Robert J. ('Bob') Stewart
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Robert J. ('Bob') Stewart (born, February 1877 in Eassie, Angus, Scotland; died, late 1960s) was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and was in charge of the underground cell which, in the 1930s, operated a clandestine transmitter in Wimbledon that relayed information between the CPGB and the Comintern in Moscow. He was the CPGB's spymaster and, at one stage, controlled the Cambridge Five[1].
Stewart trained as a ship's carpenter but, early on, he went into politics. He became a member of Dundee Town Council and stood there as a CPGB candidate in June 1921, when he polled 6,160 votes. Even after he moved to London in 1929, Stewart retained his connections to Dundee, standing there again as a CPGB candidate in 1931, when his voted increased to 10,261.
Stewart was a founder member of the CPGB when it was created in 1921. He remained on the party's Executive Committee until 1936, when he became secretary of the Control Commission, the party's disciplinary body.
Stewart moved to Moscow in early 1923 to work at Comintern headquarters. While there, he met several key Soviet leaders and attended Lenin’s funeral. He was sent by the Comintern to many parts of Europe, because his British passport enabled him to travel at will. In 1924, he was sent to Ireland to assist in the creation of a Communist Party there.
As the British representative on Comintern, Stewart attracted considerable attention from the British authorities. The three volumes of Bob Stewart's MIS file open in September 1920 with a report from SIS that identified him as a Communist and 'a secret agent for England on behalf of the Third International'.
Files on him are available in the National Archives. One of the bundles, covering the period 1927-31, covers Stewart's contacts with Norwegian and Chinese communists in 1927. It also includes reports from an informant in Ireland about Stewart's activities there, including, in 1929-1930, contacts between the IRA and the CPGB.
He published an account of his work, Breaking the Fetters, in 1967.
