James Klugmann

Norman John Klugmann (27 February 1912, London – 14 September 1977, London), generally known as James Klugmann, was a leading British Communist writer who became the official historian of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

Born Norman John Klugmann, in 1912 in Hampstead, he later adopted the name James and dropped the second n in his surname. His father was a tobacco pipe merchant, with a strong Jewish accent and the family lived in a Victorian house on Haverstock Hill, Hampstead, London. His sister Kitty Cornforth was also a committed Communist, marrying Maurice Cornforth. Harry Hodson, in his memoirs, recalls visiting the Klugmann family home and recounts of James Klugmann, that “his background was impeccably bourgeois.”

Educated at The Hall School, Hampstead, Gresham's School and Trinity College, Cambridge (at both of which he was a friend and contemporary of the spy Donald Maclean), Klugman joined the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1933 whilst studying at Cambridge, where he won a double first.

Klugmann was at pains to deny any connection with spying during his lifetime and a long period of secret service surveillance on him threw up no obvious proof. He had however been on the fringes of such activity, which no doubt gave rise to suspicion, along with his university friendships of some of those who were involved in espionage. With the defection of Vasili Mitrokhin it was revealed that Klugmann was a KGB agent, under the codename MER, who was instrumental in recruiting the Cambridge Five.

In 1935, Klugmann gave up an academic career to become Secretary of the World Student Association, based in Paris, travelling widely across the world. This role, which involved the building of the Popular Front against fascism, first attracted the attention of the British Security Service. MI5’s description of James for its operatives, which was put on file around 1938, said: “Height about 5’ 8”, light build, broad brow, small featured face, fuzz of greyish hair, probably wears glasses, not remarkably Jewish but rather foreign appearance.”

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