Army vet

Former BBC Personnel "special assistant" Brigadier Ronald L. Stonham has died at the age of 86.

He started his working life in the Post Office Engineering Department in the Second World War. In 1948, he joined the Royal Signals Regiment. By 1963 he had risen to the rank of Major. In 1971 he was attached to the intelligence section of the Chief of General Staff. In 1977, he advanced to Brigadier of the Signals Regiment, and retired from the army in 1982.

He then joined the BBC, working for the Director of Personnel, Christopher Martin, based in Room 105 - spookily close to George Orwell's (imagined ?) Room 101. His real job was security liaison officer - the contact between MI5 and Auntie, looking after vetting of new hires.

The BBC ritually denied that vetting took place, at least until 1985, when David Leigh and Paul Lashmar, writing in the Observer, detailed the process and a number of high profile cases. Then, the BBC admission was that it had been going on since 1937, but that ‘only relatively few members of staff go through this procedure. They are necessarily involved in sensitive areas or require access to classified information.'

By 1998 Mark Hollingsworth and Richard Norton-Taylor had built on the Observer story enough to indicate that vetting had been widely used, but often unsuccessfully, in a book called "The Inside Story of Political Vetting". Among those MI5, via BBC Personnel, had tried to stop working for the BBC, were Michael Redgrave, Anna Ford, Michael Rosen, directors Roland Joffe and Roy Battersby, and producer Kenith Trodd.

And in 2006, the Telegraph revealed the scale of Stonham's operation. In 1983, 5,728 job applicants were vetted; sometimes the vetting included checks on partners.

Ronald Stonham retired from the BBC in 1988.