Dr. Faber and the School Medical Officer in Cambridge
By Constance Bell ·
The Security Service files on Hildegarde Nunn May reveal a woman with four identities and a strategic marriage to an atom spy, hidden behind the facade of a local clinic
The theft of the atomic secret was not a failure of locks and guards, but a failure of trust in the people who cared for the community. In the classrooms and clinics of the English academic establishment, the most dangerous agents did not look like soldiers; they looked like the doctors treating the children of the elite.
For years, the Security Service tracked a woman who moved through the corridors of power and medicine with an ease that masked a profound betrayal. This story is reconstructed from catalogue descriptions of the Security Service's personal files, a summary of the evidence that remains the primary window into a life of calculated deception.
The Dr. Faber Aliases
Hildegarde Pauline Ruth Nunn May was not a single person, but a series of masks. The record lists her under four distinct names: "Hildegarde (Hilde) Pauline Ruth NUNN MAY, aliases Hildegarde BRODA, Hildegarde GERWING, Dr FABER" (KV 2/2554). This is not the naming convention of a political sympathizer or a socialite; it is the toolkit of a professional intelligence asset.
Hildegarde arrived in the UK as a refugee from Austria, a landlocked Central European republic then reeling from the annexation by Nazi Germany, in 1938. She spent years working as a School Medical Officer in Cambridge, the university city that served as the intellectual heart of Britain and, as the public record establishes, a fertile breeding ground for Soviet recruitment.
The desk's reading is that the position of School Medical Officer was not a career, but a cover. By operating within the public health system of a university town, Hildegarde gained unfettered access to the families and social circles of the academic community. If the shape of this file is what it appears to be, her medical practice provided the perfect operational screen for identifying, monitoring, and managing targets within the Cambridge scientific elite without ever raising the suspicion of the local constabulary.
A Triangle of Scientists
The record establishes a precise and damning sequence of relationships. Hildegarde was first married to Engelbert Broda, an Austrian Communist and scientific colleague of the man who would become her second husband (KV 2/2554). Broda was part of a network of exiled intellectuals who viewed the Soviet Union not as a foreign power, but as the only viable bulwark against fascism.
Then there was Alan Nunn May. A physicist of formidable talent, Nunn May was a member of the British team working on the atomic energy project in Canada between 1943 and 1945. He was a GRU agent—the military intelligence arm of the Soviet Union—whose treason was exposed in 1945 by Igor Gouzenko, a Soviet cipher clerk who defected in Ottawa. Upon his return to Britain, Nunn May confessed to spying and was imprisoned.
Shortly after Nunn May was released from prison, he married Hildegarde (KV 2/2554).
The connection here is the only one that matters: the marriage was not a romantic coincidence, but a structural necessity. Broda and Nunn May were scientific colleagues; Hildegarde was the common denominator. The pattern suggests that Hildegarde functioned as a professional courier or a 'cut-out,' the vital link facilitating communication between high-value scientific assets. She was the bridge between the physics of the bomb and the handlers in Moscow.
The Austrian Centre
Hildegarde did not operate in a vacuum. She was "heavily involved in the activities of the Communist controlled Austrian Centre and other Communist Front organisations in the UK" (KV 2/2554). The Austrian Centre acted as a hub for refugees and exiles, using the guise of mutual aid to filter potential recruits and maintain a registry of useful intellectuals for the Soviet cause.
This network extended beyond her immediate circle. Related files show the Security Service was monitoring a wider web of operatives, such as Ronald Hamilton Gunn, a member of the Communist Party who was active in the Society for Cultural Relations between the People of the British Commonwealth and the USSR, and the Moodys, long-term Communists who emerged in connection with the case of the atom spy Klaus Fuchs (KV 2/3224, KV 2/2797).
When the record places Hildegarde within these "Front organisations," it is describing a sophisticated infrastructure of influence. These were not mere discussion clubs; they were the intake valves for the GRU. Hildegarde’s role in the Austrian Centre provided her with the political legitimacy to move between the refugee community and the British establishment, while her medical credentials provided the social legitimacy to enter the homes of the people her handlers wanted to watch.
The Operational Marriage
The timing of Hildegarde’s marriage to Alan Nunn May is the most telling detail in the record. To marry a convicted atom spy immediately following his release from prison is not the act of a supportive spouse; it is an operational arrangement.
The desk's reading is that the Center ordered this union to provide a secure, domestic environment for a compromised agent. A man who had been caught and imprisoned is a liability; he requires a handler who can monitor his every move, manage his finances, and ensure he does not flip to the West. By placing Hildegarde—a trusted asset with her own reporting line—as his wife, the Soviets ensured that Nunn May remained under surveillance even within his own home.
Furthermore, the record's tendency to describe Hildegarde as the "wife of the atom spy" (KV 2/2554) suggests a systemic failure of the Security Service to recognize her individual agency. By framing her as a dependent spouse, the official narrative obscures her own standing. The existence of the alias "Dr. Faber" proves she had an independent operational identity. She was not merely the wife of a spy; she was a primary intelligence asset in her own right.
If a full release of the PF Series files occurred, the desk believes the withheld pages would show that Hildegarde’s reporting lines did not run through her husbands, but directly to the Soviet residency. The redactions in these histories often protect the most efficient assets—the ones who were never caught.
The pattern of her life—the refugee arrival, the strategic marriages to scientists, the cover as a community doctor, and the multiple aliases—points to a woman who was a professional operative in a war for the world's secrets. Hildegarde Nunn May played the part of the dutiful doctor and the loyal wife, and in doing so, she helped ensure that the most guarded secret of the twentieth century became a Soviet possession. The cost of her 'medical service' to Cambridge was the security of the West.