Percy Glading
Percy Eded Glading was an English communist and a co-founder of the Communist Party of Great Britain. 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, 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 kept in touch with him through a series of handlers.
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. 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 had 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. In January 1929, Glading and Pollitt were in the minority over the question of the progressive 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 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 howAlso 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.