Renate Simpson in 2010

Published: 31 October, 2013
by TOM FOOT

HER childhood home was one of the first targeted by Adolf Hitler’s Gestapo after seizing power in 1933 and the knock at the door stayed with Renate Simpson right up until her death, aged 89, last Friday.

It “came like Hell”, she recalled a few years ago in an interview with the New Journal.

Her father, Robert Rene Kuczynski, prominent economist, fled that night, taking with him 20,000 books. She soon followed when the family reunited in Camden.

Born in Berlin in 1923, Renate lived in Belsize Park in her early teens and later, from 1987, in Bloomsbury, with her husband Arthur who she met in Cambridge in the 1940s while organising for the National Union of Students.

Renate came from an extraordinary family of academics, statisticians and prolific writers that included her sister Ursula, one of the foremost secret agents of the 20th century, known by the code name “Red Sonya”.

Renate had said: “I was aware that you do not talk to her about that. But I was very proud of what she was doing. She was the first of my family to join the Communist Party.”

Ursula was the only woman ever to be appointed honorary colonel in the Red Army and used to train new young recruits at the family home, in the original Isokon building in Lawn Road, Belsize Park.

Her mother, Bertha, who fled with the family to Camden in 1934, was an equal inspiration. She would spend most of her time writing letters to friends back in Germany telling them: “For God’s sake get out”. “It was her way of fighting,” Renate had said.

A gifted student, she began studying economics at the London School of Economics aged 16 in 1940 when the college had been evacuated to Cambridge during the Second World War.

During the 1950s and 1960s, she became active in the Communist Party and began fundraising for the Daily Worker.

She interpreted at International Peace Congresses around the world and got a job as a research assistant to Ernest Rudd, who led the first research unit into higher education itself.

Her 30-year probe into that specialist arena was published in 2009. It followed translations of Karl Marx’s Theories of Surplus-Value for the former Communist Party publishers Lawrence and Wishart.

She was also published on the development of higher education in Cuba and the Philippines and later translated from German to English her sister’s biography, Sonya’s Report.

Moving to Bloomsbury in 1987, Renate was active in the Camden branch of the Communist Party of Great Britain, the Marx Memorial Library, London CND, Cuba Solidarity, Caribbean Labour Solidarity.

She spearheaded second-hand book sales fundraisers for the Morning Star with her friend Nicola Seyd.

She was also founder member of the Socialist Film Club and an enthusiastic member of the Royal Statistical Society.

Her book, a detailed study of the development of PhD degrees in Britain, was published in 2009 and a celebratory party was held in Coram’s Fields centre, attended by many academics.

She was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2009 and left Camden in January 2011 for a residential home in Bradford near her younger son.

She leaves behind three children and six grandchildren.