Rebel Britannia

25th October 2003:

While his men were out in force, searching in vain for a notorious communist courier, the police chief spent the night dancing with a charming young Englishwoman at a New Year's Eve ball. His dance partner was, of course, the very agent his officers were hunting. They never caught her; nobody ever did.

Noreen Branson knew how to dance in respectable company - she had, after all, been a debutante. But her aristocratic upbringing at her grandparents' house in Berkeley Square had not been as untroubled as it might sound: at the age of eight, in 1918, she was suddenly orphaned when both her parents died within days of each other. Her mother fell to typhoid, and then her father was killed in combat. Little Noreen Browne developed a loathing of war which never left her, and which perhaps determined the course of her adult life.

As a young woman, Noreen's chief interests were singing and playing the piano, both to a high standard; she was not involved in politics. But then in 1931 she met a painter named Clive Branson through an amateur dramatics group. She later recalled that they spent the whole night of their first meeting sitting in an open-all-hours Lyons' Corner House discussing socialism - of which she knew nothing, while he was already a convinced advocate. She thought his opinions were "quite incredible, but frightfully interesting." Within a couple of weeks Noreen and Clive were engaged to be married.

Having already cast off her religious upbringing in favour of atheism, and primed by her anti-war passions, she became an immediate and complete convert to the socialist cause. The books her new fiancee gave her to read made sense of what she had felt all along.

The disastrous collapse of the 1929-31 Labour government prompted the young couple to become active in politics, rather than just talking about it, for the first time. They joined the Independent Labour Party but within months had switched to the Communist Party, where they stayed for the rest of their lives.

One small event which had a significant impact on Noreen happened when she and Clive encountered a couple of blokes in a block of flats staggering downstairs with an old piano. The men explained that the piano belonged to a neighbour who had been widowed, and would not be allowed to claim any benefits until she had sold the instrument - so they were hiding it for her. The vicious pettiness and philistinism of the bureaucracy stuck in the throat and the mind of the musical Noreen, but she took note also of the solidarity of the neighbours.

In the mid 1930s, the CP found a perfect use for Noreen's upper-class voice and the ease with which she could move in posh circles. She became for some months a secret courier, carrying money and documents to comrades in countries, including India, where communist parties had been made illegal. She seems to have taken this adventurous and dangerous work in her stride; her underground activities were never suspected by the authorities.

Clive went to fight the fascists in Spain in 1938, having finally persuaded Party headquarters to let him go. They'd thought him more valuable as an organiser of volunteers to Spain, a task he achieved partly through means of a message centre in London disguised as a sandwich bar. It was while he was away that Noreen began working as a researcher for the CP, trades unions and other groups. She became one of the most accomplished writers, editors and historians ever produced by the Communist, cooperative and labour movements in Britain. She was especially associated with the magazine Labour Research, which she wrote for regularly, beginning in 1938, for the next 65 years.

Clive Ali Chimmo Branson was killed in action in 1944 in Burma, where he was a tank commander with the British Army. Today several of his paintings hang in the Tate. His widow, Noreen, lived into the following century, dying at the age of 93 on 25th October 2003, still actively working for socialism at the end of an extraordinarily productive life.

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Sources:

www.bishopsgate.org.uk/collections/branson-noreen

www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80009003

Red lives (Manifesto Press, 2020)

https://grahamstevenson.me.uk/2008/09/19/noreen-branson/

www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/clive-branson-3094