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The only known picture of Eva Reckitt, which made up part of the MI5 secret files |
To many, she was a simple bookseller. To MI5, she was a dangerous woman funding communist espionage activities.
Files released by the Public Record Office reveal 20 year surveillance of the ‘milch cow’
BY day, she was a wealthy Charing Cross bookseller whose sizeable fortune had been inherited from her family’s successful soap suds company.
But by night, Eva Reckitt was known as “the milch cow” in underground fraternities, ploughing thousands of pounds into communist activities based around her homes in Hampstead and Holborn.
Now, once-secret files have been released by the Public Record Office in Kew, showing how the secret service kept the owner of Collet’s bookshop under an eagle-eye watch for nearly 20 years, tapping her phones and intercepting post.
She was among a number of communist sympathisers who were tracked even before the Second World War.
The bundle of released documents show that among the scanned mail there were personal letters and messages to friends about mundane matters – holiday destinations and the weather.
But the correspondence also show how she helped keep many small communist organisations afloat with a series of donations, even if they did not always have much affection for her.
The books stocked in Collet’s, which finally closed down in 1989, 14 years after her death at 86, might have been a giveaway. Marxist literature and foreign texts were regulars on the shelves. Ms Reckitt, however, was said to rarely publicly affiliate herself with the Communist party and kept her donations to the Belsize branch secret.
The secret service files also includes a sepia, age-peeling photograph, the only picture that spies had to work with as they tracked her activities across London and in some cases through Europe.
An MI5 file composed in August 1928 made clear the suspicions: “This lady is known as the ‘milch cow’ of the communist party. She is a fanatical communist and is always ready to do anything, even financially, to assist the party. On various occasions, money has been forwarded from abroad to her, which was actually intended for the Communist party.”
Ms Reckitt lived at various addresses in Hampstead, including two different properties in Lawn Road and another in Percival Road.
At one she time had a flat in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in Holborn but didn’t stay at any one place for very long.
Another MI5 file in 1929 said: “Eva Reckitt is in frequent correspondence with Karl Wittfogel and his wife. Wittfogel is known to be a bolshevik courier and is already known by Scotland Yard to have visited the country on several occasions, although they have been unable to find any trace of such visits. Scotland Yard has come to the conclusion that he arrives with a false passport under a false name.”
Telephone exchanges were bugged and letters intercepted but a separate spy file added in the same year moaned that investigators were tired of the humdrum nature of most of the chat that they picked up: “Conversation between leading communists is so guarded that it is difficult either to get the opportunity of hearing the whole of the conversation or distinguishing certain topics without causing undue alarm.”
Ten years later, a file firmly marked secret at MI5 headquarters showed she was still under surveillance. It said said: “This woman acts as a cover for an espionage organisation known to be working in this country on behalf of a foreign power.”
Ms Reckitt’s family had stockpiled its wealth by running a washing detergent company, one of the first to find widespread success across the world in the 19th century. The company has gone through many transformations since – at one time linked with Colman’s mustard firm but now known as Reckitt Benckiser, which makes the detergent Cilit Bang.
A separate file in Scotland Yard, written in 1941, said: “Eva Collet Reckitt has been known to us since 1936 in connexion (sic) with the Communist party. She is a person of considerable wealth which is or was derived mainly from Reckitt’s Blue and Starch Company and there is no doubt that she is the chief financial supporter of the organisation. She is not an open member of the party. She is known to be in close touch with all the leading members.”
But while Ms Reckitt was quick to release the cash to those who asked for her help, her influence and respect among members of the party is not clear.
Other organisers were apparently unimpressed by her ability to do anything else – including Emile Burns, a party organiser who lived in Howitt Road.
“Burns said that Eva Reckitt was regarded as a ‘cheque book’ and nothing else,” said a MI5 file in 1944.
“She was promoted to various companies and committees but nobody ever told her how they spent her money.” |
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