When they’d lived in Hounslow, social breakfast get-togethers had become a feature of the household. My father was a student at LSE at the time and fellow students would come and stay and there’d be animated political discussions in the evenings, which would continue over breakfast. It was a good opportunity to introduce people to each other and make time to talk. The same routine of breakfast gettogethers continued in Islington, with a stream of guests including Pierre Trudeau, who became prime minister of Canada, and Joshua Nkomo, who led the Kalanga people of Matabeleland in white-ruled Southern Rhodesia and the political organisation ZAPU – Zimbabwe African People’s Union. (He would be arrested in 1964 and spend ten years in prison but ultimately became a vice president of Zimbabwe.)
In the 1950s, Southern Rhodesia was a tinder box waiting to explode. It was self-governing, although a British Crown colony, and came under the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, also known as the Central African Federation (CAF), an overarching political grouping that would include the three areas: Southern Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe); Northern Rhodesia (Zambia); and Nyasaland (Malawi). The problem in Southern Rhodesia was land. The Land Apportionment and Tenure Act of 1931 had made it impossible for native Africans to own land, Africans only being allowed to work 25 per cent of land on a collective basis, while the minority white population could own 45 per cent of the most fertile land. Over the years the law changed somewhat but, essentially, Africans were legally barred from owning their own country. All kinds of hurdles were put in their way. Hence, the tinder box.
In February 1959, my father went on a fact-finding mission officially arranged by the Northern Rhodesian Government. They had no problem with the tour; the objections came from the federal government who felt themselves to be independent of the British Government, even though they were actually part of colonial Britain. There was a sense of separation developing between the white settlers in Southern Rhodesia and their government in the UK, which would come to a head when, aiming to create an independent state of white minority rule like in South Africa across the border, the leader of Southern Rhodesia, Ian Smith, pronounced a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) on 11th November 1965. He chose Armistice Day to remind the British in the UK that the Rhodesians had fought alongside the mother country in the Second World War, hoping perhaps this would invoke a show of solidarity to their cause.*
In 1959, my father was concerned that Southern Rhodesia would turn into a blood bath like that occurring in Kenya, where white land settlement was also the major issue. He gave two speeches on ‘The Labour Party’s Colonial Policy’ at the invitation of the Southern Rhodesian African National Congress, in Salisbury and Bulawayo, which would get him thrown out of the country by the federal government as a Prohibited Immigrant. He’d been talking about the struggle of the working class in Britain, then got to the part the white authorities found objectionable: ‘So you must work for your rights in peace and then you will be much more likely to have the rest of the world behind you. Your slogan should be: “Work hard, educate yourselves, and organise.” Use the right way, and you will win. If you use the wrong way you will be giving the most powerful weapons to those people who do not want to achieve the same things as you do. I ask you to have pride in your country. Hold your heads high and behave as though the country belonged to you. If you behave in a way that you are ashamed of, you cannot be surprised if people who are now your friends do become ashamed of you.’ A reporter who was present at one of the speeches, Clyde Sanger of the Central African Examiner, put the speech in context, in response to a report in the Rhodesia Herald in which my father had been called a ‘pedlar of mischief ’. Sanger made the point that ‘over and over again and with considerable courage he condemned the use of violence’.1 Even though he was advocating peaceful means of struggle, the whites took objection to the words ‘Hold your heads high and behave as though the country belonged to you’ because, as far as they were concerned, it did belong to them. When my father arrived at Ndola Airport in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) a crowd of white people were waiting to throw tomatoes at him.2 A week after returning to London on 12th March 1959, he attended a meeting at Central Hall where a fight broke out during which a young man shouted at him, ‘Traitor to the white race.’3 To put these events into historical context, this was three years before Nelson Mandela would be arrested across the border in South Africa and go on to endure 27 years in prison.
My father’s anti-colonial attitude dovetailed into events much later on. When the ex-MI6 conservative MP Stephen Hastings called for an inquiry into the Frolik allegations against my father in December 1977, he had personal reasons to do so. His father was a Rhodesian farmer, while Stephen himself had been in talks with Ian Smith, the leader of the white supremacists. He had links with South Africa, and the guerilla war was still going on. Hastings opposed the sanctions being imposed on Rhodesia, and wanted to find reasons to bring anyone who supported the black Africans into disrepute.
Few British politicians in the 1950s and 1960s would put into words the nub of the matter – colonialism was about slavery, racism and financial exploitation. They preferred the narrative that white people ‘civilised the natives’. But my father was never shy in bringing the true nature of colonialism into sharp focus. In support of the Tanganyika Independence Bill, on 8th November 1961, he said in the House of Commons, ‘Less than a hundred years ago British public opinion was electrified by the terrible reports of the slave trade in Tanganyika. At that time that country was being depopulated at the rate of tens of thousands a year by the slave traders who had gone into the interior from Dar es Salaam and who were using Zanzibar as their headquarters. It was partly as a result of this House setting up a select committee in 1871 to investigate the slave trade that the British public began to take an interest in doing something constructive for that part of the world. Now, less than a hundred years afterwards, we in this House welcome … the independence of this vast territory which had its very heart, its very soul and its very body torn out for something like four hundred years from the 15th century to the middle of the 19th century. We and the rest of the world have a debt to repay to Tanganyika for the damage done.’
When my father returned from Australia he made a statement in the House of Commons about his bizarre behaviour in 1974. It included these words: ‘as a back-bench Member of Parliament, I campaigned vigorously for African independence … Much of my back-bench activities at that time … were concerned with advancing this cause. I believed in it sincerely and passionately. But those ideals were shattered in the late 1960s and the 1970s as Uganda and some other countries I had helped towards independence moved from democracy to military dictatorship and despair.’ At the time my father said this, Idi Amin was in the process of killing somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 Ugandan people, and Nelson Mandela was incarcerated by the racist South African apartheid regime, where he would remain long after my father had died. Events in Africa eroded my father’s political and emotional foundations and, of course, they contributed to his depression. Hopelessness had replaced optimism.
* When the white Rhodesians declared UDI in 1965, the Labour government of Harold Wilson vacillated. In the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street on the 13th October 1966, the secretary of state for defence, Denis Healey, laid out the military challenge: the Rhodesian army was 10,000 strong; they had an armed police force of 12,000; three squadrons of modern ground attack aircraft, and one squadron of Canberra light bombers; there was no base closer than Aden; and the nearest port was Dar es Salaam, 1,000 miles away. There are those who think he exaggerated these figures and logistical problems to cover up the fact that Britain’s soldiers were still busy fighting the ‘secret’ undeclared war in Malaysia, against Indonesia. The Minutes read ‘The campaign itself might well be short: but thereafter we should be committed to occupying the country, with a bitterly hostile European population and with no Africans capable of running the country.’ (Ref: The National Archives: CAB 128/46/21, Document
25.) Another factor was that the Cabinet didn’t know how deeply the apartheid government of South Africa would get involved, and the UK relied on them for uranium and gold, plus they needed access to the military facilities of the Simonstown base. Although mandatory sanctions were imposed, British Petroleum (BP) offloaded their oil onto French ships which sailed to South Africa, from where it was taken overland and across the border into Rhodesia. America continued to buy chrome. It had not gone unnoticed by all black Africans that while the British were quick enough to put down a black rebellion by whatever military means necessary, when the rebels were white they did nothing. Harold Wilson added to this insult when emerging from negotiations with the Rhodesians by saying we couldn’t fight ‘our kith and kin’ – meaning the whites. A guerrilla war ensued involving Joshua Nkomo’s ZAPU and the larger group, ZANU, led by Robert Mugabe. Tens of thousands died. Largely on the kudos of having been involved in the fifteen-year war against the minority white rule that followed UDI, Mugabe became prime minister in 1980, and president in 1987, clinging to power for another 30 years.
4
The Bangladesh Fund
I have my father’s collection of photos of bloodied, dead people lying on the streets of East Pakistan, which would become the independent country of Bangladesh, and it was the slaughter of 250,000 people there in 1971 that drew my father into the situation. When the British hurriedly partitioned India in 1947 at the end of colonisation, the two land areas deemed majority Muslim became ‘West’ and ‘East’ Pakistan, with 1,000 miles of India sandwiched between them. But the majority, who lived in the East, felt oppressed politically, financially and militarily by those in the West, and wanted independence. Demonstrations were peaceful, an election was won, yet the West Pakistanis were not prepared to allow separation. The easterners, Bengalis, reacted by killing those from the West, which brought about a military crackdown in March, with many Bengalis killed in turn. Ten million refugees fled to India. My father was asked by the charities War on Want and Oxfam to go on a fact-finding mission, and so his involvement with the independence movement began.
In Calcutta he met the ‘Bangla Desh’ Government in Exile including Tajuddin Ahmad, who was acting prime minister while PM Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was imprisoned in Pakistan. My father spoke advocating independence for Bangladesh in the House of Commons and elsewhere, and arranged for ‘Bangla Desh’ stamps to be made in the UK and shipped to Bangladesh, as a way of stating it was actually a country, despite what the West Pakistanis were doing. He also became a Trustee of the Bangladesh Fund, which had been set up to collect money from UK Bengalis who wanted to support the Government in Exile, whether by arms or relief. Another Trustee was Mr Justice Abu Sayeed Chowdhury, who became president of Bangladesh. The money was collected by Bengalis in the UK, and deposited directly by them into a designated bank account. None of the Trustees had physical access to the financial collections.
The Indian government didn’t want any more weapons going into the war zone, but international pressure persuaded them to send in the Indian army, and they defeated the ‘West’ Pakistani army. In December 1971 the fighting ended, and on the 8th January 1972 Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was released from imprisonment in Pakistan. My father was in Dhaka when he returned in triumph to Bangladesh and, in front of a million jubilant people at the racecourse, a cheque for £412,083 from the Bangladesh Fund was presented to Rahman by Abu Sayeed Chowdhury. The cheque was drawn on the account at the National Westminster Bank in Tothill Street, London, and became the first foreign reserve of the new nation. My father was made an honorary citizen of Bangladesh in recognition of what he had done for them.
Almost three years later, on 20th November 1974, my father disappeared in Miami. A week or so later rumours began to circulate that a large sum of money had gone missing from the Fund in 1972, before it reached Bangladesh. On the 29th, my mother told The Sun newspaper that such gossip was ‘despicable’. On the 1st December 1974 the News of the World reported that unspecified ‘documents about the relief fund’ had been given to the law offices of former solicitor general Sir Dingle Foot by a retired vicar and minorities activist, Michael Scott, after he was told by ‘some Bangladeshis’ that the ‘fund had topped £1½ million’. The first detailed newspaper report came out a day later, in the Daily Mail, whose headline read ‘Yard mystery of Stonehouse fund’. Rev. Michael Scott was quoted as saying ‘I started receiving complaints about the fund in 1972 and the police were informed.’ Nothing had been done about the complaint and a Bengali barrister, Fazlul Huq, said he believed a diplomatic cover-up was very likely. The article said ‘Official accounts of the fund which closed in September 1972 show receipts of £412,083. Bengalis have claimed that more than £1 million was donated.’ So, according to the article, £587,917 was missing, the ‘Yard’ – by which they meant Scotland Yard, the HQ of the Metropolitan Police – had done nothing, and there was a diplomatic cover-up. The source of the accusation was unnamed ‘Bengalis’ and they had apparently told Scott that ‘The complaints concerned collectors who were unconnected with the trustees.’1 It seems they were saying that, as well as official collectors of donations for the Bangladesh Fund, there were people collecting money to put in their own pockets. There has never been proof of any such fraud and it seems the ‘Yard’ thought there was nothing to investigate. Even though the article made it plain that the unsubstantiated and uncredited accusation was ‘unconnected with the trustees’, my father would come to be accused in the British press of having stolen (approx.) £600,000.
The donation collectors had put the money into their local branches of the National Westminster Bank and none of the trustees had access to it, either before deposit or after. The Fund was officially audited, and another audit was carried out by the new Government of Bangladesh when they received it. There never was £1 million collected. That was a figure completely made up by the unnamed ‘Bengalis’ who suspected that unofficial collectors had taken money. When the Daily Mail article came out, Mr Justice Abu Sayeed Chowdhury, a trustee of the Bangladesh Fund and future president of Bangladesh, issued a denial that any money was missing and that appeared as three lines hidden deep within the newspaper, where nobody saw it. What they had seen was ‘Stonehouse stole £600,000 from charity’, and that would cast aspersions on his integrity, right up to the present day. On 6th December, four days after their ‘missing’ Fund money article, the Daily Mail published another Bangladesh-related story, headlined ‘£1 million riddle of Mr Fixit, MP’. In this, they said my father had made at least £1 million from business deals in Bangladesh. This was completely unfounded and my mother was furious. The following day they had to run ‘What £1m, says Mrs Stonehouse’.
The December 1974 Daily Mail article about ‘missing’ money generated other press reports, full of innuendo. In December 1977, Department of Trade (DTI) investigators Michael Sherrard and Ian Hay Davison, appointed to carry out an exhaustive examination of my father’s business and personal finances, published their report. It said: ‘Mr Stonehouse was one of three trustees of the Bangla Desh Fund – sometimes known as the Bangladesh Relief Fund. We were aware of rumours in the press that he might have misappropriated or made use of the funds of that charity. Although not strictly within our terms of reference, we kept a weather eye open for any evidence of improper dealings with the funds of that charity or the possible mixing of such funds by Mr Stonehouse but our work did not reveal any hint of wrongdoing in this connection. We have seen many witnesses hostile to Mr Stonehouse: not one of them has suggested that he interfered in any way with charity monies. It is only fair to Mr Stonehouse to say that, so far as our investigations can show, such rumours are without foundation.’2
But stolen charity money was a story too juicy to let go and the press just couldn’t help themselves, so a year after the DTI report was published, on the 17th November 1978, The Times ran an extremely damaging editorial, saying, ‘It is impossible to gauge to what extent the disappearance of £600,000 from the Bang
ladesh Fund (of which he was a trustee) may have sown unjustified public suspicions about international charitable enterprises in general.’3 We couldn’t believe what we were reading. A letter from my father’s solicitor, Michael O’Dell, was printed in The Times the following day: ‘At no time have the police or any other responsible body ever suggested that Mr Stonehouse was involved in any way, shape or form, in the disappearance of one penny from the Bangladesh Fund.’4 Bruce Douglas-Mann MP also wrote to The Times, on 21st November: ‘Inquiries which I have made reveal no grounds whatever for suggesting that any of the money gathered by hundreds of self-appointed collectors for this fund in 1971 (in the immediate aftermath of the invasion of what was then East Pakistan by West Pakistan) disappeared after it reached the trustees.’5
This was happening two months after my father’s heart had stopped, when radioactive dye was released into his heart to facilitate X-rays at Hammersmith Hospital, which he recovered from after electric shocks were administered, and ten days after he’d had bypass heart surgery, while still serving a seven-year sentence in jail. The last thing he needed was this. He was furious, and from his hospital bed wrote to the editor of The Times about ‘that shocking canard concerning the Bangladesh Fund. You refer to a missing £600,000 without any evidence or basis whatsoever. In fact there is nothing missing from the Fund. Once the figure of a missing £1 million was being bandied about. Why don’t you use that amount? Or even £6m? Why should the journalistic licence you take to yourself be limited to a mere £600,000?’ This letter, like so many other letters of denial over the years, would never be published.
John Stonehouse, My Father Page 4
