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Ronnie Stonham (Read 11811 times)
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Ronnie Stonham
Aug 7th, 2014, 1:59pm
 
Ronnie Stonham, the "Christmas Tree man", has died at the age of 86.  

Ronnie Stonham had had a long career in Army intelligence, rising to the rank of Brigadier General, before retiring and joining the BBC in 1982.  

He was attached to the Personnel (as it then was) department, but his actual job was liaising with MI5, who for many years were allowed to vet new recruits to the BBC.  

After people had been interviewed for jobs and provisionally selected, they would then have to "go through the formalities" - which meant being vetted by the Security Service.

So he kept files on all those who'd been checked.  Those who'd been rejected on MI5 "advice" were said to have a green Christmas tree-shaped sticker attached to their file.

(But does anybody know if that was actually true?)

The whole thing was officially kept secret - although widely known by staff - until the newspapers started to delve into the practice and publish details, including Ronnie Stonham's involvement.

Because of his background in intelligence work in Northern Ireland, he was advised to leave, for his own safety.  He retired to Dorset where he kept a low profile.  He'd been ill for a long time and died in a care home.

The routine vetting of recruits by MI5 was reported to have ended in the 1990s.
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Ian Pollock
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Re: Ronnie Stonham
Reply #1 - Aug 7th, 2014, 8:26pm
 
I knew a former BBC employee who told me he had actually seen the Christmas tree on his personnel folder - and for no obvious reason.
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Re: Ronnie Stonham
Reply #2 - Aug 8th, 2014, 3:26pm
 
It's a great story, and I like to think it's true. But if someone were rejected by the BBC, would they then have a personnel file to attach a Christmas Tree to?
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Re: Ronnie Stonham
Reply #3 - Aug 8th, 2014, 3:57pm
 
I suppose Mr Stonham might have kept a list of all those he blacklisted. The person who told me he had seen a Christmas tree on his own file was a well-established member of the BBC's news staff in the 1970s and 1980s. He died a few years ago so he is no longer around to confirm this.
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Re: Ronnie Stonham
Reply #4 - Aug 9th, 2014, 12:32pm
 
BBC Radio (don't know which channel) carried this report on Ronnie Stonham's death.
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Re: Ronnie Stonham
Reply #5 - Aug 10th, 2014, 5:27am
 
This is taken from The Times:

BBC spyhunter takes secrets to grave
by Alex Spence,  Media Editor
Published at 12:01AM, August 8 2014


It is one of the BBC’s deepest secrets and an episode that is worthy of a Cold War thriller. For years, staff appointments at the corporation were clandestinely vetted by MI5.

Checks on thousands of prospective presenters, writers and producers were carried out, and some were blacklisted for reasons they would never have known about. The vetting operation was based in Room 105 of the old Broadcasting House, near the room that inspired “Room 101”, the torture chamber in George Orwell’s 1984.

The process was overseen in the 1980s by Brigadier Ronnie Stonham, a former army officer who acted as liaison between the BBC and the intelligence service.

Mr Stonham died this week at the age of 86, taking to the grave many of the details of his secret operation. His work was exposed by newspaper reports in 1985, when The Observer claimed that potential employees had been blacklisted on the basis of inaccurate information. In one case, a young film-maker had been barred in the 1960s because he went on a student exchange to Czechoslovakia.

As a result of the outcry, the BBC admitted that the “scope of the vetting had become too wide” and scaled it back. Mr Stonham retired in 1988.

That year, the author Mark Hollingsworth revealed in his book Blacklist that Roland Joffé, the Oscar-nominated director of The Killing Fields, had also been blocked. Hollingsworth said that the clandestine operation had been “judge and jury over the careers of many BBC journalists and staff — it’s a very dark period of the BBC’s history”.

In 2006, The Sunday Telegraph claimed that 5,728 BBC employees were screened in 1983 for “subversive” links. Confidential documents revealed that the corporation had denied the existence of the vetting operation at the request of the security services, it said.

Other than those few reports, the scale of the vetting operation has remained a mystery.

The BBC’s only acknowledgment of it on its website is a short entry under the corporation’s history. It says that “all current affairs appointments” and “many other production jobs not in sensitive areas” were referred to Mr Stonham to be cross-checked against the MI5 database.

“If MI5 judged the applicant to be unsuitable they could be barred from the job, though without being told why,” the BBC said.
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Re: Ronnie Stonham
Reply #6 - Aug 13th, 2014, 12:09am
 
This is also taken from The Times:

Secret MI5 files on BBC staff ‘were shredded when Cold War ended’
by Alex Spence Media Editor
Published at 12:01AM, August 12 2014


A secret BBC unit that vetted journalists for ties to communists ceased operating and shredded all its files in the early 1990s, according to a former employee of the division.

The official broke his silence to defend the clandestine programme, which scrutinised thousands of BBC employees and potential employees in co-operation with MI5.

Its existence was exposed by The Observer in 1985 after claims that journalists and film-makers had been wrongly denied jobs or promotions because of alleged ties to extreme left-wing groups.

Michael Hodder, a former Royal Marine who worked for the vetting unit in the 1980s, and later ran it, said that the vetting had already been scaled back by the time its existence was revealed. No one was blacklisted by the unit in the 17 years he worked at the BBC, he said. Mr Hodder added that the vetting, which operated from room 105 of the old Broadcasting House, ceased after the end of the Cold War in 1992. Mr Hodder supervised the destruction of all the confidential files it had secretly amassed on BBC journalists.

“I shredded the lot,” he said.

The BBC’s secret vetting operation has become a part of the corporation’s folklore. Its confidential personnel records became known as “Christmas tree files” because of a symbol that was stamped on the front of the folders that resembled a Christmas tree.

It began in 1937, initially to ensure that the BBC’s staff did not have ties to Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts, and continued during the Cold War to screen for communist sympathisers. At its peak, thousands of staff were referred through the unit to the security services for scrutiny.

When the unit’s existence was exposed by The Obsever, amid claims that individuals had been blacklisted without knowing why, the BBC was accused of compromising its journalistic independence by co-operating with the intelligence services.

According to an entry on the BBC’s website, the public outcry forced the BBC to admit that the “scope of the vetting had become too wide” and it pledged to scale it back. Since then, the BBC has said little in public about the matter.

Mr Hodder, who left the BBC in 1996, said he decided to speak publicly to clear up misconceptions about the programme after the death of Brigadier Ronnie Stonham last week.

Mr Stonham, a former Army intelligence officer, was the liaison to MI5 when the Observer article was published in 1985 and his career at the BBC was cut short by the controversy.

Mr Hodder said that Mr Stonham had been appointed by the Home Office in 1979 to reform the BBC’s vetting operation because it had grown out of control.

“[The articles] did not reflect what he was trying to do, which was to cut down on all the vetting,” Mr Hodder said. “He was disappointed that the story had been leaked when all he was trying to do was get the matter progressed and be less of an encumbrance for people at the BBC.”

Mr Hodder took over the unit when Mr Stonham retired in 1988 and ran it until it was disbanded in 1992, as it was deemed no longer necessary. The confidential personnel records in Room 105 were all destroyed by two staff members over several days.

Mr Hodder said that he and Mr Stonham had agreed not to talk about their work. “The only reason I’m speaking now is because I was rather upset at the way [Mr Stonham] has been portrayed.”

The BBC declined to comment.
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