THE GRANDMOTHER OF CAMBRIDGE SPIES
Edith Tudor-hart, the woman who recruited Kim Philby to the Soviet cause, was airbrushed from history, Charlotte Philby writes
The first time I stumbled upon Edith Tudor-hart — a passing mention in an article about my grandfather, the double agent Kim Philby, I was struck by a single image. It's a haunting black-andwhite portrait of a woman, her eerie gaze somehow at odds with the flapper-girl haircut, eyes pointed down as if distracted.
There is something simultaneously knowing and self-conscious about the figure as she sits back in her chair, arms crossed, a cigarette clutched between her fingers. Behind the eyes, there was something cool and unknowable but there was also something tragic, and — do I retrospectively fill this in, knowing what I know now? — a hint at the terror of what had already passed, and of what was still to come.
It seems impossible I hadn't heard of Edith until last year, given how much I've read about the lives of the Cambridge Spies. The story of the English gents who betrayed their country for the communist cause has been told time and time again. Yet rarely is there mention of the Vienna-born Edith Tudor-hart — nee Suschitzky — a figure so integral to the formation of the group she was referred to under interrogation by Anthony Blunt as “the grandmother of us all.”
Devouring what little I could find about Edith — not least through the fascinating documentary Tracking Edith, painstakingly created by her great-nephew Peter Jungk — I discovered she was the remarkably self-possessed and single-minded daughter of Wilhelm and Adele Suschitzky, who ran one of the first socialist bookshops and publishers in a working-class district of Vienna.
Edith, 16, had taken herself from Austria to England to train as a teacher under Maria Montessori. She later studied photography at the Bauhaus in Dessau, where her already fervent commitment to the communist cause was nurtured by her teacher there. Edith was recruited to Stalin's secret police, the NKVD.
She recommended my grandfather, Kim Philby, be approached. She handed him over on a bench in Regent's Park, where secret agent Arnold Deutsch delivered his pitch, inviting the connected and convinced the Englishman who would become the reviled Third Man to work for the Soviets.
For much of her life, Edith remained a committed spy. She also became a devoted single mother to her beloved son Tommy, who was a severely mentally disturbed child with various unconfirmed diagnoses, ranging from schizophrenia to severe autism. Alongside an impressive career as a photographer in advertising, to raise money to look after her only child, she spent years documenting the communist movement for the party as a photojournalist.
As well as a stunning portfolio of political photography, Edith's contributions included handing over
national secrets about the building of an atomic bomb — accessed via the Viennese nuclear physicist Engelbert Broda, with whom she had been having a romantic affair. She also acted as a conduit, passing on information from key spies including Anthony Blunt and Bob Stewart after the rezidentura in the London embassy ceased activity, in the run-up to the Second World War.
In the early 1950s, when my grandfather first came under suspicion from British intelligence services — a decade before he was finally outed as a double agent and escaped to Moscow — Edith was driven mad by constant surveillance and interrogations about her connections to Kim. She persistently denied their shared past and had managed to burn most of the negatives of her camera films that might connect the pair. But one photo — a now-famous image of young Philby, taken that summer in 1933, smoking a pipe — survived.
Though no link was ever proven, Edith was prevented from working as a photographer and, at the age of 44, she fled to Brighton where she opened an antique shop in the North Laine. She died 20 years later in a pauper's hospice, her only child incarcerated in an asylum, her ashes scattered by an employee of the home, in the absence of family or friends. She was effectively shunned by the Soviet regime to which she gave her life, without ever accepting a penny for her work. My grandfather, by contrast, was given an apartment by the KGB, as well as a state funeral in Moscow when he died there in 1988, and has since had a square dedicated to his name.
Having a longtime interest in espionage and spy fiction, I am fascinated by how women are cast in this predominantly male world — often relegated to bit-parts: lover, femme fatale, victim. With my first two novels — Part of the Family and A Double Life — I wanted to explore the idea of women who make seemingly unconscionable decisions, and how we react when they do. But Edith's story is even stranger — and more intriguing — than any fiction.