Margot Kettle papers

Catalogue record

Notes

CP/IND/KETT. Margot Kettle (née Gale) was never in the first or even second rank of CPGB activists, though she did play an important role during the war years as an undercover communist in the students' movement. In the course of these activities, she established a wide range of contacts in the youth and student movement, and it was on these that she drew for two major unpublished research projects towards the end of her life. The first, undertaken in the 1980s, was her Recollections of a younger world aimed at recovering the memory of the anti-fascist generation of the 1930s. As well as her manuscript and correspondence with publishers and others, the papers include Kettle's transcripts of interviews with contemporaries in the youth movement. Though Kettle was unsuccessful in finding a publisher, she then turned her attention to John Gollan, the subsequent CPGB general secretary who in the 1930s was one of the leading figures in the youth movement. Again working drafts and correspondence can be found alongside interview transcripts, and provide an insight into the older generation of the 1980s as well as its halcyon days some decades earlier.