James Klugmann, the subject of this biography, has hitherto appeared as a shadowy figure in the story of the Cambridge spies: Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross. He was a much-loved figure in the British Communist Party, which he served with devotion from the early 1930s until his death in 1977, but very few of his comrades knew him well. Even the historian Eric Hobsbawm, who knew him better than most, comments in a pen-portrait: “What did one know about him? He gave nothing away.” (Interesting Times, p.123)
Farfield boarding house at Gresham's School, built 1911. Wikicommons/ Adam Stanworth. Some rights reserved.Geoff Andrews provides a full and compelling account of this remarkable, but reclusive man, drawing on three sets of sources: Klugmann’s personal papers; his MI5 file, the public records relating to his wartime service in the Special Operations Executive (SOE), and Soviet intelligence archives; and interviews with his former comrades, colleagues and friends. As a historian specialising in the history of ideas and political movements, whose previous works include New Times: The Final Years of British Communism, Andrews sets out to illuminate the choices made by a leading Communist intellectual in the context of the times in which he lived and the dilemmas he faced. In this, he succeeds admirably, highlighting en route the inherent tensions between partisan commitment and personal integrity.
From privileged outsider to student communist
Born in 1912 into a prosperous and liberal Jewish family in the Belsize Park area of Hampstead, Klugmann won a scholarship to Gresham’s School in Norfolk, the nursery of several notable Communists and left-wingers: Tom Wintringham and W.H. Auden left before Klugmann arrived in 1926; Benjamin Britten, Donald Maclean and the Simon brothers, Roger and Brian, were all his contemporaries. Gresham’s had a progressive reputation. It was the first public school to join the League of Nations Union and it shunned corporal punishment, leaving the boys to police themselves, subject to just three rules: no smoking, no swearing and no “impurity”.
