Real-life city spies were hardly like James Bond

It is possible there are one or two people still living in Stoke-on-Trent who will remember being treated by Doctor Barnett Stross.

- Fred Hughes - Historian and author

SECRETS: Two Potteries spies were active at the height of the Cold War.

Known to his Hanley patients as Doctor Bob, he practiced as a GP in Shelton from 1927 to 1945.

But on another level he achieved international recognition through the Lidice Shall Live campaign after it was destroyed by the Nazi SS.

A total of 172 men and boys were murdered and 308 women and children were enslaved.

Barnett Stross was a Labour Stoke-on-Trent councillor from 1935 to 1945 and Member of Parliament until his death in 1967.

It was during my research into his inspirational life story, Roses from Ashes, published by the city council in 2012, that I came across references falsely claiming he had passed secret information to communist spies.

The source came from a Czech Communist defector who, in 1970, also named Prime Minister Harold Wilson, presumably to spice up its authenticity.

The allegations were soon discredited as malicious information.

It is, though, one of the many bogus files that doubtless remain in the dusty cellars of the Secret Service - misleading and insignificant.

Many fantasy spy plots have prompted books and films, fiction and nonfiction.