John Stonehouse, My Father

by Julia Stonehouse

  But my father didn’t fall overboard from a ship, and he hadn’t been in a plane crash. He didn’t leave a trail of blood; he left his clothes at a beach cabana. He was missing. Each year around 200,000 people go missing in the UK and although 99 per cent are eventually found or return home, around 2,000 are lost forever. All this uncertainty explains why life insurance companies wait seven years before allowing a claim on a missing person. Before he was an MP my father sold insurance for Canada Life, including a policy to the governor of the Bank of England. At the trial he said, ‘I knew quite a lot about insurance because I had worked for an insurance company … I knew that no claim could be made without a body, or without a court decision.’33 The judge told the jury, ‘when he says he knew, of course that would presuppose it is taken for granted by everybody concerned in this case that is so. What he is meaning there is that it was his belief.’34 Either way, what my father believed conflicted with the charge, namely that he ‘dishonestly attempted to enable’ my mother to claim on the insurances. If it was an ‘attempt’, it was risky in the extreme to expect British law to change its usual procedure in the case of no body and making the beneficiary of an insurance wait seven years before they can apply to a court for a death certificate. My father continued: ‘My wife in fact approached all of them except the Royal, which I approached, because they had offices in Dover Street. Why there were so many policies was to achieve flexibility and we could let one or two lapse if required. All the premiums were paid by my wife.’35 There was plenty of speculation, both inside and outside the family, that my father might have committed suicide but, if he had or had been suspected of having done so, the life insurances would have been invalid because life insurance does not pay out in the case of suicide.

  When people are convinced someone is guilty, guilt seems the only explanation for otherwise perfectly logical events. On the 19th May 1974 my father’s car was destroyed by an IRA bomb at Heathrow Airport and later that night another bomb went off at the Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes HQ, around the corner from where my parents lived in Kennington, London. My mother started thinking it would be a good idea if there was life insurance on my father, especially as he was travelling so much, and to some quite dangerous places. On the 17th June, the IRA bombed the Houses of Parliament, injuring eleven people. My mother requested a Canada Life agent to come to the house in Kennington, where they met at teatime on the 4th July. He left her with a five-year proposal form for my father to sign. On the 17th July, a bomb went off at the Tower of London, killing one person and seriously injuring 41, many of them children. On the 22nd July, Norwich Union received a proposal form from my mother, along with a letter which, according to the agent’s witness statement, ‘intimated that the proposal form was for temporary insurance cover on her husband’s life’. This was another five-year term policy, as was the Phoenix Assurance policy my mother arranged shortly after.

  London was a very dangerous place at the time. IRA bombs were going off left, right and centre. In 1973, 100 people had been injured in London by bombs at King’s Cross and Euston stations, and the five car bombs that exploded outside key locations including the Home Office and the Old Bailey. 1974 was much worse, and in February twelve people were killed on a bus. A further 28 would lose their lives in pubs in Guildford, Woolwich and Birmingham, with 226 injured. In London, five bombs were placed in letter boxes, injuring 40, and other targets included Harrods, Selfridges, and various restaurants. Nowhere was safe in 1974, and we were not the only family taking out life insurance that year. On the very day we were told about my father’s disappearance, 21st November, an IRA bomb in Birmingham killed at least seventeen, with innumerable life-changing injuries.

  The judge was very keen to emphasise the fact that my mother’s solicitor had written to the insurance companies three weeks after he disappeared, even though those letters made it clear my mother was not making a claim and just noted she was aware of the insurance policies, and the judge overlooked the fact that my mother was replying to mail she’d received. For example, on the 28th November 1974 – eight days after my father disappeared – Martyn Jones of Canada Life wrote saying, ‘no doubt you will keep us informed of the position as appropriate’. My mother replied to him on the 3rd December, saying, ‘As you can imagine we are going through a form of nightmare here, hoping against hope that it has all been some ghastly mistake. We are still making all kinds of enquiries and obviously this is going to take some time. I’m about to see the police this afternoon to ask them to look into another area of search as a result of a very similar case we’ve just heard of. But it’s all pretty depressing and nerve-wracking. The press have been unbelievable but at least we have been surrounded by good friends and family. I’ll be in touch if I have any news.’

  My parents had a big row about Martyn Jones of Canada Life on the 26th May 1976. Arguments between them were so unusual that my mother made a note about it, from which I quote now. She wrote: ‘Tonight, the first real words of anger to pass between us since John’s return from Australia.’ She’d picked him up in the car from Lambeth Bridge, finding him ‘lower and more dejected than at any time during the trial. Apparently, a young insurance man named Martyn Jones had been a prosecution witness during the day and had followed a question-and-answer exchange with completely unsolicited remarks of his own to the effect that when he met me to discuss the insurance scheme I had said that my husband had asked me (instructed me, I’m not sure which) to acquire the insurance cover. John felt that the prosecution regarded this as the best and biggest break in the trial hitherto.’ When they got home my mother went through the file and found a letter to her from Jones which hadn’t been submitted by the prosecution. ‘Of course they wouldn’t,’ said my father, ‘they’re only interested in anything that would link me with the insurance, so they’ve omitted yours and produced one sent to me after I’d been to the doctor.’ My mother wrote, ‘What must have happened was that he had transposed remarks I’d made about discussing the question of insurance with John into an instruction to purchase the insurance. It was an understandable mistake in the circumstances.’ But my father said, ‘It was no mistake. The police have been drilling him all day. He’s been waiting around all day and only came on the stand about 3pm. He’s so hostile to me.’ This is what my father was dealing with – conniving police and prosecution, all determined to see him do jail time for the insurances.

  At committal, the defence lawyers had focused their attention on two technical points relating to the insurance: the ‘attempt’ to defraud occurred in Miami – outside the jurisdiction of the court; and the ‘attempt’ was not ‘sufficiently proximate’ to where the insurance pay-out might occur, namely England. Lawyers would obsess about these two points through several further legal proceedings, but they were red herrings. The essential point was that they were short-term policies and literally couldn’t be claimed. Unfortunately though, the Old Bailey judge instructed the jury to convict on the insurances on the basis of the technical red herrings, and the more common-sense point about them being unclaimable short-term policies was lost in the fog of law. Judge Eveleigh took the decision about the insurances out of the jury’s hands by telling them that a higher court would rule on it, if his direction was wrong: ‘There is an attempt by the accused within the legal meaning of that word attempt if you are satisfied that the matters I have stated to you are proved. I am going to repeat that, that he falsely staged his death by drowning, dishonestly intending that a claim should be made and the money obtained in due course, sooner or later. If I am wrong about that, there is a higher Court that will put me right. That is the definition you have to follow in this case.’36

  That direction of Judge Eveleigh led to a change in law – ‘the law in Stonehouse’ – whereby a judge cannot any longer instruct a jury to find the defendant guilty. The proceedings that led to the legal change is found under ‘Director of Public Prosecutions v Stonehouse: HL 1977’ and in them Lord Salmon said: ‘Anyone in the judg
e’s position might easily have made the slip which he did of not leaving the jury to decide whether the facts proved amounted to the attempt charged,’ adding, ‘I am completely satisfied that no miscarriage of justice could have resulted from what technically was a misdirection.’37

  Judge Eveleigh’s summing up was long. It began on 2nd August and went on until the 4th and, to read it, it covers 130 pages. My father wrote to me from Cell No. 11 at the Old Bailey on the 3rd, saying of the judge: ‘He is awful and cunning with it, skilfully giving the impression to the jury of objectivity but all the time weighing the balance decidedly against me.’ On Thursday the 5th August, the jury retired at 10.55am and returned at 8.10pm with four unanimous verdicts. The jury were already down to eleven members due to the ill health of one, and the judge told them, ‘I am in a position now to accept a verdict from you upon which at least ten of you are agreed,’38 and sent them off to a hotel for the night.

  Early the next morning, before the jury had decided the final seventeen verdicts, and before Judge Eveleigh sentenced my father to 95-and-a-half years, the front page of the Daily Express blasted like a bomb into our family with the headline: ‘Stonehouse guilty on 4 counts as wife says: I’ll cite Sheila WHY I’LL DIVORCE JOHN’.39 The newspaper had made it look like an exclusive interview with my mother but, in fact, the reporter, Paul Hopkins, had cobbled together a two-page story using information from various sources. In the spring of the previous year my mother had told a friend, who we later discovered had been sleeping with an editor in the Beaverbrook Newspapers group, that she would probably eventually have to divorce my father. At that time in 1975, my mother had recently returned from Melbourne, where it had become clear to her that my father and Sheila had been having an affair for years and that divorce was probable some time in the future. She had told the friend in confidence, but that so-called friend had told her lover and he had told Paul Hopkins to use the information when it would have maximum impact. That day had come, fifteen months later. My mother was warned about the upcoming Daily Express story on Thursday 5th by a phone call from a journalist at another newspaper, and she immediately phoned the editor of the Daily Express. He wouldn’t take her calls, so she phoned her lawyer and they both spent most of the night frantically trying to get an injunction to stop the fabricated story. They failed, and by dawn the presses were running. Jane wrote in her diary on the night of the 5th: ‘Ma has a story breaking tomorrow – about divorce. Poor thing. She’s under so much strain she doesn’t really know how to cope. Paul Hopkins has finally done the dirty.’ Isolated as he was in Brixton Prison and at the court, my father didn’t know the background to the story, which we all thought influenced the judge to hand down the excessively long sentences. My mother wrote to my father as soon as the final sentences were announced on Friday 6th August. He replied to her the following Wednesday, from his cell at Wormwood Scrubs Prison: ‘I appreciate the difficulty you were put in by H**** and of course it is for you to handle the situation in the way you think fit … I shall always be grateful for your love, which I treasure. As you so rightly say we achieved great things and some marvellous happiness.’

  Also that morning, Friday 6th August 1974, the Daily Telegraph’s front page had twenty passport-sized photographs of my father, that had been in his attaché case when he was arrested. They’d come from their correspondent, Ian Ward, eighteen months earlier. The caption referred to one of the four guilty verdicts delivered the previous day: ‘uttering a forged application for a passport in the name of Joseph Arthur Markham’. My father immediately knew the source of these images was Ian Ward, and it reminded him, as if he needed it, of all the trouble Ward had caused. In early February 1975, while my mother was in London and my father vulnerable and looking for an ally, Ian Ward had suggested he could help my father write a book. In his police statement Ward said: ‘Mr Stonehouse some days prior to the arrival of his wife, gave to me for safe keeping his black attaché case, this contained according to him all the private papers, concerned with his disappearance in Florida and his subsequent trip to Australia. It was his stated intention that these would be used to illustrate the proposed book. This attaché case was also kept under the bed next to the red suitcase.’ Ward arranged for a photographer, Mr Howe, to photograph ‘the entire contents of the attaché case’. The negatives and one set of prints were given to my father, apparently, but ‘the other set of prints I sent to my office in London’.40 My father did not give Ward his attaché case ‘for safe keeping’ only for Ward to send photos of the entire contents to his newspaper. Undoubtedly, Ward did not have my father’s permission to do that.

  At 4pm, the jury returned their final verdicts, and then Judge Eveleigh passed sentence. My sister Jane recorded in her diary what she saw in court: ‘The judge was absolutely obscene – he said Pa was a hypocrite, deceitful, all the things he accused others of being. That’s why he broke down dummy. I could shake him by the neck – tightly. I have never witnessed such vitriol – he loathed Pa. Obviously thought he was lying all the way through. The adjectives, dishonest, deceitful, persuasive, ambitious, greedy – on and on. Didn’t believe he was an idealist. Didn’t mention the breakdown. His venom was shattering. Pa stood impassively. Gave a sincere thank you and mitigation – about the years he’s worked for others. About nobody being hurt except his family. Judge not listening at all. Callous. He hated Pa attacking the establishment.’ Judge Eveleigh said about a deterrent sentence: ‘Its principal object is to inform others that they cannot profit by this kind of behaviour or any criminal behaviour.’41 Well, I’m sure the sentence of 95-and-a-half years sent that message out loud and clear.

  My father instructed his lawyers to appeal on all charges and sentences, but they had other ideas. For the appeal, he was represented in January 1977 by Louis Blom-Cooper QC and Geoffrey Robertson. The paperwork for Appeal 4265R76 shows that ‘counsel having abandoned in court the application for leave to appeal on the remaining counts’,42 they pursued just one tiny legal technical point to do with the insurances: the red herring concerning the ‘attempt having occurred outside the jurisdiction of the English Courts’. My father was furious. He wrote to me from Blundeston Prison on 26th January 1977: ‘You will have heard the result of the so-called Appeal. Well, if that doesn’t confirm the prejudice I have been up against then nothing will. It also confirms the incredible self-orientation of counsel. I gave clear instructions to Blom-Cooper QC through my solicitor that appeals must be lodged against all convictions and grounds for appeal were available in the judge’s summing up which was rigged against me. Instead he decided to appeal only on legal points on the insurance charges and dropped the rest in court without advising me, of course … He did ask for the sentence to be reviewed but leave to appeal was refused on that so he couldn’t even deploy the arguments and, as you know, his previous legal argument was knocked down flat. And the price he paid for that was to say on my behalf that I accept conviction on all the other charges which I damned well don’t.’

  On 6th February 1977, he wrote again, saying, ‘My disgust is strongest for counsel who regard the whole sordid business as a game with clients merely props to be used for their own grotesque and arcane pleasures. Mine never followed my instructions and actually abandoned the appeal against convictions on all charges except the insurance ones although there were powerful reasons for complaint in the twisted summing-up of the judge on these counts quite apart from the basic illogicality of being convicted of stealing from oneself. I understand only too clearly what went through his mind. He calculated that by abandoning them he could curry favour with the appeal judges and would then be able to argue his favourite insurance points in a favourable climate. But they threw it all back and made him look silly. He came on Friday. Full of bounce and blasé as hell. Appointment was for the morning postponed until 3.30pm then they arrived ¾ hour late so giving us very little time. One feels at the end of everyone’s list of priorities. I said “what have you got to say” BC said “I have nothing t
o say, what have you got to say to me.” Which made me speechless for fifteen minutes.’

  The appeal judges had had before them a letter from the senior medical officer at Blundeston Prison, Francis Eteng, which read: ‘[He] went on to say that he “had a nervous breakdown progressively from 1974 and on looking back it must have been coming on since 1971 because a psychiatrist called L. Howard in Sussex, after examining his paintings, thought that he was heading for a nervous illness.” Describing this nervous illness he said that following the collapse of his ideals he became tense, sleepless, perspiring at night, behaving in an hysterical manner and disorientated; in fact, he attributes all his anti-social behaviour to this condition but he did not seek medical advice because “reason had gone out of him”.’ Eteng then goes through the usual physical medical history, and concludes: ‘He has “doubtful” insight into his condition and I think he has a tendency to exaggerate the normal stresses and strains of life and to wishfully think that he had a nervous breakdown which gave rise to his irresponsible conduct, and, as such, wants to be pitied.’43 I don’t know what Eteng considered ‘the normal stresses and strains of life’, but I suggest that being branded a communist spy during the era of threatened nuclear war is not one. And neither were the other major stresses being put upon him from 1972 onwards.

  In a confusion of ignorance, a huge whirlpool developed, generated by the suspicion he was a spy, exacerbated by his obvious infidelity, fuelled by his financial difficulties, and driven faster ever downwards by the money-making potential of negative or false press stories. I wish my father had never been caught in Melbourne and had succeeded in his escape from reality, living a calm life playing chess, listening to jazz and classical music, soaking up the sun. He might have lived to the age of 83, when he could have used the newly released StB file to prove to the world that he was, in fact, innocent of that heinous charge of treason. As it was, he very nearly died in prison and, aside from Sheila and the family, nobody cared. They all thought he deserved it.