Percy Glading

Percy Eded Glading ( 29 November 1893 – 15 April 1970) was an English communist and a co-founder of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). He was also a trade union activist, an author, and a spy for the Soviet Union against Britain, an activity for which he was convicted and imprisoned.

Glading, who was born in Wanstead and grew up in East London, left school early to find work. Starting with menial jobs such as delivering milk, he found skilled work at the Stratford marshalling yards. Later, he worked as an engineer at the Royal Arsenal, which was then the national production centre for military materiel. Glading spent World War I at the Arsenal, and after the war, he chose to involve himself in working-class politics. He joined the forerunner of the CPGB, which he later founded with his friend Harry Pollitt and others.

Glading was a national organiser for the CPGB and acted as its ambassador abroad, particularly to India. He was active in other groups, such as the National Minority Movement, and when he married, his wife, Elizabeth, joined him in his political activity. He was prominent in the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU), but his political activity resulted in dismissal from the Royal Arsenal, a security-sensitive post, as the government regularly dismissed those suspected of subversive activities from its employment. MI5 opened a file on him in 1925 and considered him an extreme communist. The OGPU and its successor, the NKVD (the Soviet secret police) kept in touch with him through a series of handlers (including Arnold Deutsch, who later recruited Kim Philby).

Around 1934, Soviet Intelligence recruited Glading as a spy. Although he no longer worked at the Arsenal, he had maintained contact with men of similar sympathies who still did so. The Arsenal was of interest to the Soviets, who knew that Britain was on the verge of creating the biggest naval gun yet. Glading had set up a safe house in Holland Park, West London, where he photographed various sensitive plans and blueprints. Unbeknown to him, the secret service had infiltrated the CPGB in 1931, with an agent known later as "Miss X"—Olga Gray. Glading trusted her and involved her in his espionage activities and lodged her in the Holland Park safe house.

He was eventually arrested in January 1938 in the act of exchanging sensitive material from the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich. Predominantly due to the testimony of "Miss X", Glading was found guilty and sentenced to six years of hard labour.

On his release from prison near the end of World War II, he is reported to have found work in a factory and maintained close links with Pollitt and the CPGB. Glading died in Richmond on 15 April 1970 at 76.

Early life

Percy Glading was born in Wanstead, Essex on 29 November 1893. He later described his youth as being "the usual joys experienced by hundreds of poor proletarian families". His father worked on the railways, and Glading grew up in Henniker Road, Stratford, near the marshalling yards. According to his obituary, Glading distributed a radical paper, ''Justice'', around the East End in his last years of school. He left school aged 12 to work as a milkman and two years later he joined the railways as a trainee engineer. He spent World War I employed as a grinder at the Royal Arsenal, Woolwich. This was an extensive government-run military-industrial complex supplying weapons and munitions to the Army and Royal Navy. In 1914 he was involved in a stoppage against blackleg working at the arsenal. He worked as an engineer in Belfast for Harland and Wolff in 1921 and was periodically unemployed.

A 2017 biography of Olga Gray's handler, Maxwell Knight, described Glading as having "thick lips" and "lank hair". He "wore large round glasses that made him look like an overgrown schoolboy" but was "quick-witted and likeable".

Early career

In 1925 he moved from grinding at the Arsenal to the Naval Department as a gun examiner. By now he was known to the security services. On 10 October the same year, Glading was best man at Harry Pollitt's wedding to Marjorie Brewer in Caxton Hall. They were good friends, and had holidayed together in St Malo the previous year (where Pollitt had first met her). Glading and Pollitt's colleague in the CPGB—and later the latter's biographer—wrote of their escapades in St Malo. Pollitt, says Mahon, borrowed an expensive-looking watch from Glading to make an impression on Brewer: "In later years", wrote Mahon, "when ollitthad come off second best in a tiff with Marjorie, who always had a mind of her own, he would say to Percy, 'It's all your fault for lending me that bloody watch'."

Glading and Pollitt had been among the founders of the CPGB, Pollitt was to be its General Secretary between 1929 and 1939 and from 1941 to 1956. When it was founded, there had been a proposal that a triumvirate composed of Willie Gallacher, David Proudfoot, and Percy Glading act as CPGB leadership; in the event, a single general secretary was appointed.

Glading was elected to the CPGB's Central Committee in January 1927. Politically, he was on the left wing of the Committee following the 1926 general strike and the Party's subsequent period of self-reflection. Glading consistently pushed for a more independent communist line (independent, that is, from the Comintern). In January 1929, Glading and Pollitt were in the minority over the question of the progressive (or otherwise) nature of the Labour Party. Then, in July 1928, when it discussed the further question of affiliation to it, extant minutes of this meeting show the members as being split down the middle, nine for and nine against: Glading was in favour of the motion. Harry Wicks, in his autobiography, later described Glading, Pollitt and himself as being consistently "on the left within the party, thoroughly dissatisfied with what they saw as the right-wing actions of its CentraI Committee". In May 1929, he was appointed a factory member of the CPGB's Political Bureau, although his tenure was to be brief.

Both Glading and his wife, Elizabeth, were high-profile communists and labour activists in the inter-war period. As well as being a party member, Glading was an active trade unionist and shop steward in the Amalgamated Engineering Union and the Red International of Labour Unions. Glading printed and distributed the CPGB's paper, ''Soldier's Voice'', and was assistant head of the CPGB's Organisation Bureau. Glading's MI5 file had been opened in 1922, and consisted of "notes on his official activities, intercepted correspondence and accounts of his movements". At this stage, though, there was nothing particularly compromising about his behaviour. It was his links to the communist agitator James Messer which drew him to the attention of MI5, as Messer was part of the Kirchenstein circle. This was an undercover courier network which relayed diplomatic, political and security secrets to Russia, and had resulted in the Arcos scandal of March 1927. Kevin Quinlan says this led to suspicions that Glading was a "conduit for the Comintern in the early part of his career". MI5 described him as "a red-hot communist", and as one of the party's "most influential members" of the period. Through his CPGB activities Glading had by now been recruited as a spy for Russia, through whom all espionage reports travelled to Moscow and to whom all funds were sent for distribution.

Indian expedition

In 1925 Glading was the first member of the CPGB to travel to India—under the pseudonym Robert Cochrane—pushing the CPGB policy of promoting revolution in Britain's colonies. Arriving on 30 January, he visited various cities and met individuals who were later to be central to the Meerut Conspiracy Case. This occurred in 1929 when a number of Indian men—all members of the Communist Party of India, then an illegal organisation—were arrested and tried for organising a railway strike there in 1925. They were charged with conspiring to form a branch of the Comintern in India and overthrow the government. Robinson says Glading saw their trial as violating the men's "fundamental civil liberties"—particularly as the group had to wait over two years to even be brought to trial—and that this made them "the final justification for the eventual overthrow of the ruling class" in India. Glading had been arrested along with M. N. Roy (who has been described by William E. Duff as a "paid Comintern agitator") and fifty-six other men, but, there being insufficient evidence to hold him, was released. The Indians were less successful and had to wait three or four years before their case even came up. It has been suggested that Roy both opposed Glading's expedition and had been irritated by it, as he believed that the CPGB had opened and read the letters they had promised to pass to Roy.

Glading's original purpose in India, on behalf of the CPGB, was seeking to forge links with Roy as well as to study Indian working conditions specifically and more generally to promote the Communist Party. Nigel West says Glading was unimpressed by the efforts of the Indian Communist Party to organise the workers. Indian Political Intelligence noted that Glading had particularly focussed his attention on "shipyards, munitions works, dockyards and arsenals where strike committees or 'Red Cells' existed". Rajani Palme Dutt, in Glading's 1970 obituary, reported that Glading was eventually "deported under the authority of the Viceroy". Covert journeys to India such as these were common for the CPGB during this period. Pollitt was to persuade Olga Gray to make such a trip in 1934 to transfer funds from Glading to the Indian communist movement. She left England on 11 June 1934 and met Glading in Paris to receive the money and instructions. On her return, Glading obtained work for Gray as Pollitt's secretary.

Return from India

Based on his experiences in India, Glading wrote articles for ''The Labour Monthly'' and produced two books: ''India Under British Terror'' in 1931, and ''The Meerut Conspiracy Case'' two years later. The first he self-published; the CPGB published the second. Glading left India on 10 April 1925. He returned to Britain by way of Amsterdam, where, in July 1925, he presented the results of his studies to a communist conference that was taking place. R.W. Robson later reported how

Also attending the conference were M. N. Roy and his wife, Henk Sneevliet, Gertrude Hessler, N. J. Uphadayaya, Clemens Dutt and R. W. Robson, also of the CPGB. Glading reported that "no Indian Communist groups existed at all", and that those he had met "were useless". Roy disputed this. He claimed that Glading had not encountered any Indian communists because they were unsure whether to make themselves known to him. Conversely, Glading believed he had found a communications problem between Indian communists and those aiding the movement from the outside.

Later career

Glading returned to Britain from the continent in 1927. He soon joined one of the most pro-Soviet English trade unions of the day, the National Minority Movement (NMM), and became a national organiser for the group. Along with another communist and fellow NMM organiser, Joe Scott, Glading launched the Members' Rights Movement at the Engineers' Rank and File Movement local conference in Yorkshire. This was a caucus within the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) which rejected a national pay settlement in 1931 and urged the formation of workers' councils in the workplace. Unfortunately for Glading, five months later, one member observed that the organisation "has not been heard of since". Further, Glading and Scott were expelled from the AEU for condemning their union's national leadership.

Back at Woolwich Arsenal, he again took up his post as an examiner in the naval ordnance department. Glading's career back at Woolwich was short-lived. Following the Invergordon Mutiny, the government mandated that those employed in security-sensitive roles should have their political backgrounds examined. Those who were found to have subversive ideas had to renounce them or lose their jobs. Glading's politically motivated trip to India was uncovered when Guy Liddell cross-referenced the names of known communists with positions of sensitive employment. Special Branch wanted him sacked as soon as possible; Glading was thus in the latter group. In 1928, he and others were dismissed for "refusing to renounce their communist beliefs" and, at least in Glading's case, for being an agitator. He demanded of his Inspector what right the man had to impose "political fitness" on Arsenal employees.

Glading appealed to his trade union for support, and the AEU brought the matter to the attention of the Trades Union Congress (TUC). They spent the next four months pursuing his case against Royal Arsenal management. Efforts included discussions with Labour MPs in parliament and barraging Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin with demands that he personally overturn the sacking. However, Baldwin did not intervene, the Labour Party did not raise it in parliament, and Glading did not get his job back. But says Jennifer Luff of the case, "TUC leaders had defended the civil liberties of a communist member" openly. The CPGB was active too, releasing a manifesto denouncing what they described as Glading's victimisation. In this, they claimed the company's actions to be merely the precursor of ridding naval and military installations of proletarian militancy. The CPGB took the opportunity to denounce "capitalist exploitation and prais class war". Glading's case became a cause célèbre and made national headlines. Glading, too, roundly denounced the Arsenal for their treatment of him:

Following his dismissal from Woolwich in 1928, Glading got a job with Russian Oil Products Ltd (ROP). It had been founded three years earlier by the Russian government to enable it to market its oil resources directly to the West. Although primarily a trading organisation, it also provided the opportunity to transmit back to Moscow any industrial and scientific intelligence its staff obtained. In 1929, Glading was promoted to the CPGB's London politburo and immediately left for Russia under the name James Brownlie. In Moscow he studied at the Lenin School for a year. This was the Comintern's training school, where Glading and other pupils were taught ideology and tradecraft. Glading's obituary, written later by Rajani Dutt, made no mention of the Lenin School, reporting that he spent "a year in the Soviet Union where he witnessed the great agrarian changeover from individual petty-bourgeoise holdings to collective farming". Following his graduation, Glading came under the aegis of the International Liaison Department (Comintern) (OMS); this has been described by Sakmyster as "the most secret department" of the Comintern, specialising in "the coordination of subversive and conspiratorial activities" abroad.

Glading returned to Britain in 1930, where he began working for the CPGB's colonial department. Based in a top-floor office at 23 Great Ormond Street, he was the Soviet link between ROP and the CPGB. He served as a cut-out, communicating information between agents. He paid regular visits to the CPGB head office at 16 King Street, in London's Covent Garden.

Historian Richard Davenport-Hines says there was "nothing stealthy about his allegiance" to his chosen causes. In 1930 he became a full-time paid officer for the League Against Imperialism (LAI), where he first encountered Olga Gray, who joined the LAI in 1932. In June 1931, Glading was suspected of personally receiving the CPGB's intelligence reports from its various espionage groups and being the individual responsible for sending them to the USSR. Some of Glading's pro-Soviet activities were undertaken with his wife, who shared his political outlook. She too, for example, had links with the Kirchenstein circle. Another of Glading's associates was Jessie Ayriss, who was married to George Hardy, a fellow member of the Communist Party; Ayriss herself was employed as a typist at the Soviet embassy from 1937 to 1944. Espionage expert Nigel West has suggested she may have acted as a courier for Glading.

Recruitment by Moscow

In the post-World War One period, an upsurge in communist activity in British industry, particularly in armaments and munitions factories led to employers in these sectors beginning to lay off workers suspected of left-wing sympathies. Although the CPGB had been of interest to the security services from its foundation, MI5's information on its activities had been confined to surveillance and technical data. When surveillance uncovered what they believed to be a "more sinister cadre" within the CPGB, MI5 infiltrated it with undercover agents. From the late 1920s, the OGPU—and from 1934 its successor agency the NKVD—were active in Britain. Recent scholarship has suggested that their ''rezidentura'' were the single biggest threat to British security during the interwar period. As well as Glading's ring, Nigel West says that John Herbert King was "haemorrhaging" information from the Foreign and Colonial Office. Farnborough RAF base had been penetrated by its own spy network, and Kim Philby and Donald Maclean had been recruited. London, comments West, "had become a veritable centre of Soviet espionage". Meanwhile, MI5 at full strength had a complement of only 26 agents at the beginning of 1938.

MI5 believed that it was in the mid-1930s that Glading turned his attention from "domestic subversion to international espionage". The KGB's own files state that Ignaty Reif had recruited him by June 1934. He may have felt, as others did, that to be a "good communist" one should "carry out intelligence work which strengthened the USSR". Either way, the first indication that Glading was shifting his focus came in 1936 when he resigned from the CPGB. Like Glading, all his agents were either present or ex-members of the CPGB. Unlike most Soviet agents, Glading did not have a cover job; nor did he organise a cover story. John Curry, in the official history of MI5, notes that Glading—indeed, all Soviet CPGB recruits—effectively ceased all party activity from the point that they were recruited. These were effectively "fake resignations" (and, indeed, were described as such later by Pollitt himself, who was almost certainly aware of Glading's espionage career). The Soviets gave him the codename "GOT", and named their "G" Group—based in Copenhagen—after him. Historian David Burke says it seems likely that the Woolwich spy ring was created by the NKVD to gain possession of a top-secret large naval gun that the Arsenal was believed to be researching. Glading had been informed of these plans—of which only five copies were ever made—at some time in 1935 by contacts in the War Office and Admiralty: Glading's mission was to report on the gun's arrival at Woolwich and obtain an example.

Glading was the subject of frequent covert surveillance operations. On one such occasion in July 1936, he was observed at Cambridge Circus meeting up with Charles Moody. Much of Glading's operation at this time would have been concerned with the on-going deadlock at the Montreux Convention, at which Britain, France, Italy and the Soviet Union disputed their proposed access to the Black Sea with Turkey. At the same time, a faction within the government led by Sir Samuel Hoare was urging for swift British re-armament, and claiming, Hoare said, that Russian re-armament made the Royal Navy look a "mere bagatelle". Doubtless, says Davenport-Hines, Glading and Moody went to a pub, having much to discuss in the "implicit threats to Soviet security being revealed at Montreux and Southampton".

In 1936, Glading was asked to vouchsafe