Dorothy Galton (1901-91): SSEES Administrator and Apiculturist. Was she also a Soviet Spy?

Dorothy Galton (1901-91): SSEES Administrator and Apiculturist. Was she also a Soviet Spy?

Faith Wigzell

With the energetic Pares retiring as Director in 1939 to be replaced by the less dynamic Professor Rose, Miss Galton was in effect in charge, and certainly the only person actively trying to ensure SSEES did not wither on the vine. In 1943 she began lobbying for the Chair of Russian to be filled and the School to develop research strengths. She did not think its task was to teach languages to civil servants and members of the armed forces, mainly what was happening at that point in time. Her efforts coincided with government recognition that Russian studies needed to be strengthened, but the resulting Russian Studies Committee moved very slowly and was not inclined to put any money behind its recommendations. Miss Galton had a candidate for Director and Professor in mind: E. H. Carr, former diplomat and professor at the University of Wales, who was known for his sympathetic views on the USSR and Marxism.  In 1944 she approached the Rockefeller Foundation, which was interested in promoting Slavic area studies, for financial help, encouraging Rose (who was persuaded to resign as Director) to talk to Carr. With Rockefeller and Carr on board the matter went to the SSEES Directing Committee, where the appointment was strongly opposed by the extremely anti-Soviet Elizabeth Hill, formerly of SSEES but by then at Cambridge, and was not helped by Rose’s incorrect suggestion that the Rockefeller money was contingent upon the appointment of Carr. The matter dragged on but Carr was rejected on the grounds that he was no scholar! At this point Miss Galton, knowing that Carr was an able administrator, revived Pares’ proposal that the Chair and the Directorship be separated, suggesting also that the Director become head of research, something that would have satisfied Carr. As attitudes to the USSR hardened, a public scandal surrounding Carr’s private life scuppered the Galton plan. The directorship was not advertised, but though the list of seven candidates included Carr, the selection board for the directorship went for the safest of choices, Dr George Bolsover [1996a:120ff], in the Galton view a political choice. It was undoubtedly a bitter pill for her to swallow; now she was working for a full-time director who took over so many of the things she had done previously, relegating her firmly to the role of academic administrator. As she said, ‘the pioneering days were over, and the fun and excitement of the work ceased after 1947’ [DG 1981:16].

In 1945, not long after Carr was rejected as Professor and Director, Miss Galton was invited by the Rockefeller Foundation to visit the US in order to assess the state of play with Slavonic and East European area studies in universities; quite an achievement for someone without a degree, and likely to have gone down badly in Cambridge. After extensive travels from coast to coast she produced a clear concise report about the current situation, summaries of the similarities and differences between the US and the UK and recommendations for improvement. In both countries she regretted the paucity of trained professional scholars. Never afraid to speak her mind, she was rebuked by the Principal of London University Mr H. Claughton for one of her recommendations [SSEES 2005/83; letter 08.08.1945]: ‘you attribute to a failure on the part of our University your conclusion that the Rockefeller Foundation should not at present make grants to British Universities for research in Russian Studies’. He cannot see what failure there might have been other than the refusal to appoint E.H. Carr. Her lengthy reply, sent the very next day, typically did not retreat from her position. She explained firstly that she had not discussed the matter of grants with any of the Rockefeller representatives while in the US. She then notes that Rockefeller is interested in funding large research projects in history or economics headed by staff, and regrets that the current staff of SSEES (and indeed of other UK universities) are not of the calibre to undertake large research projects, unable to resist adding that perhaps it might have been different had Carr been appointed. However, the failure to attract and train researchers dated from the pre-war period and was now a matter of regret for Pares. She hoped Rockefeller would help fund PhD studentships. The correspondence ceased there. Doubtless Mr Claughton felt there was nothing to be gained from further remonstrance, but the exchange cannot have helped Miss Galton in her next move to get Carr appointed just as Director.

I remember her in 1959 as the person who handled admissions, writing to me using old envelopes resealed with an economy label; no need to impress a potential student! A formidable character, striding the corridors of SSEES, she was known by students as Dolly Galton, an irony because no one would ever have dared call her that. Miss Galton to you! An émigré working on the Cambridge services course who disliked her described her in 1955 as ‘a domineering person who controls all the business of the LSSEES’.  However, despite her stern exterior and forthright manner – students were often afraid of her – she would spend time helping them make an application or get a job. Professor Olga Crisp was told as an undergraduate that it was her duty to return to her native Poland. Olga refused, at which point Miss Galton proceeded to help her [1992b]. 

Her retirement present from SSEES caused some bemusement among the academics at the presentation; they had never seen a honey extractor, but it helped her devote many happy hours to beekeeping. Living by then in a country cottage in Norfolk, she tended her bees as well as combining her interest in apiculture and Russia; in 1971 she published her Survey of a Thousand Years of Beekeeping in Russia and later a book on the origins of the beehive, which made somewhat fanciful claims. She managed to complete the manuscript of a third book before she died, but sadly the typescript has disappeared. She still had time to complete translations (from Russian and Hungarian), keep up with friends, travel to the USSR, teach English in Hungary and engage in a good deal of voluntary work, mainly for the local Labour Party. When she died she donated her body to medical research. She sounds like a thoroughly worthy personage. Special Branch, however, were firmly of another mind, and kept tabs on her 1925-1956. They could never be sure whether she was spying for the USSR or not.

Miss Galton certainly had strong left-wing views; unsurprising, given that her father had been secretary to Beatrice and Sidney Webb and later Secretary of the Fabian Society. Dorothy herself left Bedford College, the women’s college of the University of London, in a huff, perhaps because her socialist views and reluctance to compromise ran up against stuffy Edwardian academic attitudes. Her socialist views did not endear her to all her SSEES colleagues and it is only thanks to Pares’ defence of her that she became School Secretary in 1932 [DG 1981b]. She described herself as a socialist of a practical kind, a typical Fabian in fact, and was an active member of the Association of Women Clerks and Secretaries. However, from late 1931 to 1936 she was also a Communist Party member, and then again from 1950 as the Cold War reached freezing point. Her closest companions were left-wing. There can be no doubt that she not only wanted the study of Russia to develop at SSEES, as it did, but also hoped for the institution not to become anti-Communist, in which she was disappointed.

MI5’s view that from 1945 the Students’ Union was completely dominated by Communists is partly confirmed by Professor John Keep, who said that in 1947 almost all the students at SSEES were on the left, even far left. The irascible Ronald Hingley, appointed to a junior lectureship that year, described SSEES in a memoir as a ‘nest of poisonous Kremlin fanciers – staff, students, and not least Dorothy “Queen Wasp’’ Galton’. However, those in positions of influence (Professors Rose and Seton Watson) and the members of the SSEES Directing Committee most certainly were not pro-Soviet, as the refusal to appoint E. H. Carr reveals [1972-89:letter 04.04.78]. Things began changing with the appointment of Dr George Bolsover as Director. He oversaw the development of SSEES in the following Cold War decade into an institution mainstream in its political outlook, In July 1948 Miss Galton expressed her serious misgivings to a representative of the Rockefeller Foundation about ‘Bolsover’s close attention to government interests’ [1996a:131]. In this she was not alone, especially during the furore caused by Bolsover’s refusal in 1950 to renew the contract of the noted Communist Andrew Rothstein. She describes how Bolsover subjected Rothstein to an ‘unpleasant attack’ which led to disputes about freedom of speech especially involving the idealistic Reginald Betts.

As a known communist sympathiser working in an institution devoted to the study of Eastern Europe and the USSR, one can understand a degree of nervousness on the part of the security services, especially since SSEES frequently provided language training for members of the armed forces and civil servants. The fear was that she would unconsciously supply information about government departments to her communist contacts. However pro-Soviet sympathies do not necessarily lead to betrayal of country, and the amount of energy they put into following her seems disproportionate. They tapped her phone and regularly opened her correspondence, learning vital information such as that someone would be dropping in to pick up her portable wireless and asking whether the electrician had come to mend the other one, or that she had bought a motorbike and would be going to see her parents. One might think that MI5’s obsession with communist rather than fascist influence in the 1930s might have diminished once the USSR became an ally in 1940, but no: in 1941 when SSEES barely existed, they ensured that Miss Galton did not get a job at the BBC, and in August 1942 they were making discreet enquiries round Hampstead where she lived, an area they said ‘was well populated with persons of communist type and sympathies’ - thin on the ground nowadays! They worried, but in 1943 her security file notes that there is no possibility of removing her from her post, but in any case any attempt to do so or to block appointments of communists to the academic staff was likely to backfire. With not so much to do, the energetic Miss Galton became a volunteer air raid warden. Her security file notes with relief that during the wardens’ training course she made no attempt to spread communist propaganda, though she did firmly tick off the lecturer who persisted in instructing a class of volunteer night-time wardens about procedures to follow during daytime raids. After the War, concerns about her activities, if they were not about the possibility that she was talent-spotting or gleaning information from officers studying at SSEES, often related to her role of finding accommodation for students, with, it was feared, left-wingers who would indoctrinate them.

Communists in the UK were two a penny in the 1930s but most were not regarded as possible spies. It was, however, key incidents in the 1930s that cemented Miss Galton’s reputation as a potentially dangerous subversive. The security services were evidently not much concerned when she attempted to steer appointments in the ‘correct’ direction. A letter written from her home address in October 1935 to Bert Williams, a full-time party worker then based in Birmingham, asks for political information about a woman currently working in Birmingham University library who is a strong contender for an important job (if not at SSEES then perhaps at LSE). Miss Galton wishes to know whether the candidate’s assertions that she is close to the Communist Part of Great Britain (CPGB) are genuine. If so, one deduces that Miss Galton will do her best to advance the candidate’s case. She was observing the typical procedure for the creation of a communist fraction inside an organisation. Instead, whenever Special Branch was asked for information about her, they consistently proffered as evidence her two visits to the USSR in the 1930s and her withdrawal from active membership of the CPGB in 1936 because she had been instructed to abandon political activities owing to ‘special commitments’ or to do research work. These warrant closer examination.

Her second visit in December 1935 was on School business, accompanying Pares who was hoping to develop academic links with Soviet institutions of higher education, part of his mission to bring the British and Russians closer together. It failed because SSEES employed emigrés. Her visit had not been planned; she was a last-minute replacement for his niece. Aware of Pares’ well-known anti-Soviet views, the hosts not only provided access to academic institutions but also to factories, clubs, schools, even a collective farm. They were rewarded by Pares’ account of his visit, Moscow Admits a Critic, published just a few months later, in which he declares that ‘a definite stage of achievement and prosperity has been reached’, though he was far from won over [1936:37]. Miss Galton accompanied Pares on many of his official visits as well as, it may be assumed, to the ballet and theatre, for which tickets were provided [DG 1981:11]. She was pleased to have seen things she would not otherwise have done, but as she wrote in late January 1936 to a journalist in the USSR she ‘did not look back on her trip to Russia with nothing but pleasure’, because she ‘was not in quite the right company’ [1925-56]. Pares did not share her political views, but she was gratified that he loved the Russian people and felt he was less anti-Soviet after their trip than before. In their free evenings, she and Pares played patience in his tiny hotel room. This would not have been unusual; Pares loved paying patience and at SSEES would often stop work when Miss Galton was his personal secretary to settle down to a game [DG 1968:482].  There was some spare time, as Pares talks about wandering around by himself without a ‘guide’ (though someone was probably keeping an eye on him). Nor did she go on all his official visits. We cannot know what she did when not with Pares, but she did meet Mirsky several times, including over dinner at the Georgian restaurant, and was delighted to have effected a mini-rapprochement between Mirsky and her  boss which took place in Pares’ hotel room and where they talked amicably [1973-89:letter 4.4.78]. Life in the USSR was becoming difficult for Mirsky; just a few months later a friend described him as disillusioned with life there, and in 1937 he was arrested, dying in prison camp in 1939. It is unlikely that Miss Galton would have been able to make much in the way of intelligence-related contacts during this visit, though certainly not impossible.

Perhaps MI5 would have been less anxious about Miss Galton and her visits to the Soviet Union, were it not for the reasons Miss Galton gave for withdrawing from Party activities. She seems to have devoted most of her political energies towards the Association of Women Clerks and Secretaries: she was a delegate for the Annual Conference in 1935, nominated for the Executive Committee in January 1936, and supported attempts to encourage hospital workers to join a union before leaving the CPGB also in 1936. Within the AWCS she was a member of the Communist Party fraction (fellow communists within the AWCS who met to work together to influence policy). However, in January 1932, less than a year after she joined the Party, it was reported that she asked ‘to be excused poster parades because she feared dismissal from her post if taking part’. Since this was just before SSEES became an independent entity, during the negotiations, her position is understandable. Then in May 1936 Miss Galton made it clear that she had no time for Communist Party fraction work, as she was doing ‘special research work’ or ‘had special commitments’. It was suggested within the AWCS CP fraction that this was in connection with the League of Nations Union organizing committee, but this is unverified. Three weeks later at the CP fraction branch meeting a Mrs Turner ‘stated that it was uncertain she was still a Party member as she was never a very active participant in Party affairs’. This scepticism continued until shortly before she resigned from the Party; in October it was reported that she ‘continues to assert that she has had instructions from “high-ups” to have nothing to do with the Party or politics. The AWCS fraction is uncertain whether her assertion is a truthful one’.

It is unclear where the truth lies. Her job was a busy one, as well as, in her eyes, of considerable importance; involvement in the creation of a specialist institution involved in the study of the USSR was something not to be jeopardised. Reference to ‘high-ups’, if not a convenient fiction, rather suggests that she discussed the matter with senior members of the CPGB, perhaps Bert Williams, with whom she was in fairly regular contact. The decision to resign, therefore, may well have stemmed from the view that continued Party membership might endanger her position at SSEES and so damage its evolution in the correct direction. An excuse had to be given to AWCS members; the ‘special research’ could thus be a piece of myth making.

The files show that British security forces were never sure Miss Galton was a spy, and a dispassionate view suggests there must be doubt. In the post-war period the continuing trepidation among the Security Services was partly derived from casual remarks made by sub-sources to a source within SSEES who was reporting to the authorities. For example, there were grumbles about her active role in the Association of University Teachers when she was not a teacher, or her meddling in library matters. Other remarks suggest a degree of personal animus, such as that she was ‘a most unpleasant and seriously unbalanced woman ... She is by no means efficient, but by her industry and her policy of interfering in every aspect of the School’s activities, she exerts considerable influence’; no one else doubts her efficiency or sanity, and her involvement in every aspect of the School’s activities simply reflects her role in the early days of SSEES’ existence, one that she was clearly reluctant to relinquish. There may also have been a degree of misogyny in the hostile attitudes towards her. But there is no certainty about it one way or another. Moscow’s view of foreign communist party members was that they should not be involved in espionage, as, if detected, this would make it more difficult for the CP to operate. On this basis her non-membership 1936-50 might imply that she was indeed passing information on to the Soviets. It is also notable that while she withdrew from political marches in 1932, she stopped fraction work just four months after her second visit to the USSR, and all political activities some nine months later. On the other hand, it may be assumed that Moscow expected British security to be aware of her membership and political activities (as indeed they were), and hence would avoid recruiting her for espionage. In any case, the information she could have furnished to a Soviet contact would have been mainly snippets about government departments and members of the armed forces, gleaned from conversations with those on courses at SSEES. They might have hoped she would ultimately have access to much more sensitive material, though this can never have been very likely. Whether the recognition that Party membership might hinder her in her work came solely from her or, more likely, was prompted by discussion with the CPGB, or whether the Soviets were involved (a little chat when in Moscow?) cannot be determined, but promoting the study of Russia and keeping SSEES from turning into an anti-Soviet institution were her driving forces. The Soviet services were very anxious about the danger to the USSR from émigrés, and there were plenty at SSEES. It is always dangerous to cite personality, but Miss Galton was definitely a person where what you saw was what you got. She was honest and forthright and never made any secret of her political views, although she knew there were times and places when she had to keep them to herself. If she found a discussion disagreeable, she would sit in silence exuding disapproval [1993]; hard to imagine her meeting a Soviet agent in the twilight and surreptitiously handing over information.

Nothing has ever been written about Miss Galton’s personal life (apart from the fact that thanks to an operation she was unable to have children). She briskly refuted the idea of a romantic involvement with both Pares and Mirsky, complaining in her memo of 1981 that people thought that, because the Director of the LSE, Beveridge, had conducted an open affair with his secretary, such things doubtless happened elsewhere. She describes Beveridge’s behaviour as ‘unseemly’. She was also less enthusiastic about the appointment of E. H. Carr when she found out that he was being cited in a divorce case. This implies that she disapproved of extra-marital affairs, though perhaps only of the public scandal. How then are we to interpret her relationship with the mathematician Professor Hyman Levy? A letter from Mirsky in 1933 mentions that he had heard about Levy from his friend Vera Suvchinskaya who had told him that she had never seen Miss Galton look happier. In December he expressed himself delighted that they were both coming and promised to take them out to dinner. In August 1935, however, he writes that he is sorry to hear that they are no longer together. Levy was a married man with three children, but he was living apart from his wife, since in 1935 he was one of four people including Miss Galton living at 14 Guilford Street near Russell Square. However, by October he was living in Winchester because, as she wrote in a letter, ‘he only stays here about two nights a week now. It was not good for him to see so little of the children’ or rather not ‘good for them’. In any case they remained friends. Levy not only had his academic commitments in London but was also a frequent speaker at events. He spent a good deal of time in town living in various places, including Miss Galton’s flat in Hampstead, writing letters from there in January and March 1944 [2010], while in February 1947 MI5 reported that the well-known communist Hyman Levy had moved in with her. Many years later when Gerry Smith talked to her about Mirsky, ‘she spoke of Levy…with unusual warmth, several times.  I remember her disappointed face when his name first came up and I had never heard of him’ [2017].

The obituary in The Times suggested that ‘at the age of nearly 90, she who had never owned a home or had a bank account because she considered interest immoral, inherited a property and a sum of money and had to learn to manage both’ [1992a]. The truth is more complex, both as regards interest and property ownership.  Firstly, she had of course managed the finances of SSEES for 30 years with great efficiency, though managing the finances of an educational institution would not have offended her socialist principles. Secondly, she was paid monthly by the University of London until she retired and then received her state and university pensions. In 1946 her annual salary was £650, just over £19,000 at today’s values, not a huge amount but an account would have been essential. It is highly likely that, like many other people at the time, she managed with a Post Office account. While technically she probably did not have dealings with a bank, she certainly did own property. When her mother died in 1953, she inherited half the estate of £2349 18s 11p (some £45,000 today). With the proceeds she and her sister bought a cottage in Essex, to which she moved from Hampstead, commuting daily in a newly purchased car. Later, together with her sister and brother-in-law, former Labour MP Albert Evans, she moved to a cottage in Norfolk they had bought. It seems likely that the finances were managed by the Evans’, and that she did not have to deal with capital, interest and property until after her sister died in March 1989, some six months after Albert, when she inherited their estate.

That she was a remarkable woman cannot be doubted. Perhaps only at that period could a woman without formal university education find herself in a position to run an academic institution. We can never know whether she was recruited by the Soviets, but it can be suggested with a degree of confidence that the CPGB encouraged her to try to ensure that SSEES did not become institutionally anti-Soviet, though this was certainly one of her own aims, along with the desire to see SSEES become known for its research.

PS There is an ironic footnote to all the above. In 1946 Miss Galton visited the US. She had been invited by the Rockefeller Foundation to visit US universities to report on the state of Slavonic studies in the US. Naturally the FBI wanted the lowdown on this dubious character. A flurry of secure letters and cables ensued. The person in charge of liaison with the US at the Washington Embassy was none other than Kim Philby!

I received a good deal of help in researching this article and would like to thank the following for their help: Lesley Pitman (UCL SSEES Librarian), Professor Gerry Smith, Professor Jonathan Haslam and my colleague Dr Pete Duncan

Primary Sources

DG 1945a       MS diary of Miss Galton’s visit to the US (4 May-12 July 1945)

DG 1945b       A Report on Slavic Studies in the Universities of the United States made to Rockefeller Foundation July 1945

DG 1981         Some Notes for the History of the School of Slavonic Studies (Galton Archive, SSEES)

DG 1981b       ‘The events of 1932’, memo (Galton Archive, SSEES)

DG 1968         ‘Sir Bernard Pares and Slavonic Studies in London University, 1919-1939’, Slavonic and East European Review 46, no. 107: 481-492

DG 1972         ‘Slavonic Studies School", The Times, 25 January, 15.

DG 1981a       ‘My American journey’ (Galton Archive, SSEES)

DG n.d.           Draft entry on Sir Bernard Pares for the Dictionary of National Biography (Galton Archive, SSEES)

Secondary Sources

1925-56           Dorothy Constance Galton: British. A Communist from the Early 1930s. National Archives [http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C11511067, accessed 26.01.2016]

1933-52           Hyman Levy: British. A founder member of the Association of Scientific Workers… [http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C11527132, accessed 07.08.17]

1936                Bernard Pares, Moscow Admits a Critic, London: Nelson    

1973-89           Smith, G. S., Correspondence with Dorothy Galton regarding Prince D. S. Mirsky (Smith Archive, SSEES)

1992a              ‘Dorothy Galton’, The Times, 6 October, 15

1992b              Crisp, Olga, ‘Dorothy Galton’, The Times, 12 October, 17

1993                Donchin, Georgette, ‘Appreciation. Dorothy Galton (1901-91)’, Slavonic and East European Review, 71:1: 131-32

1996a              Haslam, Jonathan, The Vices of Integrity. E H Carr (1892-1982). London/New York: Verso

1996b              Smith, G. S., ‘D. S. Mirsky to Dorothy Galton 1932-37’, Oxford Slavonic Papers: 93-131

2000                Smith, Gerald Stanton, D. S. Mirsky: A Russian-English Life, (1890-1939). Oxford: Oxford University Press

2004                Haslam, Jonathan, ‘Pares, Sir Bernard (1867–1949)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/35378, accessed 10 Aug 2017]

2005                SSEES Archives/box 83

2009a              Roberts, I.W. and Roger Bartlett, History of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 1915–2005. London: School of Slavonic and East European Studies

2009                Showler, Karl, ‘Galton, Dorothy Constance (1901-1992)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press [online edition: www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/51046, accessed 16.07.17]

2009b              Gardham, Duncan, ‘Beekeeper was spy for Stalin’, The Telegraph, 1 September

2009c              Osley, Richard, ‘Dorothy, a secretary and a spy’, Camden New Journal, 3 September 2009

2016a              Osley, Richard, ‘Appeal over spy suspect Dorothy’s lost manuscript, Camden New Journal, 11 January

2017                Email from G. S. Smith, 10.08.2017.

n.d                   Hingley, Ronald, ‘Recollections, unrevised and uncorrected, of experiences as Director of the Joint Services Language School, University of London, 1951-1955. Unpublished typescript.