Red Star Research

Records reveal how MI5 spied on feminists, trade unionists, anti-fascists between the wars.

Summer 2004

The May 2004 release of files by the Public Record Office in London revealed that the activities of Sylvia Pankhurst [1882 ­ 1960], who achieved fame in the Suffragette Movement before the first World War, were monitored and investigated by the Security Services after she later became associated with communist, anti-fascist and anti-war causes.

Other released files also show that Arthur Horner [1984 ­ 1968], a founder
member of the Communist Party in Britain in the 1920s, who later went on
to become General Secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers between
1946 and 1959 and Felicia Brown, who was killed in action at Aragon in
Spain in 1936 during an attempt to dynamite a railway station, were also
spied on and regularly had their mail intercepted, telephone calls
monitored and activities noted down by Mi5.

Pankhurst?s support for the Abyssinian cause after the Italian Army
invaded the country [now called Ethiopia] in 1936 and in particular her
founding and editing of the ?New Times and Ethiopian News? the same year
seem to have raised special concerns amongst the authorities. The file
contains notes of interviews with her and details of her correspondence.
She later emigrated to Ethiopia in 1944, becoming a friend and adviser to
the Emperor Haile Selassie. File papers show that this caused such
consternation that in 1948 the British Security Service was considering
various strategies for ?muzzling the tiresome Miss Sylvia Pankhurst.?

Arthur Horner was first placed under Security Service surveillance in
1921, appearing on a list of British Communists. The file contains copies
of Home Office warrants to monitor his mail. When he was arrested, during
a mineworkers protest at Mardy in December 1931, convicted and sent to
prison for riotous assembly those members who campaigned for his prison
release were also placed under investigation. Horner continued to be kept
under careful investigation when he became president of the South Wales
Miners? Federation and then General Secretary of the NUM.

Felicia Brown first came to the Security Services attention in 1933 when
she distributed communist leaflets to nurses at Guy?s Hospital in London.
When the Security Services uncovered that her addresses were being used
for mail from abroad being sent to UK Communists they intercepted and kept
copies of most of it. Brown was on holiday in 1936 in Spain when the Civil
War broke out. She refused to leave and later gave her life in the fight
against Franco.

The release of these files, coming so long after the events which they
describe throw some light on the work of organisations such as Mi5 in
monitoring and, no doubt, working to neutralise the activities of
communists, trade unionists, anti-fascists and anti-war campaigners
between the 1920s and the mid 1950s.

Considering that MI5 now has just as many operatives, their words not
mine, in the field today and that they have at their disposal more
sophisticated systems of surveillance than ever before then it is a safe
bet that similar files on trade union activists, anti-fascists and
anti-war campaigners exist today.