London

Records go back to the Domesday Book of 1086

MacColl’s MI5 file contains details of his trips abroad, photostats of letters, transcripts of phone calls and anything else that caught the secret service’s attention. It sat for years in a plain buff folder, just like the ones in the title sequence of ‘The Prisoner’, each neatly typed page littered with obscure initials, reference numbers, squiggles and crosses, stamps saying ‘Use with Caution’, and a log of who had written it, read it, verified it and approved it. When the file was closed a few years later (since MacColl never did try to topple the government), it became not a file but an archive, subject to strict laws concerning its future. MacColl’s distilled life story was sent along to the National Archives, where it was labelled ‘Closed until March 2006’ and filed very neatly among miles and miles of identical-looking folders. Feature continues

Yet now here it is, open again, and anyone who wants to can rattle down the District Line, call it up and nose through it in a pleasantly climate-controlled environment.

Now that much of the archive is on the internet – you can search for files by subject name, and pay for them to be scanned and emailed to you –there ought to be less reason for people to travel to Kew to bolster their favourite conspiracy theories. But that would be a pity, and not just because they’ve gone to the trouble of putting in a Costa Coffee franchise. The lure of this place is entwined with the desire to get your hands on the documents themselves. There’s something intensely romantic about peeking into the daily routines of spooks and mandarins who once invested so much effort into staying out of sight.

www.nationalarchives.gov.uk


The ex-files!
A selection of recently declassified dossiers

1931-1955 KV 2/2155-2156
Francis Klingender This Marxist art historian was a contact of famous KGB double agents Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess, and his file contains a note from Blunt proclaiming he was ‘quite confident that [Klingender] would not do anything disloyal to this country’. Blunt’s dismissive attitude meant that Klingender was treated as a minor figure by the security services. Or was Blunt deliberately throwing them off the scent?

1934-1938 KV3/251
Japanese Espionage Activities Contains the only photograph of a suspected Japanese spy, Kanichi Nisiyama, and details of the Japanese spy ship, the Wani Maru, which sailed under the cover of a Japanese Boy Scouts Friendship Mission.

1943 MH102/895
Girl absconders from approved schools soliciting American soldiers in the streets and spreading venereal disease This wartime Ministry of Health file includes a list of the schools in question, which were the equivalent of today’s young offenders’ institutions. There is a discussion of what restraints could be used to stop the girls getting out, and a list of the STDs that were treated after the ‘feckless’ girls had had sex with GIs.

1951-1954 PREM 11/5220-5221
Winston Churchill’s Diaries The two diaries run from November 1950 to April 1954, and contain details of all his official duties, including the Queen’s Coronation, plus his observations on horse-racing, films he’d seen and the running of his farm.