FREE BOOK PREVIEW: The Real Miss Moneypenny
It’s always exciting when a new book unexpectedly drops on the doormat, with that new book smell and the promise of a new rabbit-hole. This time, it was Weidenfeld and Nicolson behind the package. The book in question is a cracking new effort to put women back into the historical narrative, and the author behind it is Claire Hubbard-Hall.
(MGM, Columbia)
The narrative in question is intelligence since the onset of the First World War. I’ll give you the sales pitch:
The first authoritative account of the remarkable women who worked in the back rooms of British intelligence - the female army of clerks, typists, telephonists, and secretaries who were the cornerstone of the British secret state, and the real women who inspired Miss Moneypenny.
Since the inception of the Secret Service Bureau back in 1909, women have worked at the very heart of British secret intelligence - yet their contributions have been all but written out of history.
Now, drawing on private and previously-classified documents, leading historian Claire Hubbard-Hall brings their gripping true stories to life.
Now, it you’re as obsessed with Slow Horses as I am, then you’ve seen this woman. One of my favourite characters is Catherine Standish. She’s there, looking utterly non-threatening and nondescript and yet she knows where pretty much all of the bodies are buried and the big manly men are usually dependent on her to survive. The fact that someone has gone out and reconstructed the experience of the women that she represents is exciting for us nerds.
Hubbard-Hall paints a picture of one ordinary day in Devon, in 1978. On that day, an elderly woman named Kathleen Pettigrew received a cousin and his family. I say received, because ‘welcomed’ would be pushing it. This cousin was aware that she had worked for the Secret Service, but unsurprisingly, she had distanced herself from the world outside her intelligence community:
He recalls how she had looked uncomfortable as they walked through the door on arrival… The flat was untidy, with books and papers piled everywhere. Consequently, as if embarrassed, Kathleen promptly directed them outside into the garden. The conversation gradually turned to the politics of the day, when Kathleen warned Richard that he could not repeat anything she said… Kathleen knew things about people she had worked with that were not safe to know. She informed Richard that certain politicians in office had questionable pasts. To his annoyance, no names were forthcoming." Towards the end of the conversation, Richard half-joked about Kathleen being 'Miss Moneypenny.’ Without hesitation, she responded: ‘I was Miss Moneypenny, but with more power.’
The chance to draw a direct line from a book about women’s history to something as universally known as James Bond is irresistible. But it is not tenuous by any means, as the author explains:
Much of what the world knows about MI6 and spying comes from the writings of lan Fleming. The Bond film franchise has immortalised James Bond and cemented Fleming's fictional representation of MI6 in the collective public memory. Fleming drew many of his ideas from his service in naval intelligence during the Second World War. Some of the audacious wartime operations he devised, oversaw and supported, working alongside several notable real-life personalities such as the Director of the Naval Intelligence Division, Admiral John Godfrey, informed the characters and storylines of his post-war storytelling. Fleming found inspiration for characters such as James Bond, 'M', 'Q' and the ever-dependable secretary Miss Moneypenny in naval intelligence and MI6.
One can only imagine Kathleen Pettigrew's possible bemusement on watching the iconic film scene in Dr No (1962), where Bond enters M's office and, with cool precision, tosses his trilby hat on the stand. A voracious womaniser, he then proceeds to flirt with Miss Moneypenny. While enjoying the attention, the prim and proper secretary quickly makes it known that flattery will get Bond nowhere.
Fleming never revealed the identities of the individuals he drew upon. The 007 creator would undoubtedly have incurred the displeasure of MI6, had he not changed the name originally given to M's devoted secretary, Miss Pettavel, who appeared in the initial draft of his first Bond novel Casino Royale, published in 1953 Fortunately for MI6, Fleming realised that his blend of fact and fiction was far too close to reality. The name was crossed out in pencil, and a new name was inserted: Miss Moneypenny.
Who was Kathleen Pettigrew?
Hubbard-Hall refers to her as a ‘super-secretary’. Right-hand woman to three chiefs of MI6, she ‘assumed an all-powerful position behind her typewriter as the service's all-knowing and ever-present sentinel… From the surprise apprehension of First World War courtesan spy Mata Hari to the unmasking of MI6 officer Kim Philby, the 'Third Man' of the Cambridge spy ring, Kathleen had created, organised and archived an empire of secrets.’
If she was a big deal, however, Pettigrew was also characteristic of women in intelligence in the first half of the 20th Century. The author describes her as a relic:
Kathleen was born in the reign of Queen Victoria and her working career had begun when pens and inkwells were still widely used. Over time, the tools of her trade evolved. Electric typewriters, encryption devices and Xerox machines were just some of the challenges she overcame and mastered.
However, the gradual rise and fall of hemlines during the first half of the twentieth century reflected the slow progress of women's fight for equality in all areas of life. Like most females working in intelligence, Kathleen had entered her profession at the clerical level. She began work during the First World War but found herself in a paradoxical position: she was trusted to keep the government's top secrets, but she was not deemed deserving of the vote. Some women were granted suffrage at the war's end, but Kathleen would have to wait until 1928 before registering and marking her first ballot paper.
Like many disenfranchised women in intelligence, Kathleen spent her youth perfecting a range of skills that fell under the loose job title 'secretary'. Despite deriving from the Latin secretarius, meaning a person entrusted with keeping records and thus secrets, this occupational label provided the perfect cover for women working in misleadingly low-status intelligence positions. In reality, they fulfilled a challenging range of complex clerical, technical and operational roles. From encoding, decoding and translating enemy messages, to writing propaganda and running agents, women were not beyond outsmarting older and better-paid male intelligence officers. Their duties varied over time and were transformed during both world wars, with women providing the majority of labour.
Still, only a tiny minority of women managed to tap the glass ceiling and become fully fledged intelligence officers before 1945. Women would have to wait until the 1970s before they were regularly recruited at the officer level. Such progress came far too late for Kathleen. Motivated by a steadfast belief in the state's legitimacy, she had worked tirelessly without any expectation of recognition.
Given all that she knew, and all that she did, it should come as no surprise that Kathleen Pettigrew left no account of her life. The author has worked diligently to try and reconstruct it. Born in 1898, her background was completely working class. Apropos of nothing, she was born a mile or so from own great grandmother in the same year. At the time, her father was a sealskin dresser, which is a manky-sounding job if ever I’ve heard of one. For the sake of fashion, crate loads of dead seals would come in from the cold parts of North America and he would be one of the men tasked with prepping the pelts. In 1902, the family moved across the river, and took up residence above a shop in three rooms next to The Strand. Apropos of nothing again, my great grandmother would end up a tiller girl nearby, from whence they have absolutely nothing in common.
Kathleen’s mother became the driving force behind said shop, and worked the counter exhaustively for two decades. Her graft opened up one avenue for her daughters, and that was a chance at a solid, subsidised education. She attended St Martin-in-the-Fields School for Girls until 1906. From there, we’re less sure.
Secretarial work was a goal for working class women. It was respectable, the pay was decent and it hands down beat working in a factory (or doing the can-can I’d imagine, like my ancestor) I have trouble imaging Kathleen with a cockney accents. Taking elocution lessons was definitely a thing for women on her career path. ‘Manners, speech and dress were of enormous importance to aspiring office workers.’
There is a chance that Kathleen finished her education at the nearby Pitman Metropolitan School on Southampton Row. According to Hubbard-Hall, many positions were offered exclusively to Pitman students, which might explain how both Kathleen and her sister, Ellen, secured jobs with Special Branch.
By 1916, their father had died and Kathleen’s intelligence career was underway. Throughout the First World War, she was employed in the secret squirrel part of the Metropolitan Police. That year, at just 18 she was the youngest woman working under ‘the ambitious head of Special Branch,’ Basil Thomson.
Kathleen quickly became adept at handling secret files and privileged paperwork. Privy to all kinds of secrets, she first captured them in shorthand while taking dictation of letters, several of which concerned suspected German agents.
It was at the end of the war that she moved across to work for MI6. ‘During the interwar period, she became an important member of the MI6 chief's trusted inner sanctum, occupying a unique proximity to power.’ She was devoted to successive chiefs, ‘loyal and completely trustworthy.’ Life can’t have been easy. During the Second World War the lines blurred between Kathleen and her boss, to the point that she was acting on his behalf. Unsurprisingly, this brought her into conflict with male intelligence officers who were suspicious of her power. One of two tropes, right? She’d have been either labelled as promiscuous, because how else would a woman rise above a man, or a derogatory battle-axe-lesbian type stereotype. Robert Cecil, MI6's Foreign Office adviser during the Second World War, described Kathleen as a ‘formidable grey-haired lady with a square jaw of the battleship type.’ Sigh.
There’s no definitive portrait of Kathleen in the book, which is sad but tells you exactly how far under the radar she flew. The closest included of her time in intelligence is one that might be her. If it was that hard to tell the story of a woman who was clearly at the top of her game, what of the others? I’ll let the author explain the issues and how she tackled them:
Historians of espionage traditionally rely on documents produced by clandestine organisations. These records present a top-down history of British intelligence, reinforcing the image of intelligence work being a solely masculine enterprise. For historians working this way, it is far easier to research men than women. Women certainly feature in organisational records such as correspondence and reports, but not as often as their male colleagues who were largely responsible for making decisions. Evidence of women's use and handling of paperwork survives in the form of chits and cover notes. Such practices are remnants of a bureaucratic culture that no longer exists in the digital era of the modern office. It is deeply ironic that the histories of secret intelligence organisations could only be written by consulting organisational documents created, organised and archived by women.
Women's records typically lie outside the archives, in private family collections. They are rarely complete and can, like any intelligence records, be a den of misinformation and mystery. To unlock and interpret them, historians must adopt a forensic approach, employing the skills and methods used by counterintelligence officers, leaving no stone unturned. By broadening the search, historians can hunt down and track women's individual and collective endeavours in modern intelligence. The chase is addictive, demanding and exhilarating. It can take years to make connections between sources and individuals.
Researching intelligence history is by no means a speedy process to undertake. MI6 women are perhaps the most difficult to research. They worked for the most secretive of all the services. They never married; they shied away from having their photographs taken; and in the years leading up to their deaths, they destroyed all personal evidence that linked them to their secret employers. Tracking down these women can be like trying to summon ghosts. However, the impossible becomes possible through meticulous research, proving that history is a prismatic kaleidoscope of interconnected stories.
Saskia Reeves as Catherine Standish in Slow Horses. (AppleTV, See-Saw Films)
Claire Hubbard-Hall has managed to reconstruct not only the real Moneypenny, or the blueprint for Catherine Standish, she’s brought back to life an army of a type; and put multitudes of women back in our telling of history, where they belong.
Her Secret Service is out now, available via all good bookshops and some heinous multinational corporations run by megalomaniacs. They’ll deliver it fast, but it’s like the Tinkerbell thing in Peter Pan. Every time someone makes a purchase on there a fairy somewhere dies.
I’ve reading the book, very good.
Sold.