The Spy Who Twinned Wednesbury
It’s not every day you find out your home town was at the centre of an espionage scandal, with a British MP turning communist spy to live out his James Bond fantasy.
“Do you realise our home town is twinned with a Czech city and they were only twinned because the local MP was a communist spy and he needed to use the twinning ceremony as cover?”
I’m accustomed to hearing my husband say quite random things when it’s me doing the driving. When it’s the other way around, with him in the driver’s seat, I try to keep extraneous information to a minimum, out of consideration for his, shall we say… more adventurous driving? Like Bond, I’m quite a nervous passenger. I’m not saying my husband drives as recklessly as Fiona Volpe, Thunderball’s femme fatale, or anything, but there’s a passing resemblance. When I bring this up, he likes to remind me that, unlike me, he passed his test first time. In response, I humbly suggest that the reason he passed first time was because the poor instructor was just too terrified to fail him.
Fortunately, Antony is usually happy to be driven. Unfortunately, when he’s in the passenger seat he’s not inclined to keep comments to himself. He Googles whatever comes to mind as he looks out of the window from the passenger side and expects me to devote my full concentration to his often out of left field utterances. Several times I’ve felt like paraphrasing Bond’s line to Tracy in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service: “Just keep your mind on my driving!”
But announcing that the town we’ve made our home for more than a decade was at the centre of an international spying operation was definitely one of the more distracting things Antony has said while we’ve been in the car together.
What had sparked this off was Antony seeing a road sign on the way into Wednesbury, one we’d passed hundreds of times before without even thinking about it. The sign welcomes visitors and observes that the town is paired with two places: Amristar in the Indian state of Punjab and Le Blanc-Mesnil, a commune in the suburbs of France. My husband’s Google searching had let him to a third which did not appear on the sign: Kladno in the Czech Republic.
In the four minutes it took to reach our house, the question that kept reverberating through my mind was: why did Kladno not appear on the sign?
When we got home, I did some Googling of my own and quickly found out about the man who had engineered the twinning with Kladno. In short, I gleaned that John Stonehouse was a British MP who had a promising career but one which never quite took off. To maintain his luxurious lifestyle, he earned copious amounts of money on the side by spying for Czechoslovakia, then in the Eastern Bloc. Although his status as a spy has been contested by his daughter, it’s widely accepted in most sources that Stonehouse worked as a communist agent from 1962 until 1974. His spying career was brought to an end when he faked his own death and unsuccessfully attempted to live a new life in Australia in 1974.
More than intrigued, I picked up a copy of a new book, Agent Twister by Philip Augur and Keely Winstone, which told the whole story with the aid of recently declassified documents.
Although Stonehouse was born in Southampton and had a globe-trotting lifestyle that would make James Bond envious, he was indeed an MP for our local area and was responsible for setting up the twinning of Wednesbury and Kladno in order to provide cover for his regular communications with his handlers in Czechoslovakia. It was a pretty decent cover story: Kladno is a city in the north west of the Czech Republic, 25 miles from Prague. Although its population is nearly double that of Wednesbury, they both share a history of heavy industry. On the surface, it sort of fits. And everyone at the time bought it.
John Stonehouse in 1970, © National Portrait Gallery, London
I should not have been surprised to find out that Stonehouse was a big fan of Bond, particularly the lifestyle elements of the character. His taste for the finer things in life is partly what led him to being in the employ of Czechoslovakia in the first place. Augar and Winstone recount Stonehouse and his wife enjoying watching Goldfinger on the big screen together on its initial release. 10 years later, before pretending to have drowned (or been eaten by a shark) in the waters that lap Miami Beach, Stonehouse chose to stay at the hotel Bond stays at in Goldfinger, the Fontainebleau.
Actor Matthew Macfayden, who plays Stonehouse in a 2022 five part drama, saw him being very much inspired by James Bond. He says that Stonehouse saw himself in his “mind’s eye” as Bond played by Roger Moore: “A case of, ‘Well, if I’m going to be a spy, I might as well enjoy it’. I imagine he created his own James Bond soundtrack in his head.”
Macfayden as Stonehouse
Stonehouse was not as successful at maintaining his cover as Bond. Once he reached Australia, events just kept getting more and more bizarre. Before faking his death he had obtained the names of dead men from Wedesbury’s nearest hospital - his own constituents - to use as his own. He was inspired by the main character from the Frederick Forsythe novel The Day of the Jackal. Despite going to these extraordinary (and, though it hardly needs to be said, unethical) efforts, the local police quickly became suspicious of this new arrival from England, although they initially thought he might be Lord Lucan, who had also recently disappeared. [As a sidenote, around eight years before he became a suspected murderer and vanished, the high-living, Aston Martin-driving Lucan was considered for the role of Bond as Connery was nearing the end of his tenure. According to several sources, he was even offered a screentest by Albert R. Broccoli, but turned it down.]
Although Stonehouse never identified himself as queer, when writing about the 22 year old Stonehouse meeting his wife-to-be for the first time, Augar and Winstone assert that:
“In the past, Stonehouse sought out companions based on shared interests, irrespective of gender. But as time has moved on, for close relationships, he’s veered towards women. They’re softer and more understanding, he thinks. Men can be so abrasive.”
Just before the ceremony that would twin Wednesbury with Kladno in 1961, a street was named in honour of the man who had arranged it. I took a detour from my run one morning to check out Stonehouse Crescent for myself. Only ten minutes from my own house, it’s a very quiet half circle of around thirty semi-detached houses. I wonder how many of the people living there have any idea that their road is named for an MP who betrayed Britain?
Probably not many. It only became publicly known that Stonehouse had been a spy in 2006. Eager to protect their reputations, three successive prime ministers covered up the full extent of Stonehouse’s treachery. Although he was imprisoned for fraud, charges of treason were never brought. To this day, Stonehouse is the only UK politican known to have acted as a foreign agent while serving as a minister.
A claim to fame for the local area or a source of shame?
Personally, I find it quite exciting that I live in a town with such an interesting footnote in its long history. And, relatively speaking, it is a footnote; Wednesbury has been a settlement since the medieval period and is one of the few places in England to be named after a pre-Christian deity, ‘Woden’ (the same Pagan god in the word ‘Wednesday’, and better known to Scandinavians - and Marvel fans - as ‘Odin’).
And although the Stonehouse-orchestrated twinning with Kladno is not widely talked about in Wednesbury, a legacy that does last to the present day is Kladno adopting the name of the British medieval town. Right in the centre of Kladno, there’s a street called ‘Wednesbury’. It’s also the name of a bus stop in the city. Next time I’m in the Czech Republic, I’ll be sure to stop by.
References
Augar, P and Winstone, K (2022) Agent Twister: The True Story Behind the Scandal that Gripped the Nation London: Simon & Schuster
Lind, B (2015) ‘The Lord Lucan Mystery and its Bond connections’ The Bond Bulletin, 8th July 2015 Available at: https://www.thebondbulletin.com/the-lord-lucan-mystery-and-its-bond-connections/
Moore, Sally (1987), Lucan: Not Guilty, Sidgwick & Jackson Limited
Stubbings, D (2022) ‘John Stonehouse: ITV drama about Black Country MP who faked his death to start next week’ Express & Star, 31st December 2022 Available: https://www.expressandstar.com/entertainment/2022/12/31/john-stonehouse-itv-drama-about-black-country-mp-who-faked-his-death-to-start-next-week/
Winstone, K (2022) From Britney Spears to John Stonehouse, a great true-life story is worth telling again and again The Observer, 31st December 2022 Available: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/31/from-britney-spears-to-john-stonehouse-a-great-true-life-story-is-worth-telling-again-and-again
