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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The authoritative account of the infamous runaway MP, by his daughter. 'A compelling account of an extraordinary political scandal, written from inside the Stonehouse family'. Martin Bell On 20 November 1974, British Labour MP and Privy Counsellor John Stonehouse faked his death in Miami and, using a forged identity, entered Australia hoping to escape his old life and start anew. One month later his identity was uncovered and he was cautioned; the start of years of legal proceedings. In a tale that involves spies from the communist Czechoslovak secret service, a three-way love affair and the Old Bailey, John's daughter examines previously unseen evidence, telling the dramatic true story for the first time, disputing allegations and upturning common misconceptions which are still in circulation. The story was never far from the front pages of the press in the mid-70s, and yet so much of the truth is still unknown. A close look at the political dynamics of the time; paced like a thriller, it's time for the world to know the real John Stonehouse.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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JOHN STONEHOUSE, MY FATHER
THE TRUE STORY OF THE RUNAWAY MP
Julia Stonehouse
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Julia Stonehouse with her father, John, 1985.
Photograph Terence Donovan © Terence Donovan Archivevi
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This book is dedicated to Michael P. O’Dell and Harry Richards – two gems among men.
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On 20th November 1974, British member of parliament, John Stonehouse, faked his death in Miami and, using a forged identity, entered Australia hoping to escape his old life and start anew. This is his true story. It involves spies, secret services, politics, high finance, and the love of two women.x
Contents
1
Going Crazy
Between the 6th and 11th of November 1974 my father flew from London to Miami, to Houston, to Mexico City, to Los Angeles, to Atlanta, to Miami, to Chicago, to San Francisco, to Tampa, to Miami and back to London. He’d planned to fake his own death and go to Australia, so when he arrived at Miami on the 6th he’d passed through immigration as Stonehouse and then doubled back to join another immigration line and entered again on a false passport in the name of Joseph Markham. He was psychologically shattered and trying to break free of the personality of John Stonehouse, but was unable to do so.
When he arrived in Miami, he booked into the beach-side Fontainebleau Hotel and phoned the National Bank of Miami to confirm his lunch meeting there the next day, to discuss the possibility of them buying a large block of shares in his banking company – originally called the British Bangladesh Trust, but now renamed the London Capital Group. He was hoping that a last-minute change of fortune could save him from the dire financial predicament he was in. He later wrote a book to explain his faked death and disappearance, Death of an Idealist, in which he said this meeting was ‘a straw to clutch’, asking, ‘Would it give me hope and pull me back from the brink of the extinction I was planning for myself?’1
He woke early the next day to a beautiful tranquil morning and started making contingency arrangements. He needed somewhere to hide a set of dry clothes, so he walked along the beach and was 2surprised to find that, next to the Fontainebleau, the Eden Roc Hotel was shuttered closed, and its exterior area dilapidated and deserted. He’d stayed there as a minister on a tour of the States, and as he now stood by its dirty swimming pool he remembered his once confident and cheerful self. He wrote that he felt ‘as though I was looking back on myself through a long series of distorting mirrors. At the other end I could see the old me looking backwards through the same distorting mirrors with an expression of horror and incredulity.’ As he stood there, a broken man, he looked back on the successful man and the once successful man also looked at him. ‘I looked over the passage of time – in both directions – and shuddered.’2
He drove to the airport and bought a ticket to Houston in the random name of George Lewis, no ID required. He also bought a suitcase and clothes, and put them in a big luggage locker, along with the false Markham passport and other documents in that name. He drove to the Fontainebleau, then walked back to the Eden Roc Hotel with a spare set of clothes and hid them in a telephone kiosk near the swimming pool he’d been at earlier. At the lunch meeting with the bank executives there was no positive news, and no pulling back from the brink. He was going. Back at the Fontainebleau, he put his Stonehouse passport and money into his document case, leaving them in his room and leaving his ticket for Los Angeles on the bedside table. He had planned to go there the next day to meet Harry Wetzel, the president of an aerospace company, the Garrett Corporation. Then he changed into swimming shorts and a shirt and headed for the beach. Leaving his shoes and shirt on the verandah, he got in the sea. He felt the water washing away the tensions of his past, like a baptism. He swam towards the Eden Roc; the sea and beach were deserted. After changing into the spare clothes he’d left in the phone kiosk, he strolled to the road, hailed a taxi to the airport, collected his suitcase with all the Joseph Markham paperwork, and flew to Houston.
From there he flew to Mexico City, exiting the USA as Markham. The plan was to catch the once-weekly Qantas flight from Mexico 3City to Sydney, but there had been an agonising delay causing him to miss the flight by ten minutes. The quickest way to get to Australia now was to catch a flight from Los Angeles, so the next day, the 8th, he caught a plane to LA, entering the USA and booking into the airport Marriott Hotel as Markham. He wanted to rest until the flight later that night, but he’d stayed at that hotel before as Stonehouse, and the memories came flooding back. The planned meeting with Harry Wetzel had not been cancelled and his offices were only yards away. They’d been due to discuss a report he was writing for the Garrett Corporation on the future of the British aircraft industry which, as a former minister of aviation, he knew a great deal about. He decided to attend the meeting anyway, although he would now be late, and walked there. With each step he felt Markham ebbing away and Stonehouse returning. On his last visit to Wetzel, he’d noticed a book of M.C. Escher prints on the bookshelf, and it now seemed as he sat in that office that his state of mind was reflected by Escher’s labyrinthine puzzles and faultless blending of day into night, night into day, up to down, and down to up. By the time he returned to the Marriott Hotel, Markham had gone and it was Stonehouse who opened the room door. He felt disembodied: one half in California; the other missing in Florida.
In mental turmoil, he phoned my mother. She remembers it as a short, garbled call, in which he said ‘he couldn’t take it anymore’. She thought he meant that he couldn’t take any more stress of trying to make business deals, not that ‘it’ meant his whole life. He told her he might not be back in time for the Remembrance Day service at his constituency, due to take place in two days on Sunday 10th, and asked that if he wasn’t back, could she go in his place. She wasn’t surprised to find him calling from LA, as he had planned to be there, but what she didn’t know was that his passport and clothes were in Miami, and he’d stayed the previous night in Mexico City.
Reluctantly, he decided to return to London. He later wrote, ‘The pain and anguish of returning to Stonehouse was intense. Markham, 4for his part, resented the intrusion on his plans; he could see no point in returning to the empty charade in Britain, but Markham would not fight the blood ties which were dragging Stonehouse back like a powerful magnet.’ There were no available direct flights, so he flew to Atlanta, arriving at 4am on Saturday 9th, and caught a connecting flight to Miami. When he arrived back at the Fontainebleau Hotel it was clear that nobody had noticed he’d been gone almost two days. He felt as though he didn’t really exist. After a short nap, he woke to the full horror that he was once again in his Stonehouse personality: ‘The horror of it hit me like a sledgehammer.’3
Once more, he felt he had to escape. Again, he left all the Stonehouse belongings in his room, took some clothes for Markham to the Eden Roc Hotel, and went for another baptismal swim in the vast blue ocean. He wrote later that this time it was different: ‘Markham was stronger and determined to succeed. The philosophical haze of the previous swim was replaced by a harsh strong light. I could see it all clearly now. Stonehouse must definitely die.’ He caught a taxi to the airport but there were no available direct flights to LA or San Francisco, where he could get a connecting flight to Australia, so he flew to Chicago where he easily picked up a plane to San Francisco. As he sat there, heading West once again, more internal turmoil struck. ‘I felt suddenly oppressed, like a reluctant lemming. Why should I throw my being over the precipice even if I was doing it only metaphorically, and only in space and time, and with the technology of jet travel to help me? From the depths of my being an emotion of tremendous intensity rose within me. I went to the rear of the plane into the tiny toilet compartment and screamed at the reflection in the mirror. “Why do you do this to me?” But who was screaming – was it Stonehouse or was it Markham? The struggle between the two was tearing me to pieces.’4 In emotional agony, he wept.
Stonehouse won that battle: ‘The umbilical cord was not severed after all. I must return to Miami and recreate my own identity.’ In 5San Francisco he bought a ticket back to Miami and, for the second consecutive night, flew from West coast to East coast arriving, after a detour to Tampa because of engine trouble, back in Miami. It was now Sunday the 10th of November and, once again, nobody at the hotel had noticed he’d gone missing. He felt it was fate – he could not escape. Meanwhile, my mother was walking in his place behind the band through the streets of Walsall and towards the church to remember the armistice and the fallen soldiers, silently anguishing about whatever mental trauma her husband was going through on the other side of the Atlantic. He flew overnight to London, feeling ‘like a condemned man, with the noose already around my neck, being dragged along to a hideous circus’.5 He arrived on the morning of Monday the 11th, went to his office in Dover Street, then to the House of Commons, and carried on apparently as normal. Nobody noticed he was silently exploding inside his head.
Two days later my parents celebrated their 26th wedding anniversary by having dinner at their favourite restaurant, La Busola. My mother felt relieved that my father seemed to have recovered from his ‘I can’t take it anymore’ moment a few days earlier in America and didn’t realise that he was already operating in two distinct mental dimensions, and that this would be their last anniversary dinner. As she sat across the table from him, my mother had no idea my father had constructed an elaborate persona in the name of Joseph Markham, complete with bank accounts and plans to emigrate to Australia, plus bank accounts in yet another name – Clive Mildoon.
My father had kept from my mother the extent of his financial difficulties, and the fact that for five years he’d been having an affair with his secretary, Sheila Buckley, who was 21 years younger than him. My mother knew my father had been under intense emotional pressure since 1969, when Josef Frolik, a defector from the StB, the communist Czech secret services, accused him of being one of their 6agents. That allegation, although unsubstantiated, had lost him his job in government and led to a group of right-wing establishment figures generating further rumour and unfounded allegations, which compounded his anxiety and stress. My mother also knew that my father took prescription drugs to counter the insomnia caused by all his problems. What nobody knew, however, was that those drugs were driving him crazy.
My father’s bathroom cabinet was full of bottles of Mandrax and Mogadon. After he died in 1988, Sheila told the Daily Mail: ‘What I should have done which I now blame myself for was to insist he had medical help. He had been to see the House of Commons doctor and had been on Mandrax pills to sleep for the last two years. It should have been a warning to me but I did nothing about it.’6 My father was getting Mandrax (methaqualone) and Mogadon (nitrazepam) from a variety of sources, none of whom knew the extent of his drug taking. In those days, doctors carried around little green prescription pads and when my father saw an MP who was also a GP walking down the corridor of the House of Commons, he’d get a prescription from him. And from another, and another, and also from his own doctor. For two years he was self-medicating on a cocktail of the two drugs, essentially without medical supervision. An increased risk of suicide is a side effect of both drugs, and a tolerance of Mandrax develops rapidly so larger and larger doses become required for the same effect.
Mandrax, known in the street drug trade as mandies or in the USA as Quaaludes, was widely prescribed in the 1970s for insomnia and anxiety, but has been banned in the UK and USA for over 30 years because of its now-recognised negative impact on mental health, including depression, anxiety, paranoia, mental confusion, poor decision-making and the increased risk of suicide. Taken with alcohol, Mandrax can be fatal. Mogadon is still available, but its recognised side effects include depression, with or without suicidal tendencies, impairment of judgement, and delusions. Today, people taking Mogadon are advised to consult their doctor if their behaviour 7becomes bizarre, and in 1974 my father’s behaviour was certainly that. Schizophrenia can develop as a result of psychological assault, which he was definitely suffering, but it’s also a reported side effect of benzodiazepines such as Mogadon. I believe the cocktail of Mandrax and Mogadon caused my father to spiral out of control and made him do some absolutely mad, out of character things, and contributed to what he called his ‘psychological suicide’.
At my father’s trial, his barrister, Geoffrey Robertson, questioned Dr Maurice Miller MP, who my father sometimes ‘consulted’ at the House of Commons, and Miller told the court that over the course of 1974 my father’s character had changed and he ‘frequently sank into deep anxiety states’. Geoffrey Robertson later wrote ‘none of the independent experts in psychology or psychiatry we consulted had any doubt but that he had been clinically depressed. The private self lost faith in the public man: he seriously contemplated suicide, but designed instead a psychiatric equivalent: he would kill off John Stonehouse, MP, and return as Mr Markham or Mr Muldoon [sic] – anonymous and unambitious men whose ordinary joys he would savour.’7 But in the mid-70s nobody knew about the catastrophic effects Mandrax and Mogadon can have on a person’s mental state: not Dr Miller, not the General Medical Council, not the NHS, not Geoffrey Robertson, not the family, not Sheila, not the Judge and jury and not, even, my father.
Depression is a strange thing in that a person can exist in a dual mental state, walking a parallel course: continuing to behave normally, and yet sometimes sinking into a dark, hopeless, suicidal space. Often the person’s family have no idea they’re experiencing the dark space and only see the person behaving normally. This is how we were before my father’s disappearance. Afterwards, we were aware of the dark times, and experienced them with him. Yet he could still appear to other people as normal, and that was a big part of his problem after he was discovered in Australia, and throughout the following legal proceedings.8
In the 1970s, mental health problems in men weren’t much talked about; men were expected to ‘deal with it’ and carry on. My father had a show to keep on the road, including employees he was responsible for, and a family. He didn’t have a group of male friends who could’ve supported him. He didn’t play cricket, rugby, football, golf, or any other ball game, so there was no tight team of sporty men who might understand him in his hour of need. The only game he played was the solitary game of chess, at which he usually beat his opponents. And by 1974, he’d come to detest the tribalism and hypocrisy of British politics, and pride would never have allowed him to reveal to old comrades what he was going through. Indeed, they were part of the problem.
Meanwhile, he could feel the dark cloak of suspicion that he was a communist spy enveloping him. The rumour wasn’t going away, it was circulating. On 20th September, two months before he disappeared, the satirical magazine Private Eye published a story saying two Labour MPs were under investigation by Special Branch, linking payments and spying to the Czech embassy. No names were given, but because the newspaper community, parliamentarians, and much of the establishment could guess this piece referred to John Stonehouse, it was a hard psychological blow. On the 15th November, Private Eye published ‘Bungler Dashed’ – a play on the word ‘Bangladesh’, a country my father was closely associated with. The article outlined my father’s career in the most disparaging terms and was a strange piece for the Eye because it was completely humourless and just a gratuitous character assassination full of false facts and inaccuracies.* When he was made aware of it a few days later, my father was furious and issued a writ and notice of seeking an 9injunction through solicitors Allen & Overy, who listed ten separate points of complaint. He was too late to stop publication, but hoped to get unsold copies withdrawn from the shops. Unfortunately he was unsuccessful.†
On the 19th, my father flew back to Miami. This time he was travelling with Jim Charlton, the deputy chairman of his trade and export company Global Imex, and my mother hoped Jim’s presence would help him maintain emotional equilibrium. She was wrong. The next time my father went swimming in Miami’s inviting sea, he wouldn’t be coming back.
10
* My father thought this article had the fingerprints of George Wigg all over it. The Machiavellian Wigg had been Harold Wilson’s former security liaison with MI5 and MI6. My father was so upset about the article, and my mother so worried about his reaction, she wrote to former home secretary Roy Jenkins, who was in Brussels at the time, saying the Labour Party was out of control and he needed to get back and sort them out. He sent a nice reply, saying that she was not the only one to suggest this.
† I assume that the reason my father’s writ was unsuccessful was because Private Eye argued that nine of the ten points had been published previously and had not been legally challenged then, and the unpublished tenth point had not been contested as yet.
2
Who Was John Stonehouse?
My father grew up totally immersed in socialist politics. He was born in 1925 and as a baby spent most of his time in a pram parked at the back of draughty halls where his mother would be attending meetings, either of the Labour Party or the Women’s Co-operative Guild – of which she became president. The same routine carried on when he was a toddler and child. My grandfather was a trade union man, so my father’s entire childhood was, in one way or another, spent absorbing socialist ideology. The Women’s Co-operative Guild was part of the larger co-operative movement, which included the Co-operative Wholesale Society, an organisation that bought food staples in bulk and distributed them to members at cost. Each purchase gave the member a ‘divvy’ – a dividend, which would later be in the form of stamps that could be collected in little books and exchanged for goods. Co-ops were democratic organisations where members voted to appoint officials and, still today, anyone who has a store card from a Co-op shop can vote for the management.
My father’s parents were William and Rosina, and John was the youngest of their four children. Both their fathers worked in Royal Navy dockyards: William’s as a shipwright; and Rosina’s as a boilermaker. At the age of fifteen, William began his six-year apprenticeship as an engine fitter at HM Dockyard Sheerness, later becoming a post office engineer and very active in the trade union. He died a few weeks after retiring and the esteem in which he was held was reflected 12by the fact that hundreds of people attended his funeral in the pouring rain. ‘Rose’, as we called her, was a councillor and alderman for 34 years, and sheriff and mayor of Southampton in 1959–60. She worked tirelessly her whole life not only for the two major political forces in her life – the Labour Party and the co-operative movement – but for all kinds of charitable causes including the Royal National Institute for the Blind, the Sunshine Homes for Blind Babies, and the National Association for Mental Health. During the Spanish Civil War my grandparents, and many other socialists, took in child refugees, and Rose went out scrubbing doorsteps to get the money to buy extra food to feed them. On a personal level, however, she was difficult. Initially, Rose wasn’t keen on my mother, thinking her too young at seventeen to marry her son. She wanted John to marry a woman who ran a wool shop in Southampton and offered my mother £1,000 to call off the marriage. Obviously, she declined. Rose wasn’t a nice grandmother; I don’t remember her saying a kind word to me, yet alone sending a birthday card. Her visits were not keenly anticipated, because she’d say things like, ‘Finish the food on your plate, don’t you know there are children dying of starvation in Africa?’ On one visit to her, I found a particularly manic passage of Shostakovich playing at full volume on her radio and when I asked if the neighbours minded, she dismissed me with a curt ‘No’. My father was always kind and attentive to her. When she was close to death, I watched him spoon-feed her with infinite love and patience.
When the Second World War broke out in 1939 my father was fourteen and staying in Tours, France, on a school exchange trip. The father of Guy – the French exchange student – was a stamp dealer and my father learned about stamps from him, to the extent that he started trading stamps himself while still a teenager, an activity he maintained his whole life. Children under fifteen weren’t allowed to travel alone in France, but my grandparents sent money to the shipping office at Le Havre and my father nevertheless travelled via Paris to Le Havre, arriving at 1.30am, and sleeping on a stone bench 13on the dockside. The next morning, he collected the money and spent a couple of days in a hotel until he managed to get a place on the second-to-last boat to leave Le Havre for Southampton. He was a scholarship student at Richard Taunton’s grammar school, and as they’d already evacuated to Bournemouth, he joined them there. At sixteen, he got a job as an assistant probation officer, which introduced him to a whole new world of people’s troubles. On one occasion he accompanied a parolee to prison in Wales and there was an argument at the gate because they thought he was the prisoner – he looked too young to be the probation officer. My father was an air cadet as a teenager and, as soon as he could, joined the Royal Air Force and trained as a pilot on Tiger Moths and Dakotas, in Phoenix, Arizona. Although he got his ‘wings’, the war was over before he got the chance to fly in combat and he spent the remainder of his service educating flight staff about to be demobbed. On a RAF scholarship, he then studied Government at the London School of Economics (LSE), graduating with a BSc in Economics with second class honours.
When my father was 22, he met my mother, Barbara, then sixteen, at the Hammersmith Palais dance hall. He was tall, handsome and loved to dance. My mother was already a card-carrying member of the Labour Party, which she joined after learning about the benefits of European co-operatives from her teacher, Miss Auber, at St Marylebone Central School. When my parents were courting, my father took my mother home late one night and they discovered she’d left her keys at home. She was living with her mother and stepfather on the top floor of a house in Highbury New Park, in Islington. A bathroom window had been left open so, in his brogue shoes with shiny leather soles, my father climbed four storeys up the drainpipe, crawled into the small window, came downstairs and opened the front door. He had a heroic streak like that. Later, as a journalist, he went deep into the war-torn Congo to find out what was going on while the other reporters sat around in a safe bar, drinking and 14copying each other’s inaccurate stories. And at the tail end of the Bangladesh War of Independence, he crossed the border from India to see for himself what was happening there. Danger didn’t hold him back.
My parents were married at Hackney Town Hall, eighteen months after they met, with the wedding party jumping on two buses to get to an Italian Restaurant on the Kingsland Road to celebrate. My mother was very beautiful, with deep blue eyes and flawless skin. Her mother, too, was a great beauty and was ‘spotted’ by film producer Harry Lachman when she was eighteen and working as an usherette at the Fortune Theatre in London. She signed a film contract with British International Pictures and found herself in Nice, France, playing opposite Monty Banks in the 1930 comedy film The Compulsory Husband. Although her meteoric rise from Islington working-class girl to movie star generated much press interest, Lilian didn’t enjoy the new glamorous lifestyle, preferring the company of her large family who joked that she and her sisters Maude and Elsie had carried out every possible job in London’s theatres, except stagehand. After abandoning the film world, Lilian developed a career as a singer and dancer on the London stage.
By sixteen, my mother was working for the Society of British Aircraft Constructors in Savile Row, with whom she attended her first air show, but one day, while waiting for my father at LSE, she saw an advert on the noticeboard for a junior secretary at the Fabian Society, an organisation that promotes democratic socialism. Despite the pay cut, she took the job and loved it. At the time, the chairman of the Local Societies Committee was Arthur Skeffington MP, and the secretary of the committee was the beautiful and intelligent Dorothy Fox. Under these two leading lights of the socialist movement my mother was encouraged to read up on the literature. Because the Fabian bookshop and offices were at 11 Dartmouth Street, a convenient ten-minute walk from the Houses of Parliament, she was also encouraged to go there and listen to debates, as well 15as attend Fabian weekend and summer schools held at Dartington Hall in Devon and Frensham Heights in Surrey. The atmosphere was electric, positive and optimistic, just what the world needed after the carnage of a war instigated by fascism. Together, and then later with my sister and I, my parents attended socialist youth camps all over Europe. In this way, they met many of the people who would later become active in politics in Europe, as my father had met students of politics from all over the world at LSE. These were the idealistic and networking years, and a lot would happen before my father came to write his book, Death of an Idealist.
As a teenager and young man, my father was a youth club leader, and later was MD of the International Union of Socialist Youth’s travel service, which specialised in organising youth exchanges, study tours and summer schools – while trying to keep the communists from taking over youth and student groups. He served on various subcommittees of the London County Council and was vice chairman of a children’s home in South London. He was a lecturer in adult education for Surrey County Council and for various co-operative societies. Most of his extra-curricular activities were voluntary. I’ve seen it said many times that my father was just greedy for money, but he was a volunteer at a farmer’s co-op in Uganda for two years – supported financially by my mother working at British Insulated Callender’s Cables (BICC), and for eight years he was an unpaid board member and then president of the London Co-operative Society (LCS). He also insisted on being unpaid as chairman of the British Bangladesh Trust. He did all these things because he believed in the causes, and, ironically, they all led to immense disappointment: in Africa in the way politics developed, including Idi Amin’s brutal control of Uganda; the take over and near destruction of the LCS by the communists; and the dangerous factionalism within the Bangladeshi community leading to the destruction of his reputation.16
My father was very active in the co-op movement from an early age, being an active member of the Woodcraft Folk – the co-operative movement equivalent of the boy scouts – and thus had an early introduction to a social organisation wherein he took various leadership roles. Later, he became involved in co-operative society committee work, becoming a board member of the LCS in 1956 until 1962, then president between 1962–4. All this work was on a voluntary basis; as president he received £20 a year for expenses. It soon became clear to him that communists were trying to prevent the LCS developing into a modern trading organisation. He told a co-op sub-committee in January 1961: ‘If we are content to merely allow our organisation to tick over as it has been doing, we shall find ourselves well and truly outstripped within the next decade’.1 He told The Grocer magazine in April 1963 that ‘due to historic circumstances, the LCS control structure has grown into a rather complex bureaucracy which tends to centralise detailed trading decisions, blunt initiative in the executive ranks and delay action’. He continued, ‘In practice many officials prefer to shelter behind committees rather than taking personal responsibility. The system encourages timidity and inaction.’2 What he was really fighting against was the communist-infiltrated ‘1960 Committee’ of LCS board members. Their candidates for re‑election to the board in May 1963 were David Ainley, Harry Clayden, Sybil White, David McCallum and Ernest Randle – all, except the last, members of the Communist Party since the 1930s or 1940s.
In a Co-operative Reform Group election leaflet urging the 1.3 million co-op members to vote for non-communist candidates, he laid out the political reality: ‘Those who have studied the development of the international Communist movement tell us that the Communists hate and fear no one so much as the Social Democrats. Wherever the Communists have succeeded in overthrowing the government, they have turned like sharks on those Socialists who had been their collaborators. This is because the Communists cannot permit the existence of a reasonable alternative to their method of 17achieving “Socialism”. For this reason they cannot afford to see the Co-operative movement succeed on any terms other than their own.’ He begged the members to vote: ‘Last year, only 12,000 people out of a membership of approximately 1,300,000 actually used their votes.’3 That’s less than 1 per cent of the electorate, but a similarly apathetic turnout in 1963 would cause the communists to get a tighter hold on the LCS, and bring about the demise of what was, at the time, the largest retail organisation in the UK. My father fought the communists tooth and nail within the organisation he’d grown up with and loved. I know this because I spent a fair amount of time as a child licking stamps and stuffing envelopes with anti-communist material. When commentators suggest my father spied for the communist StB because he was a secret sympathiser, they must be unaware that he spent almost ten years of his life, unpaid, battling communism. And if they say he did it for the money, there was no amount of money in this world that would convince my father to risk incurring the wrath of his anti-communist mother, who knew well the invidious nature of communism, which was rife in her day.
A constant feature of my father’s political life was anti-colonialism. The Movement for Colonial Freedom used to hold meetings at the Quaker Friends House opposite Euston Station and afterwards participants would often continue discussions at our house in Islington. Day and night the house rang with anti-colonial discourse, with my mother providing impromptu meals for the guests. Anti-colonial sentiment extended across the world at the time and my father was friends with many of the movement leaders, some from Africa but also, for example, Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore. He also travelled to speak in support of their cause at independence rallies, such as with Dom Mintoff in Malta. My parents attended so many independence celebrations that Prince Philip once said to my mother jokingly, ‘We must stop meeting like this.’
18My father was easy-going and generous. When we lived in the big house in Islington, my parents once lent it to Hephzibah Menuhin, sister of the violinist Yehudi, and her husband, Richard Hauser, while we went on holiday to Elba for three weeks. Hephzibah was preparing for a performance of Bela Bartok’s Piano Concerto No. 1, so my parents hired a grand piano from the Wigmore Hall for her to practise, and had it installed in the first-floor study. Luckily, we had double-size front doors, so it could get in the house. Hephzibah didn’t need it, in the event, because she used a table-top dummy keyboard to practise. Instead, her daughter Clara used the grand piano to play chopsticks. When we returned from holiday, we found a large group of young men talking on the steps outside and as we walked around the house, found more groups of men in every room. Hephzibah was in the kitchen, sitting around the table with Clara and her nanny, and various other people, singing ‘Que Sera Sera’. She’d forgotten we were coming back that day. All the men were sleeping at our house, having recently been released from prison and having nowhere else to go. Prisoner rehabilitation was one of Richard’s social projects – as with Hephzibah, one among many. Apparently, she’d borrowed sheets from our neighbour, Jane Carton who, with her husband Ronnie, compiled The Times crossword. Some people might have kicked up a fuss on finding nearly twenty exprisoners sleeping in their house, but my parents weren’t like that. They just turned around and booked us into a hotel in Bloomsbury for a week while Hephzibah and Richard found alternative accommodation for their jolly band of misfits.
Both my parents were very kind. One day it was pouring with rain and as I stepped in the back door of a taxi, a young girl stepped in the door on other side. Neither of us wanted to get back into the rain so we shared the taxi and, on the journey, I heard her story. Beatrice Kasozi was sixteen years old and on the run from the brother of the Ugandan President, Idi Amin, who wanted to marry her. Her parents were opponents of Amin and her father had been shot while 19driving his car, but luckily dodged the bullet. Kampala was dangerous, all kinds of gruesome murders were taking place, and it was thought best for Beatrice to get out of town. Her father had sent some money to a contact in London who was supposed to look after Beatrice, but he’d never shown up. She was almost penniless, and alone. When I told my parents this, they immediately took Beatrice into their home and she became a member of our family.
Everywhere I’ve gone in my life, I’ve met people who were helped by my father. Travelling around East Africa in the late 60s, I met many people who remembered so well his efforts on their behalf in their struggle for justice and independence. For years I couldn’t pay in an Indian restaurant using a cheque or card because many ‘Indian’ restaurants are run by Bangladeshis, and when they saw the name they’d say ‘No, no, you must accept our gratitude, come again, any time, no charge.’ To avoid them being out of pocket I had to ensure I carried cash to pay. I came across many people in random circumstances who would tell me their experience of him, like the time I went into a dry-cleaning shop and the woman behind the counter, seeing my name, asked the usual ‘are you related?’ When I said ‘yes’, she implored me to thank my father because he’d been a tremendous help to her son when they were both in the same prison. ‘Tell your father my son is doing really well,’ she said, beaming.
As a father, John Stonehouse was tolerant, supportive and amusing. As well as reading books to us, he made up great stories of his own, usually bizarre and hilarious. When I was a teenager attending the large Mount Grace Comprehensive School in Potters Bar, a couple of friends and I asked the dinner lady why in the first sitting kids got three sausages, and in the second sitting they got two, and in the third sitting just one. It was more than sausages of course; third sitting got dregs on a regular basis. Soon we were all called to the headmaster’s office where we were made to line our toes up against the carpet before being given a lecture about interfering. He said to me, ‘This is not LSE, Miss Stonehouse.’ This was shortly before the 20Christmas holidays, when a huge volume of snow fell. We lived right across the road from the school and the night before it was due to open again, I told my father I was going to leave the headmaster a message, and told him my plan. He decided to come with me, and we climbed over the gate in our wellington boots and went to the small field under the headmaster’s first floor window and wrote with our feet, in huge letters, ‘FUCK YOU.’ We didn’t tell my mother, because she wouldn’t have been impressed, or my sister Jane, because she’d tell the whole school it was us. The next morning the kids were in hysterics when they saw this message from their classroom windows, until the caretaker broke the wording with a big broom. Nevertheless, the message had got out there and my father and I had a good laugh about it.
He only once told me not to do something and that was when I was about ten. ‘Where have you been?’ he asked casually. When I said ‘Sunday school,’ he made me sit down and listen to a history of religious wars, and an explanation of how so much war has been approved and encouraged by religious establishments of all faiths. At the end of it he said ‘when you’re older you can decide for yourself whether you want to go to church but, for now, I won’t allow it.’ Clearly, his own Roman Catholic upbringing – and my grandmother was very active in the church – had not convinced him of the church’s moral superiority.
Many people of my generation were burdened by their parents’ racist, homophobic, or class-ridden prejudices – legacies they had to struggle to overcome. My siblings and I never had that, which meant we could start life unencumbered by those negative attitudes. My father couldn’t care less what colour someone’s skin was, what race or creed they were, what their sexual orientation was, where they came from, or how much money they had. Essentially, he believed in human equality and judged people on whether they were kind to their fellow human beings. I don’t remember him once criticising my friends; it simply wasn’t his natural style to find negative things 21to say about people. That trait changed with time and experience, especially with regard to the press and parliamentarians in the House of Commons.
My father became a Labour and Co-operative Party member of parliament in a by-election on the 28th February 1957, representing the West Midlands constituency of Wednesbury until February 1974 when the seat was abolished by boundary changes. He then stood for and became the MP for the adjacent constituency of Walsall North, whose boundaries were changed to incorporate some of the old constituency of Wednesbury. Nobody ever accused him of not being a highly conscientious and hard-working constituency MP and in this he was much supported by my mother’s extremely efficient services as an unpaid parliamentary secretary.*
When Harold Wilson won the general election in 1964, he appointed my father parliamentary secretary at the Ministry of Aviation and over the next six years he would become parliamentary under-secretary of state for the colonies, minister of aviation, minister of state for technology, postmaster general and minister of posts and telecommunications. In 1968 he was appointed a privy counsellor, one of a select group that offer ministerial advice to the Queen. However, when Wilson lost the election in June 1970, shortly after the StB defector accused my father of being a spy, he was not offered a position in the opposition shadow government. His political career was over.
* Historic parliamentary proceedings as recorded by Hansard are available online, and so my father’s entire parliamentary record is available to view at https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/people/mr-john-stonehouse/index.html.
3
‘Hold Your Heads High and Behave as Though the Country Belonged to You’
When I was nine, I came out of the front door of our house in Islington and stepped into a big puddle of industrial superglue. It was disconcerting not to be able to move my feet. For a minute there I thought I was paralysed. We never found out who’d done it, probably the same people who painted ‘BLACKS GO HOME’ in big letters over the pavement outside our house. Or maybe it was the people who painted the large swastika on our front door.
When I was ten, the phone rang and a man told my father, ‘we know your daughter Jane gets on the overground train at Canonbury Station and gets off at Gospel Oak Station and walks across the park on her way to school. One day we’re going to take her.’ My sister did indeed go that way to her school, Parliament Hill. We never found out who’d phoned. It had hallmarks of the South African secret police, BOSS, but it could equally have been the racist British fascists. We were always under some threat or another. One day I remember the police crawling all over the house looking for a bomb because there was a ticking noise. It turned out to be the constant drip of rainwater from the wrought iron plant guard around the first-floor window ledge. We laughed in relief when we realised that, but this is indicative of how our lives were.
By this time, we’d lived in Uganda for two years and my father had been to Africa several times since. On one trip he’d been 24investigating the political and economic conditions for Africans in the British colonial territories of Kenya and what was then called Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia, Nyasaland and Tanganyika (now Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi and Tanzania). Officials in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, based in Salisbury (now Harare), took objection to his activities and threw him out, declaring him a Prohibited Immigrant.
In 1952, we’d set sail for Africa on the maiden voyage of the SS Uganda. A fire erupted in the luggage hold half-way down the Red Sea and the male passengers were warned they might have to help put it out. It was a chaotic scene as the captain and everyone else, excluding my father and sister, were being seasick. A friendly cleric was praying for everyone while also vomiting over the side of the ship. My parents were taking a harp and washing machine to Kampala for Shirley, wife of George Shepherd, who my father would be joining as a volunteer for the Federation of Partnerships of Uganda African Farmers. We arrived in Mombasa on the 19th August; I was eighteen months old and my sister, Jane, was three. Somehow we got to Kampala with the harp and washing machine intact, and approached the house where we’d be living. My mother remarked how beautiful the tree outside was. It seemed to be covered in bright yellow flowers, but as the vehicle drew closer, the ‘flowers’ flew like an explosion in all directions, revealing themselves to be birds. This was Africa – colourful, exciting, surprising – and we loved it.
The house belonged to a Ugandan family, the Kitemerikes, and we shared the top floor with the Shepherds. There was no water or sanitation, but there was music and dancing and people were coming and going all the time and, aside from the bats and cockroaches, it was great fun. My mother wondered what Shirley thought she was going to do with the washing machine and supposed, being Americans, they were living in hope. George was a Doctor of Philosophy and had met my father when they were both at the London School of Economics. He’d been in Kampala almost a year before we arrived. 25Both he and my father were unpaid volunteers, although they were given free accommodation and had a few expenses paid. My mother would support us by working as the secretary to the East African managing director of BICC, a large company that installed electrical cables between the pylons that opened up the supply of electricity in East Africa.
When my sister contracted cerebral TB, BICC provided us with a company bungalow where Jane could be better taken care of with the luxuries of running water and electricity. After moving in, my sister and I spent two days splashing around in the bath water, turning the taps on and off, enjoying the novelty of running water. Although I was only three-and-a-half when we returned to the UK, Africa left deep impressions. My earliest memory is stopping in our open-top Land Rover to watch the animals, with my sister and I on the back seat, and a giraffe coming over, leaning down and licking my sister’s cheek. It was like sandpaper, she said. My mother remembers as hairraising an occasion when we were driving along a dirt track and a herd of wildebeest came charging towards us. Luckily they separated when they reached the Land Rover and continued running on either side of the vehicle.
We lived in Uganda for two years, with my father and George working under the leadership of Ignatius Musaazi, director of the Federation of Partnerships of Uganda African Farmers (FPUAF). This made them essentially employees of the FPUAF, when it was almost unheard of for white men to work for black men. In Africa at the time, the usual position was that black people worked for white people, and that’s how the whites, and the colonial governments, liked things. The FPUAF was an African-run organisation, distinct from the co-operatives that had been set up by the colonial government which Ugandans felt made them no better than serfs working for the white man. George and my father were tasked with assisting in the formation and organisation of co-operative societies and setting up the Uganda Consumers Wholesale Supply Co. Ltd. 26The idea was to develop African trade and commerce from the start of the process to the end. It involved the collection of crops such as cotton, maize and coffee from many smallholdings, and selling them in bulk, thus achieving a better price for the farmers. Also, along the lines of long-established co-operative societies in the UK, retail co-ops would buy in bulk and sell at wholesale prices, cutting the cost to the consumer.
Encouraging the participation of Africans in trade and commerce proved difficult for a number of reasons. Most had only known self-sufficiency or exploitation by whites or Indian middlemen; the co-operative business model was something that had to be shown and proved. The FPUAF itself was disorganised, and some people within it saw it as an opportunity to exploit. Mr Sallie wrote to my father, complaining that Mr Joseph had not issued a sale receipt for some cloth in a shop and when the customer came back to collect it demanded the twenty shillings payment again. Mr Kafero also made a complaint about Mr Joseph, saying he was rude in speaking English to customers when knowing they couldn’t speak it. My father and George travelled all over Uganda, buying and selling, and while they were doing the co-op’s business from the front of the truck, one of the members was selling shares for a fake company at the back. When they complained about this, the share-seller was voted in as a director of the FPUAF by the other members. Disenchanted, George packed up and left for the USA. Despite the difficulties, there were some wonderful people in the FPUAF who really understood the advantages of a co-operative society, and were committed to achieving them.
My father travelled around East Africa, making contact with old friends from LSE and meeting new friends, all involved in the anti-colonial struggle. Kenya was different to Uganda in that it had a large number of white settlers, and land was being withheld from Africans. This led to understandable resentment. Africans wanted independence, and to be free of the paternalistic attitude of the whites who, at the same time, did nothing to create the institutional structures that 27could lead eventually to one man one vote. How would democracy follow independence if the colonial government did nothing to promote it? Kenya was repressive, and the result was the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA), also known as the Mau Mau – ostensibly an independence army but actually a brutal organisation. The colonial government gathered up tens of thousands of innocent people while trying to identify Mau Mau members. Most were never given a trial but were detained for years. Even when acquitted, men would remain imprisoned for more years, leading to deeper resentment. This only helped the Mau Mau to find converts. With the vicious circle of violence on both sides, no forward movement in terms of African development was being made. The black Kenyans felt a sense of hopeless frustration. My father collected information on the torture and killings being carried out by the British colonial authorities in Kenya, and sent that information – including names, dates and events – back to the UK. His activities brought him to the attention not only of the colonial authorities, but also of BOSS – the South African secret services. The CIA were creeping around, and when my parents saw some of their reports they realised the CIA were being informed by people who had no idea what was going on in Africa.
By the time we left Uganda at the end of my father’s contract, the colonial authorities had us under surveillance. They didn’t like the fact that my father worked for Africans, lived with Africans, socialised with Africans, ate with Africans, tried to help Africans become financially independent, and was supporting African independence. When my mother, sister and I arrived at Kampala airport to catch the plane to London, an undercover agent took our photograph. He didn’t say anything. Another photographer took our photo as we approached the steps of the plane to London, and said: ‘Your girls look lovely in those suits, I wish my daughters had such beautiful clothes.’ We were wearing skirts and jackets made of soft, lightweight, grey wool, and patterned shirts, and they were exceptional because they’d been made by my mother’s paternal grandmother who, before the war, 28had been a court dressmaker and made clothes for the royal family. She’d mailed the outfits to Uganda so we’d have something warm to wear when we arrived back in the UK, after running around in light cotton dresses for two years. The photographers had been sent to get evidence that we’d actually got on the plane and left the country. Presumably, they also took photos of my father, who’d left a couple of weeks before. The photographers worked for Special Branch, part of the colonial government.
We returned to a deeply racist Britain. This wasn’t simply a reaction to the British Nationality Act of 1948, which allowed people from the colonies and newly independent Commonwealth states to take British citizenship and live here; the British had been educated to a sense of superiority, and that was hard to shift. Even though the wartorn country and new National Health Service needed more workers, when they arrived, they got the cold shoulder, complete with signs saying things like: ‘No blacks, Irish, or dogs’. In 1958 there were riots in Notting Hill, and in Nottingham there were clashes involving racialist groups and their opponents, following a resurgence of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists’ ideology, popular in the 1930s.
Parliamentary reports from this period show just how entrenched this racism and, concomitantly, white entitlement was. On 31st May 1957, the House of Commons debated the East African Commission report and Mr Sorensen MP said, ‘Let us by all means realise that we have as much right – we, the white people – to be in Africa, or in certain parts of Africa, as the Africans themselves,’ and ‘we should respect also, however foolish it may seem to us, the reluctance of the African to change his way of life … It may be a stupid, it may be a primitive way of life; it may seem to us a foolish, unenlightened way of life; but it is their way of life.’ In a debate four days later, on the Central African Federation, Kenya and Tanganyika (Racial 29Policy), the conservative MP Archer Baldwin said, ‘To say that the Highlands ever belonged to the Africans is not correct. There was no land which belonged to them. With shifting cultivation they eroded a piece of the Highlands and then moved on somewhere else, and then did the same thing again. It was only after the Europeans got there and stopped them fighting that the position which exists today was brought about.’ The position he is talking about, of course, is that white farmers had appropriated the fertile land. Archer Baldwin was knighted the following year.
These attitudes were what my father was fighting against. On 28th November 1957, he asked the secretary of state for the colonies what funds had been allocated to the building of both African and European residential estates in six specific towns. The answer was that absolutely nothing had been spent on any African housing, and that £291,500 had been spent on housing for white people in Ndola, £188,000 in Kitwe, £55,000 in Luanshya, and £85,000 in Chingola. Nothing had been spent in the other two towns, Lusaka and Mufulira, apparently.
A leading light in the UK anti-colonial movement was Labour MP Fenner Brockway, who was a driving force behind the Movement for Colonial Freedom, of which my father became vice chairman. In their 1961 brochure, when Brockway was chairman, they explain their aims: ‘The M.C.F. stands not only for the political freedom and the independence of all peoples, but for their freedom from military and economic domination. It is thus opposed to neo-colonialism, and now that independence has been gained by so many countries devotes much of its activity to exposing the persistence of imperialism.’ In a debate on 3rd May 1957, Commonwealth and Empire Resources, Brockway referred to a United Nations report, saying ‘These figures show the amazing fact that 30.6 per cent of the value of the total products of Northern Rhodesia goes in interest, dividend and profit each year to financiers in Europe and in America. My hon. Friend the Member for Wednesbury (Mr Stonehouse) described the wage 30levels of African workers in the copper fields. When, on top of those disgraceful facts, is added this proportion of one-third of the total value of production of the Colony which passes to external financiers, one begins to understand the degree of exploitation which is taking place in the Colonial Territories.’ When anti-colonial MPs such as Brockway and my father challenged this financial status quo, the British establishment could feel their bulging wallets being stolen, and they didn’t like it.
When we’d returned from Uganda in 1954, my parents found that the American tenants they’d rented our house to in Hounslow had painted it baby blue from top to bottom: ceilings, walls, floors, stairs, bannisters and furniture. My mother was aghast, and immediately took steps to find an alternative property. Her family lived in Islington, where she’d gone to primary school, and they told her that the local landowners, the Northampton Estate, were selling off their housing stock. My mother went directly to their offices and told them she and her husband would have a deposit from selling their house in Hounslow and were able to get a mortgage, and acquired a house for £5,000. So it was that we came to live in a huge four-storey Victorian villa with a garden overlooking the delightful River Walk, near my mother’s grandmother and a street away from her great aunt Caroline. The house was too large for us, so my parents rented out the top floor to lodgers, but that still left plenty of space to accommodate the many African revolutionaries and British anti-colonialists who regularly held meetings there. My mother was a great hostess and my parents held terrific parties with interesting guests. They were young and idealistic: in 1956, my father was 31 and my mother, 25. The brightest socialist minds and many future African leaders were their friends. My sister and I often played with the children of barrister Seretse Khama and his British wife, Ruth, whose interracial love story is the subject of the film A United Kingdom. 31Seretse became the first prime minister, then president, of Botswana, and his son, Ian, became the fourth president of Botswana, until April 2018, helping the country achieve remarkable economic growth.
