"A Free Country"

A majority of Cambridgeshire's county councilmen agree that Vienna-born Dr. Hildegarde Broda, 42, more than earns the salary she gets as assistant county medical officer in charge of schoolchildren.

Not so, says Tory Councilman Archibald Claude Taylor, former mayor of Cambridge. Last fall Councilman Taylor did his best to prevent Physician Broda from getting a raise in pay (from -L-950 to -L-1,300 yearly) but was voted down. Last week he was busy trying to get the doctor fired from her job altogether. Reason: last August, Dr. Broda married Atomic Physicist Alan Nunn May--ex-convict and a key member of the U.S.S.R.'s wartime atomic-spy ring in Canada.

"What's wrong with that?" shouted Taylor's opponents in a stormy council meeting last week. "It is not fair to the lady," answered Taylor, "that she should be put in a position where she may be suspected of indoctrinating the children with whom she comes in contact." "Rubbish," said another councilman, but Taylor was warming to his work. "This is a free country," he cried, "and Dr. Broda can marry whom she likes [but] I have liberty to say what I feel the public have asked me to say . . . We don't like the way you have shown appreciation of what this country has done for you, Dr. Broda, and you should leave public service."

"I don't know if Dr. Broda is a Communist." shouted Labor Councilman Arthur Newman through the uproar that followed. "I don't care two damns if she is ... Three of my children attend schools that come under the attention of Dr. Broda. What attention they have got has been good. If she indoctrinates them ...

I can take care of any five minutes she has with them in ten minutes I have afterward."

Councilman Taylor's motion, said another Laborite, was "a dirty, saucy attack." Was it his "business to introduce the filthy system of McCarthyism here? Dr. Nunn May has served a prison * for his crime. How many more sentences must he serve? Turn this wicked resolution into a vote of confidence in Dr. Broda!" By acclamation, the council voted to turn down Taylor's motion and keep Mrs.

Nunn May at her job.

* Six years and eight months for violating the Official Secrets Act.

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