Dorothy, a Secretary or a Spy?

"MI5 Files show how special branch feared uni administrator leaked to USSR

With a shock of unruly hair and an austere stare flashing through her tiny-framed glasses, Dorothy Galton was known at the University of London as a fearsome nit picker of a school secretary.

When she died in 1992, obituary writers could not help but mention her 'formidable' and 'autocratic' approach to the running of the School of Slavonic Studies in Senate House, Bloomsbury.

But files released this week by the National Archives show that MI5 thought she was far more dangerous than a bossy boots who simply berated students for wrongly filled out forms or overdue library books.

Special Branch officers thought Ms Galton was a spy.

The files reveal that for 20 years of her life she was tailed by secret agents who were convinced Ms Galton, who lived for several years in South Hill Park Gardens, Hampstead, was leaking information to Russia at the start of the Cold War.

Between 1932 and '36, she was openly a member of the St Pancras Communist Party, but gave up her subscription to conduct 'special research projects'.

This, the files show, aroused secret services' fears that Ms Galton, who had visited the USSR, had inappropriate access to sensitive information on armed forces personnel who enrolled at the university to quickly learn foreign languages.

Her phones were tapped and her mail was intercepted – although the messages that were discovered had little more information than her joy at riding a mini-motorbike and plans to buy a car and move to a cottage in Essex.

The files, which relate to surveillance carried out throughout the 1930s and 1940s, show how Special Branch officers tried to monitor the rise of Communist debates within the University.

They read 'A powerful personality in the school is the secretary, Dorothy Galton, a most unpleasant and seriously unbalanced woman and the only person in the place which makes a serious attempt at administration. She is by no means efficient, yet through her policy of interfering in every aspect of the school's activities, she exerts considerable influence. Most of the emigre East European students and some of the Americans were met by her with hostility but the Communists find in her a valuable friend.'

The documents, two beefy files of scribbled notes and typed dossiers which have been made available for download on the Public Records Office's website, show how 'discreet enquiries' were ordered to be carried out on the Hampstead neighbourhood where she lived. It was claimed by Special Branch that the NW3 district had many Communist sympathisers.

'We have proved that Miss Galton has access to restricted information', said one secret report. 'The most damning allegation is that the whole of the (School of Slavonic Studies) is unprotected from Miss Galton's 'snooping', or 'from the inquisitive gaze of the Russian intelligence.'

Another report said: 'It would seem wrong that a person of Miss Galton's record should have access to any classified information'.

While they suspected information was being siphoned out of the university's filing cabinets and to eastern Europe, the reports suggest that secret agents failed to find any conclusive proof.

Ms Galton retired from the school in 1961 and went on to keep bees in her retirement and wrote books on bees' wax and honey. She died aged 90 having never married, owned property or used a bank account."

Richard Osley, Camden New Journal 3/9/09

Walk Two: Piccadilly Line, October 4

In 1930 Frank Pick, the managing director of London Transport, took his architect Charles Holden on a tour round Europe to find inspiration for new tube lines that would inch into rural Middlesex. You can see signs of what they found everywhere on the Piccadilly Line stations they built in the early 1930s. So on this tube journey we will find brickwork borrowed from the Hilversum of Wilhelm Marinus Dudok, the weird expressionist ceilings of Manor House, the rectilinear watchtower of Turnpike Lane, the bauhaus unsupported glass corners of Bounds Green, the cinema-style kiosk architecture of Wood Green, the serene, severe Swedish classicism of Arnos Grove, the Metropolis fantasia of Southgate, with its curving shopping parade, topped with a futuristic beacon. Finally, we come to the concrete concourse of Cockfosters, which seems to usher you into Mitteleuropa rather than the commuter belt.

The Piccadilly Line extension is what interwar London had in lieu of an avant-garde, a total artwork made up of architecture and signage by Charles Holden, posters by E McKnight Kauffer or Moholy-Nagy, to sit on tube seats designed by Marion Dorn and Paul Nash. Modernism was not allowed into the heritage city, so it set up its illuminated outposts in the outer suburbs, in a doomed attempt at changing the centre from the periphery. So while on this journey we will try to imagine these tube stations stretched up to 20 storeys – their expanses of glass, their crepuscular London light, the signscape of their posters, light fittings, roundels, decorated tiles and friezes – into a glorious modernist skyscraper which would be everything the stone severity of Senate House is not. Meeting at Russell Square Station, 2pm, Sunday October 4 2009.

Walk One: Bloomsbury, Saturday October 3

This walk will explore the locale of Senate House looking at Holden’s monolith from a number of viewpoints, visual and conceptual. We’ll consider its local presence as a hub of time, space, ideas, resistances and recurrences.

The walk starts in Russell Square, moving into Holden’s entrance hall and northwards into Torrington Square. We’ll appraise the truncated scheme against Waugh and Giedion’s responses:

….the vast bulk […] insulting the autumnal sky

….the monstrous three-hundred foot tower which thrusts itself upward like an explosion to shatter forever the serenity and cohesion of the district lying below.

Northwards past the Church of Christ the King (which also ran out of money before it was finished) and through Gordon Square, the completion of an earlier huge local planning endeavour. From there to UCL and the University’s original local presence; a nod to recent built bulk (UCH and the Wellcome Building); a long trawl southwards down Gower Street picking up the 1920s London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (also built with the help of American money). Here we can note the overwriting of Keppel Street (an 1848 Chartist route). Then to a distinctive evaluation point where Senate House and the Edwardian aspect of the British Museum face each other. From there through Bedford Square and into Great Russell Street, stopping at Congress House for a bit of post-War modernism and an example of the Epstein omitted from the Senate House façade. Through into Bloomsbury Square and an encounter with Victoria House, an earlier local megalith and a precedent for the overwriting of local scale. Along to Southampton Row and its contribution to post-War Bloomsbury diversification, and back to Russell Square and a glimpse of the Brunswick Centre and the Institute of Education. Cohesion lost – or differently configured?

The walk will take about 1.5 hours and will end with drinks in Senate House.

Guides and interrogators will be Henderson Downing, Owen Hatherley and Victoria McNeile, research students at Birkbeck. Guest expert is Christopher Woodward, co-author of A Guide to the Architecture of London: 4th ed, August 2009.

Meet in Russell Square at 3pm, 3/10/09.

When in doubt, leave it out

The other key client for the eventual building, Lord Beveridge, upon becoming director of the LSE, asked a cab driver to take him to the University of London. The cabby 'looked blank. As I explained, a light broke on him. "Oh, you mean the place near the Royal School of Needlework." I discovered that this was what I did mean.'

As an pointer to the many secrets it holds - a detailed investigation of the Senate House, from the archives of City of Sound.

In the Shadow of Senate House is a series of events taking place in and around Birkbeck College, University of London in Autumn/Winter 2009. Birkbeck sits literally in the shadow of Senate House on Russell Square. Our research also has the monolith’s shadow cast across it in various ways, for we are all investigating modern and contemporary city fabric and the politics and poetics of inhabiting urban space. Victoria McNeile is writing a social and cultural history of Russell Square. Owen Hatherley is exploring the political aesthetics of modernist building. Henderson Downing is following the trails of paranoid city stalker Iain Sinclair. In addition, we are users of the library, but we also pass through the building on our journeys through Bloomsbury.

We are all fascinated in the everyday and extraordinary activities that happen around its fringes – the clatter of suitcases as people struggle to and from the many hotels; the historical rustles in the bushes at Russell Square; the distant echo of Chartists gathering in the square on 10 April 1848; the alternative institutions in the shadows from the marginalised religious sects to today’s non-academic academies; ‘the School of Life’ on Marchmont St or ‘Aquarium’ on Woburn Place or the ‘Public Reading Rooms’, further down on Caledonian Road; occultist Bloomsbury; the urban legends that attach to the building and re-circulate – Hitler’s headquarters, bunkers in the basement, troglodytes in the tube line. What we propose is a multiple stranded exploration – which does not attempt to tell an official history of the building, but rather to see how the building has produced or obliterated modes of life in its shadow. (This is, in a sense, an imaginative pre-empting of what might yet come to be our actual exclusion from the building, if certain moves are made within the University of London). This is not simply an examination of Senate House, but rather the building is a stand from which to hang a number of themes pertinent to living, studying and passing through an old Moderne city.