LETTERS FROM LONDON

The wartime correspondence of Kathleen Harriman, a young American accompanying her father on a vital diplomatic mission to Britain, shines extraordinary light on some of the 20th century's most famous names

- EXCLUSIVE BY GEOFFREY ROBERTS

ATHLEEN Harriman jumped at the chance to accompany her father on his wartime mission to London. A wealthy American tycoon, Averell Harriman was US President Franklin Roosevelt’s special envoy to Britain. “Ave” arrived in March 1941 and 23-year-old Kathy a couple of months later.

Averell’s job was to expedite the supply of American aid to embattled Britain — materiel vital to the country’s survival against a Nazi war machine that had already defeated France and conquered continental Europe.

Kathy acted as Ave’s hostess, but her day job was as war correspondent for the US-based International News Service.

Her father’s political connections gave her an easy entrée to elite social, political and military circles, including Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the flamboyant Minister of Supply, Lord Beaverbrook, proprietor of Britain’s biggest-selling newspaper the Daily Express.

Kathy was a frequent visitor to Beaverbrook’s Surrey mansion, Cherkley Court, where she met the Express’s legendary editor Arthur Christiansen, who took her under his wing and published her first articles. Another role-model was Express journalist Hilde Marchant, Britain’s foremost female war correspondent.

Intelligent, attractive and personable, Kathy was a huge political and social asset to Ave. But above all, she was a working reporter who witnessed air raids, visited bombed cities and munitions factories, toured military bases, interviewed allied leaders, and wrote stories about daily life on Britain’s home front.

From London, and later from Moscow when her father became US ambassador to the Soviet Union, Kathy wrote hundreds of letters to family and friends.

Often intimate and emotional, her correspondence was rarely only about herself.

She wrote about the people she met, the circles she moved in and the historic events she witnessed.