Edith Bone kept her political life well hidden and it is difficult to find information on her, though the suspicion has been voiced that she became a ‘spy-master’ for the Comintern in the late 1930s.
Edith Bone was born Edit Hajós in 1889 in Hungary where she became a doctor. But from 1923 to 1933, she lived in Berlin where she worked for the Comintern. She fled after the Bulgarian Communist Dimitrov was arrested, charged with responsibility for the Reichstag fire. (Bone had been doing translating work for him.) She went to Paris where Munzenberg sent her on to the UK to do party work. Here, in 1934, she married Gerald Martin, a translator, became a British subject and photographer and joined the CP.
In July 1936, she and her friend, Felicia Browne, drove to Spain, wishing to reach Barcelona in time for the Peoples Olympiad. 1 But they arrived shortly before Franco’s rebellion. Bone was then involved both as a doctor and with the establishment of the Communist ‘Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia’.
Back in London, Bone lived in the modernist Lawn Road flats, in Hampstead, where supposedly (and probably actually) lived a network closely tied to the Soviet regime. Here lived Brian Gould Vershoyles, a low level spy for the USSR, who was linked to Lotte Moos (my mother who also briefly lived there and knew Dr Bone), and Rene Kuczinski, who was regularly visited by her infamous brother, Jurgen. (See separate biography for ‘Kuczinski clan’). Bone also knew Edith Tudor-Hart (see separate biography). Also living there was Arnold Deutsch who became the most successful Soviet spy in London, and who recruited the ‘Cambridge Five’. The Lawn Road flats were of great interest to Mi5! 2, 3
Though she had lived for the previous ten years in Germany and was only recently a British citizen, Bone did not join the German speaking KPD exile group, as did most of the KPD exiles. A CP functionary, the CPGB strongly discouraged her from having contact with the KPD exile group, the Comintern line at the time. MI5 were suspicious of her but seem not to have caught on to her importance. She has been regularly linked to the Soviet Secret Service and may very well have helped them recruit spies.
In 1949, Bone went as a free-lance correspondent to Budapest for the Daily Worker. Accused of spying, this time for the British government, she was detained –or ‘disappeared’ into solitary confinement for seven years. (She was freed during the last days of the Nagy Government of 1956 when a student group seized control of the political prison where she was held.) She died in 1975 in the UK, it would appear a lonely figure who had buried herself in translation work, including of historically ‘Jewish’ literature.