Files released today by the National Archives show that MI5 were taking an interest in the Manchester Historian Rodney Hilton.
Hilton was born in Middleton in November 1916 and was brought up in a family with Unitarian and Independent Labour party traditions. He went to Manchester grammar school, and then to Balliol college, Oxford.
He became a leading figure in Marxist history and would write about new dimensions of the lives of medieval peasants and townspeople, and to outline the dynamic forces behind economic and social change.
Hilton was a member of the Oxford University group of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1937 and of its National Student Committee in 1938. As a junior army officer in World War II he showed no evidence of communist activity, says the released files, but at the same time maintained contact with the Party HQ and after World War II joined the Party’s Historians’ Group and its National Cultural Committee.
By 1949 he had been selected to train Party cadres and in the mid-1950s was a member of the Advisory Council of ‘Marxist Quarterly’. His second wife Gwynneth was also an active communist and a committee member of her branch of the Party but he resigned from the Party following the 1956 Soviet action in Hungary.
The files show that in 1952 he discovered his post was being intercepted and went to the Birmingham head postmaster to complain.
According to Cambridge University’s Christopher Andrew, an expert on the Cambridge Spy Ring and official historian of MI5, his girlfriend at the time and later to be his second wife Gwyn Evans, also a Communist historian, who lived in Nottingham, was alarmed to discover that their letters and telephone calls were regularly intercepted. Hilton’s MI5 file, which is combined with that of Gwyn Evans, records a satirical comment by him in the course of an intercepted phone conversation with Gwyn: ‘Rodney … said he wondered if the little friend who opened his letters was listening to this telephone. [Gwyn] said she was a bit shaken by it, when she thought of the stuff she poured out daily. [Rodney] told her that it was no good taking any notice of ‘them’.”
One hundred and thirty seven files were released today including The so-called ‘spy who saved D-Day’ Juan Pujol-Garcia, codenamed ‘Garbo’ by MI5, whose deceptions as part of Operation Fortitude were vital in convincing Germany that the Normandy landings were a diversion for a larger invasion elsewhere and the celebrated British historian E.P. Thompson, author of ‘The Making of the English Working Class’, who was a prominent member of the Communist Party of Great Britain until his resignation over the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.
Hilton died in June 2002.
