Jill Melvina Mosdell was a Metropolitan Police Special Branch officer who joined the Special Demonstration Squad around April 1970 and was deployed until February 1973. Her cover name is not known. She died before the Inquiry began its work and little has been revealed of her activities as a police officer.
The 32 reports released by the Inquiry in which Mosdell is recorded as an undercover officer date between 22 April 1970 and 9 February 1973. There are noticeable gaps, however, and no reports between 3 August 1970 and 14 September 1971 are available.
Although Mosdell spied on four Inquiry core participants – Diane Langford, Peter Hain, Christabel Gurney and Jonathan Rosenhead – all said they were not able to remember her in the absence of a photo or her undercover name.
Mosdell initially targeted anti-apartheid groups including the north-west London Stop the Seventy Tour, south-west London Action Committee Against Racialism and the Anti-Apartheid Movement. In late 1971 Mosdell began trying to infiltrate Maoist groups and attended a few meetings with HN45 ‘Dave Robertson’ who was already embedded in Maoist organisations.
When Robertson was uncovered as a police officer at a meeting on 6 February 1973, managers also withdrew Mosdell and HN346 ‘Sandra Davies’, who had infiltrated similar groups.
Jill Melvina Mosdell was born on 20 June 1941 on the Isle of Wight, Hampshire. She had entered police service by 1965, when she appeared to be living at the Metropolitan Police Section House for Women Police Officers at Pembridge Hall, 16/18 Pembridge Square, Kensington, west London.
Mosdell was one of only two female undercover officers in the SDS in the early 1970s, the other being HN348 ‘Sandra Davies’. Although her cover name is not known, according to her contemporary HN339 ‘Stewart Goodman’ , she did have one.
In her witness statement to the Inquiry, Davies wrote that Mosdell, with whom she became good friends, stood out for her smart dressing. ‘I recall certain officers were very scruffy and dirty but Jill Mosdell was very smart and particular about her clothing’, she wrote, ‘although she probably wore less expensive clothes when she was undercover.’
In contrast, Mosdell seems to have rented extremely modest cover accommodation. The 1971 SDS Annual Report lists the rent in August 1971 as £12 a week, by far the cheapest undercover residence funded by the SDS at the time.
Mosdell’s reports were signed off initially by Chief Inspector HN1254 Phil Saunders , who had been promoted to head of the SDS in March 1970.
HN332 Cameron Sinclair replaced Saunders as chief inspector in September 1971, signing her reports from then until February 1972 when he was replaced by HN294 as acting chief inspector.
Mosdell’s initial reports focused on the north-west London group of the Stop the Seventy Tour (STST) , indicating this group was her original target. STST renamed itself the Action Committee Against Racialism (ACAR) in July 1970.
In September 1971 she reported twice on ACAR’s south-west London branch. From November 1971 and throughout 1972 she was active in the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) and seems to have gained significant access to its executive committee.
From 27 December 1972 to the end of her deployment in February 1973, she appeared as a co-signatory with HN45 ‘Dave Robertson’ on four reports on Maoist groups. Robertson had spent a number of years infiltrating Maoist groups connected with activist Abhimanyu Manchanda and the left-wing bookshop Banner Books in Camden.
According to these reports, Mosdell was at the 6 February 1973 Indochina Solidarity Conference at the London School of Economics with Robertson when he was recognised as a police officer, leading to both deployments ending. For more information on this significant event in the early history of the SDS see Robertson’s profile.
Stop The Seventy Tour
The Stop The Seventy Tour (STST) was an single-issue anti-apartheid campaign group established in 1969 to prevent South African sports teams, particularly rugby and cricket, playing in the UK. Led by Inquiry core participant Peter Hain, it was notable as a stand-alone organisation that did not rely on, nor was a front for, the various political groups of the era.
It grew rapidly throughout 1970, forming a number of branches, and was attracting considerable press and police attention. In August 1970, having achieved its goals of disrupting the 1970 Springboks rugby tour and caused the cancellation of a planned 1971 cricket tour, it amalgamated with the Anti-Apartheid Movement, changing its name to the Action Committee Against Racism (ACAR).
Mosdell’s first report released by the Inquiry showed her infiltrating a branch the north-west London branch of STST on 16 April 1970. She attended a meeting at private address at which there were 20 others. This was unlikely to have been her first such contact with the group. Notably, at the opening of the meeting, stringent security measures were imposed:
[Privacy] asked that all persons present supply their full names, occupations, telephone numbers and affiliation to any political groups, in order that a full check could be carried out on the membership. The meeting chair stated that by this method she hoped to eradicate the possibility of infiltration by “police agents”.
Over the next month, Mosdell reported back on the various planned activities of the group; a teach-in at the North West London Polytechnic, a picket of Barclays Bank on 30 April and a fundraising party for the group on 25 April. She later went to the fundraiser, reporting back that it was a ‘purely a social occasion; nothing of interest to Special Branch was discussed.’
Many of the reports of subsequent north-west London STST meetings follow a similar pattern. They usually concerned 15-20 people coming together, often at the Friends Meeting House at 120 Heath Street, Camden or at members’ houses, to plan events or coordinate participation in public demonstrations.
On 26 May, Mosdell noted a plan to go fly-posting in Hampstead Heath later that evening. It is unclear whether she took part.
In August 1970, after STST had achieved its goal of preventing the following year’s South African cricket tour, Mosdell reported that the STST was planning to partially amalgamate with the Anti-Apartheid Movement.
She included detail on how the groups would share activities, particularly that the STST would continue to undertake militant direct action, citing the STST chairwoman who explained the group, ‘would for the present be referred to as North and North West London Action Committee Against Racialism and its objectives were to prevent the sale of armaments to South Africa and to oppose Racialism’.
After a year’s gap in her disclosure, the next of Mosdell’s reports released by the Inquiry find her still embedded in anti-apartheid groups, attending the smaller meetings of the south-west London branch of ACAR in September 1971.
She recorded discussions of possible actions, such as disrupting the forthcoming trial of Peter Hain arising from his activism with STST, or staging a sit-in during a protest at Australia House, though it is unclear what role Mosdell took in supporting such actions or attending the protests more generally.
Anti-Apartheid Movement
From November 1971, Mosdell reported on the larger Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) and appears to have developed a position of trust, able to access important documents and executive committee meetings.
Core participant Christabel Gurney OBE, a former AAM member, believes Mosdell must have been a ‘regular presence’ at the group’s office in Charlotte Street, central London, to gather the information in her reports. She gives as an example a June 1972 report on a public meeting of hundreds of people in central London, in which all the people Mosdell named were AAM office staff or volunteers.
On 8 November 1971 Mosdell reported on a meeting of around 15 people, ‘all believed to be active members of the Anti-Apartheid Movement’, at the home of activist Herbie Pillay, where they discussed a sit-in at South Africa House.
This was clearly not a formal meeting, but a small group that had come together for the purpose of planning a direct action. As Gurney noted in her written statement: ‘It appears that she did much more than report back on the identities and activities of those who were regularly in the AAM office.’
Mosdell’s reports on the AAM’s activities continue into 1972, even though they often concerned open meetings and peaceful demonstrations, attending by religious figures and MPs, as well as people who simply showed an interest in anti-apartheid and were not active members.
For example, in March 1972 Mosdell submitted a copy of a leaflet on an AAM public talk titled ‘Namibia – Prisoner of Apartheid’, to be held at Central Hall, Westminster, with speakers including bishops Trevor Huddlestone and Colin O’Brien Winter and Alex Lyon MP.
That month, she recorded information several times on AAM plans for a demonstration in London to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination on 21 March, including delivering petitions to the government. She explicitly noted that the organisers wanted peaceful pickets on the day as they wished to avoid adverse publicity.
The disclosure demonstrates that Mosdell was clearly very much in the loop for Anti-Apartheid Movement organising and was kept informed of its intentions. For example, on 29 March 1972, she was able to send a telegram to Special Branch detailing which protests were going ahead on that day.
On 3 May 1972, she noted that the AAM executive committee had been invited to meet the Tanzanian ambassador to the United Nations, who was chair of the UN Committee on Decolonisation, at the House of Commons. A report filed that day provided details of an AAM executive meeting held on 18 April, though this information appears to have been gained by access to the minutes rather than having been present herself.
Mosdell's reports do contain errors; one on a public meeting on Rhodesia, listed speaker John Ennals, the chair of the AAM, as an MP, confusing him with his brother Peter Ennals MP, though this mistake could have been made by a SDS back-office administrator when typing up the report. She filed several more reports on the AAM in August 1972 and a final one in December, about an AAM Christmas party at Gurney’s flat.
Addressing this report in her witness statement, Gurney wrote: ‘I cannot imagine why it was of interest to the police. I am still disturbed by the thought that a police officer entered my flat under false pretences.’
Maoists
In an abrupt and unexplained change of targeting after Christmas 1972, Mosdell turned her attention to Maoist groups in north London, attending events with fellow officer Dave Robertson. In his evidence to the Inquiry, Robertson suggested that SDS head HN1251 Phil Saunders had asked him to help Mosdell infiltrate Maoist groups as she was not making headway in joining women’s organisations. This interpretation seems unlikely, given Mosdell was successfully embedded in the Anti-Apartheid Movement less than a month earlier.
A 27 December 1972 joint report by Robertson and Mosdell on the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist) (CPE-ML) was most likely based on information from a disgruntled activist not aware they were talking to undercover police.
Robertson appears to have been the lead author of the report, which included allegations that the CPE-ML, not an SDS target at the time, was a CIA or Soviet government front, set up to discredit Chinese communism. Later, the CPE-ML did become a target of the SDS in its own right, infiltrated in 1974-1975 by HN13 ‘Barry Loader’ and in 1981-1985 by HN19 ‘Malcolm Shearing’.
In 17 January 1972, Mosdell reported on a private committee meeting of Abhimanyu Manchanda’s Britain Vietnam Solidarity Front (BVSF). It noted six people as present, although one of these may have been Robertson as only five activists were listed in the appendix.
This would have made the ratio of undercover police to activists at the meeting more than one to three. In her oral evidence, core participant and BVSF member Diane Langford said the meeting was with the president of the National Union of Students and so would have been called to plan an anti-Vietnam war demonstration.
At such a small meeting, Langford said, it would have been impossible for the undercover officers merely to observe and not get involved in organisational decision-making. Robertson had a different explanation for why he and Mosdell attended such a small meeting. He wrote that Maoist gatherings were often poorly attended and being at such a small meeting did not mean the undercovers were part of an inner circle.
Mosdell appeared with Robertson again a fortnight later, on 3 February 1973, attending a photographic and film exhibition at the Conway Hall put on by the Anti-Imperialist Coordinating Committee, where many Maoists were present or speaking.
Her last report published by the Inquiry is from the Indo-China Solidarity Conference conference at the London School of Economics on 6 February 1973.
Again attending with Robertson, she noted a large Maoist contingent among the 60 or so people present, but did not mention that Robertson had been recognised as a police officer by a women called Ethel at the conference, something he said caused the abrupt end of his deployment. For more information on this contested event see Robertson’s profile.
Mosdell was withdrawn at short notice, along with HN348 ‘Sandra Davies’ and HN45 ‘Dave Robertson’ after the latter was recognised as a police officer on 6 February 1973 by a woman called Ethel who lived near the SDS safe house and worked with an activist they were spying on, Diane Langford.
A core participant at the Inquiry, Langford states in her written statement, that Ethel told her a week after the event that Robertson had threatened her family if she told Langford he was a police officer, though Robertson denies this and contests the sequence of events describes by Langford.
Mosdell’s and Davies’ withdrawal is mentioned in the 1973 SDS Annual Report, though curiously not Robertson’s, which seems to have been – perhaps deliberately – obscured.
After two paragraphs, one heavily redacted, about the female undercovers being withdrawn as a precaution, the report goes on to state: ‘The avoidance in nearly six years existence of the irretrievable exposure of any SDS officer could induce complacency’.
As Dave Robertson had just been irretrievably exposed, unlike the two female undercovers, it is curious this sentence remained in the Annual Report and raises the possibility that it was deliberately designed to mislead the senior officers who would have read it. For more information on this see Robertson’s profile.
It is not known when Mosdell retired from the Metropolitan Police, but at some point she returned to live in the Isle of Wight. Records from Companies House list her as the director of the Eastcliff Court (Phase 2) Management Co. Ltd in the Isle of Wight from 1993 to her death in June 2005 and give her occupation as ‘lecturer’.
Jill Mosdell died before the Inquiry began, her cover name is not known and no application to restrict her real name was made. You can read Inquiry Chair John Mitting’s Minded-To notice allowing the publication of her real name by visiting the procedural documents area of this profile.