Special Bulletin: The Philbys’ Marriage Certificate

Readers will by now be familiar with the three major arguments suggesting that Kim Philby’s marriage to Aileen on September 25, 1946 was bigamous. They consist of the following:

1. Logistics: In order to get a divorce from his first wife, Litzi, Philby had to leave the UK to contact her, gain her agreement, and then arrange for the divorce to be legalized. According to Valentine Vivian, his then boss at MI6, Kim did not divulge this plan until Litzi had already left the country, planning to join her partner Georg Honigmann in Berlin. Honigmann’s Personal File maintained by MI5 indicates that Litzi left at the end of August, and she was verified as being in Prague on September 5. Kim was quoted as stating that he had gone to Paris ‘in due course’ to gain the divorce. There is no record of Litzi’s going to Paris. The original marriage had taken place in Vienna in 1934, and that city would be the obvious location to pursue the divorce. A note on file indicates that Kim’s divorce was made absolute on September 17, yet no evidence is given. For a foreign divorce court to grant an absolute decree of divorce in such a short space of time seems utterly improbable. (One prominent historian has expressed to me in writing that she agrees that the marriage was bigamous for these reasons.)

(For introductory reading, see ‘Was Kim Philby a Bigamist?” in https://coldspur.com/a-wintry-miscellany/, and https://coldspur.com/kim-philby-a-re-assessment/.)

• Litzi’s Testimony: She never referred to any divorce proceedings, and did not marry Georg Honigmann. Litzi told her daughter, Barbara (Honigmann), that she regarded herself as married to Kim for the rest of her life. She did not admit to meeting Kim at this time. Babara Honigmann wrote a very contradictory and equivocal account of her parents’ relationship in her memoir. Genealogical records show that Litzi and Georg were only ‘partners’.

(For more detail, see https://coldspur.com/life-with-the-honigmanns/, and https://coldspur.com/the-tales-of-honigmann/ – especially the coda.)

• Dick White’s Testimony: In an exchange posted in the Personal File of Flora Solomon, Dick White (then head of MI6) in 1962 described the event of the Philby marriage at Chelsea Register Office as ‘alleged’.

(For analysis of the Solomon controversy, see ‘Philby’s Bigamy’ at https://coldspur.com/spring-2026-round-up/ )

I believe that the suggestion that Philby’s marriage to Aileen was bigamous was first made by Anthony Cave-Brown, in his biography of Sir Stewart Menzies, “C”.When Jack Easton (who was fairly new to MI6) returned to London at the end of July 1951, after having a meeting with Bedell Smith, the CIA chief, Valentine Vivian apparently showed him a document that Menzies had withheld from him. In 1987 Easton told Cave-Brown: “I encountered a document that showed that Philby’s marriage to Aileen Furse was bigamous . . .” Now that would be a curious artefact, one that proved that a divorce from Litzy had not taken place, and one can only imagine some kind of witness statement that refuted an affidavit that Philby must have made. Easton even went on to challenge Philby on his bigamous marriage (or so Easton claimed), but Philby was able to wriggle out of it.

Now the first two arguments imply that the marriage ceremony between Kim and Aileen did in fact take place, with witnesses present, but that it was illegitimate, the assumption being that Kim had somehow presented evidence that he had procured a divorce, or had made a sworn statement that to that effect, but had submitted false testimony. The fresher, third, argument, however, represents doubt concerning the ceremony’s ever taking place, and that official records had been falsified. Either case, if found to be true, has very alarming consequences. So what do the records say?

The most common artefact, which comes up in searches on genealogical websites, is the Central Register of Marriages for the three months of July, August and September 1946 (see above). This clearly identifies Aileen Philby (who had changed her name from Aileen Furse to Aileen Philby by deed poll some years before) and Kim Philby as having been married at Chelsea Register Office during that period. A drill-down in the central archives comes up with a presumed copy of the certificate issued at Chelsea (see below).

I note some salient points about this item:

1. It is a transcription of an original document. The writing is all by the same hand (that of F. W. Shears, the Registrar), and the number (73) has been inscribed by hand, suggesting that it is not any kind of photostat of the original.
2. This process leads to some questionable aspects. While the statement says that ‘This marriage was solemnized between us’, suggesting that the signatures of the participants should appear opposite, the names of Harold (‘Kim’) and Aileen have been entered by Shears himself. That pattern is repeated against the rubric of ‘in the presence of us’, where the names of the witnesses, Flora Solomon and Thomas [sic] Harris are likewise in Shears’s script.
3. Harris’s first name was actually ‘Tomás’, so Shears made a mistake in his transcription.
4. The appearance of the Superintendent Registrar, S. G. Marsh, has also been entered by Shears.
5. In his statement, Shears does not actually avow that he was responsible for officiating over the marriage himself. He declares that the couple were married ‘by license before me’. Google informs me, however, that “‘Married by licence before me’ is standard historical phrasing found on UK marriage certificates and church records. It indicates that the marriage was authorized by a special or common church licence (bypassing the need for traditional banns) and conducted by a member of the clergy.” The bypassing of traditional ‘banns’ in a church wedding in order to formalize the marriage quickly, or perhaps an equivalent reduction in the time between application for a civil marriage and the ceremony itself, may be significant.

This entry may be totally genuine and legal, and other records may confirm such practices. Yet, to this lay person, it does bear a smack of laxity and less than strict legal propriety.

Some more resourceful delving allowed a copy of the original certificate from Chelsea to be acquired (see above). I make some observations:

1. This is a certified copy of the original entry in the register, and maintains the number ‘73’ in pre-printed format.
2. F. W. Shears uses the same formula to record the circumstances of the marriage.
3. Shears writes out the same words for listing the couple, with his spelling out of the fact that Alice (Litzi) was divorced from Friedmann appearing more clearly here in the original.
4. No evidence of Kim’s divorce from Alice is recorded.
5. S. G. Marsh has signed off his approval of the whole process himself.
6. In this original, the marriage couple and the witnesses have apparently applied their proper signatures, as the wording invites.
7. The signatures of Kim and of Flora Solomon can be verified as being genuine from other documents (see below).
8. Tomas Harris’s signature appears to be spelled correctly here, although without the ‘á’. That is perhaps a little surprising.
9. Aileen’s signature is a mess, however. The ‘A’s of ‘Aileen Armanda’ would appear to have been written by Shears. The ‘Philby’ part of her signature would seem to be in the hand of her partner.

So how can this mess be explained? How was it that Aileen could not collect herself properly, and was allowed to enter some graphic lettering that does not represent a valid signature? Whether she stumbled with a faulty pen or was in some way incapacitated cannot be ascertained. One member of my Legal Advisory Board has suggested that she perhaps tried to use the Registrar’s pen, and it failed to flow with ink. But, in that case, why would she not have turned to Kim and used the pen that he had just deployed successfully? Why would the Registrars accept an inadequate signature? Yet a more devious thought occurred to me – perhaps Aileen was not at the ceremony? Could the licence have been pre-arranged (‘by licence before me’), with the Registrar just going through the motions? It sounds highly irregular, but I suppose political pressure could be applied to such adventures, with the formalities achieved in a private session beforehand. I do not see any other possibilities besides these two.

It comes back to an essential question, however. Why would the two security services (if indeed their representatives are the culprits) want to abet an illegal marriage? And it goes back further to the sequence of events. Why did Kim decide that he should get a divorce only after his wife had left the UK for the Continent? For that is what he told Valentine Vivian. Was he taking his matrimonial orders from Moscow, and did the NKVD instruct him to get a divorce only when Litzi was safely out of the country? I have always declared it absurd that Kim did not get divorced around 1940 or 1941, i.e. soon after he started living with Aileen, since a clear separation from Litzi would then have reinforced the notion that he had abandoned any sympathy with her politics as well. Yet for some reason they hung on, as if Moscow were concerned that its superior agent (Litzi, at the time) would have her citizenship and right to reside in the UK removed if she were divorced. Not so, of course. But could Kim not have explained that to his handlers?

Maybe Kim was under pressure from his superior officers at MI6 to regularize his domestic arrangements since they had plans for him, and moving to Ankara would require a more stringent examination of his marriage records. It is not as if they were unaware of his marriage to Litzi, or that MI5 was ignorant of her subversive activities during the war. Resorting to underhand methods, however, would have been a highly risky undertaking, and hardly worth the candle. Maybe, when the divorce issue came up, Vivian and co. were so concerned about the whole ‘double agent’ deal blowing up in their faces that they decided to assist in Moscow’s bidding, however erratic and irresponsible it was, in the belief that they needed to maintain the charade (in their view) that he was working for Moscow.

Of course, if Kim’s divorce was never granted, and his marriage to Aileen was in fact bigamous, then his marriages to Eleanor Brewer and Rufina Pukhova were likewise bigamous, since Aileen’s death in 1957 would not have changed anything, and he predeceased Litzi by three years.

Thus it is all very enigmatic. Can I call upon the coldspur Irregulars to contribute?

• Does anyone have any evidence that Kim’s divorce from Litzi occurred?
• Does anyone believe that it was logistically possible?
• Has anyone come across the evidence that Hunter of MI5 claimed to have discovered that gave the date (September 17, 1946) of the final Kim-Litzi divorce decree?
• Can anyone suggest why Roger Hollis would have become interested in the bigamy rumpours in August 1947?
• Can anyone shed light on the processes behind the circumstances of a ceremony solemnized ‘by licence before me’ in a civil marriage in 1946?
• Can anyone describe how much time would be required to inform a Register Office of an intent to marry, and what evidence would be required to prove a divorce had taken place (papers? affidavit?)
• Can anyone offer a more convincing explanation of the fudged signature by Aileen?
• Does anyone have a sample of a similar marriage involving a divorced participant at the time, and could thus show how certificates were normally completed? [This last item could, of course, be followed up by making an application to the Chelsea Register Office, based on the Central records.]
• Does anyone have a convincing explanation for the behaviour of Valentine Vivian and Dick White?
• Can anyone explain what Jack Easton was referring to in his statement that he saw a document ‘that showed that Philby’s marriage . . . was bigamous’?

I look forward to your comments.