London, 17 November 1972
Personal
On the advice of my friend, Sir Alexander Downer, I am writing to inform you of an unhappy circumstance on my return to this country from Australia last week.
There was no passport officer present at the barrier marked ‘Commonwealth and Irish’. I had the alternative of going through the United Kingdom or the Alien barrier. You would be very mistaken to believe that an Australian subject of the Queen will willingly accept the appellation of an alien in that same Queen’s Kingdom. I was rejected from the British passport desk by an Indian passport officer and told, so that all could hear: ‘You bloody Australians want the best of both worlds’. I had the further insult of being told to get rid of my Australian passport and get a British one.
I have served since the age of sixteen in Her Majesty’s forces in the prosecution of the troubles of this country. I was shot three times and have remained partly paralysed as a result of it. I retired from the Grenadiers in 1961 to join Christie’s, and I own land and have a family in England. You will understand therefore the feelings that motivated the enclosed telegram which I sent to Her Majesty The Queen today1 and which has been released to the Australian Press, as this letter will be, for, Sir, please rest assured that those Commonwealth territories which today are Monarchies will inevitably become Republics in the satisfaction of Edward Heath’s personal obsession.
That may well be what you wish, for you as a Government seem to have lost all sense of honour and obligation to those who laid no limit to your demands on them. You have been, as a Party and as individuals, utterly lacking in honour and honesty in all aspects of your immigration policies.
As evidence that I do not live, on the other hand, in a private world of racial prejudice, may I say that in the time of his exile, when your Government would not provide five bob for the Kabaka of Buganda,2 I housed and fed him and his household for the first year.
1 Document 344.
2 Sir Edward Mutesa II, King of Buganda, 1939–66, and President of Uganda, 1963–66. Deposed in 1966 by Milton Obote and exiled to Britain until his death in 1969.
[NAA: M 1002, 284]