John Stonehouse, My Father Read online

  † 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Eye argued that nine of the ten points had been published previously and had not been legally challenged then, and the unpublished tenth point had not been contested as yet.

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  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 by 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 on 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 copying 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 as 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 t
he 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.

  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 achieving “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.’

  My 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 driving 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 Christmas 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.