I was born in a working class area of Leeds in September 1919. My parents were Quaker-ILPers and it was natural for me to gravitate to the labour movement. In 1934 I left school and joined the South Leeds Labour Party. The Labour League of Youth of the pre-war period had been heavily infiltrated by the Communist Party, a leading light being Ted Willis – later Lord Willis. I saw much of the CP in action in Leeds and met many of their members. Harry Newton was born in 1922 and would only be 17 when the war broke out. He claimed to have joined the CP before the war but I never met him. This story appears to have been one of the many with which Harry romanticised his life and experiences. I rejoined the ILP of my parents in 1939 and from then until 1956 was regarded as a ‘Trotsky-fascist’ by all the local Stalinists. I still retained conversational links with some – like Harry – who always enjoyed a good chat.
I first met Harry Newton after the war when he had finished his military service. Late in 1946 I left Leeds for Bristol, but retained close links with the city because my family was still there. Harry Newton was then working full-time in the Communist Party offices, though in what capacity I have forgotten. In subsequent conversation with me, he said that he had shared an office with Bert Ramelson, a Canadian lawyer who had fought in Spain and who had subsequently married Marion Jessop whom he had met at the Lenin School in Moscow. Marion was born round the corner from me, and her father, Tommy, was an AEU organiser and local Labour councillor for North Holbeck in Leeds. Bert was by then the Yorkshire Organiser of the CP and subsequently became its national Industrial Organiser. I occasionally met Harry at meetings, but much more often after 1956 when, along with about half the membership, he left the CP following the Hungarian uprising.
He became a paranoid hater of all things relative to the Communist Party. He also boasted that he had recruited Arthur Scargill into the CP (a claim made by Bert Ramelson at various times). Of particular interest was his description of Bert Ramelson’s nervousness when Marion was returning from a CP Central Committee, or an even more important one abroad. He drew from this the conclusion that Bert was ‘the resident’ agent of the Soviets and Comintern. Of this story I was sceptical at the time for, according to the evidence of Soviets who had defected, it was not usually the practice for them to have someone in this post who occupied a prominent public position in the Party.
Harry joins the ILP
In August 1972 the ILP held its annual Summer School at Hepburn Hall, St Andrews, for two weeks. Edith, my wife, and I drove there for the second week, and, much to our surprise, found Harry Newton there with his wife and a child, then aged about ten. (I had not met his wife previously, for, rather late in life, he had married a woman from Selby in Yorkshire.) He was not then a member of the ILP but subsequently went onto the National Administrative Council of the ILP when he had completed a year’s membership. We shared a table with them for meals and enjoyed long and vivid conversations.
In the conversations we had in that week Harry told me that he had developed a great interest in the interface between Marxism and Christianity and was conducting discussions with many people from both sides of the debate. Michael Meadowcroft, when an MP, testified that Harry was attending Quaker meetings, and some people have told me that had had become an attender at Roman Catholic services. This was ecumenism with a vengeance! In that week we spent with him he displayed again his great personal hostility towards the CP. He said that he was doing a lot of writing and the most effective publications he felt were opposition ones, such as the house journal of the Economic League. I never saw any of these articles.
East-West Digest
A couple of months later I received in the post from Professor John Vincent, a copy of the September issue of East-West Digest. This had the reputation in left-wing circles of being funded by the CIA. Vincent appended a note saying, ‘I thought this would interest you’ to an unsigned article, ‘Strategy of Destruction: the ILP Re-Assessed’ – By a Special Correspondent’, pp. 701-705. The article was critical but reasonably accurate. It listed all the National Administrative Committee (NAC) members and nationally-elected officers, together with the jobs they held. The home address in Leeds of the General Secretary was supplied. In my case the CV was a little dated, for I had progressed a little further up the ladder than its job description. Its most amusing aspect was the attempt to paint the ILP as a potential revolutionary force which had abandoned ‘the parliamentary system’.
‘Growing weaknesses in a period of increased revolutionary activity in the last decade have forced the ILP to reassess its position: its quasi-Trotskyist programme has been consolidated into an overt plan of revolutionary action, the ultimate aim of which is a remote concept of a Socialist World Commonwealth with its more immediate (sic) objectives as the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of workers’ control in the United Kingdom.’ It also pointed out, that ‘On Ireland the Party supports the official Sinn Fein (the Communist dominated wing of the IRA) and the Peoples’ Democracy, through which Bernadatte Devlin came to prominence, as organisations whose objectives are the establishment of a Socialist Workers’ Republic.’
All this was more an attempt at making someone’s flesh creep than a serious political analysis. The article is so well documented that whoever wrote it must have known the calibre and limited resources of the membership. The very mention of Ireland would obviously touch a raw nerve. I recognised some of the phrases in it as the patter of Harry Newton at our mealtime conversations and wrote ‘Harry Newton’ on it. I showed the article to Eric Preston in Leeds, the then leader of the ILP. He agreed with me about the authorship. The article listed him as ‘a Senior Lecturer at Leeds Polytechnic and at various times a Communist Party member, Ban-the-Bomber and Rank and File shop steward.’ It omitted to say that he had also been a member of the Conservative Party at one stage in a rather varied career.
The balloon goes up
On February 20, 1985, Channel 4 banned a 20/20 Vision documentary programme and the balloon went up when, the following day, the newspapers printed the accusations contained within it. The Guardian of February 21, 1985, printed a full account of the story; In it Cathy Massiter, a former MI5 officer, blew the whistle on MI5 activities and named Harry Newton as a spy within the labour movement. (Tribune of March 1 printed a transcript of some of the programme.)
Massiter said she was put in charge of the surveillance of CND: ‘It was perceived as more than ever necessary that we had to be able to answer very precisely whatever questions we were asked about CND and its subversive penetration which meant that our study had to be perhaps rather closer than it would have been otherwise.’
‘To do this MI5 got one of its agents, Harry Newton, a respected lecturer in trade union law and life-long activist in left-wing political groups, to join CND in 1982. Newton, who died last year, had been the treasurer of the Institute of Workers Control, a left-wing think-tank supported by prominent trade union officials like Jack Jones and Alex Kitson and had been recruited by MI5 in the 1950s.’ (My emphasis, DB) ‘Newton filed regular reports about the workings and activities of CND headquarters….’
Massiter continued: ‘He (Newton) had a strong opinion that [Bruce] Kent might be a crypto-communist. I personally saw no justification for this whatsoever, but that certainly was the view he expressed.’ She said that Newton’s reports were entered on MI5 files and the view that CND was controlled by extreme left-wing activists was passed on to Mr Michael Heseltine, the Defence Secretary. Even she found no evidence to support this view. She also alleged that material gathered by MI5 was passed on to a counter propaganda unit, DS19, set up by Mr Heseltine in March 1983 to combat CND’s unilateral line.
Those of us who remember the rabid speeches of Heseltine of the period when he used such arguments, can also remember the hilarity with which they were received in the labour movement by people who really knew the true situation. As all agents are prone to do, Harry was feeding his masters with what they wanted to hear
Good old Harry
After his exposure, there was a spate of ‘good old Harry’ letters in the Guardian, all testifying to his work in the labour movement, his generosity in helping good causes and the sheer impossibility of his having been an agent. The inconsistency of his stories was also revealed. A typical example was an article by Trevor Blackwell in the Guardian (March 3 1985).
‘Harry had a fund of marvellous stories which he told with great relish and perfect timing: about the gas strike he led in Yorkshire where, when he subsequently left work to study at Leeds University, a defeated and exasperated management told him that they would have built him his own bloody university if they had known that was what was needed to get rid of him; of his days in the Communist Party when he acted as the courier who took the gold to Moscow, and about his subsequent anxious conversations with Harry Pollitt about Russian comrades who had disappeared since the last time he was over there – conversations always held in a graveyard to avoid the hidden microphones at Communist Party Headquarters.’
These stories were told later in life to new faces. Newton did not go to Leeds University but to Hull, where, as a mature student in the sixties, he took a degree in economics. Why would he be taking gold to Moscow? To my knowledge he never went to Moscow. In conversations with me, when I told him of my experiences of that city on technical-conference visits, he never revealed that he had visited the place.
As the late E.P. Thompson pointed out (Guardia n, 2 March, 1985), ‘I also knew Harry Newton, on and off, for thirty years, in the adult education and other movements. He was an unlikely agent. But then, as a historian of such things, who has looked into what traces of such espionage as survive in the public records, when they are opened after 100 or 75 years, I know that agents are always unlikely persons. Harry was a man who received kindness from many people and, if he was suborned or twisted into this role, he must have suffered agonies of remorse. I despise the authors of that crooked trade.’
In April 1985 the Labour Leader, the paper published by the ILP, printed a long defence of Harry signed by a host of people, including Liz Newton, Harry’s widow and Eric Preston. Liz Newton was totally ignorant of any of her husband’s activities, and, as an active member of the labour movement, could not bring herself to accept this act of gross betrayal. They offered the rather weak defence that, ‘she [Massiter] and MI5 may well have been the victim of a Newton hoax…. Those of us who knew Harry reasonably well, knew that he had a well developed, even a perverse sense of humour and that he delighted in “playing along” with people, or indulging in some affectation, particularly if it enabled him to explore situations that interested him.’
The Guardian had given a deal of prominence to the Massiter exposures and the Labour Leader complained that it had refused to print this letter.
Upon reading this I telephoned Eric Preston, telling him that he would be well advised not to pursue this line and I followed it up with a letter, reminding him of the article I had shown him and his agreement that Harry must have written it. Not a further word was heard of the ‘hoax’ story; and the ILP demand for a ‘public enquiry’ was dropped.
Michael Meadowcroft was a radical Liberal MP for West Leeds and when the Massiter story appeared in the press he wrote a spirited defence of ‘a personal friend from the early 1970s’. He also claimed Harry as a member from that period: ‘I can recall his distress at being ostracised by a few former trade union colleagues after he had thrown in his lot with the Liberals in Leeds.’ He also claimed that Harry had spoken to a Liberal Conference in London shortly before his death, despite his failing health. Were MI5 collecting material on the radical wing of the Liberal Party with its cohorts of active Young Liberals? The early 1970s was when they were in the leadership of the anti-apartheid struggle. Was MI5 then trying, at a later stage, to keep in touch with the Meadowcroft wing of the Liberal Party which did not join the Liberal Democrats? Or was this move Harry’s?
Two facts stick out a mile. Harry became the national treasurer of the Institute for Workers Control and worked in CND headquarters, at a point when they were the source of much interest to the Security Service. (And, according to the recent research by Seamus Milne, he would have been used to penetrate the National Union of Mineworkers in 1984, had he been in better health.) Additionally, he was a thorn in the flesh of any organisation he joined, a born sectarian who diverted the energy of members away from the initial purpose of the organisation and into internal squabbling and fighting on theological matters. In a recent letter Ken Coates MEP, the founder of the IWC, said, ‘Harry distinguished himself by taking up positions which were more extreme than anyone else thought reasonable, and defending them at length.’
The destruction of Fircroft College
The one event in Harry’s career which gave him national publicity was the 1975 Fircroft College strike. He had been a student there from 1959 to 1960 and then moved back in 1970 as a teacher. Fircroft was an adult education college wherein trade union-sponsored students had an active role. It was administered by the Cadbury Trust and students took over the campus, with scenes reminiscent of the Ruskin College dispute which led to the establishment of the National Council of Labour Colleges a couple of generations earlier. Five months of self-rule followed with lecturers teaching to programmes devised by their more militant colleagues. A High Court order finally evicted the students and a Department of Education inquiry followed. The barrister, Andrew Legatt, who conducted it, laid special blame on the shoulders of the Principal, the staff -and particularly Harry Newton, Senior Lecturer, for his part in leading and inspiring the dispute. In 1976 the college was closed and the staff made redundant. (Four years later Fircroft reopened with a new teaching staff.)
There is one remarkable anecdote from the Fircroft strike. Trevor Blackwell has recorded (Guardian, March 4 1985) how he ‘attended a meeting with Harry to try to gain support for keeping the college open. Harry was a gifted orator and not for the first time, he seized the attention of the meeting with his opening statement: “I know from my years in politics”, he said, “that in every meeting, be it ever so large or small there is always a spy.” He paused, the audience hushed and still before him,. “Now all I ask of the spy who is here this evening is that he report me correctly, so that I shall only be attacked for what I have actually said.”‘
Lessons to be learned?
Cathy Massiter estimated that there are ‘hundreds’ of agents and informers in domestic targets around the country. If all these are in place, why was the whistle blown on Harry?
He died in 1983 after suffering a stroke and had been infirm for a considerable time. He could not be questioned;he had been widely known and trusted by all. The shock waves were bound to be profound. Wanting the observed to know they are under surveillance, seeking to spread instability and distrust, security services have admitted to doing the occasional shoddy job on envelope opening and phone-tapping. Was the exposure of Newton a warning to the labour movement? Had MI5 wanted to prevent the exposure, surely legal action could have been taken under the Official Secrets’ Act. Such action was not taken: the story appeared on TV and full publicity was ensured by the preliminary ban.
There are some obvious lessons to be drawn. Agents must always have some items to report to their paymasters. If there are none they have to be invented or situations exaggerated to make them of importance. In short, agents can become self-generating romantics. The very idea that the ILP, the classical non-Leninist political group, could be a danger to the state is a rollicking piece of fun – in retrospect.
Telling security forces that which they wish to hear can be dangerous.
Dr. Bateman has written widely on labour and trade unions issues.