My Uncle, the (suspected) Spy

At the Christening I mentioned the other week I got talking to my Uncle Geoff, he's somebody who seems to fill every working minute of his life either working or doing something for other people, he's one of those who can't keep still. Anyway during the conversation we were having about life in general he casually dropped into conversation that he had been the subject of an MI5 and MI6 enquiry during the sixties and he'd been formally informed that 'there was a file on him somewhere'.

He was born in 1942, actually the first in the male line of my family not to have been born an Eastender in over two hundred years, my Nan was evacuated from Poplar to Royston in Hertfordshire in 1941 where she gave birth the following year. Anyway once he'd finished his formal education he went to university in London where he took cookery as his subject and qualified as a chef in the early sixties. Rather than open a restaurant or work in a hotel he went into commerce and became a chef then restaurant manager then catering manager for a subisdiairy of the Dutch Phillips Electrical group.

During the late sixties he went touring around Europe with one of his cousins in a Triumph Herald, they went all over mainland Europe and even up to the Arctic Circle. I remember as a small child watching a slide show projected onto this enormous white screen in my Grandparents lounge. Anyway in 1969 he decided that he'd spend his summer holiday visiting Moscow, this being during the cold war days the tourist visa had to be approved not only by Moscow but details had to be vetted by the Home Office - there weren't any problems so off he went.

Now at the time of his visit he was working in the same building, but not the same area, as parts for some of our defence equipment were being developed by the Phillips subisidary. Every morning he would have to walk from the managers meeting through a corridor alongside the R & D department back to his office by the company's restaurant. It was because of this walk and his visit to Russia that somebody in Phillips decided he could be a security risk and reported him to the security services. It sounds straight out of a le Carre novel but he says that what surprised him even more was the call one afternoon from one of his bosses to inform him that he had been informed on.

As far as he knows he was never placed under surveillance or had his phone tapped but who knows?

As a postcript to the Russian trip he went to Germany later the same year and was on a walking tour close to Checkpoint Charlie when one of the other tourists, an American, got a bit lairy with the East German border guards and the guards decided to open fire!