Norman Ian MacKenzie

Norman Ian MacKenzie (18 August 1921 – 18 June 2013) was a British journalist, academic and historian who helped in the founding of the Open University (OU) in the late 1960s.

Early years MacKenzie was born in New Cross, south-east London in 1921, the son of Thomas Butson MacKenzie (1881–1962), a credit draper, and his wife, Alice Marguerita, née Williamson (1884–1957). He attended Haberdashers' Aske's Hatcham Boys' School, the local Grammar School.

In 1939, MacKenzie won a Leverhulme scholarship to 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.

Career 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. MacKenzie made frequent trips behind the Iron Curtain throughout the 1950s and possibly worked for MI6 gathering intelligence. On a visit to Bulgaria in 1955 he got a tip-off that Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev was going to denounce Stalin but his report was not believed until the speech was actually given some months later, in February 1956.

He was twice unsuccessful at elections as the Labour candidate for Hemel Hempstead in 1951 and 1955. In 1957 he was involved in the formation of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).

Orwell's list

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: 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. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1978, together with his wife Jeanne.

Later life 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.