07-06-2014, 05:16 PM
KLUGMANN JAMES
James Klugmann
The son of a prosperous Jewish merchant, James Klugmann was actually born Norman John Klugmann in London 0n 27th February 1912. In his youth, he started using James as a first name by choice, and gradually dropped the final `n’ in the spelling of his name.
Kitty Cornforth was James’ sister, and she was also a committed Communist, married to Maurice Cornforth (see separate entry), making what would later be two senior Communists brothers-in-law.
Harry Hodson, in his memoirs, recalls visiting the Klugmann family home as a friend of the elder brother, Frank. Although this testimony is slightly marred by Hodson’s recall of James Klugmann’s first given name as being `Donald’ and not Norman! Though this may have simply arisen from his reminiscences of Klugman and Donald Maclean as fellow school mates, and a consequent conflation of the two men’s names; since Frank was Hodson’s particular chum it is to be expected that the following recall, at least, is accurate, if not the precision of a name.
Hodson remarks of James Klugmann, whom he identifies correctly as the `official’ historian of the British Communist Party: “His background was impeccably bourgeois; his father was a guttural-voiced Jewish businessman in the smoking pipe trade, and the family lived in a forbidding Victorian house on Haverstock Hill, Hampstead…”
At an early point in his life having chosen `James’ as a more acceptable first name, James Klugmann joined the Communist Party in 1933, while at CambridgeUniversity. He has been accused of recruiting John Cairncross for the KGB, to become the fifth member of the infamous Cambridge spy circle, supposedly putting Cairncross into contact with Samuel Cahan, a KGB operative. More generally, his name continues to crop up in connection with the Cambridge 5. Secret Service files on Klugman include extracts from Special Branch reports and CID reports on Klugmann’s speeches, there are details of intercepted correspondence, records of telephone conversations and reports on Klugmann’s activities. A note suggests that Klugmann may have assisted in the escape of Burgess and Maclean, but there is no evidence to suggest this.
But Klugmann was at pains to deny any connection with spying during his lifetime and a long period of secret service surveillance on him threw up no obvious proof. He had however been on the fringes of such activity, which no doubt gave rise, along with his university friendships of some of those who were involved in espionage. It was long speculated that Klugmann was actively gay in his university days, like some of the Cambridge spies, but, whatever the case, he appears to have been quite celibate in his later life.
From his student activist days, James’ postal mail was regularly intercepted by the security forces, at least from 1937 (and they were consulted regularly, even long after his death, with around 1996 appearing to be the last serious reference to his records. Summary details of James’ correspondence was systematically placed in their files, for which posterity can thank them!
In 1935, Klugmann gave up an academic career to become Secretary of the World Student Association, based in Paris, travelling widely across the world. It was this role, which focused heavily on the building of the Popular Front against fascism, which seems to have motivated a life-time of security force attention. Given the recent acceptance by MI5 that its past was marked by a largely unnecessary intrusion into the lives of politically individuals that was often prompted by the prejudices of its own officers, MI5’s description of James for its operatives, which was put on file around 1938, speaks volumes: “Height about 5’ 8”, light build, broad brow, small featured face, fuzz of grayish hair, probably wears glasses, not remarkably Jewish but rather foreign appearance” [my emphasis].
During World War Two, James rose to the rank of major an unlikely outcome given his general disposition. He had joined the Royal Army Service Corps as a private in 1940 but, having a double first from Oxford and a natural flair for languages, he was soon transferred to the Special Operations Executive, apparently without a proper security assessment.
His climb to the dizzying heights of Major was largely inspired by his sheer talent. A passage in a letter sent in August 1942 by Michael Carritt, “the Organiser of the Communist Party in Bradford”, to his brother, Gabriel, was noted: “James has jumped from the lowest clerk to Lieutenant. They just couldn’t get on without him, as he was the only one who (?) could make himself understood to the native masses.”
The MI5 official noting this in the files concludes this must be Klugmann, “whom I know to have been an associate … in Cambridge” of a group of university friends that Michael Carritt was writing of to his brother. This group included Klugman, Michael Carrit, Chris (Kit?) Meredith and Ram Nahum. James had lived in the same house as Nahum along with Freddie Lambert.
Klugmann had made an “extensive tour on behalf of the World Students Association in 1938, and he seems to have been in Egypt amongst other places”, little wonder then that he now found it so easy to relate to local support staff. Perhaps he even found links with the nationalist community and this helped smooth the way for all the administrative troubles of the British forces that James now resolved.
A Photostat of Carrit’s letter was promised to an official handling army security but not before the large number of old friends, all civilians, mentioned had been thoroughly checked. It’s feasible that this delay played into James’ hands, as he now became increasingly indispensable to the military unit he was serving in. An October 2nd letter from Arnold Kettle to Helen Simon passed on news about James who “is a 2/Lt. in the Near East and, as you would expect, doing marvelously at Arabic etc.”
His files reveal that, in January 1942, the security forces were asked by a senior officer in Cairo to “vet him for most secret work and he was rightly turned down by the vetting section”. But no further reports on him were filed during 1942. In January 1943, Klugmann’s commanding officer reported that, “despite our strongly worded advice, he had been doing most secret work for S.O.E., and, as a result very largely of his Colonel’s opinion of him, he was immediately cleared for Intelligence duties also.”
Seemingly, the lack of recorded information on James arose despite his role as “one of the Force’s contacts in Cairo”. The phrase hints at a role within the Cairo Parliament, the troop’s increasingly restless debating and action organisation, which led to a wider forces’ progressive movement that some have credited for being at the heart of the unexpected 1945 election win for Labour.
In February 1942, he had been posted to the Yugoslav Section of SOE. He became a deputy director, based in Cairo and later in Bari, Italy. Through the reports he gave, Klugmann revealed the diminished role of the official Yugoslav resistance, a monarchical creation, and charged that members of its HQ were collaborators only interested in military operations against Tito’s Partisans. After the war he was attached to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in Yugoslavia.
Reports on his work for SOE, suggests he vetted agents, passing the good ones on to the Communist Partisans whilst the bad agents went on to Milaovic and the Chetniks. A 37-page verbatim conversation between Klugmann and Bob Stewart (supposedly responsible for undercover members and work) appears in the files. Klugmann’s work in the Middle East, Italy and in Yugoslavia and as solider in RASC and later SOE and as a civilian in UNRRA are all detailed. The attention paid to Klugmann in post war years would seemingly be belied for relevancy, given his humorous and placid nature and the character of his subsequent life and work.
By August 1945, James was back in London, living with his mother at 89 Belsize Park Gardens. The security forces asked that he be was put under continuous observation for the remainder of his stay in this country”. When he finally returned from service abroad, on 20th July 1946, he took up residence at 61 Talbot Road, N6, and began writing for World News and Views and handling some work in the Education Department at King Street. He wouldspend the rest of his life working for the Communist Party on theoretical questions and in Marxist education.
Special Branch took the trouble in November 1946 to send a constable to listen to James speaking to a Hampstead Communist Party branch meeting on “Problems of Peace and how they affected Germany”. James’ speech focused on aspects of the occupation of Germany that would, over the next few years, become all too familiar as being at the root of a willingness by the western powers to force relations with the USSR almost to the point of war. The policeman produced a ponderous report, noting that an audience of about 60 attended the “proceedings, which were orderly throughout”!
Klugmann’s expertise in foreign affairs continued to keep him closely watched by the security forces. MI5 was able to have written for its files, presumably by one of its plants inside the Party, a lengthy Special Branch report on the Communist Party’s national congress in early 1947. James Klugmann’s speech on US affairs at this congress greatly interested the authorities.
His Yugoslavian experiences saw him called upon to write a seemingly authoritative but virulent criticism of Tito following the split with Stalin of 1948. But the resultant work, `From Trotsky to Tito’, was later viewed with embarrassment by Klugmann.
From 1957-1977 he was also editor of "Marxism Today". He became especially interested in dialogue with Christians during the 1960s and was a keynote speaker at many theological sessions for students and others.
James was an avid seeker out of second-hand book shops on his travels around the country to speak; he was a collector of books and ephemera. His home was virtually a library, with bookshelves creeping up every wall and around every corner.
He died in September 1977. His collection of radical and Chartist literature and cartoons was donated to the Marx Memorial Library on his death.
Publications by James Klugmann:
Wall Street's Drive to War (Communist Party, 1950)
From Trotsky to Tito (1951)
The Peaceful Co-existence of Capitalism and Socialism (1952)
Jointly with P. Oestreicher `What Kind of Revolution? A Christian-Communist Dialogue’ (1966)
Dialogue of Christianity and Marxism (1967)
The History of the Communist Party of Great Britain: Formative and Early Years 1919-1924, Vol. 1 (1969)
The Future of Man (1971)
The History of the Communist Party of Great Britain: The General Strike 1925-26, Vol. 2 (1972)
Sources:
www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documentsonline/populardocs.asp/
LondonUniversity: School of Slavonic and East European Studies: www.aim25.ac.uk/cats/58/6978.htm/
http://www.athelstane.co.uk/hvhodson/hvhbiogr/index.htm
MI5 files on Norman James Klugmann in the National Archives
GS private information
http://www.grahamstevenson.me.uk/index.p...Itemid=112
http://www.andrewlownie.co.uk/authors/ge...-communism
James Klugmann and the Hopes and Fears of British Communism.
James Klugmann and the Hopes and Fears of British Communism will tell the full story for the first time of James Klugmann, who was the leading political inspiration behind the generation of Cambridge communists, including several of the ‘Magnificent Five’ who went on to spy for Russia. Klugmann has appeared in various accounts of the spy ring, but his full role and extraordinary life has never been told before.
The book makes extensive use of recently released archive material, notably Klugmann’s MI5 file, which sheds revealing new light on his life, notably his role in the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War, where he has been accused of manipulating intelligence reports to win the allies’ support for Marshall Tito’s communist partisans, and his role in recruiting the ‘fifth man’, John Cairncross in the Cambridge spy networks of the 1930s.
As well as filling an important gap in the existing literature on the Cambridge communist generation, the book challenges conventional portrayals of Klugmann as a Soviet stooge, Stalinist hack, or notorious spy. As the book will argue, a much more complex picture emerges of him as both a humanist communist, and party functionary, whose real and conflicting loyalties, to the British Communist Party, the Soviet Union and his own political morality and conscience, did not prevent him from being an inspiring political educator and intellectual.
This study of James Klugmann provides new historical insight crucial for understanding both the left wing politics of the 1930s and for looking again at the motivations of the Cambridge spy network and in doing so challenges some Cold War and post-Cold War assumptions about this period.
The book will argue that James Klugmann’s life and political commitments helps understand the wider political events which shaped the fortunes of British communism, the anti-fascist popular front of the 1930s, the Cold War tensions, the upheavals of 1956 and 1968, the rise of Eurocommunism and the impact of the industrial strife of the 1970s.
It will also reveal the personal and political torments Klugmann endured throughout his life, conflicts of loyalty which have wider implications for understanding the historically important relationship between intellectuals and communism. It tells the story of how one of the most brilliant communist intellectuals of the 1930s died an intellectually broken man.
Geoff Andrews biography
Geoff Andrews was born in Cardiff in 1961 but has lived most of his life in London. After leaving school at 16, he was offered a place as a mature student at Ruskin College, Oxford, where he was taught by David Selbourne and Raphael Samuel, and competed his studies at University College Cardiff.
He has spent much of the last decade in Italy, writing about the troubled politics and fascinating food of that country. He writes and broadcasts regularly on Italy, and his articles have appeared in the Financial Times, Open Democracy and La Repubblica. His last two books, Not a Normal Country: Italy After Berlusconi (2005) and The Slow Food Story: Politics and Pleasure (2008) have both been translated into Italian.
His Slow Food research took him to ten different countries and he has subsequently been an occasional contributor to The Food Programme on BBC Radio 4. Prior to writing about Italy and food, he wrote a history of the final years of the British Communist Party – Endgames and New Times (2004). This introduced him to the extraordinary life of James Klugmann, one of the Cambridge communists of the 1930s and the subject of his forthcoming book.
He is Staff Tutor in Politics at the Open University and is proud to be the manager of Philosophy Football FC.
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ecVUT...i5&f=false
http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/2...25/letters
LETTERS
Communist in the SOE
From Mr David Turner Sir: Sir Ian Fraser (Letters, 14 August) is somewhat mistaken when he says that James Klugmann, of the wartime Special Operations Executive, was 'an Oxford don generally supposed to be a card-carrying communist'. Norman John (`James') Klug- mann was quite openly a card-carrying member of the Communist party of Great Britain from 1933 until the day he died in 1977.
He was educated at Gresham's (where he knew Donald Maclean) and Cambridge (where he was a contemporary of Maclean, Guy Burgess and John Cairncross; he also knew Anthony Blunt). In 1935 he gave up postgraduate research to become the sec- retary of the Communist-led Rassemble- ment Mondial des Etudiants, a post he held until 1939. Evidence in the Soviet archives proves that during this time Klug- mann helped the NKVD to recruit Cairn- cross.
Klugmann was conscripted into the Royal Army Service Corps as a private and later transferred to the Intelligence Corps. By 1942 he was a corporal in the Cairo headquarters of SOE; by June 1943 he was a captain; by October 1943 he was a major; and by June 1944 he was a lieutenant- colonel. During 1945-6 he worked with the United Nations in Yugoslavia. The precipi- tous upward curve of Klugmann's career was partly due to the fact that, true to his name, he was a 'Huger [clever] Mann' (he was fluent in French, German and Serbo- Croat). However, M.R.D. Foot records that the turning point in Klugmann's progress was when, as an NCO, he took a cup of tea to Brigadier Terence Airey, who recognised him as a fellow Old Boy of Gresham's. It also helped that Klugmann's MI5 file had gone up in smoke during an air raid in September 1940.
The accusation made by Sir Ian Fraser and by Crown Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia (`King's move', 31 July) that Klugmann tampered with SOE reports to push Britain into supporting Tito instead of the royalist Mihailovic has been around for many years, confirmed by SOE records released into the Public Record Office. However, it seems most unlikely that Klug- mann singlehandedly changed British poli- cY. There were others lobbying hard for support to be switched to Tito, most notably Sir William Deakin and the late Sir Fitzroy Maclean, who can hardly be accused of having been communist moles. Whether his conduct was reprehensible is a moot point given that Mihailovic's Chetniks are clearly among the political ancestors of today's Serbian ethnic cleansers.
What Klugmann really deserves to be condemned for is his authorship in 1951 of a mendacious piece of tripe entitled From Trotsky to Tito, in which he denounced his erstwhile hero Tito as an agent of the West:
At a certain time, and exactly how and when history still has to disclose, the British political and military leadership, on a very high and top- secret level, must have received information . .. that there were leading elements inside the Partisan forces, inside the Yugoslav Commu- nist party, spies and provocateurs, Gestapo ele- ments, Trotskyites, who could be 'trusted' (from the point of view of British imperialism), and could be used to . . . carry out an Anglo- American imperialist policy. This was the basis of the change of British policy from Mihailovic to Tito in the period of 1942-43. It was carried out . . . with that great measure of cunning and deceit for which British imperialism . . has become notorious throughout the world.
He knew all this to be lies; but, being a dutiful communist functionary, he appar- ently felt obligated to perjure himself. Leg- end has it that, long after Moscow and Bel- grade had patched up their differences, Klugmann was still haunting second-hand bookshops in order to buy up and destroy copies of his embarrassing opus.
David Turner
Oak Lodge, Chestnut Street, Borden, Kent
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/may2002.pd
Клугман стиже у Кајро у Јануар/Фебруар 1942 године.....али мислим да је Британска политика формулисана много пре рата......а он је само био жешћи наставак......
Тако питам јели има константности и наследнишство са некоме Дикина....код мислим да је повезан са корене пуча Априла 1941 године......
Битно је да се истражива Британске везе са корене КОМУНИЗАМ после Болшевичке револуције.....а занимљиво да се тамо Клугман и своје колеге се нађу и поново у Спанској револуцији са твз југословенски геноцудни КОМУНИСТИ/СОЦИЈАЛИСТИ.....
Што је овде најбитније овде се шаље најпаметнијих, синове ЕЛИТЕ, ештаблишмент једне државе....
Али мене заиста је чудно колико КОМУНИСТИ се нађу међу најбогатијих Јевреја....то је једног неописљивих парадокс!
James Klugmann
The son of a prosperous Jewish merchant, James Klugmann was actually born Norman John Klugmann in London 0n 27th February 1912. In his youth, he started using James as a first name by choice, and gradually dropped the final `n’ in the spelling of his name.
Kitty Cornforth was James’ sister, and she was also a committed Communist, married to Maurice Cornforth (see separate entry), making what would later be two senior Communists brothers-in-law.
Harry Hodson, in his memoirs, recalls visiting the Klugmann family home as a friend of the elder brother, Frank. Although this testimony is slightly marred by Hodson’s recall of James Klugmann’s first given name as being `Donald’ and not Norman! Though this may have simply arisen from his reminiscences of Klugman and Donald Maclean as fellow school mates, and a consequent conflation of the two men’s names; since Frank was Hodson’s particular chum it is to be expected that the following recall, at least, is accurate, if not the precision of a name.
Hodson remarks of James Klugmann, whom he identifies correctly as the `official’ historian of the British Communist Party: “His background was impeccably bourgeois; his father was a guttural-voiced Jewish businessman in the smoking pipe trade, and the family lived in a forbidding Victorian house on Haverstock Hill, Hampstead…”
At an early point in his life having chosen `James’ as a more acceptable first name, James Klugmann joined the Communist Party in 1933, while at CambridgeUniversity. He has been accused of recruiting John Cairncross for the KGB, to become the fifth member of the infamous Cambridge spy circle, supposedly putting Cairncross into contact with Samuel Cahan, a KGB operative. More generally, his name continues to crop up in connection with the Cambridge 5. Secret Service files on Klugman include extracts from Special Branch reports and CID reports on Klugmann’s speeches, there are details of intercepted correspondence, records of telephone conversations and reports on Klugmann’s activities. A note suggests that Klugmann may have assisted in the escape of Burgess and Maclean, but there is no evidence to suggest this.
But Klugmann was at pains to deny any connection with spying during his lifetime and a long period of secret service surveillance on him threw up no obvious proof. He had however been on the fringes of such activity, which no doubt gave rise, along with his university friendships of some of those who were involved in espionage. It was long speculated that Klugmann was actively gay in his university days, like some of the Cambridge spies, but, whatever the case, he appears to have been quite celibate in his later life.
From his student activist days, James’ postal mail was regularly intercepted by the security forces, at least from 1937 (and they were consulted regularly, even long after his death, with around 1996 appearing to be the last serious reference to his records. Summary details of James’ correspondence was systematically placed in their files, for which posterity can thank them!
In 1935, Klugmann gave up an academic career to become Secretary of the World Student Association, based in Paris, travelling widely across the world. It was this role, which focused heavily on the building of the Popular Front against fascism, which seems to have motivated a life-time of security force attention. Given the recent acceptance by MI5 that its past was marked by a largely unnecessary intrusion into the lives of politically individuals that was often prompted by the prejudices of its own officers, MI5’s description of James for its operatives, which was put on file around 1938, speaks volumes: “Height about 5’ 8”, light build, broad brow, small featured face, fuzz of grayish hair, probably wears glasses, not remarkably Jewish but rather foreign appearance” [my emphasis].
During World War Two, James rose to the rank of major an unlikely outcome given his general disposition. He had joined the Royal Army Service Corps as a private in 1940 but, having a double first from Oxford and a natural flair for languages, he was soon transferred to the Special Operations Executive, apparently without a proper security assessment.
His climb to the dizzying heights of Major was largely inspired by his sheer talent. A passage in a letter sent in August 1942 by Michael Carritt, “the Organiser of the Communist Party in Bradford”, to his brother, Gabriel, was noted: “James has jumped from the lowest clerk to Lieutenant. They just couldn’t get on without him, as he was the only one who (?) could make himself understood to the native masses.”
The MI5 official noting this in the files concludes this must be Klugmann, “whom I know to have been an associate … in Cambridge” of a group of university friends that Michael Carritt was writing of to his brother. This group included Klugman, Michael Carrit, Chris (Kit?) Meredith and Ram Nahum. James had lived in the same house as Nahum along with Freddie Lambert.
Klugmann had made an “extensive tour on behalf of the World Students Association in 1938, and he seems to have been in Egypt amongst other places”, little wonder then that he now found it so easy to relate to local support staff. Perhaps he even found links with the nationalist community and this helped smooth the way for all the administrative troubles of the British forces that James now resolved.
A Photostat of Carrit’s letter was promised to an official handling army security but not before the large number of old friends, all civilians, mentioned had been thoroughly checked. It’s feasible that this delay played into James’ hands, as he now became increasingly indispensable to the military unit he was serving in. An October 2nd letter from Arnold Kettle to Helen Simon passed on news about James who “is a 2/Lt. in the Near East and, as you would expect, doing marvelously at Arabic etc.”
His files reveal that, in January 1942, the security forces were asked by a senior officer in Cairo to “vet him for most secret work and he was rightly turned down by the vetting section”. But no further reports on him were filed during 1942. In January 1943, Klugmann’s commanding officer reported that, “despite our strongly worded advice, he had been doing most secret work for S.O.E., and, as a result very largely of his Colonel’s opinion of him, he was immediately cleared for Intelligence duties also.”
Seemingly, the lack of recorded information on James arose despite his role as “one of the Force’s contacts in Cairo”. The phrase hints at a role within the Cairo Parliament, the troop’s increasingly restless debating and action organisation, which led to a wider forces’ progressive movement that some have credited for being at the heart of the unexpected 1945 election win for Labour.
In February 1942, he had been posted to the Yugoslav Section of SOE. He became a deputy director, based in Cairo and later in Bari, Italy. Through the reports he gave, Klugmann revealed the diminished role of the official Yugoslav resistance, a monarchical creation, and charged that members of its HQ were collaborators only interested in military operations against Tito’s Partisans. After the war he was attached to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in Yugoslavia.
Reports on his work for SOE, suggests he vetted agents, passing the good ones on to the Communist Partisans whilst the bad agents went on to Milaovic and the Chetniks. A 37-page verbatim conversation between Klugmann and Bob Stewart (supposedly responsible for undercover members and work) appears in the files. Klugmann’s work in the Middle East, Italy and in Yugoslavia and as solider in RASC and later SOE and as a civilian in UNRRA are all detailed. The attention paid to Klugmann in post war years would seemingly be belied for relevancy, given his humorous and placid nature and the character of his subsequent life and work.
By August 1945, James was back in London, living with his mother at 89 Belsize Park Gardens. The security forces asked that he be was put under continuous observation for the remainder of his stay in this country”. When he finally returned from service abroad, on 20th July 1946, he took up residence at 61 Talbot Road, N6, and began writing for World News and Views and handling some work in the Education Department at King Street. He wouldspend the rest of his life working for the Communist Party on theoretical questions and in Marxist education.
Special Branch took the trouble in November 1946 to send a constable to listen to James speaking to a Hampstead Communist Party branch meeting on “Problems of Peace and how they affected Germany”. James’ speech focused on aspects of the occupation of Germany that would, over the next few years, become all too familiar as being at the root of a willingness by the western powers to force relations with the USSR almost to the point of war. The policeman produced a ponderous report, noting that an audience of about 60 attended the “proceedings, which were orderly throughout”!
Klugmann’s expertise in foreign affairs continued to keep him closely watched by the security forces. MI5 was able to have written for its files, presumably by one of its plants inside the Party, a lengthy Special Branch report on the Communist Party’s national congress in early 1947. James Klugmann’s speech on US affairs at this congress greatly interested the authorities.
His Yugoslavian experiences saw him called upon to write a seemingly authoritative but virulent criticism of Tito following the split with Stalin of 1948. But the resultant work, `From Trotsky to Tito’, was later viewed with embarrassment by Klugmann.
From 1957-1977 he was also editor of "Marxism Today". He became especially interested in dialogue with Christians during the 1960s and was a keynote speaker at many theological sessions for students and others.
James was an avid seeker out of second-hand book shops on his travels around the country to speak; he was a collector of books and ephemera. His home was virtually a library, with bookshelves creeping up every wall and around every corner.
He died in September 1977. His collection of radical and Chartist literature and cartoons was donated to the Marx Memorial Library on his death.
Publications by James Klugmann:
Wall Street's Drive to War (Communist Party, 1950)
From Trotsky to Tito (1951)
The Peaceful Co-existence of Capitalism and Socialism (1952)
Jointly with P. Oestreicher `What Kind of Revolution? A Christian-Communist Dialogue’ (1966)
Dialogue of Christianity and Marxism (1967)
The History of the Communist Party of Great Britain: Formative and Early Years 1919-1924, Vol. 1 (1969)
The Future of Man (1971)
The History of the Communist Party of Great Britain: The General Strike 1925-26, Vol. 2 (1972)
Sources:
www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documentsonline/populardocs.asp/
LondonUniversity: School of Slavonic and East European Studies: www.aim25.ac.uk/cats/58/6978.htm/
http://www.athelstane.co.uk/hvhodson/hvhbiogr/index.htm
MI5 files on Norman James Klugmann in the National Archives
GS private information
http://www.grahamstevenson.me.uk/index.p...Itemid=112
http://www.andrewlownie.co.uk/authors/ge...-communism
James Klugmann and the Hopes and Fears of British Communism.
James Klugmann and the Hopes and Fears of British Communism will tell the full story for the first time of James Klugmann, who was the leading political inspiration behind the generation of Cambridge communists, including several of the ‘Magnificent Five’ who went on to spy for Russia. Klugmann has appeared in various accounts of the spy ring, but his full role and extraordinary life has never been told before.
The book makes extensive use of recently released archive material, notably Klugmann’s MI5 file, which sheds revealing new light on his life, notably his role in the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War, where he has been accused of manipulating intelligence reports to win the allies’ support for Marshall Tito’s communist partisans, and his role in recruiting the ‘fifth man’, John Cairncross in the Cambridge spy networks of the 1930s.
As well as filling an important gap in the existing literature on the Cambridge communist generation, the book challenges conventional portrayals of Klugmann as a Soviet stooge, Stalinist hack, or notorious spy. As the book will argue, a much more complex picture emerges of him as both a humanist communist, and party functionary, whose real and conflicting loyalties, to the British Communist Party, the Soviet Union and his own political morality and conscience, did not prevent him from being an inspiring political educator and intellectual.
This study of James Klugmann provides new historical insight crucial for understanding both the left wing politics of the 1930s and for looking again at the motivations of the Cambridge spy network and in doing so challenges some Cold War and post-Cold War assumptions about this period.
The book will argue that James Klugmann’s life and political commitments helps understand the wider political events which shaped the fortunes of British communism, the anti-fascist popular front of the 1930s, the Cold War tensions, the upheavals of 1956 and 1968, the rise of Eurocommunism and the impact of the industrial strife of the 1970s.
It will also reveal the personal and political torments Klugmann endured throughout his life, conflicts of loyalty which have wider implications for understanding the historically important relationship between intellectuals and communism. It tells the story of how one of the most brilliant communist intellectuals of the 1930s died an intellectually broken man.
Geoff Andrews biography
Geoff Andrews was born in Cardiff in 1961 but has lived most of his life in London. After leaving school at 16, he was offered a place as a mature student at Ruskin College, Oxford, where he was taught by David Selbourne and Raphael Samuel, and competed his studies at University College Cardiff.
He has spent much of the last decade in Italy, writing about the troubled politics and fascinating food of that country. He writes and broadcasts regularly on Italy, and his articles have appeared in the Financial Times, Open Democracy and La Repubblica. His last two books, Not a Normal Country: Italy After Berlusconi (2005) and The Slow Food Story: Politics and Pleasure (2008) have both been translated into Italian.
His Slow Food research took him to ten different countries and he has subsequently been an occasional contributor to The Food Programme on BBC Radio 4. Prior to writing about Italy and food, he wrote a history of the final years of the British Communist Party – Endgames and New Times (2004). This introduced him to the extraordinary life of James Klugmann, one of the Cambridge communists of the 1930s and the subject of his forthcoming book.
He is Staff Tutor in Politics at the Open University and is proud to be the manager of Philosophy Football FC.
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ecVUT...i5&f=false
http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/2...25/letters
LETTERS
Communist in the SOE
From Mr David Turner Sir: Sir Ian Fraser (Letters, 14 August) is somewhat mistaken when he says that James Klugmann, of the wartime Special Operations Executive, was 'an Oxford don generally supposed to be a card-carrying communist'. Norman John (`James') Klug- mann was quite openly a card-carrying member of the Communist party of Great Britain from 1933 until the day he died in 1977.
He was educated at Gresham's (where he knew Donald Maclean) and Cambridge (where he was a contemporary of Maclean, Guy Burgess and John Cairncross; he also knew Anthony Blunt). In 1935 he gave up postgraduate research to become the sec- retary of the Communist-led Rassemble- ment Mondial des Etudiants, a post he held until 1939. Evidence in the Soviet archives proves that during this time Klug- mann helped the NKVD to recruit Cairn- cross.
Klugmann was conscripted into the Royal Army Service Corps as a private and later transferred to the Intelligence Corps. By 1942 he was a corporal in the Cairo headquarters of SOE; by June 1943 he was a captain; by October 1943 he was a major; and by June 1944 he was a lieutenant- colonel. During 1945-6 he worked with the United Nations in Yugoslavia. The precipi- tous upward curve of Klugmann's career was partly due to the fact that, true to his name, he was a 'Huger [clever] Mann' (he was fluent in French, German and Serbo- Croat). However, M.R.D. Foot records that the turning point in Klugmann's progress was when, as an NCO, he took a cup of tea to Brigadier Terence Airey, who recognised him as a fellow Old Boy of Gresham's. It also helped that Klugmann's MI5 file had gone up in smoke during an air raid in September 1940.
The accusation made by Sir Ian Fraser and by Crown Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia (`King's move', 31 July) that Klugmann tampered with SOE reports to push Britain into supporting Tito instead of the royalist Mihailovic has been around for many years, confirmed by SOE records released into the Public Record Office. However, it seems most unlikely that Klug- mann singlehandedly changed British poli- cY. There were others lobbying hard for support to be switched to Tito, most notably Sir William Deakin and the late Sir Fitzroy Maclean, who can hardly be accused of having been communist moles. Whether his conduct was reprehensible is a moot point given that Mihailovic's Chetniks are clearly among the political ancestors of today's Serbian ethnic cleansers.
What Klugmann really deserves to be condemned for is his authorship in 1951 of a mendacious piece of tripe entitled From Trotsky to Tito, in which he denounced his erstwhile hero Tito as an agent of the West:
At a certain time, and exactly how and when history still has to disclose, the British political and military leadership, on a very high and top- secret level, must have received information . .. that there were leading elements inside the Partisan forces, inside the Yugoslav Commu- nist party, spies and provocateurs, Gestapo ele- ments, Trotskyites, who could be 'trusted' (from the point of view of British imperialism), and could be used to . . . carry out an Anglo- American imperialist policy. This was the basis of the change of British policy from Mihailovic to Tito in the period of 1942-43. It was carried out . . . with that great measure of cunning and deceit for which British imperialism . . has become notorious throughout the world.
He knew all this to be lies; but, being a dutiful communist functionary, he appar- ently felt obligated to perjure himself. Leg- end has it that, long after Moscow and Bel- grade had patched up their differences, Klugmann was still haunting second-hand bookshops in order to buy up and destroy copies of his embarrassing opus.
David Turner
Oak Lodge, Chestnut Street, Borden, Kent
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/may2002.pd
Клугман стиже у Кајро у Јануар/Фебруар 1942 године.....али мислим да је Британска политика формулисана много пре рата......а он је само био жешћи наставак......
Тако питам јели има константности и наследнишство са некоме Дикина....код мислим да је повезан са корене пуча Априла 1941 године......
Битно је да се истражива Британске везе са корене КОМУНИЗАМ после Болшевичке револуције.....а занимљиво да се тамо Клугман и своје колеге се нађу и поново у Спанској револуцији са твз југословенски геноцудни КОМУНИСТИ/СОЦИЈАЛИСТИ.....
Што је овде најбитније овде се шаље најпаметнијих, синове ЕЛИТЕ, ештаблишмент једне државе....
Али мене заиста је чудно колико КОМУНИСТИ се нађу међу најбогатијих Јевреја....то је једног неописљивих парадокс!
