15 Facts About Melita Norwood

Melita Norwood rejected the Soviets' offer of a pension, and argued that her disclosures of classified work helped to avoid the possibility of a third world war involving the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union.

Melita Norwood's father was a close associate of both the Bolsheviks and Leo Tolstoy before he died of tuberculosis in 1918, when Melita was six years old.

Melita Norwood was involved with the Tuckton House group of exiles, publishing translated editions of Tolstoy's works.

Melita Norwood won a scholarship in 1923 for an education at Itchen Secondary School, Southampton, becoming school captain in 1928.

Melita Norwood then went on to study Latin and Logic at the University College of Southampton, before dropping out in 1931.

Melita Norwood left the Independent Labour Party after the group splintered in the mid-1930s, after which she joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and became an active supporter of the party's newspaper The Daily Worker.

Melita Norwood would continue to live there until she was 90.

Three of its members were arrested in January 1938 and sentenced to between three and six years in prison, but Melita Norwood was not then detained.

Responsibility for Melita Norwood was turned over to the GRU, the Soviet Union's military overseas intelligence service.

Bailey, head of a department at the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association, enabled Melita Norwood to pass her Soviet handlers material relating to the British atomic weapons project, known at the time by the innocuous name of Tube Alloys.

Melita Norwood's husband died in 1986, and Norwood said in 1999 that he had disapproved of her activities as an agent.

Melita Norwood was well known to be a communist sympathiser but a separate report in 1999 stated that British intelligence became aware of her significance only after Mitrokhin's defection; to protect other investigations it was then decided not to prosecute her.

Melita Norwood said she gained no material benefits from her spying activities.

Red Joan is a 2018 film very loosely inspired by Melita Norwood's life, starring Judi Dench and Sophie Cookson.

On 2 June 2005, at the age of 93, Melita Norwood died at New Cross Hospital in Wolverhampton, West Midlands and her body was cremated.