The Spy Who Came in from the Co-Op
by David Burke
232pp, Boydell Press, £18.99
On 11 September 1999, Dr David Burke travelled by coach from Leeds to London, to enjoy a frugal Sunday lunch of fish fingers and allotment-grown greens with a lady of 89 called Melita Norwood, and to continue examining the papers of her late father, which are of interest to serious scholars of Tolstoy. When the coach stopped as usual at Milton Keynes he bought a Sunday newspaper and discovered for the first time that his hostess had been one of the most important Soviet spies of the 20th century, rivalling Kim Philby and Klaus Fuchs. Without her, the Soviet Union might not have developed an atomic bomb until the mid-50s, instead of joining the nuclear club in 1949.
The then home secretary Jack Straw announced that, at her age, there was no point in prosecuting her. He was right, though he refrained from adding that a prosecution might reveal lapses which would embarrass the security services. Norwood turned down lucrative newspaper offers for her story, preferring to tell it for nothing to the academic whom she already knew and trusted. She had never cared much about money, and from then on Burke's Sunday visits had a new purpose and a new urgency.
It was a good choice. Burke is not just an expert on Tolstoy, he also knows a good deal about Russian émigrés, and about the early days of the British Communist party and its Moscow links. In particular, he knows more than most about Lenin's friend Theodore Rothstein and Theodore's son Andrew. The Rothsteins, father and son, were for many years the crucial link between the Communist Party of Great Britain and Moscow. Andrew Rothstein took most of his many secrets to the grave with him in 1994, but Burke knows a few of them.
So he can write authoritatively about the émigré networks of the 20s. He can make connections between the Rothsteins and Norwood's father, Latvian émigré Alexander Sirnis, who died the day after Armistice day 1918 while translating Lenin's works into English. He can even link Sirnis with Anthony Blunt's family, though he has to strain a bit.
A lifelong socialist, Norwood started spying in 1932 when she went to work for the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association, which played a key role in Britain's atomic research. That same year the leftwing Independent Labour party, of which she was a member, disaffiliated from the Labour party. But the ILP was itself terminally divided between those who wanted to go it alone, and those who wanted to throw in their lot with the Communist party. The latter group was led by a young lawyer called Jack Gaster. And Gaster was a close friend of Norwood's husband Hilary Nussbaum (he later changed his name to Norwood) - himself part of that Russian Jewish diaspora that had fled persecution at the start of the 20th century. It was through Gaster that she met Andrew Rothstein, who saw both her potential and that of the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association.
Along with Fuchs, she helped the Soviet Union to many of Britain's nuclear secrets, and could have gone to prison for many years. Burke throws new light on communist and cold war history, and identifies for the first time a block of flats in Lawn Road, Hampstead, as the centre of much of Moscow's spying activities in London. He is also able authoritatively to debunk the security services' self-serving efforts to downplay her role and paint her as merely a rather dotty old lady who did a spot of amateur spying. He shows that she was crucially important.
This is a splendid book, exhaustively researched and written in a clear, unpretentious style, though not without its faults. We meet too many people fleetingly without getting to know them, as when we are told of the Lawn Road flats that "other famous residents included the sculptor Henry Moore, Agatha Christie's second husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan, and his colleague at the Institute of Archaeology, the communist prehistorian Gordon Vere Childe". And I could have done with more colour. In his introduction we read about Norwood's allotment, her left wing opinions and the Che Guevara mugs from which she drank her tea, but Burke seems to think that is our ration, and from then on confines himself to the important facts. But when it comes to facts, he is a fine guide to them.