100 years ago today in Derry my father drew first breath. Though he and his family left at the height of the 1920s Troubles, he took lasting memories with him; of walking the City Walls with his parents and of outings on the River Foyle with the Sea Cadets his father ran. In 2000 I moved to Derry for the Bloody Sunday Inquiry. One day I called him just as the Guildhall clock bonged at noon. “Hah, haven’t heard that for 80 years,” he said.
His Scottish father was in the first wave sent to Flanders in 1914. He survived the Somme but was invalided back to London after Mons. He was nursed by an East End girl from Poplar, whom he married. They ran Missions to Seamen hostels, first in Wales, then Derry, then a travel agency sent my grandfather back to Belgium to give English families tours of the beautiful city of Bruges, the beaches of Ostend and the battlefields of the Great War.
In Bruges, my father was taught by French-speaking nuns. His first day, being an inquisitive child, he found a small porcelain pot on his desk, filled with a mysterious dark substance. His hands covered in indelible ink, he was banished to the school chapel to repent his wicked ways. Still curious, he saw a rope dangling from the ceiling. A tug, and the school bell pealed out. The priest in charge drummed into him the urgency of learning French.
With the Great Crash, the family moved back to England and ran the Workers’ Travel Association’s trade union holiday home in Dorset. At Lyme Regis grammar school he met Joyce Lane. When he became Head Boy and she Head Girl, she refused to let him take himself too seriously; when he pinned announcements on the school notice-board she drew stick men on them, to the amusement of the headmaster, if not the head boy.
He won a place at university but, as so often in those days, his parents couldn’t afford the fees. So, when war came, he remembered the visits to the WWI battlefields with his father: the grisly detritus still sticking out of the ground – helmets, even bones. He enlisted in the Merchant Navy so he could play his part against fascism without having to carry a gun. He took a crash course to become a radio officer. What he saw of the world, from New York to Durban, from Calcutta to Sidney, left him with a profound concern for equality and human dignity and an interest in international affairs that lasted until his final days.
Asked later how he dealt with the risk of being torpedoed, he said: “if we were carrying iron ore, we slept fully clothed and in our life jackets. If the hold was full of explosives, we put on our pyjamas. No point in worrying.” Fortunately, when his ship was torpedoed in 1942 it was not carrying explosives and, after three days clinging to an overcrowded raft in the Indian ocean, he and his fellow seamen were rescued.
He was demobbed on 15th November 1945. Two days later he and Joyce married in Lyme Regis. He had no job, no university degree and his work experience was limited to just five years at sea. But he never doubted his own abilities and he had a remarkable way of persuading others to trust them too. If he’d been a lawyer, he would never have lost a case!
Starting as a trainee in a company supplying lubricants to shipping lines, he became its general manager in a few years. Living in Churchill’s constituency, he threw himself into Conservative Party politics. He was never afraid to disagree with party leadership or even with Churchill the first time they met. “Come on, Harvey, we must have a talk,” said Churchill and steered him into his library to discuss foreign policy. The 27 year-old must have made an impression on the 73 year-old because when someone attempted to introduce them again weeks later, Churchill said: “You don’t have to introduce me to Harvey, we’re old friends, aren’t we Harvey?”
As Chairman of Churchill’s constituency party, Harvey was summoned to 10 Downing Street on April 6, 1955. Churchill took his customary seat in the Cabinet Office, beckoning my father to sit on his left. He showed him a copy of his letter of resignation to the Queen. Signing it, he said: “There are only two people to whom I have written such a letter; to my Sovereign as representing the Nation and to you as representing my constituents.”
The following month, John Harvey was elected MP for Walthamstow East, a seat he held through the elections of 1959 and, by the tiniest of margins, in 1964. He refused offers of junior ministry posts, preferring the security of his day job in the oil industry. In 1966, when Labour won Walthamstow, he left the business of politics and continued in the politics of business, serving as public affairs director on the board of Burmah Castrol, together with Dennis Thatcher – of whom he was much fonder than he was of Mrs T.
His own political philosophy was perhaps best summed up on the 50th anniversary of Churchill’s appointment as Prime Minister. “There is no handbook of Conservative dogma,” he said: “The fundamental aim of conservatism is to conserve all that is best out of the past and to use it constructively in the present for the benefit of the future.”
He cared passionately about conserving Epping Forest, which he served as a verderer for 28 years, determined to maintain its original acreage against the encroachments of developer and road builder. After 51 years of their very loving marriage, Joyce died in 2007. He followed a year later.
He managed every little detail of his life and tried hard to manage mine. He needed to be sure I could work the ancient Amstrad which he used to write his carefully crafted letters and keep meticulous accounts. He was a very public man but very private too; he shared the secrets of his filing cabinet but never told me of his poems or his young man’s dreams, shut in a dusty briefcase for me to find when he had gone. He kept his feelings close. We shook hands awkwardly until his last decade, when suddenly he opened to embrace and we would kiss each other’s weekend-stubbled cheeks and say those strange words: I love you.
