John Stonehouse, My Father

by Julia Stonehouse

  16

  Prisoner 334093 and the Broken Heart

  My father was escorted from the dock of the Old Bailey and taken to the 19th-century Wormwood Scrubs Prison, where he would join another 1,200 men. He described it as ‘an ancient series of buildings with gross overcrowding’. As a ‘long-server’ he was allowed the privilege of working, riveting strips of aluminium together to make louvres for windows destined for DIY stores. In a good week he could earn £1 to spend in the canteen. He wrote: ‘I had a succession of inmates to share my room (always three of us) and got on very well with all of them, which was important in view of the long hours spent together.’ He wrote to Jane two weeks after the end of the trial, saying, ‘when I look back I realise just what a terrible job we had to push back that wall of prejudice. I suppose there was no way in which we could have won against the combined pressure of the media and the establishment. It was too much to hope for.’ From his prison cell, he resigned as a privy counsellor on the 17th August and, finally, as an MP on the 27th. The Home Office press release announcing that he was being transferred to Blundeston Prison, near Lowestoft, on the 25th November, referred to it as an ‘open’ prison, and the press would consistently refer to it as such. It wasn’t. Blundeston was a high-security prison, with all that entails.

  Two days later, he wrote to Jane, saying, ‘I have been feeling happier and more relaxed than for at least four years and possibly longer. I feel more like a whole person. As I look back I realise how unhappy I was during the period of Labour Government (particularly when I was in the Post Office and after). It was such a fraud on the British public and I was part of the squalid sham. Trying to break out of it worked for a time in 1970 and 1971 but Bangladesh was a truly terrible trauma for me. And those vicious attacks on me in connection with the formation of BBT were the last straw. My breakdown began then. I was desperately unhappy carrying that burden and working against such odds. I was always disguising from everyone just how depressed I was because I didn’t want to worry or hurt anyone. And nearly everyone around me went blithely on behaving as if everything in the garden was lovely while my world and my life was gradually disintegrating. Of course I was foolish not to confide in you and others but I was anxious to save them the terrible anguish I was suffering hoping, as I did, that I would find the solutions to the impossible problems. But there are no solutions for the simple reason that idealism and politics, and idealism and business do not mix. Anyone trying this impossible mix is bound to be crushed – although circumstances sometimes are not serious enough for them to realise it and they muddle on.’

  ‘I am telling you all this – not because it is new to you as you have understood so well and you have been so good and kind in listening – but simply to emphasise the wonderful joy I feel now. I am free in the real sense of the word for I have both found my identity and I have shed those terrifying burdens. It is truly wonderful to be treated as an ordinary human being. Carrying a public persona (even when things are going relatively well) is a strain and when one is reviled, abused and pilloried as I have been for the past nearly two years it is sheer torture. But now I am treated as an ordinary prisoner it is a marvellous relief for me. There were some idiots who thought I wanted special treatment. From their subjective point of view it is probably what they expected of a man who had apparently earlier enjoyed privilege. That, of course, was a complete reverse of the truth – I wanted nothing but to be treated as badly or as well as the most unprivileged member of the community. And the fact that I have had such treatment has been the real cause of my amazing recovery. I have had no suffering since August 6th, it has been a pleasure to experience, the worst possible conditions at the Scrubs are so much better than the tension and desolation that I had to bear before.’ He writes that the conditions at Blundeston are so much better, then says, ‘I was happy at the Scrubs but I expect to be even happier here. I will soon be working of course in one of the workshops (as I did at the Scrubs) but even so I find it more relaxing than anything I’ve done in twenty years (or even 30 years). There is simply no pressure. I am learning at last what a joy it is to have an “ordinary” life.’

  Sheila sent my father four letters a week, and was allowed a visit once every two weeks. He was put to work making box files for the government, which seemed ironic, and was paid £1.30 a week to produce 120 boxes while standing on his feet seven hours a day. He spent the money on tea, powdered milk and honey. To exercise, he practised yoga. In December, he heard that the appeal would take place in January and decided not to attend because, ‘my presence will make hackles raise and personal resentment return. They do hate me so – and I don’t know why – except that I attack all their sacred cows.’ The day before the appeal he wrote to Jane: ‘I have had no opportunity of discussing the matter with counsel. They were too busy to come all the way out here. The last time I saw Geoffrey was briefly in August at the Scrubs … I’ve written out copious notes on the judge’s summing-up but of course have no idea how counsel react to them. As you can imagine my blood boiled on re-reading that stuff. It was so cunningly done. I was an innocent crucified in a sacrificial rite. And it is called justice. I still ask myself “how can one steal from himself?” Do you know that of the miserable £27,000 or so £10,000 was salary from EPACS which I was entitled to draw anyway. And to charge me with “pecuniary advantage by deception” for merely giving personal guarantees shows the lengths they were prepared to go to get me. William Stern gave personal guarantees for £110 million and no one suggests he obtained “pecuniary advantage by deception” although it is as plain as a pikestaff that he could not be worth that sort of money in his individual capacity. But that’s exactly what they got me on! And the credit cards – just a few weeks overdue. And no complainants. No one saying “we was robbed”. As you can see I am still uptight, as you would say, about it and the appeal tomorrow has brought on this surge of resentment on my part. And by golly I am resentful of the system which came down on me on such scanty allegations.’

  The next day proved to be a terrible blow because my father learned that his QCs, Louis Blom-Cooper and Geoffrey Robertson, had not appealed all the charges and sentences, as he had instructed them. He was furious. He wrote to Jane on the 7th February, saying, ‘The games some people play! I am more than ever convinced that this country has acquired a special tribe of witchdoctors, the soothsayers who can never be questioned and who run their own lucrative club – financed by a social security called legal aid – and who play with pawns they call clients.’

  In his 23rd January letter to Jane, he’d written about his mother: ‘Have just had a most bitter note from my mother. If you can bear it would you ring her and pacify her. If only she could understand. Perhaps if she read Death of an Idealist she would get it; trouble is she is part of the early problem but how can one tell her that.’ With the stresses of the outside world impinging on the peace of incarceration, it was a blessing that he’d been allocated a share in an allotment. He had to pay for the seeds out of his £1.30 a week earnings but, by 11th March, he wrote to me that he’d planted 50 strawberry plants, a blackcurrant bush, raspberries, gladioli, chrysanthemums and Canterbury bells. He had plans for tomatoes and melons. Some kind stranger called Peters had sent him a book about the agricultural community at Findhorn, and he was contemplating utilising some of their methods.

  The following week my father had to meet with the DTI inspectors and, the week after that, attend preliminary bankruptcy hearings. On the 3rd April, he wrote to Jane about it: ‘The examination in bankruptcy was, as you realised from the reports, (although most of those were misleading) a farce. In fact it should not have taken place but deferred, as the Official Receiver intended all the time, to October. They just wanted a bit of circus and expected me to cooperate!’ Two weeks later, he had his first heart attack, with symptoms lasting four days. He wrote to me later: ‘I think the attack was brought on by the stress and strain of being dragged back to London like a bear on a chain to the circus of the b
ankruptcy hearings. That experience brought back with a vengeance all the tensions of the three years before; indeed I began to feel similar symptoms to my breakdown in 1974.’

  Four days later he had a second heart attack, the symptoms of which were sudden onset of crushing central chest pain which lasted for about twelve hours, accompanied by leg pain, vomiting, sweating and shortness of breath. He was given one aspirin and one valium by a medical ‘trustee’ and allowed to rest in his cell over that weekend. On the Monday morning a doctor came and told him to get to work. He was put on ‘light’ duties, which included cleaning the toilets, walking up and down stairs, and moving heavy furniture around. A psychiatrist at Blundeston, Dr Roberto, said his attacks were psychosomatic, which fed into the prison’s general theory that he was just malingering. On the 11th May he was taken in the back of a taxi at high speed to Lowestoft Hospital for a mass X-ray, hand-cuffed and between two warders. This was always how the prison authorities would transport him to his various visits. On the 13th, he was taken to Great Yarmouth Hospital for a ‘routine’ ECG, but was admitted into intensive care on an emergency basis. It inconvenienced the prison to have two warders at the hospital, so he was only allowed to stay for 36 hours. My father’s consultant, Dr Oliver, was horrified to later discover that he’d not been given any medication, specifically glyceryl trinitrate, and out-patient treatment would not be allowed by the prison authorities.

  I wrote to the governor of Blundeston on 18th May 1977, concerned that the heart attack hadn’t been taken seriously at the time, and that similar casualness might be adopted with any future incident. The Home Office replied saying the current medical management of mild heart attacks ‘consists of only a very short initial period of rest and then encouragement to return to a full and active existence as soon as possible in order to prevent the development of what used to be known as cardiac neurosis, which resulted in a person, who had completely recovered from a heart attack, living the life of a complete invalid with the limitations and unhappiness that this entailed under the erroneous impression that this might prevent further attacks’.1 He was put in the prison hospital wing, where his ‘treatment’ consisted of valium, from where he wrote to Jane about the view from his window: ‘the massive double fence with barbed wire atop (it is put there to keep all my enemies, especially reporters, outside)’.

  On the 22nd May he wrote to me that, ‘I have resorted to poetry as an outlet for my frustration. Imagine that! And I never had patience for it before!’ He’d written a poem to Jane a few days before that included lines he’d penned following the journey to Lowestoft Hospital:

  Today I saw wild bluebells in a wood;

  T’was a glorious revelation which can be understood;

  Only by one who senses the feeling;

  Of the agony that deprivation in my soul was seeking;

  Beautiful innocence of those wild flowers convey;

  Such contrast to the mechanical world of ‘obey’;

  Their freedom more noble in a sense;

  Than the tulips standing erect, in order, behind a garden fence.

  The last verse of the poem gave a clue as to how the initial euphoria of being ‘ordinary’ had been replaced by the tedium of prison life:

  Insignificant little things, maybe to some;

  But a whole world of difference to the life, humdrum;

  Of keys and locks and tedious sameness;

  Day after day, on us inflicted, quite shameless.

  At least he was about to get some mental stimulation, because the prison’s education department had arranged for him to take a degree in English through the University of London. His focus would now be on Chaucer, Shakespeare, the Gothic writers Hugh Walpole et al, and Keats, Shelley and Byron.

  In July my mother’s decree nisi came through. It happened to coincide with the death and funeral of my father’s uncle – his mother’s favourite brother and her best friend. We were concerned that the press would descend on her to ask what she thought about the divorce, and so unfortunately, because the press can’t be controlled, we had to break the news about the divorce right after the funeral. A short and innocuous story about the divorce in the Daily Express on the 20th was annoying nevertheless, because it contained a ‘quote’ from my mother that she’d never said. Jane wrote to my father about it: ‘I expect Sheila will tell you about the stupid Express story. I was sitting next to ma when silly and malicious Don Cooligan rang. I heard all of what she said and she then told us all what he had said. Which was that he’d rung S’s pa who said that she was having nothing more to do with you. He was obviously trying to get her going but she was very cool and said she’d heard nothing of that rumour and even if she had she wouldn’t make a comment on it as it wasn’t her place to. And you must have seen the front page. It makes me so sick … even when you don’t talk to the buggers you know they’ll print what they feel like anyway and you just pray that maybe that particular reporter will have an ounce of integrity … but that is so rare in Fleet St., if it exists at all. Anyway, you know that better than I do.’ I think it’s very hard for people who’ve never had the misfortune of being ‘media fodder’ to understand what actually goes on. We felt like ‘media fodder’ because we were chewed up and spat out, but from the journalists’ point of view we were like tubes of paint to squeeze and get whatever material they could to concoct into a picture of their own imagination and liking. The fact that the picture is a fabrication is known only to them, and the tubes of paint, but not to the general reader.

  On the 8th September, Jane wrote to the prime minister, Jim Callaghan, asking that our father be moved to an open prison – perhaps to Kirkham, where they had 200 spare beds. He referred the letter to the Home Office, who passed it to the regional director of the prison department, who replied: ‘it would not be appropriate for me to discuss the reasons for the decision taken in your father’s case.’ There were many such letters of appeal over the years, with no success. The government would make a point not to give him the ‘special consideration’ they would give to anyone else. They didn’t want it to look as if they were giving ‘favours’ to one of their own, so they leant in the other direction. And the length of the sentence was beginning to get to our father. On the 13th September, he wrote, ‘out of here in three years four months and twenty-nine days’.

  His mother was becoming increasingly ill and on the 28th November he wrote and told me: ‘I made a request to speak to her myself which seems reasonable as she is in no fit state to travel here but that cannot be approved here as it is against the regulations. The Home Office has not yet given me a reply but I expect the request will be rejected.’ Communication with the outside world was always a problem. He wasn’t allowed to receive money, even if it was only to pay for stamps. Everything had to come out of the weekly ‘pay’ which, in October, was 80p a week for his cleaning job. This had to pay for extra postage as well as shampoo, toothpaste, tea, milk, etc. He wrote: ‘It has made me very economical (I practically count the grains of tea).’

  Even from his prison cell my father observed politics and wrote: ‘The awful thing is that the petty bickering and sheer incompetence is still evident in this Government and is even worse than the 1964–70 vintage. The hypocrisy is rampant. But I must not dwell on such subjects or I shall be getting depressed and that would never do. My health is reasonable in the circumstances; this place is extremely comfortable in the circumstances; the food is very good in the circumstances; I am playing better bridge after hours of practice; the chess is excellent and Jane’s old radio, although now split into four pieces, continues to issue forth a wonderful diet of music – so I have no complaints, well almost no complaints, in all the circumstances.’

  On 14th December, the Department of Trade published the results of their inquiry into his businesses. The newspapers particularly liked the quote that he was, ‘A man for whom truth was a moving target … and who used companies as if they were an additional hip pocket in his trousers.’ It was curio
us how the report managed to both excuse and blame all the other people concerned. The report said ‘Justice cannot be done to many of those we have to criticise without an appreciation of the effect of Mr Stonehouse’s personality on them. Most held him in awe and great respect. He treated them well, took them for walks along the corridors of power and enabled them to rub shoulders with men and women of considerable eminence.’ Is this saying that people who worked with him were so star struck by meeting politicians in the grubby, claustrophobic environment of the House of Commons they became incapable of doing their job? Maybe they just couldn’t do their job. Maybe that had a lot to do with why problems developed. The report said of the accountant, John McGrath, that he ‘played a direct part in transactions of a most dubious kind’. The young and impressionable accountant, Alan Le Fort, was accused of keeping records ‘deliberately fragmented and complicated the entries for the purposes of camouflage’. Sir Charles Hardie of the firm who audited the BBT accounts was accused by the inspectors of ‘a serious dereliction of duty’ and the audit as ‘thoroughly slipshod’.2

  Despite all the criticism, no charges were brought by the DPP and instead the DTI inspectors recommended changes to the law, specifically the Companies Act 1948. They suggested to the minister concerned that, ‘Companies should not be permitted to lend money on the security of their own shares,’ and that Section 54 (Sections 190 and 197) relating to loans to directors should be amended because they contain ‘exemption for loans made in the ordinary course of business’.3 The DTI inspectors wrote: ‘The DPP has seen the report and no further action is envisaged against Mr Stonehouse neither does the DPP propose to take any action against any of the individuals mentioned in the report.’4