From Amethé to Zeppelin
[This is the first of several (intended) biographical sketches of people I started researching because of their appearance in the Cambridge University Library Archives MS Add.8287/R/1/2]
Cambridge college registers are normally a dull, if sometimes boastful, source of biographical information. Amethé Smeaton’s entry in the Girton College Register of 1948 is an intriguing exception (my emphasis):
SMEATON, AMETHE GWENDOLEN MARION MACKENZIE (Countess VON ZEPPELIN): b 31 Jan 1896, at Rangoon; dau of Donald Mackenzie Smeaton, C.S.I., M.O. (see Who was who 1897-1916), and Marion H. M. Ansell; m (2) c. 1921 I. McEwan; (2) c. 1930, Count — von Zeppelin. Educ. at home; Girton 1916-1917. Joined husband in Austria Aug. 1939 and did not get back to England. Broadcasts given on German wireless in her name were in fact given by another Englishwoman. Address Kartnerstrasse 28/1 Wien 1, Austria.1
As elements of a life’s tapestry, becoming a Countess von Zeppelin is a mildly interesting fate for a daughter of the Colonial Office, and taken together with denying being a Nazi broadcaster it invites some mild curiosity. Thanks to some previously recently revealed letters in the Cambridge University Library it turns out to be possible to pull on some of these odd threads: this biographical sketch, with some speculation, is what happened when I tried. It is a partial glimpse of how Amethé Smeaton lost her children to a principle of free-love she was introduced to by a brilliant man, of how her Tory instincts got her fatally entwined in a Fascist war that killed her husband and son, how she lost still more to Stalinism, and in the end, may have found some consolation in the philosophy of ideas.
I was looking Smeaton up in the first place as one of the correspondents of the scientist John Desmond Bernal. Smeaton’s letters to him were filed in an envelope by Bernal’s wife Elaine alongside hundreds of others, from dozens of women that Elaine simply called ‘Lovers’. In the 1950s, the Countess, signing herself merely Amethé, repeatedly wrote to Bernal begging him for money from postwar Vienna. She was, hungry, ill, and exhausted; and Bernal went to considerable lengths to transfer money against a backdrop of British currency restrictions and the tightening of the Iron Curtain. Bernal is well documented as a brilliant man, committed to, among other things, a passionate and ultimately foolish engagement with Stalinism. My first thought was to wonder if the dozens of letters from Smeaton might shed any light on Bernal. Was this evidence that, as MI5 suspected, Bernal was a Soviet spy?
That turns out to be unlikely, but then she got more interesting. First, Smeaton turned out to be the 1937 English translator of Carnap’s 1934 Logische Syntax der Sprache, a book still seen as a significantly innovative text in that weird world where mathematics and linguistic philosophy coincide. In other words a book that was a bugger to translate from German. The translation itself was commissioned by the Zelig-like Cambridge figure CK Ogden, who had a finger in many of the modernist pies being, um, baked in the interwar world. How did this woman, who crashed out after spending just two weeks as a student in Cambridge, find herself at a cutting edge of 1930s intellectual thought?
—
Amethé Smeaton was a child of the British Imperial elite, born in 1896 in what was then Rangoon. Her father was Donald Smeaton, whose high-flying colonial career as Financial Commissioner to Burma was cut short after an embarrassingly public argument with Lord Curzon. Donald Smeaton retreated to the Home Counties, took a seat in Parliament as a Tory consolation prize for failure, and wrote a book defending the Karens of Burma. Amethé’s mother Marian is, as usual, harder to locate historically but she too came from an upper middle class background, although unusually she was a divorcee when she remarried Donald.2
Amethé’s father died when she was 14, and she remained her mother’s only child, educated at home until around the age of 18 when she took pre-degree courses at University College London. In 1915 she applied for and was given a place at Girton College Cambridge before dropping out after only two weeks.3 Smeaton dropped out for what were officially called ‘health reasons’. The Girton archives hold a series of letters from her mother recording Smeaton’s headaches, memory loss and chronic cough which her doctor considered to have been psychosomatic; in modern terms a diagnosis of something like chronic anxiety seems plausible. Over the next months Marian Smeaton attempted to get her daughter back into the university. Her final attempt was to rent rooms on King’s Parade and move to Cambridge to live in them with Amethé. But even these arrangements proved too much, and Smeaton would never return to formal education.
Smeaton then disappears from sight for a couple of years until April 1919 when she married a Scot, Ian McEwen. McEwen had just finished serving as a Captain in the RAF, which he had joined in the last three months of the war in 1918, although without seeing action. The couple had two children, a girl, Elaine, in December 1919 and a boy, Ian, in March 1922.4
Smeaton’s social world is undocumented until the late 1920s. She was an ‘old family friend’ of the architect Clough Williams-Ellis. In 1927, when she was in her early 30s, and with two children under ten, she went to holiday at the Clough-Williams home at Plas Brondanw, near the Portmeirion resort he was building.5 It was at Plas Brondanw she met John Desmond Bernal, five years her junior and then a lecturer at Birkbeck College London at the heart of a heady time in crystallography that was laying the foundation of modern molecular biology.6 It was an exciting time, and Smeaton long recalled hearing of ‘the breakthrough in quantum mechanics’.7 Bernal was a magnetically unorthodox figure with a generous intellectual spirit of jesuitical but unforbidding Marxism, Freudianism, and free love. Just four years earlier he had graduated from Cambridge University on one day and on the next day married Eileen Sprague, a Cambridge typist, in what was mutually intended to be an ‘open marriage’.
Smeaton, we know from Bernal’s weirdly meticulous records, had a physical, but not ‘complete’ affair with Bernal in that 1920s summer.8 She was probably the fourth or fifth woman he had been in love with; she in turn called him her ‘best friend’.9 Eileen Bernal seems to have known of the affair and to have considered that it did not violate the promises made in her own marriage: she and Smeaton were friendly correspondents to the ends of their lives, and many years later Smeaton fondly recalled to Eileen a Cambridge cocktail party ‘where Bernal’s whole harem was present’.10 Over the rest of his life, Bernal would go on compulsively seeking the bodies, love and adoration of eighty or more women: it was Eileen who ensured that love letters from many of them would be preserved by the University Library in Cambridge. I suspect many of the other senders also thought of Bernal as their ‘best friend’, but in the nature of that inward collection, it is difficult to detect what Bernal thought in return. But he did think something that causes Smeaton to out in the long list of Bernal’s women over the decades. None of the others were notably right-wing: many were only loosely political, and especially in later years many women were recruited from the admiring young comrades he met in the Communist and peace movements. But Smeaton appears very early in the list and uniquely as, in her self-definition, a ‘lifelong Tory’. In fact in the 1930s she went rather further politically, publishing an ‘adulatory’ interview of Mussolini in the right-wing Morning Post.11 And unlike many of the other entirely one-sided ‘Lovers’ letters the archive does have personal letter from Bernal to Smeaton , albeit presumably unsent. For all their differences on what Bernal thought deeply moral issues, he wrote
You are the most important person there has ever been in my life. But you are first of all an important person in yourself. You have all the intelligence and ability for great things.12
Smeaton and Bernal remained in contact but seem never to have renewed their physical if incomplete Welsh affair of 1927.
Bernal could well have been the first person Smeaton had ever encountered who made a convincing moral and intellectual case against marital monogamy, and may or may not be a coincidence that by the end of 1928 Smeaton had started an affair. It was with a man styling himself the Count von Zeppelin, though MI5 were not to be impressed with this: they were later clear that ‘his real name is Leo Parcus’.13 The most likely paternal justification for the bestowal of the aristocratic name is Eberhard Friedrich von Zeppelin (1869-1926), but Leo is not listed in the published aristocratic genealogies of the Zeppelins, and does not seem to have inherited any wealth. When Parcus described himself as Count in newspapers, there was never any refutation, so he was possibly an illegitimate son, and if so of Graf Eberhard Friedrich von Zeppelin.14 Parcus seems never to have had any employment. He had featured a few years earlier as the hero of Schiggi-Schiggi, a supposedly non-fiction book of travel adventures – including the taking of a wife – in Bolivia. Leo Parcus was the named adventurer, but, oddly, the book itself was announced as having a different author.
Smeaton fled the family home and her two children in Chelsea, and by March 1929 was living in the South of France with Parcus, the couple giving out that they were the ‘Count and Countess Von Zeppelin’. 15 Smeaton’s husband Ian McEwan promptly filed for divorce. He was by now living in New York, where his occupation was variable: in immigration records he was a ‘schoolmaster’ in 1931, a ‘headmaster’ in 1933, and a ‘wine merchant’ in 1934, but to the court he described himself as ‘RAF retired’, although it was a decade since his largely peacetime service.16 The divorce came at a heavy cost: her husband Ian was awarded custody of the children, then aged 8 and 10. He soon remarried, and the children moved with him to the US and were forbidden to write to their mother.17 They returned to Europe periodically and were allowed to see their maternal grandmother, but only if Smeaton was not in the house.18
The following summer, Smeaton married her co-respondent and took the title Countess Von Zeppelin that she would cling to for the rest of her life. The couple had married in the South of France and for the next few years they stayed in continental Europe, including in Vienna, and by 1933 were living at the gigantic Schloss Wernberg, near Villach in Austria.19 There was perhaps an expectation of money coming from both sides of the new marriage. Count Eberhard Zeppelin, who had died a couple of years before the wedding in 1926, had considerable industrial wealth to which he had added Canadian oil money in the person of his first wife Mamie. But either no money ever transpired or Parcus spent it without her; from this point onwards a recurrent theme in Smeaton’s letters to both Bernal and Ogden is a begging one, asking for £10 or £50 or £200 to stave off catastrophe in the ‘family exchequer’.
There are two English glimpses of life in the Schloss. The first came from that old family friend, Clough-Ellis, who had introduced Smeaton to Bernal and was later repaid with an invitation to stay with the Zeppelins:
There was no difficulty about accommodation, the castle being very large and built around a courtyard on a rocky bluff above the rushing river Drau with cone-topped towers, winding stone stairs, a vast empty and echoing Prälaten-sall with frescoed walls surviving from its religious past and great wolfhounds prowling around. A fairy tale castle if there ever was one. And what of our long-suffering host and hostess? Kindness itself in their different ways, the count, Leo, a lively muscular little man usually in national green hunting dress, leather shorts, feathered hat, and so on – extrovert and pleasantly eccentric . For example attending an auction whilst we were there to buy a bull for his farm, he came back with a lion cub had taken to instead.20
William-Ellis was more critical of Amethé than of her Jack-in-the Beanstalk husband :
She on the other hand was a highly sophisticated English intellectual, tall and elegant and an old family friend whence our ill-starred visitation. Yet to our confusion we found that she had unconsciously absorbed some of the to us odd ideas of Austrian aristocracy. 21
Another view of the couple came around the same time by another old friend, the politician John Strachey. In the days when Oswald Mosley had been considered on the left, Strachey had been his most prominent political ally, but by this time their ways had long parted and Strachey was in a tortuous relationship with the Communist Party. In 1932 he was about to publish The Coming Struggle for Power which was to become one of the most widely read popularisations of Marxism-Leninism in English. But Strachey, like Clough-Ellis, was also an old family friend: Smeaton had visited him when he was still living at home with his much more right-wing father, the editor of The Spectator. And Smeaton invited Strachey to stay in her Austrian Schloss to finish his Marxist tract. It did not go well:
Strachey was there busy correcting proofs of The Coming Struggle for Power but since Count Zeppelin was drawn towards the Nazis the arguments were too fierce for comfort and after parting the four never met again.22
The Zeppelin’s Schloss may have been a fairy tale one, but there is no obvious source of an associated wealth that could have sustained it, especially given a man who brought lion cubs back from market. The supply of wealthy Communists willing to pay to stay in a Nazi castle dried up and around 1932 the Zeppelins ran out of money. It was Smeaton, rather than the Count, who started taking paid work. She successfully acquired the job of translating Prince Eugene for Victor Gollancz which came out in 1934; at a rough estimate this would have earned the translator £35.23 It was on a visit to London in 1933 that Smeaton made contact with another publisher, Charles Kay Ogden, whose large archive offers more documentary evidence.
There are then intriguing references to an attempt to set up some kind of a Schulverein, literally a ‘school association’.24 It is a possibility that Smeaton attempted to offer some kind of institutional home to the mathematicians and philosophers of the ‘Vienna Circle’. This self-consciously elite group was nearly as significant in the course of twentieth century philosophy of language and mathematics as they thought they were. Today, even mathematicians with no interest in philosophy have still heard of Kurt Gödel and incompleteness; scientists have heard of Karl Popper and falsifiability; and graphic designers of Otto Neurath and Isotype. 25 Certainly, within a year or two – and the failure of whatever the Schulverein – was, Smeaton was not just in contact with some of the world’s most innovative mathematical logic, but writing knowledgeably about it to Bernal
Menger’s is on the new logic, discusses Jan Łukasiewicz multi-valued logic which is so full of the most exciting possibilities & that of an ωω etc werbige logic, and above all young Gödel’s discovery that widersprachlosigkeit is not to be proved in mathematics. 26
Back in Austria Smeaton made a proposition that should have been right up Ogden’s street. She offered him the English translation of a series of lectures by Viennese professors, including Haber, Carnap and Menger.27 Menger had the young Kurt Godel as a student and these lectures on the ‘border-land of mathematics, logic and language’ would have been, in hindsight, a major publication coup for Ogden along the lines of his earlier success with Wittgenstein. This offer – and in particular the fact that Smeaton had herself been offered the translation rights by Menger – indicates that she was circulating among elite intellectual circles in Vienna, although given that she also had to ask Ogden for Otto von Neurath’s address in Vienna she must have remained peripheral to the group.
In 1934, the Zeppelins gave up trying to make a living in their Schloss and returned to England. Amethé’s mother had died, leaving a modest (for their class) legacy of £633, and a house in Blackwater, Hampshire. It is from 1934 that Smeaton can be traced in her own words for the first time. Despite Smeaton’s modest entitlement to some Trust set up by her father’s will many years earlier, upon their return to Hampshire they found themselves living in genteel poverty. She wrote to Bernal begging him to somehow call off the debt collectors who were about to summons her for nonpayment of her bill at the Cambridge bookshop Heffers. Writing from Hampshire, she asked Bernal to lie and say she was still abroad. Over the next few years there were a dozen more letters, each more financially desperate than the one before, but always with a note of gratitude recognising the fact that Bernal had written back.
Then, after 1936, Bernal stopped writing back for a long time. Perhaps Smeaton, like a good few of Bernal’s lovers, simply was not high enough up in his inbox. It was not his wife Eileen who was by now the mother of his first two children he rarely saw, and not just his (for him) long term partner Margaret Gardiner with whom he had a further child that year. In the dozen years since meeting Smeaton he had had romantic relationships with an astonishingly pathological three dozen more women. In 1936 alone, Bernal’s own reckoning was that there were eight women whom he was currently emotionally entangled with, at least by letter.
Smeaton still had some work. In the autumn of 1933, CK Ogden had put her in touch with the elderly semiotician Dr Gätschenberger of Würzburg. Smeaton was to translate his Grundzuge einer Psychologie des Zeichens, together with a new book named Symbola, into English. Gätschenberger’s English was functional, but the 70-year-old was anxious to ensure that his distinctions between Durschaubarkeit and Symbolierbarkeit were to correctly and pleasingly translated into English. It was a disaster. Smeaton put in months of work on project and when Gätschenberger saw her work, he immediately sent back the £10 translation royalty Ogden had sent him and cancelled the project, saying that Smeaton did not understand the content and her work was ‘not exactly a translation but rather a free rearrangement…my exactness has been destroyed.’ Smeaton’s fee from Ogden vanished at the same time.28
In the spring of 1939 Smeaton’s son Ian was 17, and sailed back from his father’s adopted USA to England to start officer training at Sandhurst. He would be dead before he was 19, on ‘active service’, in the Scots Guards, and was buried in Oxford.
Smeaton probably did not know about her son’s death for many years. For, two years earlier, weeks before the outbreak of war in 1939, Smeaton and her husband had left England and neither would ever return. It would have been uncomfortable to stay: according to a now-lost MI5 file Smeaton had already come to their attention before the war as anti-British.29 Leo would have faced internment as a German citizen had he remained, and Smeaton had lost her own British citizenship when she married, and she too might have been interned. But there may also have been a pull to Vienna.
There is a park called the Mauerbach about 20 miles outside of Vienna, It once housed a fortress, and is now home to a hotel. But in 1939 it was occupied by one Dr Richard Aninger and his business, Rusticola AG. According to a modern Austrian history of the park, Dr Aninger’s property was ‘expropriated’ in 1939, and taken over by Smeaton’s husband in 1942. That is not the full story in at least one respect: Smeaton’s own account, written to Bernal after the war, innocently just records that she and her husband took up residence there in the expropriated castle much earlier, in 1939. Somebody stole the place from someone. Who from whom is murky, but Smeaton was nearby.
Another historically murky incident in Smeaton’s life, the one that the Girton Register alludes to, took place on 21st September 1939, when the declared war between England and Germany was still primarily an economic and not yet a military one. An Englishwoman identifying herself as Smeaton, gave a single English-language talk on a German radio station broadcasting to England. The talk, which suggested it was not too late for friendship between England and Germany, was in the opinion of the BBC monitors at Caversham mainly written by the Nazi propaganda service.30 Smeaton’s biography as the daughter of a Liberal MP made her an attractive identity to adopt if one were to broadcast Nazi messaging aimed at Anglo-German friendship. But the talk also contained private but useful propaganda details such as Smeaton’s son’s recent enrolment at Sandhurst, and so it is likely that Smeaton indeed delivered this (one) broadcast, or at the least contributed to it. This would later prove a dangerous decision. Other British subjects who gave such talks met with harsh justice after the war, most notoriously William Joyce ‘Lord Haw Haw’ who was hanged for treason in 1946. Another woman, Susan Hilton, who knew Smeaton during wartime, admitted to a series of such broadcasts and on her return to England in 1946 was found guilty of treason and sentenced to a year in prison.31
By 1947 Smeaton would be denying to Bernal that she had been a ‘regular broadcaster from Berlin’.32 On her account, another woman, Dorothy Eckersley, adopted her identity for her own broadcasts. And there certainly was a Dorothy Eckersley involved in similar broadcasts.33 But Eckersley too had extensive British establishment connections and it is implausible she would have adopted the name ‘Countess von Zeppelin’ for the purposes of propaganda to the British.
After this episode, Smeaton and her husband avoided any further entanglement with the Nazi party. Until July 1944, they lived outside Vienna in relative safety and comfort at the Mauerbach estate. In the aftermath of the 29 July bomb attempt on Hitler’s life, the Nazi state arrested over 7000 suspects. According to Smeaton, it was at this time and for this reason, that Parcus, who was then in his 40s, was sent to the fighting in the then Yugoslavia. She never heard from him again and was told he had been tortured and then killed by partisans.34
In April 1945, the Soviet Army arrived in Vienna. One historian of the period compared the lootings and rape that followed to the worst of the Thirty Years War.35 Smeaton, writing to Bernal two years later, wrote
Just before the Russians came…I went back into the devastated Schloss and for three months lived there with the Russians in and out night and day - a time of horror that I who can, or could, "take it" do not care to look back on. No reports are exaggerated. I lived through and experienced it all.36
Whether this is read as an account of being raped and looted by Soviet soldiers, or encountering the reality that she might be, the horror is palpable.
By September of 1945, the victorious Allies had partitioned Austria, like Germany, into four zones, with Vienna subdivided like Berlin. The Mauerbach was in the Soviet zone and Smeaton was, in her turn, expropriated from her home and sent to live in Vienna, when a further catastrophe engulfed her.
I was turned out and the Russians took over. They gave me 3 days to pack up and allowed me to take some of the remaining furnitures, pictures & books sent to Vienna if I could find transport. I did this at a cost of 10000 marks …in gold pieces. I stored the stuff – 80 cases of books – in the American district in Vienna and a month or so later there was a fire in the warehouse and everything including all the books and pictures were burnt to ashes…
Smeaton became a suspect person in post-war Vienna. She had been entangled in what MI5 called the ‘van Potts circle’. From 1942 onwards, Lise van Potts was part of a German counter-intelligence operation in Vienna which attempted to keep tabs on the English-speaking population of the city. Smeaton was suspected of working for Potts and through her for the Gestapo. Another suspect who admitted similar activity was Susan Hilton, whose released MI5 file documents the suspicions and feeds Smeaton’s Wikipedia page. It was through debriefing Susan Hilton that MI5 knew that Smeaton had indeed disappeared from central Vienna between August and September 1945, corroborating her account to Bernal. But there was a further detail, more suspicious in British eyes. When Susan Hilton was extradited back to England to face a treason trial, she had with her
a visiting card of the Countess ZEPPELIN bearing a cryptic message (in German): “The bearer of this card also brings the bird with her…Please give it (the bird) seed and water till tomorrow morning37
As the MI5 official noted dryly in their report, no trace was found of any bird or birdcage. Neither MI5 nor I figured out precisely what this referred to, but clearly Smeaton was asking for a person to be sheltered overnight and the prime candidate for such a candidate in a Vienna in end-of-war turmoil must be a high ranking Nazi.
Smeaton started to try to get back to Britain. In July 1946, she asked for help from John Strachey, that pre-war Schloss visitor, now Minister of Food in the Attlee government. Strachey knew of the rumour surrounding Smeaton’s broadcast and wrote a confidential note to his colleague in the Foreign Office asking if it was true. As he said
obviously if her feeling for her adopted country led her to take such a step in support of the Nazi regime, it would be impossible for me to resume my previous friendship.38
Unfortunately for Smeaton, the Foreign Office were able to retrieve the log of the 1939 broadcast and the Strachey option instantly went cold.
Smeaton tried again though a different route a few months later. Hildreth Glyn-Jones was a British KC who was in Vienna prosecuting the first Austrian war trial; his wife Kitty had been a fellow Girtonian during those few weeks Amethé had spent in Cambridge thirty years earlier and on the strength of this old girl network Kitty had befriended Smeaton at the British consulate. It was through Glyn-Jones that Smeaton’s account of her war became set in the Girton Record.39 Kitty’s husband also consulted the Foreign Office:
Apparently one Mrs Glyn-Jones has asked her to come over to this country as a friend. Mr Glyn-Jones is anxious to know whether he should advise his wife to pursue the matter.40
This enquiry generated further memos inside the Foreign Office. They observed that the 1939 broadcast meant there was no chance of Smeaton returning to the UK as a German or Austrian citizen. However, if Smeaton was to reclaim British nationality she would be entitled to a visa. But if she did so, there was a chance that she might be prosecuted. The Foreign Office’s response to Hildreth Glyn Jones is not recorded, but neither is there any record of his wife ‘pursuing the matter’. By the mid 1950s Smeaton gave up any idea of returning permanently to the UK, and in deed was never to leave Austria again.
Smeaton found poorly-paid office work in Vienna, and from then on her letters to Bernal constantly and naturally enough contained repeated requests for money. At the beginning of the 1950s things were worse than ever financially. Smeaton had made contact with an old friend, an Englishwoman living in Gloucestershire named Christine Arnold, and Arnold tried to send money too. But sending money out of the UK at the time was extremely difficult, and Arnold enlisted Bernal’s help. Bernal both sorted the banking problems out and contributed substantial sums of his own, sending £50 or a £100 at a time.41 It was never enough: in 1959 Smeaton was still writing that ‘we only eat once a day’.
Smeaton spent some of the money she received on an attempt to recover money that her husband had in bank accounts in Trieste; she was still trying to do this in 1960 which was when, for the first time, she received a death certificate for her husband. By this time she had been living for many years with her partner Michaelangelo (Michel) Mühe, himself also often chronically ill and unemployed. He lived with her until her death.
During her time in German Austria, Smeaton had completely lost touch with her daughter Elaine. Her letters to Bernal after the war, poignantly show her following daughter’s career as a doctor from afar in the newspapers, unsure about whether Elaine’s fiancé had survived the war.
But in the midst of all this misery, Smeaton’s letters to Bernal are not without joy and expectation and intellectual. In 1951 she asked Bernal what he thought of Norbert Wiener’s then fashionable Cybernetics; fifteen years later she asked him if he could get her a copy of The Theory of Sets and Transfinite Arithmetic. Bertand Russell sent her a copy of his autobiography.
Smeaton never met Russell again, but she did meet Bernal in Vienna several times. In the post-war years Bernal was a reliable – and effective – speaker for the anti-American peace movement across Europe. These were entirely controlled by the Comintern, and with their support Bernal became a very highly travelled man at a time when almost no other British people could travel to western Europe because of currency restrictions and to eastern Europe because of visa restrictions. So he was able to see Smeaton in at least 1951 and 1958.
Into the 1960s, Smeaton continued to write to Bernal, thanking him for money, which always remained tight although the privations of the 1950s seems to have receded. Her health stayed poor, but she continued to be grateful for the letter he sent her. In 1966 she noted that ‘it will be 39 years since we last me’; in 1968 she wrote ‘you are a conjuror. You are the best friend anyone ever had (CP Snow was right)’. And then, one final letter not from Smeaton but from her loyal partner Michel, enclosing a notice of the death of the Gräfin von Zeppelin (geboren Smeaton) on 2 Dec 1969.
(Girton 1948). Girton College archives GCAS 2/3/1/48 and GCAC 2/4/1/14 show that the entry was compiled on the basis of third-hand reports. Ancestry.co.uk confirms that Smeaton married Ian McEwan in April 1919, not 1921, and provides a French certificate of her marriage to Léo Paul Friedrich Karl Wilhelm Zeppelin in 1929.↩︎
The divorce record at 15858 (presumably from J77 but this is based on a copy at ancestry.co.uk) shows that Marian petitioned for divorce in July 1893 on the grounds of ‘frigidity impotence & malformation of the parts of generation’ of her husband Cyril Ramsbotham. After Marian and Cyril each underwent a court-ordered medical inspection of their ‘parts and organs of generation’ she was awarded the divorce, and Cyril had to pay her costs of £125.↩︎
Smeaton’s tutorial file GCAS 2/3/1/48.↩︎
Elaine’s birthdate is given as 6 Dec 1919 by one ancestry.co.uk source albeit unsupported by a birth certificate. An average 40-week gestation would thus have made Smeaton about eight weeks pregnant on her wedding day.↩︎
(Williams-Ellis 1971).↩︎
Smeaton’s letters to Bernal (and a single unsent note by Bernal) are in MS Add.8287/R/1/2/29, here called ZEPPELIN. Smeaton dated her first meeting with Bernal to 1927 in ZEPPELIN 29 Mar 1966 which is consistent with his own note of a lover ‘A’ appearing in Wales in 1927 in BERNAL O1. Another list of lovers in BERNAL R names her explicitly but puts the meeting at a possible but less likely 1924.↩︎
ZB 20 Mar 1966. Bernal never worked on quantum mechanics but, working in the Cavendish, would have been one of a handful of British scientists with the necessary mathematical background and the interest in atomic structure to grasp the importance of, say, Dirac’s contemporary work.↩︎
BERNAL R13 J2 Note by JDB.↩︎
ZEPPELIN.↩︎
BERNAL R13 18 Jan 1961.↩︎
This is based on a series of blogposts, itself citing an unnamed correspondent, dating the article to 1924. I have not been able to verify this; the same source says that Parcus had been a German officer in the First World War and that ‘according to Ayer, [Parcus] chased Otto Neurath through the streets of Venice with a revolver’.↩︎
BERNAL R13 J2. This is plausibly but not definitely addressed to Smeaton. The undated fragment is identifiable as JDB’s by the handwriting, and it was kept alongside Smeaton’s incoming letters.↩︎
KV 2/423.↩︎
Zeppelin airships were named for Graf Ferdinand Adolf von Zeppelin (1838-1917). His younger brother was Graf Eberhard Moritz von Zeppelin (1842-1906) who married Sophie von Wolff (1840-1919) and had a son, also named Eberhard. This son, Graf Eberhard Friedrich von Zeppelin (1869-1926) married Mamie MacGarvey (1879-1961) the daughter of Canadian oil money, divorced her in 1906 and remarried Gabriele von Wolf (1867-). No children of either of these marriages are recorded by the aristocratic genealogies It is unclear if adopted children would be listed in these, although there seems no point in adoption in this context otherwise.↩︎
Daily Telegraph 7 May 1929, page 7.↩︎
1933 SS Olympic; 1934 SS Washington: ancestry.co.uk↩︎
ZEPPELIN 1952.↩︎
R18 28 Jun 1964; 1933 SS Olympic: ancestry.co.uk↩︎
OGDEN Box 80↩︎
(Williams-Ellis 1971)↩︎
(Williams-Ellis 1971)↩︎
From (Thomas 1973). This is probably the memory of Strachey’s wife Celia. . Strachey had been a follower of Mosley when both were in the Labour Party, but broke with him and was in the mid 1930s one the most prominent and prolific Marxist-Leninist theorists in Britain. He left the CPGB over the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and was returned as a Labour MP in the 1945 election.↩︎
This is based on en estimate of 95000 words and Ogden’s rate to Smeaton (below) of 7’6 per 1000. It is about £3000 at 2024 prices.↩︎
ZEPPELIN probably before Smeaton’s mother’s death in 1932.↩︎
My anecdotal observation is that working philosophers are more interested in other members associated with the circle, especially Wittgenstein, but also Carnap, Quine and Ramsey.↩︎
ZEPPELIN.↩︎
ZEPPELIN.↩︎
OGDEN Box 21 Folder↩︎
TNA KV 2/423 cites the (undisclosed) file PF 46592 as evidence for Smeaton being ‘anti-British’, rather than the more plausible ‘pro-German’. It also says that Smeaton’s Sep 1939 broadcast was from Vienna, which might explain why no one of that name, real or not, was recorded in the sources on Berlin-based broadcasters examined by (Doherty 2000).↩︎
FO 371/55098 The talk was not indexed in the normal way within the BBC files and was only found by a ‘feat of human memory’ so it is impossible to be sure if it was the only such broadcast.↩︎
KV 2/423 is Hilton’s personal MI5 file.↩︎
BERNAL Smeaton 2 Feb 1947.↩︎
Eckersley was part of the Right Club circle of strongly pro-German and anti-Semitic members of the British establishment in the immediate pre-war period(Cullen 2013; Kenny 2003). Smeaton wrote to Bernal (BERNAL 2 Feb 1947) that Eckersley was ‘forced’ to make to the broadcasts in Smeaton’s name. Eckersley, but not Smeaton, is identified as one of the two dozen or so regular speakers on the English-language German wartime services in (Doherty 2000), which is based on extensive research in the surviving German radio archives but does not include the Sep 1939 broadcast documented at the TNA.↩︎
ZEPPELIN 2 Feb 1947.↩︎
Wikipedia’s description of Gosztony, Peter (1978), Endkampf an der Donau 1944/45.↩︎
ZEPPELIN 8 Feb 1947.↩︎
KV 2/423↩︎
FO 371/55098.John Strachey MP to Hector McNeil MP 16 July 1946. It is impossible to see any point when Strachey and Smeaton could have been friends on the basis of shared politics. McNeil was a Minister of State and the deputy to Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevan; his civil service secretary at the time was Guy Burgess. In 1932 Strachey was divorced by his first wife Esther on the grounds of adultery with Celia Simpson whom he went on to marry.↩︎
Girton↩︎
ZEPPELIN Oct 1946. From this time onwards, the only documentary source on Smeaton are the Bernal letters which are the basis for the rest of this account.↩︎