John Stonehouse, My Father Read online

  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 to 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 investigating 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. Both 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. The 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 could 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, had 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 Policy), 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 levels 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 Brock
way 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. Seretse 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.