Kitty Bowler: The English Captain’s Spy

In Barcelona in September 1936 it was said that everybody was ready for the unexpected; sometimes it happened. Kitty Bowler, an American journalist, was wandering past the city’s Café Rambla when she eyed ‘a moving forest of bare knees. Only England could produce anything so incredibly tall and fresh as these boys. Then a soft-voiced bald man touched my arm: “You must join us,” he said’. He was Tom Wintringham, a ‘big shot’ in the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and soon to be the ‘English Captain’ at the Battle of Jarama. Only a few days later he proposed to Kitty, in his words, ‘curtly, nervously, without prejudice to any other interest either might have in people a thousand or three thousand miles away’.

The love affair between Tom and Kitty, in the intensity of war, was romantic and tragic. In January 1937 she was interrogated as a Trotskyite spy. A month later she saved his life after battle. In July she was expelled from Spain and a year later he was expelled from the Communist Party for refusing to leave her.

Tom became infatuated with Kitty. He involved her in his work without caring that in the closed, class-bound, paranoid circles of mid-1930s Communism she had all the wrong credentials. She was an amateur journalist, an upper-class American girl and not even a member of the Communist Party. When he sent her to London in November to persuade Harry Pollitt (general secretary of the Communist Party) to send out more International Brigaders she made a bad impression on the proletarian Comrades: ‘Eeh lad, what d’y expect,’ said one. ‘Smelling like a whorehouse and dressed like for the races.’ Two months later Tom made an even worse mistake. While in Albacete as a machine-gun instructor for the International Brigades, he sent for Kitty to bring spare parts for his guns. She should not have done so. Albacete was out of bounds to non-Communists. Its Comintern chief was Andre Marty, whose obsession with spies and traitors, ‘the Russian syphilis,’ bordered on madness. He was also a cruel misogynist. Kitty was arrested and interrogated roughly for three days and nights. Then she was found guilty of being a Trotskyite spy and expelled from Spain. She was released into Tom’s arms – but not told about her sentence.

Tom and Kitty spent a passionate weekend recuperating in Valencia. ‘Good, gallant Schwimp [her nickname because she was small and Tom spoke with a lisp], you know a good deal about giving a man a good time, and then some,’ wrote Tom. Shortly after he was made commander of the British Battalion and the very next day it moved out to the battlefield of Jarama. At the end of the second day of an appalling bloodbath Tom was hit in the thigh and removed to a field hospital.

On February 14th Kitty joined him and got him back to Valencia ‘walking with a limp, a stick and a wistful, convalescent smile’. Within days Tom was delirious with typhoid. Nothing if not determined and courageous, Kitty found medicine, fresh food, a specialist doctor and a private hospital: undoubtedly she saved his life. They went off to Calpe on the Costa Brava for a convalescence that was a virtual honeymoon. ‘Our memories of Calpe,’ wrote Tom, ‘the sun, the sea, chess and vermouth, afternoons resting, an occasional rough house. The happiness we shared was more real than I’ve known.’  Tom’s wife, a woman of ‘unimpeachable Marxist propriety’, came out from London to save the marriage, but realised it was all over.

In early July the lovers returned to the war. Within days Kitty was arrested and kicked out of Spain. By the end of the month she was back in New York and on the way to a nervous breakdown. In August Tom was wounded for a second time and repatriated to England. Kitty joined two other Mrs Wintringhams around his bedside.  

It is easy to see why the CPGB expelled Tom the following July for refusing to leave Kitty. It was the height of Stalin’s purges of ‘Trotskyites’ and the leadership had to watch its back. Perhaps that’s why Pollitt said he was sure ‘the American dame’ was a spy: ‘I can smell ‘em.’ But was there any evidence whatsoever?

She was not a spy. However Kitty was incredibly indiscreet. She gabbed to Pollitt about her meetings with the anti-Stalinist POUM in Barcelona, she took a camera to Albacete and did not declare it and then, tellingly, there is this anecdote from Herbert Greene (brother of the novelist) in his autobiography, Secret Agent in Spain. Greene flirted with spying for both sides and was the last person to trust with information. He met Kitty, a complete stranger, in their hotel lobby in Valencia and she chatted him up. They went out for the evening: ‘She shepherded me round and from her I learnt more about the dispositions of the various forces on both sides than from anybody else.’ She was arrested soon after.

Poor Kitty was asking for trouble and in that paranoid world of the Comintern in Spain she was certain to get it.

Hugh Purcell is the biographer of Tom Wintringham. An extended paperback of The Last English Revolutionary: Tom Wintringham 1898-1949 will be published by Sussex Academic Press next spring.