Major Stanley Jenkins
Cold War leader of the National Union of Students who campaigned against communist subversion
MAJOR STANLEY JENKINS, who has died aged 95, was president of the National Union of Students from 1949 to 1951 during the early stages of the Cold War, when he battled to reverse the tide of communist subversion in the British student movement.
In the immediate post-war years the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY) and the International Union of Students (IUS) were the only two international youth organisations recognised by the UN. But both were controlled by the communists and backed by Moscow. In 1948 the IUS, based in Prague, even supported the communist coup there, ignoring the opposition of the Czech student union and doing nothing to protest against the arrest of its leaders.
During his early days as NUS president, Jenkins had taken the view that the NUS should remain a member of the IUS and campaign to reform it from within. “That proved to be hopelessly wrong,” he recalled. In 1948 he represented the NUS at the Sokol Festival in Prague, where he was constantly shadowed by communist surveillance teams, and where he took on the new prime minister, Antonin Zapotocky, over his assertion that the Czechoslovak people were “happy” with their “liberation”.
Jenkins recalled that “in all conscience I could not offer congratulations... One student pushed a note into my pocket pleading with me to tell the world about the repression and arrests of students. Another asked for help to escape the country... I took the bull by the horns and asked the prime minister why, if everyone was so ecstatic about the changes, had I encountered so many individuals who were anxious for the world to know the truth?” On hearing the translation, Zapotocky swept angrily out of the meeting.
The western counter-offensive began in London where Ernest Bevin and the Foreign Office thought up the World Assembly of Youth, which held its first international conference at Westminster Hall in 1949. Independently in 1950, the Nordic student unions, led by the future Swedish prime minister Olaf Palme, and the British NUS, led by Jenkins, set out to find alternative forums for international cooperation. This led to the creation of what became known as the International Student Conference (ISC). The move was controversial with Jenkins’s largely communistdominated executive and he risked his position to get the NUS to attend the first ISC meeting in Stockholm towards the end of the year.
In 1951 Jenkins launched an attack on the IUS in a speech to a 500-strong IUS audience in Prague, where delegates, led by Alexandr Shelepin (later head of the KGB), tried to shout him down. “He was Stalin’s right-hand man, he was the head of the youth and student movements, and he was the man who called me an ‘arch-fascist imperialist beast’,” Jenkins recalled. But he refused to leave the rostrum and insisted on finishing his speech. Subsequently the NUS disaffiliated from the IUS following a national referendum. All contact was finally broken off in 1952.
Stanley Kenneth Jenkins was born in Brecon on November 25 1920, the eighth of nine children of a builder, two of whom would succumb in childhood to TB, a disease which he survived. In his teens he became a table tennis champion in South Wales and was drawn in the Welsh Open Championship against the reigning world champion, Victor Barna and the English champion Ernie Bubley.
Called up into the Army in 1940, he was posted with the Royal Engineers to Burma, where he trained West African troops. Aged 25, he assumed command of 32nd Nigerian Artisan Works Company, Royal Engineers, in Rangoon, where he had to arrange the courts martial of two young soldiers who had shot an officer. From Rangoon he was posted to Mandalay to take charge of a Gold Coast company, 26th Artisan Works, to restore order after another mutiny.
Demobbed in the rank of major in 1946, Jenkins enrolled at Cardiff Technical College, where he studied Building Technology and became involved in student politics as Welsh vice president of the NUS. In 1949 he toured India, Pakistan and Ceylon as part of a three-man NUS team, covering 25,000 miles in 12 weeks, and taking part in 27 debates and addressing more than 30,000 students. He had breakfast meetings with Jawaharlal Nehru, and several meetings with the last Viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten, whom he recalled “having his pedicure... stretched out on a low divan with beautiful Indian maidens tending his feet”.
Later that year he was elected NUS president, becoming the first full-time paid president of the organisation and the only one ever to come from a technical college.
Although international work dominated Jenkins’s presidency, the NUS did play an important domestic role as well, running campaigns to secure free education for all and expansion of university places. “When I started off in NUS, we were totally barred from anything, we were young communists,” he recalled. “In the end I was invited to Downing Street, I met Clement Attlee. We were being listened to. A moderate voice will always be heard, an extreme voice won’t be.”
After stepping down as NUS president, Jenkins joined the Foreign Office and was dispatched for two three-year spells to Singapore, where, in 1957, he was assigned the task of preparing a tennis court on which the Australians Lew Hoad and Ken Rosewall, who had won the Wimbledon Men’s Doubles the previous year, could practise en route to England. There were no existing courts so Jenkins marked out a section of a cricket pitch. Although Hoad went on to win the singles title, the doubles was won by the Americans Budge Patty and Gardnar Mulloy. “Stanley, your ‘tennis court’ cost us our title!” Rosewall told him 40 years later.
In the early 1960s Jenkins served as First Secretary in Chancery in Rangoon, during the period in which the Burmese Socialist Programme Party seized power. In 1964 he was sent to New Delhi to brief Mountbatten on General Ne Win, the first chairman of the Burmese party. In 1967 he was posted to the High Commission in Nicosia as First Secretary. Returning to Britain in the rank of counsellor, he sat on the Civil Service Selection Board and turned down a posting to South Africa.
He took early retirement in 1978, to spend more time with his family and help his local community of Ferring, West Sussex. In 2000 he published his autobiography, So Much To Do So Little Time.
In 2012, at the age of 92, Jenkins gave a rousing address at the NUS National Conference, declaring that “the voice of students should be heard”, a speech which survives for posterity on YouTube.
Jenkins was pre-deceased by his wife Barbara and is survived by his four daughters.
Stanley Jenkins, born November 25 1920, died April 10 2016