At last, 'Defence and Aid' can own up to prodigious feats. Over the past quarter of a century, since it was banned by Pretoria, the London-based anti-apartheid organisation has smuggled £100 million into South Africa. The money has been used for the defence of thousands of political activists and to provide aid for their families while they were in prison.

The International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa, to give it its full name, was the brain-child of John Collins, a canon of St Paul's Cathedral, and was never penetrated by Pretoria's feared secret police, BOSS. Last year, IDAF was unbanned by President F. W. de Klerk. There was no longer a need for the cloak and dagger. The story can now be told.

Canon Collins's flair for raising money for radical causes faced its baptism in 1956, when South Africa launched the firstof its treason trials. The canon guaranteed the legal costs and support for the 156 accused and their families. He was as good as his word. He wrote to the newspapers, held protest meetings and art exhibitions, had Paul Robeson singing spirituals in the cathedral. Almost single-handed, he raised two thirds of the costs of £250,000, the remainder coming from Defence and Aid in South Africa. The trial dragged on for four years before the last of them was acquitted.

By then, the British Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa (as it was first called) was in operation. Nelson Mandela, on the run from South Africa, came one day in 1962 to lunch at Amen Court, the family's grace-and-favour house near St Paul's. Collins's widow, Diana, says: 'He asked John if he would still support them if they turned to violence. There was a long discussion. John was a pacifist, but he said it was not for us to tell South African blacks what to do. Whatever they were accused of, they should have a fair trial and their families helped.'

A year later, Mandela, Walter Sisulu and other ANC leaders were in the dock at the Rivonia Trial. Their defence costs were largely met by Defence and Aid. Otherwise, Mandela et al might not have been saved from the gallows.

The small fry were not forgotten. A prosecutor in the Eastern Cape was heard to lament: 'We have no problem in political cases - they all plead gilty, then Defence and Aid steps in.'

Defence and Aid went international in 1965, with branches in Britain, New Zealand, Scandinavia, Holland and India. Collins made his plans clear to the United Nations special committee on apartheid: 'No political organisation which seeks to change South Africa's racial policies can function properly in the open; the black political organisations are banned. Those who wish to continue the struggle have to go underground. But what man or woman can happily or easily undertake such dangerous work if he or she knows that, by doing do, the wellbeing of the children and other dependants is at stake?

No wonder the Pretorias hated Defence and Aid and the irrepresible 'politial priest' who was forever putting apartheid in the dock of world opinion. On 18 March 1966, Johannes Vorster, Minister of Justice, banned the South African Defence and Aid Committee as an 'unlawful organisation' under the Suppression of Communism Act. Lengthy prison sentences awaited those who handled the tainted money. The Terrorism Act would make it a capital offence to attempt to bring about social change with the help of a foreign government or institution, even when no violence was involved.

The safety net which Collins had promised to those on trial for their beliefs seemed doomed. The Canon of St Paul's cast about for a solution.

It came from Neville Rubin, a liberal South African lawyer, who devised a barriered system of legal firms using numbered trust accounts. They found a sympathetic solicitor, another South African, Martin Bayer, of Birkbeck, Montagu's in St Bride's Street, a short walk from the cathedral. Within a fortnight, Collins, Rubin, Bayer, his colleague William Frankel and Phylis Altman, the IDAF general-secretary, had agreed on a plan that would keep the South African at arms' length for a long while.

The plan came in two parts. Collins set up a network of impeccable donors to fund defences. The recruits were not bogus, but little of the money was to come from their own pockets.

The smokescreen featured Lord (Jock) Campbell, Booker sugar baron and chairman of the New Statesman board; Jacquetta Hawkes, J.B. Priestley's wife; two Labour peers, Walston and Mitchison, and the latter's authoress wife Naomi; Lord (C.P.) Snow; and Professor Norman Bentwich. They became trustees of fine sounding organisations operated through numbered accounts at the Zurich branch of Lloyds Bank, and later the Union Bank of Switzerland.

Campbell chaired the 'Freedom from Fear International Charitable Foundation' for the legal defence programme, while the 'Freedom from Hardship International Charitable Foundation' accounted for welfare. Diana Collins is blunt about their role: 'We managed to get these very public, respectable people to perjure themselves in a good cause by saying they had sent money.'

The second leg was the creation of a cordon sanitaire of solicitors who would correspond with the South African trial lawyers and transmit funds to them. These front firms never breathed a word about their connection with Birkbeck's, who in turn carefully concealed the Collins link. Snoopers were thus two removes a least off scent. At IDAF, Collins and Phylis Altman alone were in on the ruse.

The Birkbeck lawyers explained to the front solicitors that delicate political reasons precluded the firm from handling such matters. They were nervous because of their South African clients. Consolidated Goldfields, under fire for its employment policies, might have been dismayed to learn that its then lawyers were in league with white South Africa's favourite hate figure.

In the early days there were also friendly lawyers in Canada, Switzerland, New York, France and West Germany, and it might have seemed to Pretoria that they represented a wide spread of well-wishers. After a while, the lion's share of work was consolidated in three or four English firms. They were not radical, simply people disturbed by the turn of events in South Africa. They believed that the money passing through their account came from a bona fide charitable trust or the private account of well-to-do, albeit left-of-centre, sponsors.

In time, these firms of English solicitors, little known to the British public, acquired enduring fame in revolutionary trials across South Africa - Carruthers & Co and Fox & Gibbons in the West End; Cole & Cole in Oxford; and more recently, Miller & Co in Cambridge, where Rosemary Sands has undertaken the bulk of the conduit work in the hectic years since 1985.

When a trial was in the offing, the phone would ring and a le-Carre-esque voice intone: 'The boss wants to see Mr X' (Frankel, who took over the Birkbeck work) or 'Mr Y' (Bayer).

The caller was David (now Sir David) Floyd-Ewin, registrar at St Paul's, the canon's go-between for much of the period. They met in the Chapter House or in the deserted cathedral, whispering to each other across the pews. Frankel recalls strolling along in earnest converse when Canon Collins opened a door that seemed part of the wall. No outsider culd have suspected that it led to a room. the Narnia alcove was the 'Canon's Closet', where the cathedral's canons prepared for services.

Frankel would then instruct one of the conduit firms to write to attorneys in South Africa thus: 'We have read in the newspapers about the trial and have been asked by a British client to offer financial support.'

Henry Brown was a young attorney handling much of the political work at Frank, Bernadt and Joffe in Cape Town in the 1960s. He had 400 people, including Mandela, on his books, facing prison trials, appeals, and death penalties; most, it transpired, were funded by IDAF. Ostensibly, much of the money came from Lord Mitchison, through Fox & Gibbons in London. it happened that an attorney in a remote dorp complained of not having the resources to defend a group of men facing serious charges. A government official offered a solution: 'Go to Brown. He can get money from Lord Mitchison.'

Sometimes the guard slipped. In the first show trial after the banning, 37 Namibians were up for treason in Pretoria. Defending them was clearly going to be costly. To counteract talk of Russian money, the defence attorney, Joel Carlson, let slip the Lord Campbell connection. Collins was horrified, but Campbell saved the day. 'I knew it was not Eastern European money,' he recalls, 'so i agreed it should go through my account, though i was embarrassed because it was not mine. i did give IDAF some money, but not nearly as much as mythology suggests.'

Collins was in a dilemma. IDAF's public face, its research and publicity sections, were effectively living up the credo of 'keeping the conscience of the world alive' on the apartheid issue. But he wanted blacks to know that Europeans were playing a direct role in the struggle. He knew that disclosing too much would destroy all he had built up. Within two years of the banning, he could assure the United Nations that IDAF was still fully operational, 'despite all that the South African government and its supporters inside and outside South Africa have done to inhibit us.'

By the 1970s, South African agents were known to be active in Britain. The wiliest of Pretoria's operatives, Craig Williamson, infiltrated deep into liberal circles, ending up deputy director of the Scandinavian-funded International University Exchange Fund in Geneva, which gave scholarships to hundreds of black refugees. But IDAF was a bigger prize. He once cabled an attorney in South Africa promising funds for a trial, then asked Phyllis Altman at IDAF to reimburse him, hoping to establish the connection with a banned organisation. Altman never dropped her guard. Williamson destroyed IUEF, but could not take IDAF down as well.

The British Special Branch also seemed watchful. Lord Gardiner, when Lord Chancellor, called at Amen Court one day, and found his host on the phone. 'If i were you, John,' he said, pointing at the instrument, 'I shouldn't trust that thing.' Diana Collins claims to have independent confirmation that their phone was bugged. The British and South African secret services, tailing CND and IDAF respectively, would have found common ground in the person of John Collins.

Collins died on 1 January 1983 and was buried in the cathedral where he never became dean, the one religious appointment he cherished. But his temporal achievements more than compensated for that. His successor at IDAF, Archbishop Trevor Huddleston, gave the address at the memorial service, and ANC leader Oliver Tambo read the parable of the Good Samaritan.

By then the canon's underground liberation movement was well equipped to take on the greatly increased demands soon to arise. IDAF was possibly the South African legal profession's most reliable employer, with more than 150 attorneys and 80 advocates on its books, though few realised where the money was coming from. In 1990 alone, lawyers received £5.65 million in fees.

Not all played the game. A Transvaal attorney decamped to England and threatened IDAF with exposure if he were not paid the money he claimed to be owed. Collins fearful of exposure, handed over £15,000 after clearing it with his donors. Frankel insists that misappropriation was negligible over the years. The IDAF books at Birkbeck's were separately audited for presentation to the United Nations Trust Fund for Southern Africa. Johannesburg accountants, Douglas and Velcich, carried out spot checks. As a result, 54 attorneys had their accounts queried. Overchargers were advised to tone down their fees. If not, they were asked to produce business accounts. Many small country firms, black and white, were heavily dependent on IDAF, and feared the ultimate sanction.

Reining in the Bar was more difficult. The big bucks - or more aptly, the big kroners - arrived in 1985, when trials and detentions began in earnest. IDAF, in consultation with the Washington-based Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law, which funded some trials, drew up a tariff. (The ceiling is now R23,000 - £4,600 - a month for a senior counsel on retainer.) Some did say, 'This is human rights work, OK,' but for most of the Bar, a tariff was anathema. Nobody, however, could raise money like Defence and Aid. 'It became a matter of wills,' says Frankel, 'and we won.'

Despite the legerdemain, it is hard to believe that from the mid-1980s, South Africa was unaware of the enormous transfer of funds. Phyllis Altman believes they did knowit was IDAF, but couldn't fathom how. A cynic might suggest that a hard-pressed minister of finance swallowed twice and turned a blind eye to a huge inflow of foreign currency.

Without IDAF's £60 million the mass of men and women in political trials over the last three decades would have entered the dock naked. The alternative in capital cases was a pro deo, or poor people's, defence by an advocate fresh out of law school. The parsimonious state legal aid system did not look kindly on 'politicals.' In 1990, IDAF transfered R35 million for political defences, compared with Pretoria's R17m in legal aid for all criminal trials.

Since January 1985, IDAF has funded 16,551 legal matters. This staggering figure covers State of Emergency detentions, pre-trial procedures, show trials, the common-law prosecution of street activists for stone throwing or school marches, stays of execution, criminal appeals, inquests, appeals by blacks forced out of white Group Areas, rural communities driven off their land, the restraint of harrasing policemen, commissions of inquiry. IDAF financed the team appearing for the family of Steve Biko's inquest - and is currently funding Winnie Mandela's defence, a source of controversy. Robert Sobukwe, the Pan African Congress leader, was given a start to his legal practice in his Kimberley exile. In 1989, IDAF handled 198 children's cases: 167 came to trial, when 134 charges were withdrawn. In 1990 alone, the legal work affected 28,000 South Africans. This year, it is 20,000.

Since 1983, the thousands of legal files have been handled on the top floor of IDAF headquarters in Canon Collins House, Islington. The offices of Programme One, as it was known, were out of bounds to the rest of the staff, who had little idea what went on above them. Every week, Frankel would peruse the high pile of documentation which arrived from the front solicitors, and send it on to be dealt with by the six-person staff.

On that floor, behind the same locked door, was IDAF's welfare arm, Programme Two.

Collins had made it an act of faith to alleviate the hardship of all prison dependants - and of the prisoners themselves, who, on release, were liable to be banned, held under house arrest or prevented from working; in other words, planned destitution.

As with the lawyers, welfare recipients had to be protected from the London connection. The solution, the brainchild of Phyllis Altman, was deceptively simple. It depended on hundreds of letter writers sending money through the post and keeping quiet about it for years. The first batch was recruited by the IDAF inner circle, and grew into a network covering Scandinavia, Holland, Ireland and Canada. Today there are 375 correspondents in Britain and another 250 abroad, of whom 115 are in Canada and 50 in Norway. Some have been writing to the same wife or grantmother for over 20 years.

Letter writers were unconnected with the struggle, and so beyond suspicion. No IDAF employee could be a correspondent, and South Africans were rare, for they might have been finger-printed or their handwriting known to BOSS.

Eileen Wainwright was living in Hemel Hempstead in 1972 when a friend, the sister of an exile, Hilda Bernstein, asked if she would write 'as a concerned member of the public' to a family in South Africa and enclose some cash. She ended up with 16 families on her roster. Only her husband was privy to the secret.

The letter writer's opening gambit was carefully worded: 'Dear Mrs Mpetla, i write as a concerned member of the public. I have heard you are in trouble. My friends would like to help you.'

It worked like clockwork. Every two months a bulky registered packet containing hundreds of pounds in cash arrived from a 'Rev Williams', for conversion into postal orders. The packet contained directions on what should be said to each family.

There was a flat two-monthly grant of £140 per family and an extra £60 a year for each school-going child, even for a family of 10 (blacks unlike whites, pay to go to school). A funeral was worth £300. There was extra for medical treatment, and to travel to Cape Town for a visit to Robben Island prison, a boon when you lived 1,500 miles away on the Zimbabwe border.

On release, a prisoner, whether famous or unknown, received R100 (£20) for every year inside. Mandela got R2,800. Ex-prisoners have been helped to complete their school exams, to study teaching or hairdressing. Others were set up in business with a knitting machine. Over the years, the programme has benefited 45,000 people.

Across South Africa, in tin hovels and mud huts, in bulging townships and sordid prisons, the recipients puzzled over the generous foreigners who had taken them under their wing - so unlike 'Europeans' at home. 'Friend,' one wrote, 'I don't know what i should do for you, so that you will see how essential are you in our lives.'

A mother passed on a message from her son, aged 13, that 'now he can read and write english he is going to write you a sweet and detailed letter very soon.'

A correspondent, David Armstrong, was thought to be a vicar, though why, he was asked, did his letters not end with 'I pray for you'? From 1985 the letters became more overtly political. A woman with a chest infection brought on by tear gas thrown into her yard, wrote: 'In a way the stressful situation for the family is relieved when the father is in detention because at least now there is a relief because we're not raided at home.'

For the most part, they said thanks, listed their needs, talked of the weather, or of a grandmother who had died. They were not grabbers. A physically handicapped woman qualified as a nurse, found a job and wrote: 'Please give the grant to someone else.'

The British letter writers sent the replies on to a London accommodation address, or to a real person with no apparent IDAF connection. Father John Sherrington's vicarage in north-west London was one of these. Accommodation addresses were shuffled regularly. The IDAF workers who collected the mail from the post boxes were always white and British, and never went twice in a row nor at a regular time. But as the British letter writers were twice removed from the IDAF, BOSS would have needed vast resources and a degree of good fortune to reach the pot of gold.

Inside South Africa, the consequences of detection were far more serious. The editor of Muslim News, Imam Abdullah Haron, died in police custody in Cape Town, 'falling down stairs.' One of his crimes was to distribute IDAF money to families of political prisoners. More fortunate was the Anglican Dean of Johannesburg, the Very Rev Gonville Ffrench-Beytagh, who was sent down for five years under the Terrorism Act for helping dependants with rent, food, school fees, even spectacles. He got off on appeal.

All the while Mrs Hodgon and her team analysed the letters and evaluated the financial needs. A bulky registered letter would set the eight-week cycle turning again.

The 10 women in Programme Two adhered to Trappist vows of secrecy. Penelope Mayson is married to an exiled Methodist, Cedric Mayson, who would never have given the game away. He thougt his wife spent her days filing. It was a strain not talking, she says, 'some of those letters were so harrowing.'

The correspondence often grew into genuine affection. David Armstrong was recruited 15 years ago by a fellow lecturer at Barnet College, Herts. 'I had no knowledge of their lives, and did not wish to incriminate them. So in a very British way, I wrote about the weather and my garden.' At one time, both Joyce Mashamba and her husband were in prison, and their three sons were looked after by the grandmother. On her release, she wrote that vigilantes had ransacked her house. Armstrong burst into tears. 'I was so angry that all i could do was send letters saying it was raining here and how's the weather there?'

One day last year the telephone rang in his London house; Mrs Mashamba was in England on a course. 'She sat in our dinning room telling her story. In and out of prison, harassed, isolated from husband and children. Yet they never broke her. I knew then that my work had been worthwhile, for now i understood the personal dimension of her struggle.'

For Armstrong, there was one jarring note. Five years ago IDAF discontinued the cumbersome 'cash in the bag' system and asked its correspodents whether they minded if the money went by bank transfer to their nearest Barclays Bank, where they would be expected to open an account. Barclays was then an anti-apartheid target because of its extensive interests in South Africa - which is why the bank was convenient for IDAF. Armstrong gritted his teeth and went along with the plan.

Now Programme Two is being closed down. At the end of April, IDAF will hand over its files to the South African Council of Churches Dependants' Conference. Peggy Stevenson, the programme director, has confessed to her letter-writers that, yes, IDAF was behind it all these years. She asked them to explain this to their South African families. Mrs Wainwright, now living in Devon, has mixed feelings: 'They thought i was a great philanthropist. They didn't know the money went further than me. So I was pleased to write and say where it realy came from. But I'll feel bereft. Mt Meals-on-Wheels work in Lympstone is tame compared with writing letters to South Africa.

The £100 million estimated by IDAF's current director Horst Kleinschmidt, have gob into South Africa has come largely from Scandinavia and the United Nations.

Britain made one miniscule grant, preferring the doomed IUEF in Geneva. The Carter Administration proffered a small 'one-off'. Former Prime Minister Vorster used to say that IDAF was 'kept afloat' by Communists, and he was correct in one respect: the contributions were in kind - wine from Bulgaria, slivovitz from Yugoslavia, a large consignment of vodka from the Soviet Union which Collins auctioned in the London docks.

In a way, the operation was a partnership between Canon Collins and the Swedish public. The link-man was a Swedish journalist, Per Wastberg, who in 1960 wrote a series of articles about apartheid in Dagens Nyheter. Money poured in from readers, and a defence and aid committee was set up.

In 1965, the Swedish government made its initial grants to IDAF; the UN Trust Fund followed suit the next year. Over the years IDAF would receive regular donations from 10-15 countries (and the UN from further 15). Sweden, Norway and Holland were the largest, India a modest but reliable contributor. Last year Sweden's aid organisation, SIDA, donated £4 million to IDAF.

Programme One closed down last week, and human rights cases will be handled by agencies in South Africa. The country's 'IDAF lawyers' now know the route of the funds they were receiving. It prompted one unwitting beneficiary, Cape Town lawyer Dullar Omar, to say: 'Nobody knew where the money came from. Nobody got kudos. This was the key to its success.' When Nelson Mandela was told of the extent of IDAF's role he was said to have been amazed.

Diana Collins's eyes light up at the memory of her husband: 'They were extraordinary activities for a canon of St Paul's. I used to tell him that i married him under false pretences. There was an easy-going don at Oxford and my family preferred him to John. Such a dull life married to a clergyman!'

This article was writen by Denis Herbstein and published in the Observer Review on Sunday 5th May 1991. It is reproduced here with his permission.