In Melbourne on the 31st December, my father took my mother to the Bank of New Zealand at 347 Collins Street and Mr Davenport gave him A$100 cash from the current account of Clive Mildoon. Davenport said: ‘He told me that his correct name was Stonehouse and introduced his wife who was with him … I informed him that under the terms of the Investment Account those funds would not be released without a month’s notice. He then made out in my presence a written request to draw the Investment Account funds as soon as possible.’6 Apparently, in Australia at that time a bank account could legally be opened in any name a person chose, so when my father returned to the banks to get his money, they accommodated him. On the 28th January he went back to the Bank of New South Wales at 425 Collins Street where he had an account in the name of Markham, and Mr Street arranged for the funds to be transferred to account number 872205 in the name of Stonehouse. Of course, all the bankers now knew exactly who he was. On the 5th February, the balance in Markham’s deposit account was transferred to the new current account. Mr Mulcahy explained how the ‘Markham’ funds in London came into the new Stonehouse account: ‘Mr Markham then gave me written instructions by way of a letter dated 3rd March, 1975 to close his account in the name of Markham at our London office … I made arrangements for this to be done and the balance was transferred to this Branch by way of telegraphic transfer. I identify the credit slip dated 5th March, 1975 which evidences the credit to his account of $5,754.90 … Following this, the Current Account in the name of Markham at this Branch was closed on 11th March 1975 and the balance of the account, A$5,961.62 was transferred to the John Thomson Stonehouse Current Account, this is evidenced by a cheque payable to J.T. Stonehouse, signed J.A. Markham dated 10th March, 1975.’7 This must rank as one of the strangest events in banking history: Mr Stonehouse signs a cheque in the name of Mr Markham, to the credit of Mr Stonehouse.
On the 1st January 1975, my father had his first consultation with psychiatrist Dr Gerard Gibney. This was an immense relief to my mother, who hoped he could now, finally, get some help with his mental turmoil. Dr Gibney recognised at once the severe depression my father had been suffering. Partly, he deduced, this was because although it cost him socially, politically and financially, my father had persisted in following causes for oppressed peoples around the world. He was spent. On the second visit, Dr Gibney took my mother aside and told her he was concerned she was heading for a breakdown too, and needed to take some protective steps. He told her not to try to think too far ahead. Not even day to day. He said break your life up into small sections, like bricks in a wall, and try to get through each half hour, building up each half-hour section bit by bit. Soon, he advised, she’d be able to tackle a whole hour, or even half a day, at a time. The world will still go on whatever happened to them, he said, and her job was to keep sane and adjusted so she could join it in due course. It was helpful advice, which my mother took on board.
It was now that the letters started arriving from people who’d gone through similar experiences – either mental health issues, or being abandoned by a husband for a younger woman. They’d be addressed ‘Mrs Stonehouse, Australia’, and were like a wave of love coming from all directions, giving my mother terrific support. She felt alone on the other side of the world, dealing with a broken man, but the empathy of strangers kept her company. Meanwhile, reliving the events of 1973 and 1974 sent my father into a tailspin, and by the middle of January he had to be admitted to Trentford Private Hospital for a few days because Dr Gibney was concerned he might attempt suicide.
That my father had adopted the Markham persona for five months before he disappeared was proving to be a huge problem to him. People thought this was proof of his devious long-term planning. What they couldn’t appreciate was the relief my father had felt in adopting a parallel persona, and imagining an alternative life as that different person. But there was no safety valve now and Stonehouse lay in mental tatters. There were no criminal charges, so the press didn’t have to worry about sub judice and could go to town. My parents were like rabbits being chased by a pack of hounds and the dogs were panting, waiting for a kill. They expected that to come from Scotland Yard’s Detective Chief Superintendent Kenneth Etheridge, and Detective Chief Inspector David Bretton, who arrived in Melbourne on the 3rd of January. They didn’t have arrest warrants, and didn’t question my father. Instead, they lurked around for three weeks like spectres of impending doom.
Back in London, my father’s associates were unhappy they’d been left in the lurch. They requested his resignation as director from the London Capital Group, EPACS and Global Imex, and he’d been happy to comply first thing in January. But the offices at 26 and 27 Dover Street, W1, were hardly quiet. Detective Inspector Townley of Scotland Yard’s Fraud Squad visited on January 3rd, 6th, 7th, 10th, 15th, 17th, 24th, 28th and the 29th, and on February 3rd, 4th, 6th, 7th and 19th. At the trial over a year later it became clear that Townley had been so haphazard in his searches that he was even unclear where my father’s desk was – which seems incomprehensible given he had only one desk in his one office. Townley also seems to have been unaware of the safe. This is important because when my father was questioned by DTI inspectors in February, he told them that the papers they needed to explain his actions were in his desk and in the safe, but in Townley’s statement for the trial he said: ‘There came a time when I did take possession of documents from the EPACS office. They were not taken from a safe at 26 Dover Street. I don’t know which is Mr Stonehouse’s desk … There were certainly documents on the premises that I did not see. I certainly did not specifically go and look in Mr Stonehouse’s desk. I cannot say whether the papers said to have been in Mr Stonehouse’s desk existed or not.’8 My father was unaware in January and February what was, or was not, happening at the office in London, and after he was arrested in March he was not allowed to speak to work colleagues as they were now classed as witnesses. Some time after he was extradited to the UK and had been bailed, he happened to be driving down Dover Street with his solicitor Michael O’Dell when they saw bags of rubbish outside the offices. He opened them up and found they contained paperwork that was helpful to his defence. Who put them there remains a mystery, as does what the police were actually doing in Dover Street on those fourteen occasions. Certainly they weren’t looking for anything that could help my father’s defence, which became disadvantaged by his lack of access to paperwork.
The idyllic hideout in Yellingbo was soon discovered by the press, and the house was besieged by 3rd January. My parents had to flit from one place to another, helped by Peter Game, the local Daily Express ‘stringer’. Constantly having to pack and unpack, find new accommodation, and dip and dive to avoid the press pack was an added burden to my parents. There seemed to be no peace. Eventually they found a tiny flat, and moved in, but every day there was a new drama to deal with – either a bad newspaper report, or the immigration proceedings, or news about the business in the UK. The response from parliamentarians at the House of Commons was universally hostile, and it became clearer by the day that returning there would just be a destabilising nightmare. But my mother, at least, could return. She had a business to attend to, a flat near the constituency to sell, a rented house in the country to pack up, four children who needed to know what was going on, and a publisher to find for the book my father had started to write as a form of therapy, on the advice of his psychiatrist. She returned to London early on the morning of the 16th January. She only had a small case of luggage because she was planning to return to Melbourne on the 6th February. The press asked her how she felt towards my father and she said, ‘As I have always done.’ She still loved him, and would stay loyal. The next day the Daily Mail took up a page with photos of the love triangle: my mother arriving at London Heathrow airport; Sheila’s ‘hideout’ in Cornwall; and my father’s ‘hideout’ in Melbourne. The public apparently loved this angle of the story, and that hunger was to prove very costly to my father’s case.
* Mauritius is isola
ted in the Indian Ocean between Africa and India, and on the trade route from China, and had been settled by many diverse racial groups. They were becoming independent from Britain and nobody wanted to see strife, but the political leaders couldn’t agree on an electoral system. My father had been there a couple of times and knew many of the leaders involved. He met them again in his official capacity during June/July 1966 and devised an amendment that satisfied all parties: the legislative assembly would have 70 members including eight ‘Best Loser’ specially elected seats, allocated to the Best Loser candidates of communities that would otherwise be underrepresented. I’ve been told by Mauritians that this amendment gave elasticity to the system and is responsible for the fact that Mauritius has largely avoided racial tension since independence – because people feel their system of representation is essentially fair. (Ref: ‘Agreement reached in Mauritius on the Future Electoral System on the Occasion of the Visit of Mr John Stonehouse, MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies.’ Sessional Paper No. 8 of 1966 [Port Louis, 1966].)
11
So Much for Comrades
On 24th November 1974, four days after my father disappeared and was generally presumed drowned, Tony Benn wrote in his diary: ‘Bob Mellish had dug out a Hansard text of the last written question John Stonehouse asked before he disappeared, requesting the statistics on death by drowning. It was a most extraordinary coincidence – or else very mysterious.’1 In fact, ‘the last written question’ was about the M6 motorway in his constituency of Walsall. The last reference to drowning in Hansard was six months earlier, on 24th May, during a debate on ‘Canals, West Midlands’. Part of my father’s speech went: ‘There are about 2,000 miles of canals in the United Kingdom … I am concerned about the 200 miles or so of canals in the West Midlands and the Black Country in particular. I understand that there are more canals in the Black Country than there are in Venice. … There are three aspects to which I wish to refer: first, safety; second, amenity; third, economic viability. In recent years many young children have died from drowning because they have been able to gain access to unprotected and overgrown canals. That is deplorable. Last year alone five young children died from drowning in Walsall. Those young lives could have been saved if the canals that are unsupervised had had sufficient fencing.’ He then talks about the potential of canals as a public amenity, including cleaning them up so anglers could use them, and says, ‘If we were able to improve our canal system and make better use of it for transport, it could be linked with the European system, thus saving costs as well as bringing us in touch in transport terms with a valuable network in Europe.’ Two other local MPs had joined in the plea for something to be done, Geoff Edge and Bruce George, who made the point that, ‘In one small stretch of canal twelve children have been drowned, and our local coroner has a file which grows annually.’ Bob Mellish was mischievous in his suggestion my father’s last question was on drowning statistics, especially given that he says he had ‘dug’ it out, and Tony Benn was too quick to lap it up and publish it in his diary. The last words my father actually said in the House of Commons before he faked his death on 20th November, were these on the 14th: ‘As the most serious danger facing the world is a world food shortage, with a dangerous threat of widespread famine, especially in Third World countries, may we not have a debate on the subject to discuss what contribution this country can make towards helping improve the position?’
Bob Mellish was the Chief Whip of the Labour Party and furious that my father was absent from the House of Commons because the government had a majority of just three. Reducing the available number of Labour MPs from three to two made it even harder for the government to pass their agenda through parliament and, if a general election had to be called, any MP could lose their job. They were all angry that my father had put them one step closer to that risk.
They also weren’t too pleased with what he’d said in the House of Commons on the 4th November, two days before his first attempt to escape his life. In a debate on ‘Industry’ he said this: ‘In West Germany there is a degree of worker participation in the management of industry which might be an example we should follow. Another significant point is the fact that the trade union movement in Germany participates constructively in industry. I would like to see that being done here, where trade unions tend to be more disruptive than constructive.’ Later, he says: ‘If the TUC and the trade union movement generally cannot keep their side of the bargain of the social contract, we shall undoubtedly have to have a wages freeze in 1975. I hope that we can break away from the depressing cycle of stoppages and strikes which handicap industry and sap the country’s morale. I regard a strike as the last refuge of a bankrupt negotiator facing an inept employer, both operating within a flimsy structure which provides no real rules of conduct. The TUC and the Secretary of State for Employment must aim for the abolition of all strikes, unofficial and official. We should apply a little civilisation to this area of our affairs and stop inflicting terrible wounds on ourselves to prove our manliness.’
My father’s animosity towards the trade union leadership was well known within the Labour Party, which was funded by the unions, and Labour parliamentarians didn’t look kindly on anyone who challenged that mutually beneficial relationship. But my father’s criticism was not reserved for the Labour Party, it applied to the whole of British politics: ‘For too long Britain has allowed itself indulgences which a successful and expanding country would hesitate to allow itself. Our problem is deep-seated, and can be best summed-up as ‘the end of Empire syndrome’. It is a failure to adjust to our new situation in the world, which does not owe us a living and is making it extremely difficult for us to earn one.’
Labour Party infighting during the 1960s and 1970s had a negative impact on all they tried to do. I’ve found reading the biographies of the main characters in this drama depressing, and the more of them I read, the more depressed I become, as the breadth and depth of their criticism of each other emerges. The whip’s office was a source of poisonous rumours while the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party, the unions, the constituency parties, the backbenchers, the ministers, cabinet and prime minister, all seemed to be working against each other. Respect of colleagues was conspicuous by its absence. By 1974 my father was thoroughly disenchanted with the whole thing.
When he was arrested on the 24th December, my father sent a telegram to the prime minister saying he ‘regrets that I have created this problem’, that he’d had a ‘mental breakdown’, adding ‘I can only apologise to you and all the others who have been troubled by this business.’ The PM didn’t have the time or inclination to reply. By this time, the government were trying to deal with a financial crisis of 26 per cent inflation, unemployment at a 30-year high, and an International Monetary Fund that was threatening to abandon the country. The last thing Harold Wilson needed was a runaway MP.
By this time, there’d been so much bad publicity, Labour politicians were keen to disassociate themselves from my father. My mother too would face years of total silence from former colleagues. Being involved in the Party as an MP and MP’s wife for seventeen years meant nothing. There was no sympathy or understanding, they didn’t acknowledge my father had had a mental breakdown and all thought the worst. So much for ‘comrades’.
The Labour Party knives were quick to come out. On the 28th December, Labour Party MP Maurice Edelman wrote a commentary for the Daily Mail which is typical in that he wanted to appear understanding of mental health issues, but at the same time didn’t accept the role mental health issues had actually played. He wrote: ‘There will be considerable sympathy with anyone who breaks down under stress. But with his particular enterprise, Mr Stonehouse entered into a whole series of plots. He allowed his mother to endure an extremity of grief. His deception about his disappearance at sea was a lie to his constituents.’2 While wanting to appear sensitive to breaking under stress, he’s saying there’s a particular way to break. On no account have any
‘plots’, and don’t upset your mother. And before you go mad, consider how your constituents are going to feel. It’s like saying if you’re going to throw yourself in front of an oncoming train, think about the driver and how he or she is going to feel. And what about the passengers who are going to be delayed? This kind of conflicted thinking, born of a disbelief that the man had mental health issues, was going to underlie all that came afterwards.
The self-serving Edelman couldn’t help revealing what many other Labour MPs felt: ‘He was born into the Labour movement and yet he couldn’t wait to get out into the exciting, capitalist embrace.’ My father worked tirelessly for the cause of socialism for fourteen years before he even thought about entering business. That’s not ‘couldn’t wait’. And while he saw promoting British industry as a good thing for the country, Edelman saw it as defecting into the ‘capitalist embrace’. This tribalism in British politics is what drove my father to distraction. Edelman got bitchy: ‘I see him in my mind’s eye, moving through the lobbies, reserved and aloof, occasionally exchanging some trivial pleasantry with one of his contemporaries, a good-looking man who would enhance any party and yet one who always seemed to be waiting for the right person to talk to.’3 My father was not reserved or aloof. What Edelman means is that he didn’t spend time drinking pints at the bar frequented by the Labour clan hatching divisive schemes and instead took himself off to the chess room with fellow enthusiasts, including Conservative Party MPs, while passing time waiting for votes. The ‘good-looking’ comment is revealing; perhaps Edelman was aware that many wives of MPs and female House of Commons staff found my father attractive. Jealousy all too easily turns into hate.
John Stonehouse, My Father Page 13
