On Tuesday morning my mother finally caught up with Sheila and they arranged to meet at the flat of one of my mother’s friends. Sheila was trying to behave normally, making polite small talk but, from the look in her eyes, she was terrified. My mother asked if she’d been having an affair with my father and Sheila broke down in sobs, saying ‘Oh dear, oh dear’, over and over again, with mascara running down her cheeks. My mother told Sheila that he’d had several affairs in the past but always came back to her, adding, ‘He could have gone off with someone else entirely. If he reappears you’re welcome to him. Then you’ll find out how painful it is to live with an unfaithful man.’ Sheila sat and cried for a while, then told my mother she’d been his mistress for a long time, that he loved her, and waited on her hand and foot. My mother drove Sheila to an underground station and when they pulled over Sheila said, ‘You may as well know it all. I think I’m going to have his baby.’ My mother felt sick. But she told Sheila, ‘If John does turn up and you’ve got rid of it, it will make him very upset. He loves children.’ Sheila left the car. What she hadn’t told my mother was that she knew my father was alive, and that he knew she thought she was pregnant, because she’d just spent the weekend with him in Copenhagen.
It was humiliating for my mother to discover from the newspapers that my father rented a flat at 25 Vandon Court. The press wanted to know what she knew. She told them that his flat was no secret and that Sheila had lived there and, as Sheila had told her, she’d been paying the rent for two-and-a-half years. I’ve seen original documents that show Sheila paid the rent in June 1972, so that information could have been true. My father wrote to the landlords on the 30th September 1974 to relinquish the lease, giving a month’s notice before vacating the property on the 31st October – when the neighbours saw him and Sheila moving belongings. This confluence of facts led the prosecution to assume Sheila was part of ‘Plan B’, but all it really says is that my father gave up the lease on the flat as part of his overall planning: he didn’t want to leave his love nest to become a possible complication.
By Sheila’s own account, she knew how painful it was to be married to an unfaithful man. She had met her future husband, Roger Buckley, when she was twenty and went to work at the same company of accountants. She ignored the warnings about his womanising and in 1966 they started a relationship. By the time Sheila switched jobs and started working for my father at the House of Commons, in May 1968, she was engaged to Roger. But soon after the wedding in 1969 she discovered he was having an affair. According to an article by Sheila in Woman magazine in October 1976, Roger was supposed to be going to night school, but came home at 1am. Sheila went to the school and found out he’d only attended a few lessons; then she checked his bank statement and found he’d been buying jewellery, but not for her. His firm took him to court over theft, and it was then Roger told Sheila he had a girlfriend and had been lying to her for a long time. At that point, Sheila moved out and the couple separated. She knew that my father rented a small pied-à-terre at Vandon Court; he said she could use it, and gave her his key. They started going to dinner, she fell in love with him, and the affair began.3 Roger Buckley would be reported in the press as saying ‘Stonehouse stole my wife’, but it was likely his own infidelity that broke up that marriage.
There were always press cars and random reporters outside the country house, and 21 Sancroft Street too. It took us a while to work out how to escape them at Faulkners Down House, which was reached by a half-mile lane from the main road: we had to walk through the wood at the back, over the field, and to the main road, where we walked along to a one-pump petrol station owned by a man who allowed us to park a car there. London was easier because of the street layout, and the support of good neighbours. Warren at number 23 wrote offering ‘an escape route’, and around the corner at 3 Stables Way, Pat and Caroline wrote to say ‘We are quite horrified at the number of newsmen outside. If we can be of any help or provide an escape route to avoid them we would be only too pleased to do so.’ We didn’t actually need their kindly offered escape routes because the press never discovered we had one of our own. Sancroft Street had a back door leading to a private patio, and a triangular communal garden that was used by three streets, including ours, and could be accessed from the other streets via two gates. Instead of walking around the block and discovering this for themselves, the press took the milk off our doorstep, trying to force us to go into the street. One day I saw two reporters parked in a car outside waving our milk bottles back and forth and grinning. I grinned back, and went out the back door, through the garden, to the shop, and came back the same way. This is the way my mother left the house to meet Sheila on a second occasion, after my mother had returned from Australia in January. Her car was parked in the street on the far side of the garden and she picked Sheila up at the telephone box at Kennington Cross, yards from the omnipresent yet oblivious press. They drove around London and talked.
On the 12th December, things began to get gruesome with the The Sun’s story, ‘Slab of Concrete Murder Clue to Lost MP’. It began: ‘A Mafia-type “concrete overcoat” murder may solve the mystery of missing MP John Stonehouse police said yesterday’ and said ‘Fort Lauderdale police sergeant Jim Bock said the slab bears an imprint of a human body … police are working on the possibility that it was Mr Stonehouse’s body.’4 Bock was quoted as saying ‘All the dates seem to fit.’ Hair and fluid samples had been taken and were being examined by forensic experts. The connection seemed to be that my father was involved in international cement deals, but the Mafia liked to have a monopoly on the cement trade, and they operated out of Miami. On the 16th, the Daily Mirror introduced the concept of a ‘Concrete Coffin Probe’. The British police were tasked with finding samples of my father’s hair, and his blood type and dental records, and getting them to the Fort Lauderdale Police in Miami who, on 4th December, had found another blood-stained pile of concrete, containing hair once again. So now my mother was running around trying to locate samples of my father’s hair, while his blood type proved quite difficult to ascertain, causing delay and annoyance to the Florida police.
It was around this time that stories began to appear about my father being connected in some way to the death of a 37-year-old Nigerian man called Sylvester Okereke, who was found floating in the Thames in November. The connection was that they’d both had some involvement in the sale of cement to Nigeria. The British soon established there was no association, but in Nigeria, in June 1975, two magazine articles weaved a connection, using faked correspondence addressed to my father at ‘Vandon Court, Vandon Place’. Given that Vandon Place doesn’t exist, and there was no reason for business mail to go to Vandon Court, this whole story seems a figment of someone’s imagination. Nevertheless, it came to the attention of D.E.R. Moore of the West African Department of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, who wrote on the 29th August 1975 to the Solicitor’s Branch of the Department of Trade, with a longer draft letter for the attention of the Home Office. It ended up on the desk of Brian Bubbear at the Directorate of Custody: ‘So far the Nigerian Government have not raised the issue with us; nor do we expect them to. They will probably shed no tears over the demise abroad of a man alleged to be a former Biafran intelligence officer. But if the press attention turned to Stonehouse’s alleged (and denied) espionage background, their interest might increase.’5 The Biafrans, in the south east of Nigeria, attempted to break away from Nigeria in 1967, leading to the Biafran war which lasted until 1970.
Aside from the usual background noise of negativity, such as in the Daily Mirror on the 13th December – ‘The Jinx that Haunted John Stonehouse’ and ‘A man hungry for big money’ – the press focus over the 12th, 13th, 14th and 15th was on life insurance. A massive banner headline on the front page of the Daily Mirror on the 13th said: ‘Lost MP insured his life for £119,000’. On the 14th, my mother told the Daily Express, ‘Cannot people understand that if his death was merely to raise money it was a pointless exercise? If this
was my husband’s intention, he was very remiss in not leaving his body.’ And she told the Daily Mail, ‘It is going to be a great struggle to get any money unless a body is found.’ One of the insurances was with the Royal Insurance Company, £30,000 for a seven-year period, taken out in early August. It would have run out of term by the time seven years without a body had passed. On the 15th December the Sunday Express quoted the chairman of the Royal, Mr Daniel Meinertzhagen: ‘I should imagine that if no body can be found there would be some difficulty establishing a claim. Certain legal actions would have to be taken by the claimant.’6 The police arrived to question my mother: a woman and a man. They sat on the sofa, and my mother showed them the policies. The woman looked first, then handed them to the man. He mumbled something, and the woman handed them back to my mother who told them that the trigger that led to the life insurances had been the demolition of my father’s car by an IRA bomb on the 19th May. My mother arranged the policies, and my father organised when he should go for the medical checks. The policeman asked: ‘why so many?’ She told him they were short-term, and in smaller amounts, so that gave flexibility. One or two could be stopped, or changed easily. Apparently satisfied, the police left. Not long after, a reporter arrived and asked about the policies. She showed them to him too. There was never any secrecy about the life insurances, and once people grasped that they were short-term and simply couldn’t be claimed without a body, they accepted that. Until the director of public prosecutions came along, that is.
We’d been waiting for Frolik to cash in on the Stonehouse disappearance, and that body blow came in the Daily Mirror on the 16th and 17th December. On the 16th, under the large front-page headline, ‘Stonehouse Security Sensation’, we read: ‘Missing MP John Stonehouse was under constant security watch before he disappeared. Secret Service officers built up a five-year dossier on him following certain allegations made when he was Minister of Posts and Telecommunications.’7 On the 17th, under the front-page headline ‘MP was named as Spy Contact’, it said: ‘Missing MP John Stonehouse was a contact for a communist spy ring, according to a high-ranking Czech intelligence agent.’8 And there was a picture of Frolik staring out at us. At that time, it was assumed my father was dead, so Frolik didn’t think he’d have to worry about libel laws as anything can be said about a dead person with no legal comeback (Frolik didn’t mention my father by name in his book, when it was published in July 1975).
The prime minister, Harold Wilson, immediately consulted the head of MI5, Sir Michael Hanley, and by 3.15pm he was on his feet telling the House of Commons that the allegations had been made in 1969, investigated by the Security Service who questioned Frolik and Stonehouse, and came to the conclusion there was no evidence. He added that he had, today, been told no evidence had come to light since then, and there was no truth in the reports that Stonehouse was under investigation or surveillance by the Security Service at the time of his disappearance. The former prime minister, Edward Heath, replied, saying that the very fact a statement is being made in response to press reports ‘opens up a situation in which all sorts of stories can circulate in the press and allegations can be made, and if they are not then denied in Parliament credence is given to them’. Harold Wilson then reminded Heath that he himself had made a statement in the House following the disappearance of high-ranking MI6 officer and KGB spy, Kim Philby: ‘considerable surprise was caused when he volunteered the statement that Philby was the third man involved on a famous occasion.’ Wilson then added the comment which would add insult to Frolik’s injury: ‘One must always face the possibility that defectors, when leaving a country where they previously were and finding their capital – intellectual capital, of course – diminishing, try to revive their memories of these matters.’ He said it had been ascertained that my father ‘was not in any sense a security risk’, and that it was only ‘fair and right’ that he make a statement ‘since so many newspapers have published top front-page headlines on this matter’. Because, that same day, the Daily Mail’s front page had been ‘Was Stonehouse working for CIA?’ Wilson further added, ‘He was not an agent of the CIA.’
We appreciated the comments of Mr Molloy: ‘Would the Prime Minister agree that the media should respond to his statement, in that the tarnishing rumours and innuendoes should cease and that the Stonehouse family should now be released from the distressing pressures causing unnecessary pain and anguish to them?’ The prime minister replied: ‘Great distress has been caused. I understand that the mother of my right hon. Friend has suffered a serious heart attack because of the anxiety and pressure. Some members of the press are hounding them in their homes – the children, their domestic staff and other persons connected with the family – to ask them far-fetched questions about matters which at the end of the day must be settled by the police authorities in another country.’ The prime minister was referring to America when he said ‘another country’, but on this same day, the 17th December, it was the Australian Victoria State Police who were trying to settle questions by messaging Interpol and asking what they knew about Mr Joseph Markham.
The following day the Daily Mirror’s banner headline read: ‘Wilson: Defector Did Name Lost MP’, reporting that Wilson had said that security services had ‘found no evidence to support these allegations or that Mr Stonehouse was a security risk’.9 Also that day, the Daily Mail broadened the subject under the heading ‘The spy and Mr Stonehouse’, saying ‘People have a right to be reassured that he was no Czech spy. But also what he was up to in business dealings.’10 The Daily Express also ran the Wilson denial, but linked it with a story headed ‘The MP who loved money’. Not a day could pass without the press making my father look bad: if not a spy, then greedy. The Sun had a small front-page panel, ‘Missing MP was quizzed by MI5 says Wilson’, with most of the page reporting on the three IRA bombs in London. Two Irish women were seen running away from one scene in Bloomsbury, where a post office worker was killed. It reminded us, as if we needed it, that taking out life insurance in 1974 wasn’t strange, it was sensible. There was a two-page spread, ‘The Stonehouse File’, on pages four to five which included the tantalising question: ‘Was he being blackmailed by the Czechs?’ Christopher Sweeney of The Times, who’d published an interview with Frolik in January, had told LBC radio that ‘according to Frolik, Mr Stonehouse was being blackmailed’. This story wasn’t going away. There was speculation that he’d defected by swimming to a submarine off the coast of Miami, been taken the 200 miles to communist Cuba, and put on a ship to Russia. On the other hand, was he the man spotted dancing in a Florida nightclub? The speculation and negative press reports kept coming. As did the reporters at the door. In the country, when it was raining and we didn’t want to walk through the wood and across the field to get to the shops, we adopted a siege mentality – trying unsuccessfully to make bread from the contents of an increasingly bare cupboard.
On the 19th December The Times announced that my father’s phone had been bugged on the orders of the prime minister, Harold Wilson. On the front page of the Daily Mail there was a photo of Sheila in her wedding dress under the headings: ‘Woman who moved into Stonehouse’s bachelor flat’ and ‘Secretary knew secrets of missing MP’. The financial losses in the property market had badly affected the Crown Agents and on the 20th the Daily Mail ran a story saying some of their losses were because of an investment they’d made in my father’s BBT, which in June had been renamed the London Capital Group. On the same day, the Daily Mail ran a piece titled ‘Missing MP ran his empire on borrowed cash’. On the 22nd, the Sunday Times ran two stories: on the front page we read ‘Did Mafia cut in on Stonehouse’s £6½ million deal’; on page thirteen, ‘The Demise of a Super-Salesman’. The only good news was that the Miami police had checked my father’s blood group against samples from the ‘concrete coffin’, and they didn’t match. The whole family were emotionally and mentally exhausted by the time we again retreated to Faulkners Down House to prepare for Christmas. My poor mother was close to c
ollapse. At this point there’d been so much negative publicity, people didn’t know whether my father was a communist spy, a CIA spy, involved with the Mafia, a greedy fraud, a thief or an adulterer. But they’d learned one thing from the newspapers – he was bad!
On Christmas Eve we were wrapping presents in my father’s study and remembering him. He always left Christmas until the afternoon of Christmas Eve, when he went shopping. I went with him once to the Army and Navy department store in Victoria and watched him buy a dozen presents in half an hour. It was amazing. At the perfume counter he stood behind and above the crowd, holding up two fingers, until he caught the eye of the saleswoman, when he confirmed ‘two’ and pointed to a perfume, then put up one finger and pointed to another. The woman put the three bottles of perfume in a bag, took his payment, and we moved on. In this way we went from department to department, quickly collecting presents. When he got home, he’d always wrap them himself using unusual and amusing paper he found around the house and making his own gift-tags with funny little drawings on them. We missed him.
John Stonehouse, My Father Page 9