John Stonehouse, My Father

by Julia Stonehouse

  My father took Sheila to her friend’s house, then started looking for my mother. She and Mathew had decided to rest in Sydney for a couple of days and the Kirlews had found a hotel where she could drive the car into an underground car park and take a lift directly to the floor where she’d booked a room, thus avoiding any press who might be in the foyer. It seemed a perfect hideaway and, as an extra protective measure, the Kirlews booked themselves into a room next to my mother and Mathew’s. The next evening, the phone rang in my mother’s room. It was my father, wanting to have dinner with her. She told him she was still too upset to see him and, anyway, didn’t want to leave her hotel. ‘There’s no need to,’ he said, ‘I’m in the room next door to you.’ My mother nearly fainted. She phoned the Kirlews in the adjacent room on the other side and they said they’d come so the four of them could have dinner together in the sitting room of my mother’s suite. My father arrived holding a Valentine’s card. He’d already given Sheila hers. Over dinner, the Kirlews tried to explain to my father that my mother’s nerves couldn’t take any more, that it would be better for her to return to London and make a new life while he could stay with Sheila. My father put his head in his hands and said, ‘I can’t cope without Barbara. I’m desperate. I need her and she knows I love her.’ My mother succumbed to my father’s appeal, and they returned to Melbourne with Mathew, leaving Sheila in Sydney.

  While all this drama was going on, Ian Ward was stirring a big pot of trouble. On the 12th February he had two exclusives in the Daily Telegraph. The front-page story was innocuous enough, ‘Secretary flies in to greet Stonehouse’, but on page three he delivered a devastating work of fiction: ‘Stonehouse Had Secretary’s Clothes Sent On’. (In later editions that day it would be headlined ‘Stonehouse shipped secretary’s clothes three months ago’.) It began: ‘A trunk-load of clothes belonging to Mr John Stonehouse’s secretary, Mrs Sheila Buckley, 28, who was reunited with him in Perth this morning, was sent to Australia last November at about the time the Labour MP disappeared … it would suggest that the MP for Walsall North had intended all along to meet Mrs Buckley in Australia. The metal trunk containing Mrs Buckley’s day and evening dresses, slips, shoes and handbags as well as some of Mr Stonehouse’s personal effects lay, unbeknown to Australian police, in a Melbourne customs warehouse for some weeks.’6 In fact, the trunk arrived at Melbourne docks with no female clothing in it whatsoever, was examined by a customs officer named Robert Rowland Hill who saw no female clothing in it, only a man’s clothing. It was delivered to Yellingbo, where my mother had stayed with my father, and where my father put into the trunk the clothing my mother had left behind while she was in London for three weeks. They couldn’t have been Sheila’s clothes, because she’d not yet arrived in Australia.

  Ian Ward’s story continued: ‘On Wednesday Mr Stonehouse transferred all Mrs Buckley’s clothing from the trunk to a red suitcase and arranged for this to be stored in a Melbourne suburban home. Yesterday, although no one was in at the time, he entered the house and retrieved the case, leaving a bunch of flowers and a note for the occupier.’7 Anyone reading this in the Daily Telegraph would be convinced that my father was a dastardly cad who wanted nothing more than to run away with his much younger secretary. And this story couldn’t be dismissed as the made-up fantasy of a cheap tabloid because it was in the most ‘serious’ establishment newspaper in the country – read by politicians, lawyers, judges and DTI inspectors. This was their newspaper, and they believed every word. The Ward trunk story led, inevitably, to Sheila being implicated in the plan to run away. The story was so damaging because, if Sheila was planning to be in Australia before my father left England for Miami, that indicated my father had a plot, not a nervous breakdown. It also pointed to a conspiracy between my father and Sheila.

  Ward’s trunk article was copied by other newspapers. On the 13th February 1975, under the Daily Mail’s headline ‘The love trap triangle’, the country read: ‘Some of Mrs Buckley’s clothes, Mrs Stonehouse also learned, were sent by trunk to Australia last November, before the Member for Walsall North was found by police and his plot to fake his death was uncovered.’8 And just to confirm the conspiracy angle, they said that in one of her letters she’d said she was pregnant, which was ‘a reminder to him that they had a pact for a life of love on the other side of the world’.

  The Ward trunk story had legs that would run all the way to the very last day of the trial at the Old Bailey, and beyond. The truth of the matter – there were no woman’s clothes in the trunk when it left London – got lost along the way. Ian Ward spent over two days, between the 7th and 9th June 1976, defending his article in the witness box. Although the police interviewed the customs officer Robert Hill in 1975, in a classic case of non-disclosure his testimony wasn’t included in the court documentation. At the Old Bailey in August 1976, Judge Eveleigh told the court his ‘name did not appear on the back of the indictment. He was not a witness that the prosecution were under an obligation to bring to this court.’9 The prosecution only decided to tell the defence about Robert Hill on 10th June after Ward had given evidence. The defence then had a mad scramble to locate him on the other side of the world, and get his statement into court. Michael O’Dell, my father’s solicitor, described the difficulties to the court, which the Judge summarised for the jury: ‘His mother would not disclose his address and he was not at home. Then he was found, and at first there was difficulty because of bureaucratic obstacles in getting a statement from him, and you can understand that because he was a Customs Officer. In the end a statement was obtained.’ But he couldn’t get to court because he ‘had broken his legs, and it might be necessary for him to be accompanied by his wife’.10 With all this delay, Mr Hill’s statement could only finally be read to the court on the very last day of the defence, 20th July. Mr Hill said: ‘I saw this item of baggage opened in my presence and under my supervision. I did not see a blouse, a black slip or any ladies shoes or any article of ladies clothing.’11 By that time it was too late – everyone had already been convinced that Sheila was in it from the beginning.

  My sister Jane arrived in Melbourne and the family settled into a routine. Their ‘unit’ was a tiny two-bedroom flat but at least the majority of the press didn’t know where it was, and that became its greatest redeeming feature. Jane and Mathew took turns sleeping on the living room floor. My father started writing his book out in longhand in the bathroom, and my mother would type it out in the sitting room. They didn’t talk about Sheila. My father and Mathew played endless games of backgammon and Scrabble. Dramas came and went.

  Ian Ward delivered another bombshell on the 25th February. In a Daily Telegraph article, ‘Secretary’s secret Copenhagen days with Stonehouse’, he said that: ‘She flew to the Danish capital after receiving an urgent telephone call from Mr Stonehouse a few hours after his arrival there’ (my italics).12 That once again made it look as if he was in cahoots with Sheila. But it wasn’t like that at all. The facts are that my father arrived in Copenhagen on the 29th November 1974, but didn’t phone Sheila that day, or on the 30th, or the 1st, or 2nd, or 3rd. He phoned and asked her to come to Copenhagen on the 4th, she arrived on the evening of the 6th, and they both left on the 8th – she back to London, and he to Australia.

  Sheila described herself as ‘a bit puritanical, a bit prim’,13 and while I might not admire her capacity to have an affair for years on end with my father, she was never the wild sort of character who’d go along with the mad escape from reality ‘Plan B’ growing inside my father’s head over the course of 1974. But what all the misreporters did over 1975 was create a distorted picture of collusion and conspiracy where there was, in reality, just love and loyalty. The reason for that is simple – as a narrative, Bonnie and Clyde was a money-spinner.

  The 25th February also saw the start of six days of grilling by DTI inspectors, carried out by Michael Sherrard QC and Ian Hay Davison. Backed up with an array of recording equipment, they tried to find out what had been goi
ng on with his businesses. Reliving the whole experience was emotionally exhausting and left my father utterly depleted. The air conditioning in the offices they were using was on full blast and the place was freezing, making the experience even worse. They gave my father an undertaking he’d be given an opportunity to make comments on the DTI’s report, but that never happened.

  Jane soon learned that our father was still at breaking point. She was 26 at the time and had never seen my father in such a horrendous state. He would cry, scream, bang his head on the floor repeatedly, rush around the flat shouting, and even lose complete control of his body. She was terrified. They all were. The real concern was that he’d go into one of these episodes never to return, for his mind to literally explode into unrecoverable madness, or for him to simply kill himself. Some days he would be found curled up in a ball on the sofa. Or he’d just cut out when my mother was talking to him about something that needed to be dealt with, by simply falling asleep in the chair. He really should have been in a psychiatric institution, but simply refused to go. Instead, the family were on constant guard, trying to calm the outbursts and keep him on an even keel. It wasn’t easy. The bad press reports kept coming, and issuing denials seemed pointless as they were rarely printed, or became one-liners at the very end of otherwise damning articles. This is such a feature of British journalism that, even today, I go straight to the last lines in damaging newspaper reports about other people to find the denial they issued if, indeed, it was printed.

  My father was talking to Sheila on the phone regularly. My sister overheard him one day saying, ‘Remember, I love you madly and passionately.’ Jane asked him straight out why he stayed with our mother if he loved Sheila and he said he loved and wanted them both. This is something we all had to get used to. On the 5th March, Jane and my father went on a trip to Canberra to visit the Bangladesh and Brazilian High Commissions, hoping for permission to travel there. On the journey, he announced they’d be meeting up with Sheila and collecting her from the bus garage that evening. There was a convention in town and all the hotels were full but, with luck, they managed to find a two-bedroomed apartment they could rent for a few days. Jane wrote in her diary that Sheila was ‘definitely in command’ and ‘seems to boss him a little’. Rather awkwardly, my father and Sheila shared a bedroom, and Jane slept in the other. She wrote: ‘I’ve retired quickly to my nasty room – she and pa are preparing themselves for their lovemaking – I hope to God they’re quiet – that I could not bear.’ For the next few days, this odd threesome went swimming from deserted beaches, and sightseeing. Jane also accompanied our father when he made a short visit to the immigration minister, Clyde Cameron, to thank him for his treatment and apologise for the embarrassment.

  On the 21st March, my father was at the ‘unit’ in Toorak Road working on his book when there was a knock at the door. It was Detective Inspector Robert Gillespie of the Australian Commonwealth Police, with DI Craig and DSS Coffey. ‘Hallo, Bob, come on in,’ said my father. After the introductions, Gillespie said, ‘Sorry, John, I’ve got some bad news for you. I have here a warrant for your arrest.’ This came as a complete shock to my father, because he’d not heard anything at all from Scotland Yard, and the DTI enquiries had been over for weeks. My mother and Mathew had gone shopping for a school uniform in expectation that the family could be in Australia for some time, and they now arrived back. My parents were allowed to have a word together in the bedroom, watched by Gillespie, and as my father got something out of a bedside drawer, Gillespie spotted documents in the name of Markham. He said, ‘I deem those documents would be relevant to the subject matter of the charges mentioned in this warrant. Would you like to examine them with me?’ My father said, no, he wouldn’t examine anything unless his solicitor was present, and Gillespie said, ‘By virtue of this warrant I intend to seize these documents.’ The three policemen then gathered up every single piece of paper they could find. Mathew watched as DI Craig searched behind the pictures on the wall.

  Gillespie had received a phone call from Chief Superintendent Etheridge of Scotland Yard at 5.20am that morning, and a telex message followed two hours later. The telex had instructed Gillespie to gather all paperwork, and refuse bail. All the pages of the book my father was working on were seized and copied for Scotland Yard, which included a chapter about the Scotland Yard investigation into the BBT in January 1973. The magistrate at the Melbourne Court granted my father bail on the low surety of A$1,000, despite the instructions from London.

  The next day, the front page of the Daily Mail blared out: ‘Yard Want MP’s Girl Friend to Return’. The smaller front-page story had two headlines in two editions, one being, ‘He needs me now says Mrs Stonehouse’. Although it may have looked like a contemporary interview, the journalist Rupert Massey was calling on notes he’d made in late January at Faulkners Down, when my mother was clearing out the house: ‘Of course I am sad that my husband should love two women. He says it is quite possible for a man to do this and I know that a man’s physical needs are different from those of a woman. I have forgiven him. I love him … divorce has raised its head in the past and I suppose it’s on the cards in the future. Sometimes I feel like a lemming going to my fate, but I am a beaver about my marriage.’14 She also said: ‘Besides him, other men are pygmies,’ and that was the problem: as a man, he was impressive. That’s precisely why other women found him attractive.

  On the 24th March, the Daily Mirror banner headline read: ‘MP IN NEW SPY PROBE’. It seemed the police had sold them pages copied from my father’s book, taken during the police search of the family’s ‘unit’, in which my father denied the allegation and explained the meetings he’d had with Czechs in the course of his ministerial duties. This was exactly why my father was angry about the police taking the papers in the first place: he suspected the police couldn’t keep their mouths or their pockets shut. The Daily Mirror completely misrepresented what he’d written in the book, saying ‘Stonehouse – after flatly denying any involvement with the Czechs – is now hinting that there was more to it than that.’15 He was doing no such thing. There was no ‘hinting’; there was a flat denial, with all contacts fully explained, but the Daily Mirror had spun it 180 degrees into a completely different story.

  The family heard a warrant had been issued for Sheila’s arrest from a reporter who phoned from Adelaide. Sheila was still staying with friends in Sydney and, because the phone at the ‘unit’ was bugged, Jane called her from a public phone and broke the news that she too would be facing extradition charges. Her warrant contained six charges, relating to my father’s case. It seemed best that Sheila make her way from the State of New South Wales to the State of Victoria, where all charges could be faced together, and my father’s solicitor, Jim Patterson, agreed. Sheila’s friend, Denis Streeter, immediately left work to drive her the 600 miles in his Volkswagen, so Patterson could accompany Sheila into a police station and place her in the jurisdiction of the State of Victoria. Flying would attract the attention of the press. By dusk the little Volkswagen had made it to a small town near the state border, where Sheila and Denis stayed overnight. Meanwhile, two Scotland Yard officers had flown from Melbourne to Sydney to arrest Sheila, using a hired light aircraft because the airline stewards were on strike. This delay caused them to miss her. They had searched the two friends’ houses where she’d been staying, even raking over the barbecue ashes – presumably looking for burnt evidence. Apparently, this was the crime of the century. The front-page headline in the Aberdeen Evening Express announced, ‘Police hunt runaway MP’s secretary’.

  The next morning, Sheila and Denis crossed into Victoria and continued driving towards Melbourne. The plan was that Sheila would phone Jim Patterson when she got close to Melbourne and Jim would guide them in. We all knew the phone at the ‘unit’ where my family was staying was bugged, but nobody realised the solicitor’s was being bugged too. That evening my father, mother, Jane and Mathew had planned to go to the cinema with the family of Peter G
ame. On the journey, just for fun, my father tried to lose the police tail. He did, but it was a waste of effort because the police already knew where they were headed, and were waiting in the cinema foyer. During Murder on the Orient Express, my father phoned Jim several times to see how the plan was progressing. He’d heard nothing. He also phoned a sympathetic policeman who told him they should avoid the Princes Highway – the main road into town. All this subterfuge was so that Sheila could walk willingly into a police station, with her solicitor, and not have the indignity of being arrested on the street. Jim had already told the police that he’d be bringing Sheila in the following day, and they were monitoring his calls. But the police felt the need to appear pro-active, so they stopped Denis’s car, and arrested Sheila. They also invited the press to take photos of the fugitive, suitably under guard, just in time for the morning papers. The state police then put out a press release congratulating themselves on her arrest. They also said that they had information Sheila was planning on meeting my father on the outskirts of Melbourne, which was nonsense. They had all the phones tapped and knew that wasn’t true. Still, it added to their drama. Sheila spent the night in a filthy cell at the old, ramshackle Melbourne Watchtower. Next morning, the magistrate was waiting for her.