Foreword

Gill Bennett – a birthday tribute

There’s an old saying that a nation without a history is like a man or woman without a memory. It may be trite, but it’s absolutely correct too. As a Minister and before that as an MP, I always had the belief that it was impossible properly to understand any contemporary issue without understanding its history. But this was not a view shared, as it turned out, by the Home Office. Early on in my time there, I asked for some historical background on a particularly tricky issue I was faced with.

‘Very sorry, Home Secretary’, but the Archivists’ Department was closed down a few years ago. Cuts, you know’, came the reply. You can therefore all imagine my immense relief when I moved to the FCO in June 2001, and discovered that there was a whole department called the Historians, led by a brilliant Chief Historian, Gill Bennett, whose 70th birthday we celebrate this evening. Gill came to work as a Research Assistant historian 49 years ago, in 1971, and in one capacity or another she has been involved with the FCO – or the FCDO as it now is –ever since. To my astonishment, I read in one biographical note about Gill that she had allegedly ‘retired’ 15 years ago! I wonder if I am the only person who hadn’t noticed this. She has carried on working not only for the FCO but other government departments, and in the course of this has developed a serious expertise in the history of our intelligence agencies and their work. As Gill has spelt out in a wonderful narrative account of her work, part of an oral history project, the work of the FCO Historians broadly divides into two – giving advice to Ministers and officials, and organising sections of the record for publication as official histories.

The justification for the first role is pretty obvious – though its importance had obviously eluded the bean counters in the Treasury and Home office when they decided in the nineties to abolish the Home Office’s memory. The second however could easily be a target for cuts from those who naively think that memory doesn’t matter. It does. There will be thousands of professional historians who are deeply grateful to the Historians for the way in which they have made available impenetrable records – and this politician, for the help which I had when I wrote my recent book on the UK and Iran was invaluable.

Gill started her career in 1972, just a year after the FCO had abolished its rule that any woman officer who married had to resign the service. It was still a man’s world. Gill tells a rather harrowing account of how she tried to juggle child care, and the office, and as a single parent, but managed this; and how gradually the Office saw just what talents she had, and got her involved not just in the Historians’ departments but many other aspects of the department’s work.

But it’s history which has been her first love, and for which the Office owes her the greatest debt. She has published a number of books, including ‘Six Moments of Crisis’ which should be at the top of any brief for incoming Ministers; Churchill’s Man of Mystery; and the Zinoviev Letters – which conclusively showed that these letters which caused such a stir in the 1924 election were indeed a forgery – but were not quite so determinative of Labour’s defeat at that election that generations of party members have been taught, with their mother’s milk.

It’s an amazing record of achievement, Gill; and along with that achievement you’ve always been a wonderful human being too. Happy Birthday!

Rt Hon. Jack Straw

29 January 2021