John Stonehouse, My Father

by Julia Stonehouse

  A new year began. In January 1978 my father borrowed The Frolik Defection from the library, and wrote to Jane on the 12th: ‘The country is mad to get excited about such trivia spread about by a renegade who obviously had to ingratiate himself with the CIA. The reason for the ridiculous stories is found in another part of the book where Frolik attacks his colleagues for stealing expense account monies by faking their reports with fictitious agents.’ I wish my father had lived long enough to see the pathetic StB file that Frolik never actually saw, and had been alive to clear his own name. It was a dark shadow that followed him to death, and long beyond.

  On the 27th, he attended the final bankruptcy court hearing, where he said: ‘If I had not had a breakdown and had been in control of ongoing companies there would have been no bankruptcy.’ Once all the hyperbole had died down, it transpired that he had claims of £258,164 and assets of £137,185, giving a shortfall of £120,979. He wrote to me on the 30th: ‘It is marvellous to get it over.’ He’d spent a night at Wormwood Scrubs Prison, saying, ‘It was quite fascinating going back and not at all horrifying as one might have imagined. I had one of my best night’s sleep (9 to 7) in a shared cell despite the extra noises there. I suppose I am becoming institutionalised after all this time. London (particularly the East End) looked as run down and filthy as ever and the people appeared miserable. Something has happened to this country. It is in a decline from which neither Jim’s [Callaghan] exhortations nor North Sea oil will extricate it.’

  On the 23rd May 1978, he wrote sad and despondent letters to both Jane and I. The state of African politics was getting him down, and he was worried about what would happen in South Africa. He wrote: ‘Can anyone have any faith in the human race after the Nazis, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Uganda and now the Congo again. When I was young I had such faith that goodness could win over evil, that people were honourable and once organised democratically could create a paradise. It will never happen. Men – and women – are greedy, feckless, cruel and brutal and need discipline to control them.’ Even his 250 strawberry plants couldn’t keep his spirits high. He wrote, ‘I am sick to death with people and I am sure you know what I mean,’ signing off with: ‘I am thinking of you a lot and hoping you can get some happiness from the hard stone of existence.’ This was the day his application for parole was to be heard, and he was stressed. He didn’t know that the local review committee heard positive recommendations from the welfare department, the probation department, the prison wardens and the governor himself. As far as they were all concerned, parole should be granted. But somewhere between them and the parole board, or the home secretary, it was going to be denied – news we’d hear on the 19th September 1978, long after other prisoners had received their decisions. It seems my father’s case had gone through some extra bureaucratic loops, which would form into his noose. June and July came and went with no news. The wait was agonising, and yet another expression of the cruelty we’d come to expect from British ‘authorities’.

  On the 13th August 1978, my father collapsed with another heart attack. He spent sixteen days at Lowestoft Hospital, where Sheila visited every day and Jane, Mathew and I would often see her. Sheila had been, metaphorically speaking, at my father’s side through this whole imprisonment period. It was only now that he told us how bad he’d been feeling; he’d been trying to be stoic. From Lowestoft Hospital, he was driven in handcuffs to Wormwood Scrubs Prison hospital, where the conditions were notoriously draconian. A psychiatric consultant, Dr Tony Whitehead, later said, ‘Conditions inside the Scrubs hospital are like those in a poor kind of mental hospital in the bad old days. It really is like an old Poor Law institution – wholly unsuitable for any kind of convalescence.’5 A social worker, Rosalind Kane, wrote a critical report about the place and said, ‘I came across endless men who tried to commit suicide because of the isolation, the lack of visits, and contact from families at a time when they needed them most.’6 In Wormwood Scrubs Prison hospital wing, a person was allowed one half-hour visit every two weeks, and to send three letters a week – if the sadistic staff felt like facilitating them.

  On the 6th September my father had a schematic attack, a cross between a heart attack and angina, which the so-called medical staff at the Scrubs ignored. It was only picked up days later when doctors from Hammersmith Hospital came to see him on a routine visit. They rushed him into Hammersmith where, on the 15th, my grandmother and Sheila happened to visit at the same time. My grandmother apparently told the Daily Mail: ‘When I went in she was sitting holding his hand … I don’t think we spoke because there was nothing for me to say to her. She at least had the decency to leave. I believe Sheila Buckley was the cause of John’s marriage break-up.’7 On the 17th, radioactive dye was released into his heart to facilitate X-rays but, while this was being done, his heart stopped and was only revived after electric shocks were delivered through the cardiac catheter.

  He was still terribly stressed waiting to hear news about his parole application, and the bad news that it had been refused came two days later, on the 19th, when he was sent back to the Scrubs hospital wing to wait for the urgent heart bypass surgery that was being delayed because of industrial strike action by the maintenance workers at Hammersmith Hospital. This was a really scary time for us all. He was lying in that horrific place, all alone except for the sadistic guards, knowing that his heart could give out again at any moment, and his parole had been refused by the faceless, cold-hearted ‘powers that be’. It was literally like living inside a terrifying movie. We weren’t with him, but the cruelty of the situation ran through our veins.

  We all started campaigning for his release from prison on health grounds. We sent endless letters to the press and the Home Office, and were never off the phone. On the 31st October Sheila was sent a letter from the private secretary of Merlyn Rees, the home secretary, saying ‘under the parole rules each subsequent parole review after the first must take place not less than 10 and not more than 14 months later … the Home Secretary orders a fresh review only in exceptional circumstances. The Home Secretary has now carefully considered Mr Stonehouse’s case in the light of your letters, but I am afraid that he can find no grounds for asking the Parole Board to reconsider his case before the normal statutory date.’

  Jane and Sheila gave a joint interview to the Sunday Mirror which was published on 15th October. A doctor at the hospital had told Jane that my father was in an ‘extremely hazardous condition’, and she described a visit she and Sheila had recently made: ‘He is like something out of a horror film. Ghostly white as though Dracula has sucked the blood from his body. It was very emotional. We both held hands with him and tried to keep up his spirits. He was desperately low. But it was obvious to me that Sheila is his lifeline.’ Jane said she already regarded my father and Sheila as married. In this visit, my father first revealed the truth about his experience in Blundeston Prison and he wrote to Jane about it when he was returned to Wormwood Scrubbs, saying he’d felt ‘enormous strain caused by the constant humiliation from a majority of the staff’. Up to this time, as Jane told the Sunday Mirror, ‘he has always held things back, frightened to cause a fuss and spoil his chance of parole. Now he’s got nothing to lose – except his life.’8 My father thought his especially mean treatment was just because he was a public figure. For example, because of his bad back, he’d asked for a bed board to put under the mattress, but he would come back to his cell to find it had been removed for no reason, which meant he had to sleep on the floor.

  On the 30th October Jane and I went to Oxford, where the home secretary, Merlyn Rees, was addressing the University’s Fabian Society. During the Q&A sessions I accused him of withholding permission for parole, which he denied, telling us ‘you girls are doing yourself no good by coming here’. Rees said: ‘Ill health is not a factor in parole. The local board makes a judgement. If the parole board say he is to be paroled, it will come forward to me.’ We knew that the review committee had approved my father’s parole, so the
problem had occurred further up the line of authority. Jane told the press: ‘It was an act of desperation. If Joe Bloggs had done what my father had done he would be out by now.’9 Jane wrote to Rees on the 6th November, asking what he’d meant by ‘doing yourselves no good’, and his assistant replied saying that, ‘whilst, of course, the concern you are expressing cannot in any way jeopardise or delay your father’s release, at the same time it will not alter the facts upon which decisions must rest’.10 As it stood, my father was due for release in March 1981, but first he had to get through heart surgery scheduled for the following week.

  My father’s brother, Bill, who lived in New Zealand with his new wife, had a trip planned to the UK, and thought he’d get a health check-up in Harley Street. He was told that because their father had died of a heart attack at age 64, and because his 53-year-old brother was about to undergo heart surgery, it would be a good idea to have two heart bypasses as a kind of preventative measure. Bill, who was 57, had been checked in to have the procedure at Westminster Hospital. I was with my father at Hammersmith Hospital when Bill came to visit, bringing the autobiography of John Masters – the author of 25 books who’d initially had difficulty finding a publisher. It was a kind of ‘don’t give up’ story. I left the brothers to catch up. Both had been trained by the RAF – Bill in Canada, my father in Arizona – and Bill had spent his working life as a pilot for the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC). The brothers had a chance to talk before my father had four bypasses on the 7th November. Bill had two bypasses on the 9th. The first thing my father asked when we were allowed to see him was ‘how’s Bill?’ We had to tell him that Bill had died on the operating table.

  These were dark times. Bill’s death and my father’s precarious state of health added to the general sense of doom and gloom we all felt as a result of seeing England at its most cruel and cold-hearted over the four years since my father had carried out his ‘psychological suicide’ in November 1974. But there were a few good souls who cheered us up immensely. One was a Mrs D. Jones who lived near my parents in Kennington. She’d walked around the area collecting 221 names on a petition asking for my father’s release on compassionate grounds due to his deteriorating state of health, and sent it to the prime minister, Jim Callaghan. She had an acknowledgement from 10 Downing Street, which she sent with a copy of the petition, recorded delivery, to my father on the 13th November while he was still in hospital. We didn’t know who she was, but she brought a sorely needed ray of sunshine into our lives.

  Another star in our eyes was our dear friend from Walsall, my father’s former Labour Party agent, Harry Richards. With other supporters from the area, he started a ‘fighting fund’ which had reached £100, enough to send a letter to every MP in the House of Commons, which included the words: ‘Society has had its pound of flesh from John Stonehouse – to leave him to die in prison would be inhuman and barbaric.’ In a local paper, the Sunday Mercury, on the 19th, Harry is quoted as saying: ‘It would have been easy for me to condemn him like many of his former close friends but if I had done that I would never have been able to live with myself after. If you do not stand by a friend when he is in trouble then you are not a friend at all.’11 If only more people were like Harry, a gem of a man.

  On the 12th November, the Sunday Mirror ran a story on page two with the headline ‘For mercy’s sake, Merlyn!’ and began, ‘Whatever is the matter with Mr Merlyn Rees? Why won’t he do the decent, humane thing as Home Secretary and set John Stonehouse free from the rest of his prison sentence NOW?’12 And in the Daily Mirror on the 18th, former Scotland Yard detective Ken Etheridge thought my father should be paroled and was quoted as saying: ‘He has been punished. I do not really think the public would be offended if he was shown mercy.’13 On the 20th, MP Kenneth Lomas submitted an Early Day Motion (EDM) calling for a debate on urging the home secretary ‘on humanitarian, and medical grounds, to release John Stonehouse from prison immediately’.14 My father’s ex-parliamentary private secretary, Andrew Faulds, thought the word ‘humanitarian’ wouldn’t help, so he made an amendment for that word to be cut. The EDM didn’t collect enough signatures to force a debate but it did seem that the tide of public opinion was turning.

  But elements in the press were not going to allow that to happen. On the 17th, The Times ran an extremely damaging editorial saying £600,000 had disappeared from the Bangladesh Fund. This old and erroneous story had been debunked by everyone in a position to know, including the government of Bangladesh, and now that had to be done again, by Michael O’Dell and MP Bruce Douglas-Mann. It got worse. On the 26th, this headline appeared on the front page of the Sunday Express: ‘£40,000 IN TRUNK STONEHOUSE DENIAL’. The story was based on an anonymous letter on House of Commons paper, addressed to Michael O’Dell, but which had ‘somehow’ come into the hands of the Sunday Express. The article started: ‘John Stonehouse has been questioned over allegations that when he leaves prison he intends to disappear again, using an assumed name and taking with him a small fortune said to be hidden from the police and Department of Trade investigators.’15 The letter referred to a trunk my father had left in a house in Sunningdale, Berkshire, sometimes occupied by a man who my father had met in Brixton Prison. My father had stayed at the house with Sheila a couple of times before the trial, and as there was nothing of value in the trunk it had been left there. The letter said the trunk contained banknotes, letters of introduction in the names of Houston and Thomson, and a blank passport. All that was a lie, but couldn’t be proved because, according to the anonymous author of the letter, and reported in the Sunday Express, the trunk ‘has mysteriously vanished’. Michael sent a copy of the letter to the Official Receiver. This whole story came on the back of The Times editorial of the 17th November, which had also said: ‘If there was any reason to suppose that he might be released to enjoy the spoils of his crimes, that would be reason in itself to deny him parole.’16 In Michael O’Dell’s letter in The Times the following day, he’d said, ‘It should be noted that the Board of Trade inspectors indicated in their report that they did not consider that there were any further monies unaccounted for.’17 Jane told the Sunday People, who had also acquired details of the story, that she was there when the anonymous letter was shown to our father by Michael O’Dell, and, ‘My father simply regarded it as the work of a scurrilous mischief-maker and took no more notice of it than that.’18 That was before we all realised it was going to become front-page news. She added: ‘he hasn’t asked anybody to lift a finger to find [the trunk] because he is totally unconcerned about it.’ Jane wrote to the editor of the Sunday Express on the 5th December asking why they hadn’t come to the family for comment before publishing and said: ‘We have been battling against stories like yours for over 4 years now. False and fanciful stories that have caused so much harm.’ Expecting an apology was like asking a hyena to say sorry they ate your puppy – it wasn’t going to happen. The closest we ever got in similar circumstances was a short letter replying that it had been ‘in the public interest’ – a catch-all phrase that means they can do what they want.

  People involved in this media concoction didn’t want my father to have bail, and were using the notion of hidden money to prevent it. Who was behind it? The letter was anonymous. It was on House of Commons paper, which is easy enough to acquire and, although it might make the story more intriguing, it was a red herring. Only people associated with the house in Sunningdale knew about the trunk, and their only incentive to devise a story about it would be money, and the only place they’d get that from is the press. It’s almost unheard of for a newspaper to print an anonymous letter, and for a weekly to do it on their front page must be unique in media history.

  This mischievous story provided the Sunday Express with increased sales, but put us back to square one. My sister had written to the home secretary, Merlyn Rees, asking him to recommend the exercise of the Royal Prerogative of Mercy so my father could be released from prison. His private secretary, John Chilcot, rep
lied on the 28th November, saying, ‘the Home Secretary has decided that he would not be justified in recommending the remission of the remainder of your father’s sentences.’19 How much his decision was influenced by the malicious false story in the Sunday Express two days earlier, we shall never know.

  Various MPs had written to the home secretary by this time and they got a standard letter back, copies of which they sent us, in which junior Home Office minister, Dr Shirley Summerskill, reassured them that ‘his life cannot be said to be in immediate and predictable danger’. They were only going to release him if he were on the brink of death. Maureen Colquhoun MP wrote, saying, ‘It is all quite appalling – and many MPs I have spoken to, feel he is being badly treated simply because he was an MP.’20 The only MP to actually visit my father during the prison years was Bruce Douglas-Mann, with whom he’d campaigned for the independence of Bangladesh.

  On the 5th December, our father wrote to Jane from Wormwood Scrubs: ‘I have been feeling worse than at any time since the operation. I am suffering pain all over my body – everything aches, spreading from my chest and I walk like a cripple. At nights I still have sweats (although not as bad as before) and this is probably due to the continued infection in my left leg. Anyway I should be patient, they say it takes six months to get over such an operation … My back is hurting me so much when I sit down I am now standing up to write – and it’s much better.’ Being in his single cell was an improvement on the ‘anti-hospital’ ward, as he called it. Many people had written to him in support, but with an allowance of only three letters a week he felt guilty he couldn’t reply.