John Stonehouse, My Father

by Julia Stonehouse

  The purpose of extradition is not to decide whether a person is guilty or innocent, but to establish whether there’s a charge to be answered. The prosecution can’t extradite on charge ‘A’ and then add charges ‘B’, ‘C’ and ‘D’ at home. In Australian law, all the charges came under one ‘information’, which meant that if any charge was deemed answerable, the whole package transferred to London. My father’s lawyer, Jim Patterson, and Sheila’s, George Hampel, tried to disentangle the ‘information’, but the rather confused magistrate went along with the prosecution. In the State of Victoria, stipendiary magistrates were not legally qualified and attained their position by a rise through the ranks of the court clerks. This means that they often take direction on points of law from the prosecution lawyers, as in this case. There are differences between UK and Australian law plus, on the 29th May, the Supreme Court of the State of Victoria had indicated that my father’s case raised issues regarding the constitutional relations between the UK and the States of Australia, and advised that only the High Court of Australia may be competent to adjudicate. But my father and Sheila wanted to avoid a long legal delay, so that option was not followed.

  The financial charges against my father amounted to around £29,000, mostly in the form of cheques alleged to have been stolen from one of my father’s companies, Export Promotion and Consultancy Services (EPACS). Patterson made the case that my father had a right to that money, and there was no evidence to the contrary. Sheila was charged with signing some of those cheques, but her lawyer made the point that ‘if every secretary or clerk or person in an office who signed cheques were to be committed for trial if it were found that the cheques were illegally dealt with subsequently, there would be a great many people in jail or awaiting trial’.17 Nevertheless, this connection made their legal fates inextricably linked and would introduce the charge of ‘conspiracy’. The defence was not allowed to question the depositions, large bundles of which had been brought from London. None of the witnesses had been brought to Melbourne, and my father’s solicitor’s request to be able to question them in London was refused. Australian witnesses couldn’t later be compelled to go to London.

  Dr Gerard Gibney, my father’s psychiatrist, appeared as a witness for the defence and explained to the court that people with depression can withdraw within their own shell, carry out their own suicide or, as my father had done, perform a kind of suicide equivalent by adopting a new personality to escape into. Dr Gibney thought that after coming to Australia, there was a part of him that hoped for detection, largely because of the feelings he had towards his wife and children, and that when he was detected he felt something like relief to know the whole experience was coming to an end. The prosecution lawyer, Mr James, also questioned Dr Gibney extensively. He did this not in a challenging or sceptical manner, but as a man who wanted to be clear about the psychiatric reasons behind my father’s actions. This same professional approach was not going to be found in England.

  The magistrate decided that there was a case for extradition, and my father and Sheila had to spend a mandatory fifteen days in jail. The magistrate, trying to be kind, committed my father to the Maribyrnong Detention Centre without knowing, apparently, that it was more cold and inhospitable than Pentridge Prison – where my father elected to go. He wrote to Jane on the 7th July, ‘it is extremely bitter here. There is something curious about the Australian cold it has an intensity about it which I do not remember from Europe.’ Sheila was equally cold when her friend from Sydney, Denis, visited her at the Fairlea Women’s Prison – which was nowhere near as nice as the name suggests. On the 16th July, the Daily Mail published extracts from the letters Sheila had sent to ‘Mr Mildoon’ in Melbourne. As official evidence, those documents should have been secure in the hands of Scotland Yard, yet here they were, for all the world to see. The symbiotic, not to say financial, relationship between the police and the press appeared to my father to be once again on view.

  The question ‘where to next?’ was answered on the 17th July: my father and Sheila were escorted back to London by Chief Superintendent Ken Etheridge and other officers from Scotland Yard on flight BA 979, which left Melbourne at 17:00 hrs.

  14

  Bonnie and Clyde are Back

  The arrival of the notorious runaways at Heathrow Airport on Friday 18th July provided a fantastic opportunity for press photographers, who’d been corralled behind metal railings on either side of the steps leading from the door of the British Airways jumbo jet. My father came down the stairs first, and was funnelled through the tunnel of flashing lights by detectives on either side of him, quickly put in the back of a waiting car, and driven off. Sheila appeared next, looking as if she’d lost weight, and was guided into another car by one of the two plain-clothed policewomen who’d been sent to Australia to collect her. They were taken to Bow Street Magistrates’ Court, where another crowd of photographers waited, along with my sister Jane. The plane had been delayed and it was too late for a bail hearing before a judge, so they both spent the night in the court’s grubby cells. The next morning, in a courtroom full of reporters, Sheila was given bail, but my father was not.

  The following Monday, a bail appeal was refused by a judge in chambers, Mr Justice Kerr. My father was represented by Sheila’s barrister from Melbourne, George Hampel, who’d been quickly admitted to the English Bar. He and Jim Patterson had flown to London at their own expense to help with the cases. Michael O’Dell became my father’s solicitor in London, and was to prove an absolute gem and true family friend. The press emphasised that the charges against my father came to £154,000 but I don’t think the public realised that £125,000 of that related to life insurance policies which had never been claimed. However, emphasising big numbers made a good story and sold newspapers. Meanwhile my father was remanded to Brixton Prison, where he would spend the next six weeks, during which Josef Frolik was doing the publicity rounds and generating reviews for his book The Frolik Defection, which was published on the 25th July. For him, the timing couldn’t have been more perfect.

  The first chance I had to see my father was that same day, Wednesday 25th July, five days after he’d been escorted back from Australia, when my mother and I visited him in Brixton. After eight months of trauma, it was a phenomenal relief just to hug him, and have the opportunity to say we loved each other. He felt thinner, and his hair had gone slightly grey, but I was relieved to find him in good spirits. He had no idea, then, that he’d be incarcerated on remand for weeks to come. The guards did what they would always do, whether in prison or at court – stand a few feet away trying to overhear his conversations. There was no privacy.

  The next bail hearing was on Monday 28th July, my father’s 50th birthday. He made the appeal himself, and failed. There had been reports in the newspapers that he’d been on hunger strike. This wasn’t true, and he told the judge that he occasionally goes on a starvation diet for health reasons. Indeed, he said, Brixton is ‘like a health farm and extremely good for me’ because, outside, he’d be harassed by the press. Each Monday he applied for bail. Michael O’Dell tried. His newly appointed barrister, Geoffrey Robertson, tried. And John Mortimer, QC and playwright, tried. They all failed. My sister and I were in court during the fourth attempt, on the 11th August, and heard our father complain to the judge that while the prosecution had access to all the documents, and had had eight months to prepare their case, he’d had no access to documents and barely eight minutes to consult with his solicitor because there were 1,000 unconvicted prisoners in Brixton Prison and only ten rooms in which they could consult their legal representatives. He was also desperate to get out so he could explain to the House of Commons, by way of a personal statement, what had happened to him, and felt his continued incarceration was the result of political, rather than legal, considerations.

  My mother made the journey to Brixton Prison practically every day, collecting laundry and delivering books, food and other extra things to try and keep up my father’s morale. The
warders sometimes escorted her to a small back door exit so she could avoid the press photographers out front, but that ruse was soon discovered and she’d find them there too. If my mother couldn’t go, Jane or I would. The longer he was there, the more depressed my father became. There were eighteen bars on his cell window, through which he could see four houses with sixteen chimney pots and four TV aerials. Apart from visits, he spent 23 hours a day in his cell. The prison was old, overcrowded, noisy, unsanitary and claustrophobic. On the 15th August, he heard on his radio that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the first president of Bangladesh, had been assassinated. This tragically disappointing news from Bangladesh was accompanied that day by another news item: the Labour Party in Walsall North had disowned their MP.

  On the 27th August, my father was finally given bail, with the condition he reported to the local police station once a day, excluding Sundays. By this time, the House of Commons was in summer recess. It would resume on 13th October, but the courts decided that 13th October would also be the day committal proceeding would begin, and couldn’t be persuaded a slightly later date would do. This meant there was no time in which my father was free to make his statement of explanation to the House of Commons, and he became even more convinced that the government was trying to silence him.

  If the Department of Public Prosecutions (DPP) thought that locking my father up in the appalling conditions of Brixton for six weeks was going to break him, they were wrong. As he collected his belongings from the remand prison, he told reporters, ‘Five hundred inside there should be out here with me.’ The justice system and prison reform were to become his new causes. He also said, ‘Wake up England – be aware of what’s happening in this country.’ From this point on, he went public with the hypocrisy and inadequacy of British politics that had, when internalised, driven him to despair. He had nothing to lose, his reputation was in tatters, and he intended to speak his truth. My father emerged from his unsympathetic treatment as the system’s most vocal critic.

  The press, as far as I know, never reported on the fact that while my father was fighting extradition in Australia and, later, in Brixton Prison, he’d been submitting written questions to various ministers, for answering in the House of Commons record. Before the Freedom of Information Act of 2000, the only way facts could be prised out of government departments was if a member of parliament asked the appropriate minister. This could be done through normal correspondence, during a debate in the House of Commons, in the form of an oral question, or by requesting a written answer for recording in Hansard. Often, parliamentary questions are rhetorical, in that the questioner knows more about the subject than the replier and the question is just a way of drawing attention to a particular subject, or getting information into the public record. Between 22nd May and 31st July my father asked 21 questions.

  Regarding problems in his constituency, questions included those about unemployment, the depressed state of the automobile industry, and the cash-flow problems of car-component manufacturers. His concern about British exports was expressed in questions about submarines, Nimrod aircraft, and diplomatic staff doing more to promote trade. On British politics, he asked the secretary of state for employment to introduce legislation to enforce trade unions to conduct elections by secret and postal ballot. He asked the minister of the civil service what the annual saving on national expenditure would be if the number of civil servants was cut by 20 per cent. One question asking for ‘details of the overseas loans to United Kingdom authorities’ revealed that the entire country was deeply in debt. Fired by his experience in Brixton Prison, he asked the home secretary ‘if he will take steps to strengthen the resources of the Probation Service to assist in dealing with the problems of juvenile homelessness’. Always with an eye on post-colonial exploitation, he asked about the accountability of UK-based multinational corporations and whether a strategy could be developed so countries around the Indian Ocean such as Mauritius, the Maldives, India and Bangladesh would benefit from the extraction of ocean bed mineral resources. And he asked what consultations had been had ‘with the Governments of Mauritius, Seychelles, Kenya, Tanzania, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Singapore and Australia regarding the intentions of the United States Government to build a military establishment on Diego Garcia in the British Indian Ocean Territory; and whether they have indicated their approval’.

  When my father returned to 21 Sancroft Street in Kennington on the 27th August, he’d been gone nine months. In that long time, he’d not had a moment’s peace, and he desperately needed to rest. But first, we celebrated with a glass of wine over a dinner of quiche Lorraine, French beans and new potatoes, followed by fresh greengages. It was the first time in many weeks that my father had not eaten alone in a cell. My mother, Jane, Mathew and I took a deep collective breath. He was alive.

  From now on, my father would have to prepare for the committal proceedings with Michael O’Dell, and without the advantage of access to all the necessary papers. Apparently, the DPP thought only they had the right to see them. This non-disclosure is an issue that’s always plagued defence teams, then as now, and has led to many injustices far greater than in my father’s case. There’s ‘the law’ and there’s ‘how the law is applied’ and, shockingly, they are not the same thing.

  On the 7th September, I accompanied my father by train to his constituency. It was a Sunday, so we didn’t have to worry about being back in time to sign in at the police station as part of the bail conditions. Everyone was very nice. We met none of the hostility or outrage the press had led the country to believe was occurring there. The Daily Express report was headlined: ‘In the streets of indifference, the Rt Hon Member for Walsall North returns after nearly 11 months …’1 My father’s constituency work had been carried out by neighbouring MPs Bruce George, Geoffrey Edge and Betty Boothroyd, and they were the people most agitated by his absence. When my father explained that he’d had a breakdown, the constituents were sympathetic and understanding. It gave my father faith that regular folk were a better kind of person than those with vested interests in the House of Commons, or financial interests in selling newspapers. Although he’d been deselected by the local party, which was understandable in the circumstances, he would remain as their MP until the next election, or until he resigned.

  On the 30th September my father went to the Labour Party Conference in Blackpool and during the breaks, while the delegates went to drink in the bar, he sat defiant and alone in chair number G30. Nobody spoke to him, except the prime minister’s wife, Mary Wilson. At that conference, the chancellor of the exchequer, Denis Healey, announced that he would be seeking a loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to bail out bankrupt Britain. On Sunday 5th October, we were all devastated to hear that Jim Patterson, my father’s lawyer in Melbourne, had died of heart troubles. He was only 53. My mother told the Daily Mail: ‘Mr Patterson became very personally involved in the case, and helped my husband come through a breakdown, and once or twice almost saved his life.’2 Jim had been a godsend to us in so many ways, and his sad passing served to remind us that, whatever our troubles, they were nothing compared to what other people were going through.

  I sat in the public gallery of the House of Commons with Jane when my father finally made his personal statement on the 20th October. Sheila sat a few rows behind us. The statement had been severely cut over the preceding few days by the Speaker, Selwyn Lloyd, who told the members: ‘The convention of this House is that a personal statement should be listened to in silence.’ Everyone was very surprised to see him speaking not from the Labour benches, but from the Opposition side, which he explained, ‘has no party political significance whatsoever. I am standing here because this is the place that I occupied for most of my time in the House in the last nearly nineteen years, and indeed it was from this bench that I made a personal statement when I returned from Rhodesia some sixteen years ago on 13th March 1959.’ The Speaker was irritated: ‘The right hon. Gentleman must say only what has been
passed by me.’ After some back and forth, my father began:

  ‘I deny the allegation that I was an agent for the CIA. I deny the allegations that I was a spy for the Czechs. I can only regret that the original stories were printed. The purpose of this statement is to explain, as best I can within the traditions of the House, why I was absent from the House for such a lengthy period.

  ‘The explanation for the extraordinary and bizarre conduct in the second half of last year is found in the progressions towards the complete mental breakdown which I suffered. This breakdown was analysed by an eminent psychiatrist in Australia and was described by him as psychiatric suicide. It took the form of the repudiation of the life of Stonehouse because that life had become absolutely intolerable to him. A new parallel personality took over – separate and apart from the original man, who was resented and despised by the parallel personality for the ugly humbug and sham of the recent years of his public life. The parallel personality was uncluttered by the awesome tensions and stresses suffered by the original man, and he felt, as an ordinary person, a tremendous relief in not carrying the load of anguish which had burdened the public figure.

  ‘The collapse and destruction of the original man came about because his idealism in his political life had been utterly frustrated and finally destroyed by the pattern of events, beyond his control, which had finally overwhelmed him. Those events which caused the death of an idealist are too complex to describe in detail here, but in the interests of clarity as well as brevity I refer to them as follows.’

  He started by talking about his anti-colonial work in Africa, and the disappointment of ‘military dictatorship and despair’ in Uganda now, for example, and then moved on to co-operatives. ‘The co-operative movement in Britain had been a great ideal for me from an early age. Co-operation was almost a religion for me. It was not only a way to run a business; it was a way of life from which selfishness, greed and exploitation were completely excluded. I became a director and later president of the London Co-operative Society, the largest retail co-operative society in the world, in active pursuit of those ideals. I did not do it for money. The honorarium was £20 per year. But I was pursued by the Communists in that position during that period. I was bitterly attacked, and at that time …’ The Speaker interrupted. ‘Order. The right hon. Gentleman must say only what I have passed.’ And my father continued: ‘That time was a most traumatic one for me and wounded my soul deeply. It had become cruelly clear that my co-operative ideals were too ambitious, for, in truth, they could not be achieved, given human motivations. I felt as though my religion had been exposed as a pagan rite.’ This probably didn’t go down too well with the other Labour and Co-operative Party MPs, of which there were fifteen at the time.