Christopher Mayhew
I.B. Tauris, London, 1998, (hb) £25.
Christopher Mayhew died recently thinking he set up the Information Research Department. As I have shown elsewhere, he was thoroughly manipulated by the Foreign Office – just like his boss at the time, Ernest Bevin, come to that. This short (142 pages) book contains 47 pages of Mayhew reminiscing about his involvement with IRD. His recollections were taped and edited by Lyn Smith, author in 1980 of one of the first big academic articles about IRD. One or two passages, for example on pp. 27 and 29, seem to me to show signs of Smith inserting material from that article. Much of the material will be familiar if you have read any of the extant literature on IRD but there are one or two points of interest:
- IRD ‘played a key role, under Reddaway’s guidance, in a publicity campaign that resulted in the removal of Achmed Sukarno as president of Indonesia in 1965’ (p. 46). This is welcome confirmation of an IRD role in the overthrow of Sukarno but Mayhew’s claim that the IRD campaign ‘resulted in’ Sukarno’s overthrow will have them laughing with their early evening cocktails over in Langley, Virginia.
- ‘At a critical moment, an important meeting was held between Cabinet Secretary Norman Brook, Pat [Patrick] Dean representing the Foreign Office, the director of MI5, Mr (later Sir) Roger Hollis, and Norman Reddaway representing the IRD. At the end of it, Brook instructed Hollis to make available to the Foreign Office, with security collateral, intelligence about communist malpractices in the unions that could be used by IRD. This led, among other things, to the ousting of Foulkes and Haxell from the leadership of the electrical trade union.’ (p. 46)
Several things worth noting here. If Mayhew is accurate, it is interesting to see that the Cabinet Secretary can instruct the D-G of MI5 to do something. This is the first confirmation I am aware of that the anti-communist campaign of the later 1950s and early 1960s began in the state. Where does this leave the received version of the campaign against the Communist Party leadership of the ETU in which brave individuals, funded by ‘Catholic businessmen’ fought against the Red Machine? And what else is included in Mayhew’s ‘among other things’? It seems likely that this IRD/MI5 campaign was responsible for Woodrow Wyatt’s 1956 pamphlet The Peril in our Midst (it never seemed likely that a lazy dilettante like Wyatt would do all that research himself); and possibly also for the Aidan Crawley series on the ‘The Hidden Face of British Communism’ in the Sunday Times in 1962, published later as a pamphlet. It also suggests that my assumption that Common Cause and IRIS were receiving official information for their publications such as the initial 1956 IRIS pamphlet, The Communist Solar System, is justified. It may suggest much more, of course. This paragraph of Mayhew’s may point the way to a completely new interpretation of anti-communism in Britain in the 1950s and 60s.
- Discussing the newspapers which received IRD material, Mayhew (or his amanuensis Smith) comments that ‘At one time the Economist‘s “Confidential Report” drew an average of 50% of its material from the IRD’. (p. 27) Presumably this refers to the Economist’s Foreign Report, among whose editors were Brian Crozier and Robert Moss.
- ‘Crucial to the IRD’s success was its relationship with the BBC.’ (p. 29)
What is wrong with Mayhew’s account is his ignorance of the way IRD developed long after his involvement with it; he remembers it simply fighting the good fight against Stalinism. Smith says in her forward that she regretted Mayhew’s death because she wanted to confront him with ‘some of the more questionable aspects of the department’s activities’ (p. x).
Apart from the IRD section the rest of the book is not terribly interesting. Part of it is Mayhew’s memories of his struggle with the CP front groups – the friendship societies – in the 1950s, and the rest is fragmented memories of his increasing dissatisfaction with the Labour Party and his eventual defection to the Liberal Party and thence into the SDP.