Stewart Purvis & Jeff Hulbert: A new MI5 suspect at Isokon Flats
Thursday, 26 September 2024 | 6:30 – 8:30 pm
New analysis of MI5’s archive shows the 'spycatchers' were watching another resident of the Isokon Flats – known for its links with espionage. Historians Stewart Purvis and Jeff Hulbert, authors of a new book ‘The Summer Camp Spies’, will reveal what they have found in the previously secret files.
It started with a name in the Isokon register of tenants that just happened to be the same as a woman on an MI5 list of ‘communist sympathisers and Soviet agents’. Detective work by Isokon Gallery trustee Leyla Daybelge and ‘Hampstead Spies’ experts Stewart Purvis and Jeff Hulbert confirmed that they were indeed one and the same person. The woman’s full story will be told in Purvis and Hulbert’s forthcoming book ‘The Summer Camp Spies’. To launch the book they will be coming to the Gallery to reveal what they’ve discovered about the latest Isokon tenant linked with espionage .
Her extraordinary life story includes a Cambridge University education, an early commitment to communism, a trip to Russia with her communist sister in the 1930s and a boyfriend who went off to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Then came a succession of wartime jobs inside Whitehall that got MI5 suspicious. An anonymous letter arrived at MI5: “I was naturally reluctant to denounce a friend whose idealism and singleness of purpose I respect, but I think that it is so undesirable to leave her in her present position”. She was fired but rebuilt her life.
The anonymous author lived in Hampstead Village, the ‘friend’ who was denounced lived in Isokon Flats. The woman’s name? Well that would be telling .You can find out, hear the story from Stewart and Jeff, and be among the first to have the chance to buy their book.