1967 A Czech Student and a Visit to Robert Maxwell in Headington Hall

 

We wait in a hall which displays a large and prominent harp, housed upright. When we go into the dining room there’s the biggest and most highly polished table I have ever seen; maybe it only seats sixteen or eighteen but there is nothing on it and it gleams. Robert Maxwell, owner of Headington Hall and Labour MP for Buckingham, sits down in the middle of one long side, gestures to me to sit opposite and gestures to the Czech student to sit at one end.

I introduce the situation: I’m chairman of the Oxford University Labour Club; the Czech student (who is about my age) has fled to England, is lodging in Oxford, and is seeking political asylum. He would be grateful for any assistance and so would I.

Maxwell begins to question the student but his English isn’t so good and Maxwell pauses to tell me he’s going to switch to Czech. A lengthy interrogation ensues, conducted by this former British army captain (Military Cross), former member of the Czech Army in exile, former Czechoslovak citizen Ján Hoch born 1923 in some Orthodox Jewish back-of-beyond, now successful entrepreneur and owner of Pergamon Press, headquartered in Oxford.

I forget if Maxwell asked the student to leave the room at the end of the interrogation but, with or without the student present, he turned to me and explained that he had large printing contracts in Czechoslovakia and was afraid that, in the current unsettled state of the country, the student might be some kind of provocateur.

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I had met the student in a house on the Banbury Road, living in a large cupboard with an English girlfriend he had somehow acquired and with whom, in the cupboard, he seemed to have a very domestic existence. Maybe he had come to England on some legitimate cultural exchange and then jumped ship when the time came to return. I don’t know; I forget. But why was I asked to go to the house? I think because of the Chairmanship of the Labour Club and perhaps because someone had maybe already had the idea of approaching Maxwell as a Labour MP. A Labour government was in power. Even if I had the idea myself, how did I make contact with him? That could only have been through Maxwell’s son, Philip, who was my age and also an Oxford undergraduate at Balliol but not involved in any local politics.

But of the details and of what happened next, I have no memory