but still involved in the secret side of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Most of the documents in that file focus on the general disquiet about the revelation in ‘secret speech’ felt by those at the CPGB’s HQ at Covent Garden. However, a more personal impact is outlined in the transcript of a phone call Nan made to her sister in law Margaret on 10th August 1956.

O/G call from NAN CAPLAN to MARGARET STEWART, BOB’S daughter in law. HARRY is back, and DRONA, (the father of NAN’s son GREGORY CAPLAN) was definitely shot in 1941. They are both shattered by it. HARRY came to see BOB and NAN insisted on seeing him. She says there is not one of the five brothers in KRONA’s (sic) family left. She threatened that if HARRY does not give her justice she’ll follow him to every meeting at which he speaks. BOB’s threatening to leave (The house? The party?) She would like her brother RAB STEWART to come and see her. BOB is going away next week so they will arrange it.
(KV2/2790 – Security File on Robert Stewart held at the National Archives.)

‘HARRY’ was Harry Pollitt, the leader of the CPGB, who had gone to Russia in part to find out what had happened to the family members of several of his own colleagues and friends. Of course, this transcript raises so many questions. How had they lived with this trauma for so long? How had they maintained their commitment to the CPGB in all that time in the face of it? What had they already known?

At this stage I still did not know the identity of Nan’s husband. From the battered suitcase that had been up in the loft, every old photograph or letter in Russian that I sifted through proved a dead end. So too did the references to KRONA or DRONA in the transcript- a nickname that didn’t seem to crop up elsewhere. However, later on in the files I did find a reference that linked Greg’s father to Grigory Kaminsky and this was the first real breakthrough in my search.

Grigory Kaminsky was the People’s Commissar for Health of the Soviet Union between 1934 and 1937. He set up the Soviet health system, improved the production of medicine and medical training and battled malaria in the USSR. Evidently, he was also Nan’s brother-in-law. However, in 1937 he made speech in which he condemned the wrongful arrests of people and accused Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the NKVD, of counter revolutionary activities. As a result, he was arrested and then executed by firing squad in February 1938. Then, it seems, the NKVD went for the rest of his family.

Now I had a surname I went back to the earlier files from the 1920s and 1930s and managed to find documents that linked Anatole Naumovich Kaminsky and Annie Stewart together which speculated about whether they were married. So, now I knew who he was but still no idea of what he looked like or any real details of what had happened to him. My first port of call would have been to search for him through the Memorial website. Memorial is the Russian human rights organisation set up to investigate the crimes of the Stalin era and beyond. They’d amassed records of all known victims in a ceaseless effort to record every human rights violation. However, last year it was closed down after years of intimidation by the Putin regime. During one court hearing the state prosecutor announced that Memorial was “creating a false image of the Soviet Union as a terrorist state.”

Screenshot of the information I found on Anatole Kaminsky. Apparently the information is from a database of “Victims of political terror in the USSR”; Moscow, execution lists -Kommunarka.

Despite Memorial being closed down I think I’ve still managed to find a record of what exactly had happened to Anatole. It appears that there are several websites that have ‘backed up’ the information held by Memorial and similar agencies and these have not all been shut down yet. Not being a Russian speaker, I can’t fully judge the reliabilty of the website I found but, as key parts of the information held on Anatole Kaminsky match what’s held in the MI5 files, I am reasonably sure that this is what happened.

On June 20th 1938 NKVD officers arrived at Anatole Kaminsky’s Moscow flat on the St. Malaya Dmitrovka. They arrested him on charges of espionage and participation in counter revolutionary organisations. He remained in custody for the next three years and was eventually convicted on 8th July 1941 shortly after the Nazis invaded the USSR. His sentence was noted down as ‘VMN’. This stood for ‘Vysshaya Mera Nakazaniya’ which translates as ‘the supreme measure of punishment’. In other words, the death penalty. On July 28th the sentence was carried out. They took him to the Kommunarka shooting ground on the outskirsts of Moscow where his body lies alongside thousands of other victims to this day. He was 34 years old.

Anatole was rehabilitated by the Khrushchev regime in 1956. Rehabilitation would have had to have been requested and I assume it was Harry Pollitt who put that in motion or it might have been Bob on his visit to Moscow in August that year. That’s as far as justice stretched.

In November this year I finally saw some photographs of Anatole, one of which is reproduced at the top of this article. They were attached to his MI5 security file held at the National Archives. I spent the morning reading all about the six years he spent in Britain before he returned to the Soviet Union and the dreadful fate that awaited him. That afternoon I met, for the very first time, another of my dad’s cousins. It was Rab and Margaret’s daughter Linda. It had been Margaret who Nan had rang up after discovering what had happened to her husband in that summer in 1956. It was an emotional meeting and we covered a lot of ground in the few hours we were together. She could not believe I had found photographs of ‘Natte’ as he’d been known. He’d died long before she was born and she’d never seen a picture of him either. Of course she was familiar the story and knew that her aunt and cousin had got away by “the skin of their teeth.” When I showed her the photographs on my phone she was instantly struck by the resemblance to Greg who she’d known well and who died in 2019. I was glad I was able to show her these images. I wish that I could have shown them to my father. Above all, I wish I could have shown them to Greg.

Alan Stewart.

Thanks to Linda Stewart, Ian Stewart, Ruth Holliday and Maurice Casey for all their help.

The Family Firm.

*The Stewart Family pictured in the mid 1920s: -R: Bob, Rab, Annie (Nan), William and Margaret.*

To the best of my knowledge the last person in my family to still be fully committed to a Marxist-Leninist revolution died in 1978. He was my grandfather William Stewart and he was lovely. However, even though those that remain have spent the intervening forty-four years failing to overthrow the capitalist system, communism has loomed ever present in the background in our lives for all sorts of reasons. It is a bittersweet inheritance. I suppose there is nothing surprising in its presence as, from the inception of the CPGB in 1920, communism essentially became the family business for the next fifty years. Practically everyone was involved.

At the end of 1955 – a few months before Khrushchev would acknowledge the crimes of Stalin for the first time in his ‘secret speech’ MI5 picked up some office gossip about the Stewart family through one of the bugs it had placed in the offices at the Communist Party’s HQ in King Street, Covent Garden. Reuben Falber, who, when Bob Stewart finally retired in 1957, would go on to be responsible for distributing funds from Moscow, was overheard talking to fellow party worker Betty Reid about a recent scandal involving Bob’s nephew Greg – a Cambridge student who had just been unforgivably rude to one of the comrades at Central Books. Here’s part of the transcript in the security files:

‘They’re a family that-well, they’re a law unto themselves because you’ve got a combination of the old fellow’s prestige and money. BETTY asked where the money came from. Regret FALBER’s reply was whispered and could not be followed.

(From the MI5 Security File on Bob Stewart KV2/2790 – The National Archives)

The ‘old fellow’ is, of course, Bob Stewart and quite clearly the whole family had something of a reputation within communist circles. In fact, Betty Reid, in a conversation recorded about eight months later, was of the opinion that the Stewart children – William, Rab and Nan, had been “thoroughly spoiled all their lives.” This kind of attitude is elaborated further in an earlier document I came across in my grandfather’s security file on a recent visit to the National Archives. It’s dated 17th October 1932 and appears to be a memorandum from Special Branch to MI5 concerning the activities of Bob and his three children. I reproduce it here in full partly because I think it’s an interesting account of how the Stewarts and other similar families were viewed within the movement but mainly because I love the description of my grandfather.

The following information has been received.

WILLIAM STEWART, who used to drive the Soviet Ambassador’s car has given up driving altogether and is now employed in the Embassy as a ‘trusted’ man. He recently stated that he was engaged there on work of a secret nature, which included a little clerical labour.

His hours are from 5pm until 1am and his wife also has a job at the Embassy.

He is forbidden to undertake Communist Party of Great Britain work.

He now wears a small moustache, Charlie Chaplin style, which gives him an altered appearance, and carries an ash walking-stick. He often wears a light green shirt, brown jacket and shorts (at other times grey flannel trousers), light brown rabbit-skin hat, and brown shoes. He apes the appearance and mannerisms of a university student.

His father, ‘Bob’, is at present in Belfast where he is assisting the Irish Revolutionary Workers’ Party.

His brother, who lived with Ralph Edwin BOND, and was attached to St. Pancras Local Communist Party of Great Britain, has now secured a situation at Arcos Ltd. as also has his wife. Both have been transferred to Islington Local.

His sister, who was active in the Young Communist League of Great Britain, and who went to Russia on several occasions, has gone to live there permanently. She also was employed at Arcos and married a principal of that concern. As he has been recalled to Russia, she has accompanied him.

The state of affairs here outlined indicates how the movement is ‘exploited as a meal ticket’ (to use the phrase of certain disgusted genuine Communists) by certain fortunate families.

The CAMPBELL family is another case in point. The sum of over £20 weekly is received in John Ross Campbell’s home from Soviet sources.

The WATKINS’ are in the same position, whilst there is a host of others.

There is keen resentment in the ‘movement’ over this condition of things. It is freely expressed that no man and wife should be allowed to hold a situation while other ‘Comrades’ are unemployed. This objection has taken root and considerable trouble on the point seems likely to develop.

SUPERINTENDENT.

(From the MI5 Security File on William Stewart KV2/4494 – The National Archives)

Alan Stewart.

Comrades: Henry Sara

Leaflet advertising Henry Sara’s Lantern Lectures (Warwick Modern Records Centre).

Late last year I was contacted on Twitter by someone who runs the Warwick Modern Records Centre account who told me they thought they had some lantern slides of Bob Stewart in Russia in 1924 – the time he was on the Executive Committee of the Comintern. They were part of the Henry Sara collection – someone I had never heard of before. A brief biography apppears on their website:

“Henry Sara (1886-1953) was attracted early in his life to social ideals, and during his twenties became active within the small British anarcho-syndicalist movement. With the advent of the First World War in 1914 Sara aligned himself with the anti-war movement and, after a campaign of public meetings, was arrested and imprisoned in April 1916 for his refusal to serve in the army. He remained in prison until February 1919, when he was finally released after going on hunger strike.

Henry Sara joined the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in the early 1920s, shortly after its formation, and became a popular speaker within the Party, travelling widely as a representative of the CPGB and associated organisations. His international trips included a lecture tour of the USA on behalf of the Friends of Soviet Russia in 1922; and visits to Germany and France in 1924, Russia / the Soviet Union in 1921, 1925 and 1927 (in 1921, by his own account, he “smuggl[ed] away on a ship from Hull, because he wanted to see for himself”), and China in 1927, where he attended the 5th Congress of the Communist Party of China in Hankow and witnessed the beginnings of the Chinese civil war. Sara’s willingness to criticise Party leaders and association with other Trotskyist “dissidents” resulted in his expulsion from the CPGB in 1932, and he went on to become a leading figure in the British Trotskyist movement of the 1930s.”

Sara used to give lectures and talks about socialist politics and illustrate them with magic lantern slides taken, in the main, from his own travels. The slides, reproduced by the WMRC on their website are exhaustive and fascinating and I’d encourage anyone interesting in Soviet history or the broader sweep of left wing politics in the early twentieth century to view them. An absolutely exhaustive and stunning resource. You can view them here: https://warwick.ac.uk/services/library/mrc/archives_online/digital/sara/

The photos the WMRC sent me on Twitter are reproduced below. The first is a group portrait taken in Faustovo. Henry Sara is the tall, dark haired young man standing on the left while that’s unmistakeably Bob Stewart standing on the right hand side of the picture. He’s roughly my age there (47) but looks odd due to an industrial accident and too many policemen stamping on his face. His wife Margaret in the glasses is sitting on the left and the little girl by his knee I’m pretty sure is their daughter, my dad’s Aunt Nan. Years later in the late 1930s/early 40s she would have to flee Russia with her baby son after her husband was arrested as a Trotskyist. He was shot in 1941 and the full details only came out in 1956. Standing at the back is British Trade Union legend Tom Mann who I’ll be writing about later. Also in this photograph is Rose Cohen – she’s sitting next to Margaret. She was a suffragette and like my great grandad a founder member of the British Communist Party. Standing behind her is probably her soon to be husband David Petrovsky. In 1938 he was arrested and executed and later on Rose was also arrested. There was nothing anyone could do as she had given up her British citizenship. Her trial lasted twenty minutes and then she was taken out and shot. Their child was sent to an orphanage. All of this is described in Francis Beckett’s superb book ‘Stalin’s British Victims’ and in Maurice Casey’s article, ‘The Suffragettes Who became Communists’ which you can read here: https://www.historytoday.com/miscellanies/suffragettes-who-became-communists

Front Row L-R: Margaret Stewart, Rose Cohen (?), Unknown, Unknown, Annie Stewart, Bob Stewart. Back row L-R: Henry Sara, Unknown, David Petrovsky (?), Tom Mann, Unknown.

This next photograph was simply labelled ‘Nan’ and though I don’t know who the older girl and the small boy are that’s definitely Bob and Margaret’s daughter Annie ‘Nan’ Stewart aged about 11 on the right. The picture appears to have been taken in the grounds of the Pushkin School.

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Annie Stewart can also be seen in the class photo from the Pushkin School – she’s the little girl standing in the dark dress fifth from the right. Bob and Margaret Stewart can just about be spotted at the back on the left hand side.

The last slide features Bob and Margaret Stewart in Red Square visiting the grave of John Reed- the American journalist who wrote the eyewitness account of the Russian Revolution ‘Ten Days That Shook the World’.

L-R Unknown, Bob Stewart, Margaret Stewart.

If anyone has any more information regarding these images please do get in touch. I’d love to know more. Many thanks to the kind but anonymous person who brought them to my attention. Learning all about Henry Sara was fascinating. Thanks also to Maurice Casey who has always been so helpful.

Alan Stewart.

Comrades: Yvonne Kapp

At the end of last year I was sorting through a large box of correspondence dating from the 1930s and onwards. In amongst them was a handful of letters addressed to Bill Stewart who was my grandfather. They stood out due to the immaculate clarity of the handwriting and the fierce affection they displayed for my family, in particular Bob. They were all signed by an ‘Yvonne’ who lived in the red enclave of Highgate not too far from the cemetery where Karl Marx is buried. It turned out they were from Yvonne Kapp, not someone I had ever heard of, certainly my father had never told me about her even though he comes in for a great deal of flattery in them. I have to admit that, starting with the letters and then digging deeper, Kapp is someone I’ve become almost infatuated with during the course of my research and I am sad that I never met her. She lived an extraordinary life.

Dating from the early 1970s the overwhelming sense that these letters convey is of age and infirmity. Bill is getting over a serious illness, Yvonne is recovering from a fall, Bob is blind and installed in a care home. There is an acknowledgment of things slowly coming to end and of putting affairs in order. A deep love and attachment is clear though the odd resentment surfaces occasionally. The first, from April 1972 is innocuous enough.

Dear Bill,

Thank you so much for sending the snapshots & your nice letter. The snaps are wonderfully good & I wish Bob could enjoy them. I thoroughly enjoyed meeting Robin on that occasion; what a very nice chap he is.

Unfortunately, I can’t go to see Bob at present as, a fortnight ago, I fell & broke my ankle – both sides of it- & shan’t be able to put that foot to the ground for 6 to 8 weeks. It’s not too painful now, but I’m helplessly moored to the bed. Still, I send letters to Bob by the nice young woman whom we’ve laid on to attend him twice a week.

I’m enclosing the publisher’s announcement of my book which will be out on May 25^th. Do ask for it at your local library- & get Robin to do the same at his if you can find the time.

With very best wishes,

Yours ever,

Yvonne.

I’m assuming the snaps were from Bob’s 95^th birthday celebrations though try as I might I have not been able to find any copies of these photos so far. Robin is my father, always known by his middle name on his side of the family but as I never really knew any of them I only ever heard him called ‘Mike’ or ‘Michael’ or, of course, ‘Dad’. The book she refers to is the first part of her two volume biography of Eleanor Marx, described by Eric Hobsbawn as, “one of the few unquestionable masterpieces of 20th-century biography.” It’s certainly the work she is best known for, completed in her seventies after ten years researching and writing.

The second letter is dated New Year’s Day 1973- the year of Bob’s death. Things seem far more urgent. Bob is growing frailer and Kapp is urging Bill to make the journey from Colchester to London to see his father before it’s too late. Bill wasn’t in the best of health either. He died in 1978 when I was about four years old. I have few memories of him save for a lovely old man in stripy pyjamas in a hospital bed whose moustache was all tickly when I kissed him. Of a tiny, dark house full of treasures and of long night time drives back from Essex to Suffolk where I only now realise how my own father must have felt whilst leaving an ailing parent as I’ve now made so many similar journeys myself. I think I remember his funeral- a haze of adults’ knees, mumbling and, in my mind, a red flag draped over the coffin. That could just be my imagination. His decorative Indian elephant bell that I adored was given to me afterwards has been a constant companion in every move I’ve made since leaving home – always kept safe.

Dear Bill,

Forgive me for not having been able to answer your letter before. I came back from my “summer holiday” just before Xmas, since when I’ve visited Bob a couple of times, ln the first of which I read him your letter, of course. He was sorry to hear of your illnesses & does hope you are now fully recovered.

He himself is growing very frail, Bill, and I hope that you will make a trip to see him very soon. His courage is unimpaired & he never complains, but feel he has to make an effort to appear as cheerful as he always is when I am there & that underneath it, he feels very tired & rather sad. His muscular strength is reduced; he finds it difficult to move about even in the room & with help & as time passes, he loses his sense of direction in his total blindness. I have never known anyone as brave & as good as Bob, I love him, dearly as you know, but now I worry about him a good deal & I wish I could do more to help him in his lonely old age. Please go and see him when you can manage it.

Wishing you a happy New Year & with Bob’s love to you.

Yours ever,

Yvonne

The next letter was written in March 1974 around sixth months after Bob’s death and his funeral at Golders Green Crematorium. Kapp’s grief is still very raw and her anger at others failing to remember his birthday on the 16^th February in commemoration is palpable. She refers to papers and photos that have gone missing and of course it’s impossible to tell what may have been lost but we do at least still have an album of cards and messages from his 90^th birthday celebrations that she seems to think has gone forever. The striking thing about this letter for me is her description of Bob as, “the finest human being I have ever known” something she would reiterate when she came to write her memoirs at the close of the 1980s. The letter closes with some comments on the problems of completing the second volume of the Eleanor Marx biography and the difficulties on living on the proceeds of the first. I don’t think much has changed for writers in the almost fifty years since she made those comments.

Dear Bill,

Thankyou for your letter. I was glad to hear from you though sorry that your health is so bad & prevents you getting out and about.

I must say I was rather surprised that, of all people who swilled and guzzled at Bob’s birthday parties year after year, I was the only one, apparently, to remember them with gratitude- or remember him on that occasion, only five months since he has gone. I still miss him very much. Though the last 3-4 months were painful to go through, I would not have foregone my weekly visits to him for anything on earth. Indeed, during the period when he was first moved to the Nursing Home, I went twice a week so that he should not feel too unfamiliar in new surroundings. Bill Brooks- and his family too- was wonderful to the very end & so thoughtful & considerate of Bob’s wellbeing.

It is horrid that his photographs disappeared. For a long time at Fenstauton Avenue, he had them with many other photos & papers of interest at the top of his cupboard & I often asked him whether I shouldn’t take them away to keep them safely: all his 90^th birthday greetings cards in a folder & a mass of other stuff. But as long as he was entirely clear in his mind, he wanted them left there. Then, as you know, he was moved to the Home at a rather critical stage when he was rather confused, & I never saw any of those papers again. But I am not very much surprised. After all, if members of his loving family could steal from a blind man a new suit he had only worn 3 or 4 times, on the grounds that he had told them to take a suit – he meant the old one- for “jumble”, then nothing can surprise one.

However, these things – papers, photos, clothes- are not important. It is Bob, the man, the finest human being I have ever known, who remains in one’s loving memory & nothing can add to that or subtract from what he has left behind in one’s heart or what he gave us all in his lifetime.

I am getting on with Vol 2 of Eleanor, but it is a slow task as I’m not so young myself. However, it will be finished before the year is out – quite a long time before, I hope, as it is going quite well. – & in the meantime, the more people you can encourage to read Vol 1 the better, as it is quite a hard struggle to live & work on the proceeds. (Not even a Phase 3 for writers!) At least each time that a library (or anyone) buys a copy – never mind how often it is lent out- I get 45p.

Take care of yourself & when you write to Robin, give him my kind regards. I took to him very much when we met at those famous (forgotten) birthday parties & you have a fine lad there.

With love to you,

Yvonne.

In the final letter I have, the grief remains The target of her anger is Bob’s daughter Nan, who I mentioned in the previous post ‘Prison Rhymes’. Since 1956, while the rest of the family had maintained their commitment to communism, she had travelled further and further away from them politically. The reasons for this are not surprising. In the early 1940s her first husband, a Russian apparatchik and the father of her son Gregory, was shot in one of Stalin’s purges. Nan and her baby son, my dad’s cousin, managed to escape the USSR but almost inexplicably the details of her husband’s fate were unclear and she remained a member of the Communist Party. Everything came out years later in 1956 after the ‘secret speech’ where Khrushchev admitted Stalin’s crimes. The trauma this caused within the family, often overheard by MI5 on tapped phones and bugged offices is the current focus of my research. By 1978, Nan has done the unthinkable. She has become a member of the Conservative Party and Yvonne Kapp is furious.

Dear Bill,

Thank you for your letter and sending me one from the Millers. I was so glad to hear from you and Robin and to know that he is settled in such a pleasant place. One day I shall try to visit him there.

I wish you yourself were feeling stronger and in better health.

The news of Nan’s preposterous move had reached me before you wrote. I’ve heard a few sick jokes in my time but Nan as a member of the Tory party is about the sickest. I’m glad that, whatever your parents suffered at her hands one way and another, they did not live to see this.

It was sad going to Peter Kerrigan’s funeral just before Xmas. What a terrible year the last one was. So many dear friends departed. I suppose that at my age it’s inevitable, but that doesn’t ease the sorrow. Let’s hope that 1978 will have less sadness to record.

Anyway, I wish you all the best for 1978 and – herewith returning the Millers’ kind letter- send you my love,

Yours always,

Yvonne.

1978 was the year my grandfather died. Kapp, born in same year as him lived to the age of 96 – the exact same age Bob was when he died. She passed away on June 22nd 1999. Eric Hobsbawm wrote an admiring obituary in The Guardian in which he described her as “self-reliant, tough, faithful, ladylike and quietly proud to the end” before adding, “She had good reason to be.”

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Clearly, the almost forty year friendship between Yvonne Kapp and Bob Stewart was a profound and important one. It began in 1934 when she was housing refugees who, a year into Hitler’s seizure of power, were already fleeing Nazi Germany for London. One such refugee, as with many in the same position, seemed particularly damaged and traumatised and was proving difficult to cope with. He was arranging for suspicious packages to be sent to her address, ranting about the prospect of being expelled from the German Communist Party, demanding money and threatening suicide. Kapp, at this point an active communist, didn’t know what to do and was frightened his death was potentially on her hands. Someone suggested she should go and see Bob for advice at the party’s headquarters in King Street, Covent Garden. He listened patiently and helped her work out the best course action to take. In her memoir, Time Will Tell, she outlines the “permanent legacy” of this situation.

Bob who had been a joiner and a cabinetmaker in Dundee, was a foundation member of the British Communist Party in 1920. He and his wife, Meg, became honoured guests in my house shortly after that first meeting and we spent many Sundays visiting them. With Meg’s death in the early 1950s and his advancing age- for he was over sixty when I first put my head round his door- his life took a melancholy turn, not made happier by retirement and the gradual onset of blindness, so that I visited him as often as I could and he would come to us on Christmas Day. At one point I took him to see an ophthalmologist who told him that his eyes had done their work and there was no cure for his failing sight.

He was always resolutely cheerful and uncomplaining, put on so brave an air of being in good spirits, took so lively an interest in what was happening in the world and, though unable to read newspapers, held so clear-headed a view of events as they unfolded (including, in 1968, when he was over ninety, telling young people- in their sixties – that the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Russian tanks, was a terrible mistake), that it was an education to be in his company and a privilege to be his friend. As his strong body lost some of its resilience, and to his blindness were added other infirmities, the Party arranged at considerable expense for him to live in a kindly if rather slapdash home for old people. There I went to see him every week during his last years and did so almost to the end though, as ill luck would have it, when he died at the age of ninety-six in 1973, I was away on holiday.

Bob, the wisest of men and also the most generous and great hearted, was the first person I had ever known who was truly good, all through. I could not have had a better teacher. His was the permanent legacy my shifty lodger left me.

(pp185-6 Yvonne Kapp, Time Will Tell, Verso 2003)

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One of the things that I most admire about this friendship is the unexpectedness of it all. Bob was working class Dundee bred joiner who had endured great poverty and left school at twelve. Kapp on the other hand was the privileged bohemian, bisexual daughter of wealthy upper class German Jewish immigrants twenty six years his junior. Reading her memoir the 1920s were a particularly heady time for her. While Bob was organising for worldwide revolution and heading off to Moscow as a representative on the Comintern, she made an early marriage to the artist Peter Kapp; headed off on a walking tour of Europe; wrote scandalous novels under the pseudonym Yvonne Cloud and dived head first into the artistic and literary world of London. In her afterword to Time Will Tell, Charmian Brinson notes:

…there is much about Yvonne’s life that reflects the intellectual, cultural and political climate of the age in which she lived, with Bloomsbury (in the shape of her friend Quentin Bell) juxtaposed with Harry Pollitt or, on an international plane, with Helene Weigel (for some years, Yvonne advised Weigel on English translations of Brecht). Figures as diverse as Rebecca West, Noel Coward, Frances and Vera Meynell, Max Beerbohm, Clifford Allen, John Collier, Melanie Klein, Nancy Cunard, CK Ogden, Rudolf Olden, John Strachey, Paul Robeson, John Heartfield, Kate O’Brien, Herbert Morrison, Jack Tanner, Jocelyn Brooke and Ilya Ehrenburg people these pages.

(p291 Time Will Tell – Charmian Brinson- Afterword-Reflections on Yvonne Kapp)

While I would love more gossip on Noel Coward who regularly came to the Kapp’s for post performance suppers after The Vortex at the Comedy Theatre, my favourite anecdote in Kapp’s memoir involves the future star of Bride of Frankenstein Elsa Lanchester and her husband and fellow screen legend Charles Laughton. The Kapps met Lanchester through joining the 1917 Club and through The Cave of Harmony- a cabaret Elsa ran and performed at. Yvonne and Elsa became close for a number or years but Kapp is scathing in her assessment of Laughton.

In that same year of 1929 Elsa Lanchester married Charles Laughton. She told me he was wonderful but, though prepared to believe her, i found that he seemed to quench her fiery spirit and mocking wit. An adoring wife, she kept the best of herself – like the choicest morsel of food and the heart of the lettuce- for Charles. He, to my irritation, could not so much order a cup of tea without playing the part of a man ordering a cup of tea.

(p86 Yvonne Kaapp, Time Will Tell, Verso)

She goes on to dismiss Laughton as a “great ham” and laments seeing less and less of Elsa until she became a “virtual stranger” who avoided former friends due to her troubled personal life.

As the 1920s gave way to the 1930s Yvonne Kapp became more and more political and her life changed direction. As Hobsbawm notes in his obituary of her:

Hitler and the Nazi tyranny in Germany turned her into a communist and this gave sense and stability to her life. Through her work with refugees it also brought her together with the former member of the Bertolt Brecht collective, Margaret Mynatt, the later inspirer and editor of the English tradition on of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels, with whom she shared her life until Margaret’s death in 1977.

(Eric Hobsbawm – Yvonne Kapp, The Guardian 28th June 1999)

The first volume of the Eleanor Marx biography, Family Life was dedicated to Margaret Mynatt. When it came out in 1976, the second volume, The Crowded Years, was dedicated to the memory of Bob.

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POSTSCRIPT: In learning more about Yvonne Kapp, I found the work of Alison Light, Charmian Brinson and Sally Alexander to be essential. Also, Yvonne Kapp’s Eleanor Marx and Time Will Tell are both published by Verso who, at the present time always seem to have a sale on so it’s worth heading over to http://www.versobooks.com to pick up a bargain.

Alan Stewart