Norman MacKenzie - Telegraph Had they known MacKenzie's true sympathies, the Soviet authorities would have done everything possible to keep him out. As a student communist at the LSE (it seems possible he was asked to join the party by the security services), he had become concerned by efforts by Soviet intelligence to recruit students to work as agents or informants in the armed and public services. As he explained later, it was in order to investigate such activities that he allowed himself to be courted by officials from the communist bloc. In the 1950s, for example, he was one of the first journalists to detect a communist caucus in the Electrical Trades Union which fixed ETU elections for far-Left candidates. He also used visits to Eastern Europe to make contact with possible defectors and was active in helping dissidents to escape from Hungary during and after the 1956 rising. This was a high risk strategy, and MacKenzie was lucky to emerge unscathed. On one occasion he was caught photographing the outside of a prison camp near Bucharest and was briefly imprisoned before being moved to a hotel, still under arrest. There, through an open window, he heard music wafting in from a concert hall nearby. Soon afterwards he was handed two tickets by Romanian security police - one was an air ticket to London, the other a ticket to a concert by the violinist David Oistrakh. MacKenzie made it back to London, though there was a nasty moment when the plane seemed to be heading towards Moscow as it left Bucharest. "I gather you're doing useful work in the Balkans," said Kingsley Martin, drily, when he returned to the office. Norman Ian MacKenzie was born on August 18 1921 in Deptford, London, the son of a credit draper of Scots descent (credit drapers sold clothes on credit, door-to-door). By the time he won a scholarship to Haberdasher's Aske's school, Hatcham, MacKenzie had read enough in the public library to become a Marxist, and in 1938 he joined the Independent Labour Party, which had links with the POUM, the anti-Stalinist communist group which was strong in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War. Orwell, famously, fought for this group and in later life MacKenzie surmised that the writer's dislike of "the New Statesman crowd" was due to the fact that Kingsley Martin had rejected articles in which Orwell had described the brutal suppression of the POUM by Stalinist hit squads, on the ground that it could undermine the Republican cause. To be fair, Orwell qualified MacKenzie's name with a question mark (MacKenzie sympathised with Orwell's views on the Spanish Civil War). MacKenzie won an open scholarship to read Government at the LSE, where he went up in 1939, became a protégé of Harold Laski's and joined the Communist Party. The following summer he was one of the first to volunteer for the Home Guard, with the enlistment number 49, and was subsequently recruited into the Auxiliary Units, a top-secret cadre of trained assassins and saboteurs who would have been the Resistance following a German invasion. In 1942 he was called up for military service in the RAF, but was invalided out after four months owing to a stomach ulcer. After graduating with a First in 1943, MacKenzie joined the New Statesman. In 1951 and 1955 he stood as a Labour candidate for the hopeless seat of Hemel Hempstead, and in 1957 became involved in the formation of CND. Yet he never took an active role, and in later life admitted that on many occasions when he had taken an "advanced position" on a political issue, he had always felt ambivalent and had avoided active involvement. Thus, when shortlisted for the safe Labour seat of Ipswich, he realised that he did not want to be in Parliament. Later he became a founding member of the SDP. It was in the 1950s that MacKenzie, who had lectured on politics in America, began to think of leaving Fleet Street for an academic career. In 1962 he was invited by Asa Briggs, Dean of the School of Social Sciences at the newly-founded University of Sussex, to join him as a lecturer in Political Sociology. One of his strangest encounters as a journalist took place shortly before he left the New Statesman when he visited the American embassy in Moscow to interview a young American, one Lee Harvey Oswald, who had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959, but now wanted to defect back to the United States. Oswald cut an unimpressive figure, and MacKenzie was amazed when, the following year, a man he had dismissed as "a nothing" was arrested for the assassination of President John F Kennedy. Two days later Oswald himself was shot dead, and the following day MacKenzie happened to be teaching a Politics class at Williams College, Massachusetts. He mentioned that he had met Oswald in Moscow the previous year; 20 minutes later he received a phone call from the FBI. During his time at Sussex, MacKenzie became increasingly interested in developing new ways of university teaching, publishing two books on this subject with Unesco. After chairing a working party on the use of television in education, he obtained funding from the Rank Organisation towards the founding in 1966 of a new Centre for Educational Technology, of which he became director. He also played an important role in the foundation of the Open University, becoming a member of its planning committee and council. MacKenzie was the author of several books on politics, the social sciences and education, and, in collaboration with his first wife, Jeanne, wrote biographies of HG Wells, Charles Dickens and the First Fabians, and edited the diaries of Beatrice Webb. The MacKenzies" work was recognised by their election as Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature and the award (for The First Fabians) of the society's Heinemann Prize in 1978. He also collaborated with Antony Brown in a series of historical novels published under the pseudonym Anthony Forrest. MacKenzie became director of Sussex University's School of Education in 1972, and Professor of Education in 1977. He retired in 1983. He remained lucid until the day before he died when, prompted by some conversational reference, he could be heard reciting the Gettysburg Address to fellow hospital patients. His first wife died in 1986, and in 1988 he married Gillian Ford, Deputy Chief Medical Officer in the Department of Health and subsequently Medical Director of Marie Curie Cancer Care. Another daughter predeceased him in 1999. Norman MacKenzie, born August 18 1921, died June 18 2013