Norman MacKenzie (journalist)

MacKenzie was born in New Cross, south-east London in 1921, the son of Thomas Butson MacKenzie (1881–1962), a tailor who sold drapery door-to-door, and later a local government official, and his wife, Alice Marguerita, née Williamson (1884–1957).[2] He attended Haberdashers' Aske's Hatcham Boys' School, the local Grammar School.

In 1939, MacKenzie won a scholarship at the London School of Economics (LSE), graduating with a first-class honours degree in government. At LSE he impressed Harold Laski, the Professor of Political Science and a Labour Party activist.[2] It was whilst a student that he joined the Independent Labour Party and briefly the Communist Party of Great Britain, but quickly became dismayed at their eagerness to place members into the armed Forces and public services.

In 1940, while a student at LSE, MacKenzie volunteered for part-time military service in the Home Guard (during World War II). He trained in guerrilla warfare at Osterley Park in west London and was a member of group that then went to Sussex and were to perform behind-the-lines sabotage and guerrilla activity in the event of a German invasion. He was also a member of the Political Warfare Executive that broadcast propaganda via radio to Germany. In 1942 MacKenzie was called up for service in the RAF, interrupting his studies at the LSE, but after four months he was invalided out of the RAF due to a stomach ulcer.[2][3]

Alter leaving the LSE in 1943, MacKenzie spent the next 19 years until 1962 as an assistant editor with the New Statesman magazine, specialising in sociology and communism.[4] MacKenzie made frequent trips behind the Iron Curtain throughout the 1950s and worked for MI6 gathering intelligence.

MacKenzie worked on extricating dissidents out of eastern Europe. In 1956, whilst in Bulgaria he got a tip off that Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev was about to denounce Stalin but his report was not believed until the speech was actually given.

He was twice unsuccessful at elections as the Labour candidate for Hemel Hempstead in 1951 and 1956. In 1957 he was involved in the formation of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).[3]

In 1962, Asa Briggs recruited him to teach sociology at the University of Sussex. Whilst there he set up the Centre for Educational Technology in 1967. In the mid-1960s he worked with Richmond Postgate of the BBC and the then education minister Jennie Lee to work on ideas about getting more people into university. He subsequently became a member of a planning committee and council that created the Open University. MacKenzie remained a council member of the Open University until 1976.[5]

MacKenzie taught as a visiting professor at Sarah Lawrence College, Williams College and Dartmouth College in the US.[6]

MacKenzie was an adviser to Shirley Williams, the Labour Secretary of State for Education and Science from 1976 to 1979,[4] and in 1981 was a signatory of the Limehouse Declaration which led to the foundation of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), which Williams co-founded. MacKenzie was an early member of the SDP, but had no organisational role in the party.[2]

He retired from teaching at the University of Sussex in 1983.[5]

In 1949 the author George Orwell included MacKenzie on a list of probable communist sympathisers that he prepared for the British Foreign Office. The list was of those considered unsuitable for the preparation of anti-communist propaganda, not those suspected of espionage. After the list was made public in 2002, MacKenzie commented:[7][8]

Tubercular people often could get very strange towards the end. I'm an Orwell man, I agreed with him on the Soviet Union, but he went partly ga-ga I think. He let his dislike of the New Statesman crowd, of what he saw as leftish, dilettante, sentimental socialists who covered up for the Popular Front in Spain [after it became communist-controlled] get the better of him.[7]

MacKenzie wrote a number of books, with his first wife, Jeanne Sampson, including well received biographies of H.G. Wells (1973) and Charles Dickens (1979) and he edited the diaries of Beatrice Webb (1982–85). He also wrote about socialism. He co-wrote several novels set during the Napoleonic wars with the ITN television newsreader Antony Brown (born 1922), under the joint pseudonym 'Anthony Forrest'.[6][9]

Following the death of his first wife Jeanne of cancer in 1986, in 1988 MacKenzie married Dr. Gillian Ford (born 1934), a government medical officer. They lived in Lewes, East Sussex. MacKenzie was a fine painter of watercolour landscapes. He was survived by Gillian and by a daughter from his first marriage.[2]

• Norman Ian and Jeanne MacKenzie papers at the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College Special Collections