1979 was an excruciating year, which we all spent just hoping my father would survive. On 9th January, he was again railing against the state of the country: ‘Increasingly I realise the Trade Union leaders are greedy barons behaving as if their members were their feudal fiefs. Cynically (that’s the way) they begin to behave “responsibly” in the one or two years before retirement so they can collect their “Companions of Honour” (CH) and peerages as with Jones and Scanlon. Moss Evans has a long way to go yet and meanwhile he intends to be a bully boy. As for the “statesmanlike” Len Murray, I heard him last night and thought I would puke: what he was saying was such patent nonsense.’ But it was good to hear, ‘My health is better. Am off most of the pills and Hammersmith hospital don’t need to see me for another six months. My time is spent 23½ hours a day in my single cell with books and radio.’
The next week he was transferred to the hospital wing of Norwich Prison, but then put in the main prison, which he described as ‘cold and forbidding and inhospitable. It was ghastly to be in a cell without heating for most of the day.’ It was the coldest winter since 1947. But, as luck would have it, by 9th February he’d been transferred to the warmer ‘Annex’ and given a new job: ‘It is really two jobs combined: Librarian and Education “Redband”. The former means taking care of 3,000 books (indexing, issuing etc.) and the latter means rushing around in the evenings making sure the “classes” are organised properly.’ He enjoyed sitting among so many books and said the selection was ‘quite good considering there are only 100 inmates as the library’s potential customers’. He wrote, ‘The Annex as you would have seen is an old army barracks and fortunately the “prison” atmosphere is at a minimum. Everyone is much more relaxed than in the old-fashioned institutions. Life is therefore bearable and it is warmer!’ The annex had hardly changed in years, and still had no window bars or locked doors. He wrote, ‘In fact the only locked door I go through is to the library and I keep the key.’ This whole set up was so much better than anything before, and it gave us hope. Above all, we were pleased to hear: ‘The staff are much nicer than any I have come across before and they largely leave inmates alone.’ But prison visits were always frustrating. As my father wrote, ‘there is never enough time to talk properly! Remember those wonderful unlimited hours in the hospital.’ It comes to something when recovering from open-heart surgery has an up-side. But, by 22nd March, he was not in a good way: ‘Certain incidents have propelled me into a distant country called melancholia so please forgive me for writing so little this time.’
Having someone you love in prison is literally a nightmare. In dreams, I’d see Kafka-like scenes of people with pallid, puffy skin, shuffling down long corridors with their heads hung low, to the sound of metal doors slamming and keys jingling. The days were better, but if I heard the words ‘The former …’ on the radio or TV, my heart would stop because I’d expect to hear ‘The former disgraced minister, John Stonehouse, died in prison today.’ I did the only thing I could do – write letters. On the 25th April, my father wrote ‘My dear Julia, You start your last letter (dated 23/4) apologising for not writing earlier but dear daughter you have showered me with meaningful letters in the past five weeks and I do not feel neglected at all. It is good to be kept in touch, to have a few lifelines to sanity. How one needs them!’ I was very pleased to hear he was getting some help: ‘A doctor from the old constituency (Dr Ralph Morton Brown) is campaigning for my release and has been supported in the press (not the nationals of course who ignore it) by the former mayor of Wednesbury (Mark Allen). I’ve had several very sympathetic and supportive letters from various people.’
When I visited my father on the 7th June, he made a record of how much time we had – one hour and 51 minutes. He’d been busying himself by building a lexicon of 1,000 new words. On the 9th, he wrote: ‘Some of them are so expressive I wonder how I managed till now to do without them. “Ultracrepidarian” for instance which means “one who criticises beyond his knowledge”. There are thousands of those around!’ Sheila and he had been writing to each other using Chaucerian English and little-known words to avoid the warder-censors understanding what they were saying, and in this letter to me he wrote: ‘Incidentally I must apologise for my parrhesia on Thursday but I had to let you know I am passible no longer. It is doubtful if I shall ever be resipiscent until this stercoraceous business is redressed. It would be a pity if it has to be post-exequial but somehow I feel we won’t have to wait that long. Fortunately I am no longer a dysthemiac although my dyslogy is still badly frustrated. However the opportunities for positive action will be accrescent if I am callid.’ The warders wouldn’t have known this meant: ‘Sorry to speak candidly on Thursday but I had to let you know I’m no longer able to suffer. It’s doubtful I shall return to sanity until this shit business is redressed. It would be a pity if it has to be after I’m dead but somehow I feel we won’t have to wait that long. Fortunately I’m no longer depressed although my ability to express ideas and reason is still frustrated by my mental disorder. However, the opportunities for positive action will continue to grow if I’m clever about it.’
In July we were told our father would be released in August. He wrote to me on the 29th July: ‘Many thanks for your cheering letters and the lovely birthday card. You are great to keep my spirits up during this most extraordinary torture. Strangely, now it is nearing its end I feel the pain. It has a physical property. I can touch it. I can put it aside and other things contemplate but always I know it is there. It has a numbing effect. Partly the pain is my continued incredulity that men are capable in a country that aspires to civilization to inflict such cruelty on others. I can only suppose it is part of the circus of Government as it is surely evident there can be no positive good from it. I want you and Jane to know how much I have appreciated, admired and drawn comfort from your unflagging support over all this time.’ In his last letter to Jane from prison, he wrote, ‘I am numb and I need to rest.’
The newspapers were gearing up for his release. On the 6th August, the London Evening News ran the front-page headline: ‘Ex-MP does less than half sentence: STONEHOUSE TO BE FREED.’ The report said: ‘The news of his release was broken today by his mother, Mrs Rosina Stonehouse, at her home in Southampton.’21 They quoted my 84-year-old grandmother as saying about Sheila: ‘I don’t know what she hopes to get out of him. He’s got nothing for her and he’s too old for that sort of thing now.’22 The next day, the Daily Mail’s front-page headline rang out: ‘Ex-MP gets parole – and faces family row STONEHOUSE’S STORMY FREEDOM.’ It told the world: ‘He will leave Norwich Jail at 7.30am on Tuesday after serving less than half his seven-year sentence for theft, fraud and deception.’ They quoted my grandmother as saying ‘I never want to speak to her and I will refuse to see her. I know she wants to marry him, but he is far too old for her. She helped to ruin him – I’ll never forgive her.’23 On the following day, the Daily Mail continued the story with a headline on page three: ‘That woman answers back’. Most of the page was taken up with photos of Sheila walking down the street after leaving work, and on the tube escalator, trying to avoid the reporters. Apparently, she said: ‘She is a very old woman who has completely misunderstood the situation.’24 The report continued ‘And she in turn criticised Mrs Stonehouse – for publicising the fact that her son is to be released on parole next Tuesday.’25 That was probably made up, but it kept the column inches dramatic, which is always the object of the reporter’s exercise.
On the 8th August 1979, our father wrote to both Jane and myself, saying, ‘Please do not have anything to do with the arrangements for my discharge.’ To me he said, ‘The circus is shattering and appalling. Please excuse me for being blunt but on no account must you or Jane or anyone come anywhere near the prison or Norwich on the day of my release. I mean this. Do not come under any circumstances. I shall not be able to leave the prison if you or anyone comes. We cannot add to the ballyhoo by having any such pressure.’ We understood his concern. On a pre
vious occasion, when Jane and I had picked him up from prison after he’d been given bail, we’d hired a professional driver to get away from the press cars and motorbikes, and it had been absolutely terrifying. We were taking him to meet up with Sheila in a remote location and couldn’t have the press know where that was. We were driven at high speed, doing sudden U-turns and changes of direction, and although we soon lost the cars, the motorbikes stuck to us like glue. Eventually, we lost them too. Since then, my father had had three heart attacks – which the prison ignored, thinking he was malingering – and open-heart bypass surgery. Doing a repeat of the fast car escape would be dangerous to him, as well as to us.
He was finally released from Norwich Prison on the 14th August with a coat over his head, concealing his face from the press, and driven away by his solicitor, Michael O’Dell, who had to cross three counties before they could shake off the press. Since his arrest in Melbourne on the 24th December 1974, my father had experienced nothing but mental turmoil, and spent four years and seven months either preparing for trial, attending court, or behind bars.
17
Freedom
It would be 40 hours before Sheila could meet up with my father. First, Michael had to shake off the press and get my father to a safe house to spend the night. The next day, once reassured the press had been thrown off the scent, a friend of Sheila’s picked my father up from a London street and took him to another pick-up point, from where he was taken to the house Sheila had borrowed from friends in London, a few days before. When he arrived, they hugged and sat on the sofa holding hands. Sheila said later that she felt very nervous. Come Dancing was on the TV with the sound down, but he turned it up, held out his hand and said, ‘Come on, I want to dance with you.’ He’d always been a good dancer. This broke the ice, and then they talked for the first time, properly, in three-and-a-half years. While he’d been in prison, Sheila had worked as a temp secretary using her middle and maiden name, Elizabeth Black. That had given her anonymity and if people said she looked like Sheila Buckley, she’d brush it off with, ‘I know I look like her, everyone says that.’ Now there would be no anonymity, and finding peace would be a struggle.
Two weeks later, on the 1st September, the entire front page of the Daily Mirror was taken up with a small, smiling ‘before’ photo of my father and an enormous, unsmiling ‘now’ photo, and one of Sheila. On page two there was a photo of the place where they’d been staying. He wrote to me from Hunstanton in Norfolk that day, saying: ‘We are exploring the quaint villages of Northern Norfolk, every one of which has a 14th-century church, walking along the sand dunes by the Wash and even immersing in the North Sea. This Indian summer is a surprising bonus. We had the use of a cottage but survived there only 22 hours as the Mirror were hiding in the hedge on our return on the second day from a lovely trip to Thetford Forest … That awful experience was on Thursday and they spread the terrible photograph all over the front page today. Is there no other news? Only one person knew we were there so we know who told the Mirror. It was a terrible breach of trust. Saddening.’ The press photographers hounded them for months with their numbers slowly dwindling until there was just one, who seemed to live outside their front door. One day my father came out with a cardboard box over his head with two cut-out eyes and the words ‘John Stonehouse’ written across it, got in his car and drove away. The photographer took the photo and presumably showed it to the picture editors in Fleet Street. It seems even they realised that enough was enough because that photo was never published, and the photographer never seen again.
Having survived prison and heart surgery, my father was just pleased to be alive. He became easy-going and appreciative of the simple things in life. He and Sheila were homeless and moving from borrowed place to place while the owners were away. He looked for a job and applied for posts as a university lecturer, but nothing materialised and, anyway, his doctor had advised him to avoid stress. Not wanting to be idle, in January 1980, he started volunteering for a charity called Community Links in Newham, East London. He invited the press to see him there as a way of bursting the bubble of interest before it turned into an ongoing circus. The remit of the charity was to develop links within the community, encouraging mutual self-help, developing homes for homeless young people and single parents, and going door to door to collect unwanted items that others might need. He was asked whether he was doing this work to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of the public. He replied ‘Frankly, I couldn’t care less what is written about me, because 99 per cent of it is twisted and vicious.’ He would work at Community Links for a year but found Newham depressing, writing to me in December, ‘It is an extraordinarily dull area. In a place of real deprivation one could feel some animation but it is difficult in a place inhabited by seedy, apathetic characters who hardly stir to make their environment better. The ennui of the welfare state is not something the socialist pioneers anticipated: it creeps everywhere deadening human relationships.’ Shortly after starting in Newham, he and Sheila had moved into a small flat at 157 Ashmore Road, in Queen’s Park, North-West London, provided by the Brent People’s Housing Association at a cost of £13 a week. Some people were reported as saying it should’ve gone to people more needy or worthy. Sheila continued to be the breadwinner.
In March of that year my mother married Dennis Flexney-Briscoe, a lovely, uncomplicated man, who enjoyed having a laugh and was never without new jokes. Like my father, he would extend a helping hand to anyone in need, and enjoyed doing The Times crossword. They moved to a house in Kennington and converted two floors to offices, from which my mother continued her public relations business, and Dennis started a marketing consultancy. They enjoyed working together to promote a wide variety of businesses and had a very interesting life, before retiring to a cottage set in a magnificent valley in Wiltshire. They would be married for 32 years – six years longer than my mother’s marriage to my father. My parents met only once after he came out of prison. Jane was having the opening party for her painting show at an art gallery near the Connaught Hotel in Mayfair. My mother and Dennis met my father in the bar there, wanting to break the ice in private before entering the fray where photographers were expected. They made sure to keep their distance at the event, so no photo could be taken of them together.
My father and Sheila married in January 1981, by which time he was writing novels: Ralph would be published in 1982; The Baring Fault in 1986; and Oil on the Rift in 1987. In December 1982, Sheila gave birth to their son, James, and my father became a stay-at-home dad when Sheila went back to work. They’d moved to a house at 20 Shirland Mews, W9, by this time, where he’d be found organising papers on the table while trying to keep the crawling baby under control. He was a very good care-giver, keeping his cool throughout it all. Our favourite place to meet up was by the Serpentine in Hyde Park, where we’d picnic and catch up with family news while watching James run around. My father seemed generally very happy and relaxed during this period, although he would still get stressed when he gave print or TV interviews, forever trying to explain why his sentence had been so unjust. He’d been discharged from his bankruptcy in June 1980, and five years later became involved in a business that manufactured hotel safes. In late 1987, they were still living in London, but were planning to move permanently into the house they’d just bought in Southampton. They were looking forward to a peaceful new life of taking James for walks in the New Forest. But that was not to be.
On the 25th March 1988, my father went to Birmingham to appear on a late-night live TV debate show called ‘Central Weekend’. The segment he was involved in was about missing people. As usual, he found himself trying to correct the interviewer’s erroneous facts and tried to explain his psychiatric suicide. This brought on a minor heart attack and he collapsed, falling out of his chair. He was taken to Birmingham hospital, where he stayed overnight. In the very last letter to Jane, on the 30th March, he wrote, ‘Central TV are very sorry! They sent me a big bunch of flowers. I cannot remember
ever receiving a bunch before so I feel I must be nearing the end. Sort of advance funeral tribute.’ The same day he replied to a letter of concern from Bill McCash, chairman of the Falcon Field Association – an association of ex-pilots who were trained by the RAF in Mesa, outside Phoenix, Arizona, of which my father was a member. He wrote in the jovial form of a pilot’s report from ‘Course 27 member, JTS’: ‘Re: incident 23:55 hours 25 March 1988. It was extremely embarrassing to have a duff landing at an on-air show with millions watching the air display. It was considered to be more than a prang and the show was brought to a premature end. However the ground crews were quickly on the scene and managed to avert a greater tragedy by keeping the engine ticking over … It is apparent that at some stage during its useful life this engine has been tampered with – probably being through dangerous and taxing assignments which overstretched its capacity … PS Technical note: The engine overhaul which was completed in 1978 included bypass additional (4) to the cylinders to improve fuel flow to the combustion chambers. This is now subject to a bush bundle malfunction.’
Two weeks later he was dead. He’d gone to the new house in Southampton to recuperate and finish his last novel, Who Sold Australia?. Sheila described his last minutes: ‘“He always felt cold and I tucked him up in bed and started to take off my make-up. Then I heard him say in a whisper: ‘I feel terribly faint.’ Then, ‘Sheila, tell me you love me.’ It was not the sort of thing he would ever ordinarily say, but I answered with all my heart. He was very happy and very calm. I would say it almost radiated from him.” He died moments later.’1 It was the 14th April 1988, and he was 62 years old.
John Stonehouse, My Father Page 27
