Margaret Mynatt and Yvonne Kapp Papers

Yvonne Kapp was born Yvonne Mayer in 1903 into an affluent German-Jewish family in Londond and was educated at King's College London. She married the artist, Edmond Kapp in 1922, and joined Communist Party of Great Britain in 1936, following a visit to the Soviet Union. After working with Basque and Jewish refugees in 1937-1938, she was appointed Assistant to the director of the British Committee to Refugees from Czechoslovakia, which shortly afterwards (in 1939) became the Czech Refugee Trust Fund. She was dismissed from her post by the Home Office in 1940 because of allegations that she was a member of the Communist Party, though she denied this at the time. Following her dismissal, she wrote, together with her friend and former colleague at the Trust Fund, Margaret Mynatt, the pamphlet British Policy and the Refugees, but no publisher could be found for it until 1997. Kapp worked as Research Officer for the Amalgamated Engineering Union from 1941-1946 and for the Medical Research Council between 1947 and 1953, undertaking field work in the East End of London. She was an editor and translator for Lawrence and Wishart (publishers) between 1953 and 1957 and also published four novels under the pseudonym Yvonne Cloud, including Nobody Asked You in 1932 and The Houses in Between in 1938. Her biography of Eleanor Marx (2 vols 1972, 1976) was hailed as a masterpiece by historian Eric Hobsbawn. She died in 1999.

Margaret Mynatt was born in Vienna in 1907, the daughter of a British musician, John Charles Mynatt (who was known professionally as Giovanni Carlo Minotti). She grew up in poverty and moved in 1929 to Berlin, where she joined the Communist Party. She worked as a journalist for a number of Communist newspapers and joined the circle around Bertolt Brecht. She was a close friend of the writer Elisabeth Hauptmann and assisted in the creation of 'St Joan of the Stockyards' and other plays. Mynatt left Germany in 1933 following the Reichstag fire, fleeing first to Prague, then to Paris and and finally settling in London. She worked for the Relief Committee for the Victims of German Fascism in 1938 before becoming Head of Tribunals for the Czech Refugee Trust Fund, where she met Yvonne Kapp, who became her life-long partner. She was dismissed (with Yvonne Kapp) by the Foreign Office in 1940 due to their (then alleged) membership of the Communist Party. They subsequently wrote the pamphlet British Policy and the Refugees, but no publishers would accept it and it was only published in 1997. Mynatt stayed in the UK after the war, making her career in journalism and publishing. She was Head of Reuters Soviet Monitor, 1951-1951; Manager of Central Books, 1951-1966 and a director of the publishers Lawrence and Wishart, 1966-1977. At the time of her death in February 1977 she was editor-in-chief of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels. Her funeral oration was given by the historian Eric Hobsbawm.