Philip Woodfield

Sir Philip Woodfield (10 August 1923 – 17 September 2000) was a British civil servant.

Woodfield was born in Dulwich, south-east London, and attended Alleyn's School, Dulwich. He was commissioned in the Royal Artillery in 1942, rising to become a captain before leaving the Army in 1947. He read English at King's College London. He then joined the Home Office in 1950 and became Assistant Private Secretary to the Secretary of State, Viscount Kilmuir. In 1955, he was seconded for two years to the Federal Government of Nigeria, to assist in the preparations for that country's independence.

In 1961 he became Private Secretary dealing with parliamentary and home affairs, in which function he served three prime ministers: Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas-Home and Harold Wilson. He returned to the Home Office in 1965 as an Assistant Secretary, and he was appointed secretary to Commonwealth Immigration Commission, which was headed by Admiral-of-the-Fleet Lord Mountbatten. When Mountbatten later undertook an inquiry into prison security, following a number of highly publicized escapes from jail, he asked that Woodfield be assigned to it as its secretary. Woodfield was then promoted to be Under-Secretary in the Prison Department of the Home Office, charged with the responsibility of implementing the recommendations of the commission that had been accepted by the Secretary of State, Roy Jenkins.

Woodfield participated in what is now believed to have been the first meeting between the Irish Republican Army and senior officials of the British Government. The meeting place on 20 June 1972 in extreme secrecy at an IRA safe house owned by Colonel Sir Michael McCorkell at Ballyarnett, near Derry's border with County Donegal. The IRA was represented at that meeting by Dáithí Ó Conaill, a senior republican strategist, and Gerry Adams, and the British government was represented by Frank Steele, believed to be an MI6 agent, and Woodfield. Six days later, on 26 June 1972, the IRA implemented a "bilateral" ceasefire, and an IRA delegation attended a secret meeting with the British Government at a Minister’s home in Cheyne Walk in Chelsea. Woodfield and Steele also represented the British Government at that meeting, along with William Whitelaw, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, and Paul Channon, a millionaire Guinness heir and minister of state at the Northern Ireland Office; the IRA was again represented by Adams and Ó Conaill, along with Seán MacStiofáin, the leader of the delegation, Séamus Twomey, Martin McGuinness, Ivor Bell, and Myles Shevlin, a solicitor.

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