It was a love letter written by one of the more important British spies of the cold war that made Tom Brass realise he had never fully known his mother.
The spy in question was John Cairncross, the alleged fifth man in the Cambridge spy ring, whose spycraft also helped the Soviets win the Battle of Kursk and turn the tide of the second world war.
“My mother came from a category of women whose lives were deemed to be of little or no interest,” said Brass. “But these love letters – which she tucked away in her copy of Cairncross’s autobiography – show that before she was a wife and mother, she was loved by a spy for her vibrancy and intelligence.”
Cairncross was known to be prickly, resentful and unsympathetic, but the previously unseen letters to Gloria Barraclough – his “Dearest Gloria” – show him to be fond and elegant.
“Writing to you seems to have some magical effect on me,” he wrote in 1944, at the same time as he was working under Kim Philby in MI6’s counter-intelligence section. “Your letters have a lightness, vivacity and joie de vivre … a fresh voice from an exquisite past.”
Brass does not believe Barraclough knew of Cairncross’s double life when they dated – he began spying in 1936, a year before their relationship began – but if she had, he thinks she would have been intrigued, not shocked.
“By the time I was ready to ask the questions, she had died.” he said. Brass’s discovery is among the most striking exhibits in Love Letters, opening this weekend at the National Archives in Kew.
The exhibition brings together intimate correspondence and documents spanning more than 500 years, revealing how private emotions have shaped public history – and how, sometimes, they have upended it altogether.
From Tudor executions to queer safe houses under police surveillance, from royal deathbeds to Victorian prison cells, the exhibition gathers royal confessions, clandestine affairs, same-sex love letters and wills written in devotion.
There are documents that altered the course of the monarchy, including a letter from Catherine Howard to her alleged lover Thomas Culpeper, which led directly to Henry VIII ordering their executions.
The gentler side of political marriage is on display in letters between Mary II and William III, while Henrietta Maria’s correspondence with Charles I, written as civil war tore England apart, speaks of tender longing, loyalty and fear for a husband facing execution.
Love letters are not always billets-doux. The raw, desperate petition written by Alfred Douglas to Queen Victoria on behalf of Oscar Wilde brims with hope that the monarch might intervene. She never did.
Sometimes love letters even come at the end of life: Jane Austen’s unusually concise 90-word will, written shortly before death, is a haiku of devotion to her sister.
The wills of Anne Lister and her partner, Ann Walker – whose lives were fictionalised in the BBC drama Gentleman Jack – chart lives lived defiantly outside of social convention.
The exhibition also shines a light on lesser-known stories of love: husbands and wives separated by war or work; notes between parents and children.
Most harrowing are the intimate words exchanged in secret between same-sex couples long before such relationships were legal – letters that can be displayed only because they were seized, used to prosecute the lovers and filed.
There are also moving examples of collective love: hundreds of people writing to defend Ira Aldridge, the celebrated black Shakespearean actor, when he faced racism and exclusion. Their letters speak of admiration and solidarity, an outpouring of support that crossed class and national boundaries.
For Brass, seeing his mother’s story woven into this wider narrative has been unexpectedly moving. “Before domestic life claimed her, my mother was seen, admired and cherished for who she was,” he said.
Love Letters is at the National Archives in Kew, London, from 24 January to 12 April.
