‘Music itself is regarded by many as sinful’
JOHN PHILLIPS, CONSUL-GENERAL TO THE SULTANATE OF OMAN,
AUGUST 1960John Phillips’s despatch comes from a long tradition of good-natured moaning in the Diplomatic Service whenever bureaucrats in London issue blanket instructions to overseas missions in disregard of local applicability. Every foreign post, large or small, has to fulfil these edicts, regardless of the endlessly variant local circumstances and no matter how trivial the need.
The Foreign Office wrote to Phillips in Oman following a request from the Admiralty Office. Clerks there were conducting an audit of sheet music for the 200 or so different national anthems played by Royal Navy ships when visiting friendly ports. The stock check was instigated after a band aboard a ship accidentally played the wrong national anthem, causing the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) embarrassment.
Oman, with its deep harbour and friendly sheikhs, was strategically important to Britain’s interests in the Persian Gulf. But it was hardly in the top league of diplomatic posts. It was therefore to no one’s surprise that when Admiralty officials delved in their files in search of the score to the National Salute to the Sultan of Muscat and Oman, they returned almost empty-handed. The clerks could lay their hands on only one version, transcribed for a wind instrument. The Foreign Office duly sent the sheet music to the Consul-General in Oman, telling him to turn musical detective and verify it.
Six weeks later Phillips sent the following despatch back to the Foreign Secretary and instantly entered FCO folklore.
At first glance the account given in the despatch reads like that of a subordinate dutifully fulfilling orders. But on closer inspection the Consul-General is actually blowing a raspberry to his faraway taskmasters, mocking at every turn the Whitehall tendency to centralize and standardize. Phillips put into the diplomatic bag bound for London along with his despatch a broken gramophone record with a recording – could it but be played – of the National Salute.
The despatch may be short but it was no rush job. According to one retired diplomat, Oliver Miles, Phillips’s registry clerk ‘sealed and unsealed that damn bag’ as many as four times ‘so that the Consul-General could change a comma’ in the despatch, and make other last-minute tweaks. Phillips was quite right to do so, says Miles, ‘because it made his career’.
The despatch leaked, and found its way into Time magazine on 14 November 1960 under the headline ‘Sultan’s Salute’. There was a leak inquiry (conducted with more urgency than usual – the Sultan himself was known to read Time), which never found the culprit.
Time’s story concluded: ‘The Foreign Office had no comment, but a Navy man said admiringly: “They do write good letters down in Muscat.” ’
THIS DOCUMENT IS THE PROPERTY OF HER BRITANNIC MAJESTY’S GOVERNMENT
| L 1752/2 | Foreign Office and Whitehall Distribution |
MIDDLE EAST (GENERAL)
September 1st, 1960
NATIONAL SALUTE TO THE SULTAN OF MUSCAT AND OMAN
Mr Phillips to Lord Home (Received September 1st)
SUMMARY
Difficulty in verifying a Ba clarinet score in a country where none can read music and music itself is regarded by many as sinful.
| (NO. 10. CONFIDENTIAL) | Oman, August 17, 1960. |
My Lord,
I have the honour to refer to Your Lordship’s despatch No. 8 of the 29th July, in which you requested me to ascertain, on behalf of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, whether the Ba clarinet music, enclosed with your despatch, was a correct and up to date rendering of the National Salute to the Sultan of Muscat and Oman.
I have encountered certain difficulties in fulfilling this request. The Sultanate has not since about 1937 possessed a band. None of the Sultan’s subjects, so far as I am aware can read music, which the majority of them regard as sinful. The Manager of the British Bank of the Middle East, who can, does not possess a clarinet. Even if he did, the dignitary who in the absence of the Sultan is the recipient of ceremonial honours and who might be presumed to recognize the tune, is somewhat deaf.
Fortunately I have been able to obtain, and now enclose, a gramophone record which has on one side a rendering by a British military band of the ‘Salutation and March to His Highness the Sultan of Muscat and Oman’. The first part of this tune, which was composed by the Bandmaster of a cruiser in about 1932, bears close resemblance to a pianoforte rendering by the Bank Manager of the clarinet music enclosed with Your Lordship’s despatch. The only further testimony I can obtain of the correctness of this music is that it reminds a resident of long standing of a tune, once played by the long defunct band of the now disbanded Muscat Infantry, and known at the time to non-commissioned members of His Majesty’s forces as (I quote the vernacular) ‘Gawd strike the Sultan Blind’.
I am informed by the Acting Minister of Foreign Affairs that there are now no occasions on which the ‘Salutation’ is officially played. The last occasion on which it is known to have been played at all was on a gramophone at an evening reception given by the Military Secretary in honour of the Sultan, who inadvertently sat on the record afterwards and broke it. I consider however that an occasion might arise when the playing might be appropriate; if for example, the Sultan were to go aboard a cruiser which carried a band. I am proposing to call on His Highness shortly at Salalah on his return from London, and shall make further enquiries as to his wishes on the matter.
I am sending a copy of this despatch, without enclosure to His Excellency the Political Resident at Bahrain.
I have the honour to be Sir,
J. F. S. PHILLIPS
‘Our Man In Chad Isn’t’
JOHN WILSON, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE REPUBLIC
OF CHAD, SEPTEMBER 1970This despatch marks the moment British diplomacy conjured up a curious and fleeting paradox: John Wilson’s appointment as Britain’s first London-based ambassador.
Long ago the Diplomatic Service, which was comprised of ambassadors and other diplomats living overseas, was entirely distinct from the Foreign Office, staffed by Whitehall mandarins. The joke that a fully fledged ambassador could operate day to day from London, thousands of miles from the people to whom he was supposed to be representing HMG, would clearly have struck the FCO’s funny bone.
As Wilson realized, the novelty of his predicament was a product of the jet age. The FCO has long rotated its diplomats between posts overseas and spells at home in Whitehall, and nowadays of course senior diplomats and ministers would think nothing of jumping on a plane for a whistlestop tour to negotiate with their foreign counterparts. The Foreign Office has repeated Wilson’s experiment since, but only infrequently, and the London-based ambassador remains a rare breed today. When representing their country, the FCO still expects its honest men (and women) to lie abroad.
John Wilson went on eventually to become High Commissioner to Canada, by which time he had succeeded his father to the barony as Lord Moran. He acquired during his career a reputation for amused candour. His 1984 valedictory, featured in our first volume of despatches (noting the parochialism of Ottawa politics, and the absence, as Wilson saw it, of a ‘ferocious competition of talent’ in Canada) caused some controversy there when we published it.
CONFIDENTIAL
FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH OFFICE DIPLOMATIC REPORT No. 424/70
| JWD 25/1 | General Distribution |
CHAD
3 September, 1970
APPOINTMENT OF HER MAJESTY’S FIRST LONDON-BASED AMBASSADOR, AND THE PRESENTATION OF HIS LETTERS OF CREDENCE TO PRESIDENT TOMBALBAYE
The British Ambassador in Chad to the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Received 3 September)
| (CONFIDENTIAL) | British Embassy to Chad, |
c/o Foreign and
Commonwealth Office,
6 August, 1970.
Sir,
Last Monday, as usual, I was at work in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. But on Tuesday I flew to Fort Lamy in Chad, 3,000 miles away in the middle of Africa, taking with me hastily prepared credentials, a speech and a morning coat. On Wednesday I called on the Chadian Minister of Foreign Affairs, the chief foreign representatives in Fort Lamy and the United Nations representative. On Thursday morning I presented my credentials to President Tombalbaye and, just over an hour later, flew back to Europe. On Friday I was again at my desk in the office.
This curious exercise in instant diplomacy was the outcome of a decision that, for the first time, the Head of a Political Department in the office should be appointed additionally as Ambassador to one of the countries for which his Department was responsible. Her Majesty’s late Ambassador in Yaoundé covered five African countries – Cameroon, where he resided, and, as non-resident Ambassador, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Chad and the Central African Republic. Mr Edden told the Department that he thought that these five countries were too many for one Ambassador to cover adequately … [He] suggested that, in default of any better arrangement, the Head of the West African Department might be proposed as non-resident Ambassador based in London … [T]he Government of Chad promptly agreed and proposed that the arrangement should come into force without delay.
To me therefore fell the honour and privilege of being the first member of the Diplomatic Service to be appointed as one (albeit certainly the least) of Her Majesty’s Ambassadors while continuing to serve as Head of a Department in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. This is an experiment and, as such, it has taken most people by surprise. It is a new departure, reported by one newspaper under the appropriate headline, ‘Our Man In Chad Isn’t’. It is too soon to say whether the arrangement is a practicable, sensible and economical one, but I shall do my best to make it so.
In the notes I recorded after a visit to West Africa in February 1969 I stressed the constant need to remember the prodigious gulf between European theory and African reality. Nowhere is this gulf wider than in Chad. We, for example, work by the clock. For Africans life is timeless and haste is unknown. I arrived last Tuesday in response to a summons from the Chadian Government, who had asked me at very short notice to present my credentials between 15 and 30 July and had agreed to the proposal that I should do so on 29 July. I rashly assumed that I should be given on arrival a programme of calls and a firm appointment at the palace. I was indeed met by the Chief of Protocol, but it soon emerged that he had made no plans at all, and that we had to start from scratch. A great deal of tactful prodding of Chadian bureaucrats was therefore called for …
Next morning I saw the Minister for Foreign Affairs, M. Baroum, who was on holiday but came into the office specially to receive me. I was told later by the German Ambassador that M. Baroum nurses racial anti-white prejudices, but I must say that he received me with great cordiality and that we had an agreeable conversation. Most of the rest of the day I spent seeing other people in Fort Lamy … By the evening, however, we were still without news of any appointment with the President. I was told by my new colleagues that I might be summoned at five minutes’ notice or alternatively that I might have to wait for several weeks, a prospect that filled me with alarm. More prodding took place, but the lamp of hope burnt low. That night, however, a message came that I was to present my credentials at 10 a.m. next day and I retired to bed in a mood of unreasoning euphoria.
On Thursday morning the timing began to slip. The Chief of Protocol rang to say that the time was now to be 10.30 and that he would fetch me at 10.15 or 10.20. A motor cycle escort arrived, the commander of which came up to my room and asked if I could tell him where we were going. I said I thought the President’s Palace, but that it was scarcely for me to say. At 10.15 I was on the steps of my hotel in a morning coat. 10.20 passed, then 10.30. No car appeared. The motor cycle escort departed. Time passed. A herd of long-horned cattle were driven by. It began to rain. The little group on the hotel steps settled down into a torpid state. 10.40, 10.45 passed. My return flight was at 12.35. I surrendered to a feeling of despair. The words of the old song came back to me:
‘There was I, waiting at the church,
… left me in the lurch.’1
There was no more we could do. The rain had stopped, but Africa, and Chad, seemed to have won.
Then, astonishingly, the escort reappeared, with a car bringing the Chief of Protocol, who explained the delay as due to the shower. Proudly the chauffeur pressed a button and the car roof opened. My flag (which, luckily, I had remembered to bring out from London) was fixed to the wing, and we set out. All seemed splendid again. Being driven slowly through the streets of Fort Lamy, past the acacias and oleanders, escorted by motor cycles, with even French officers having to salute and a cheer going up from some Nigerian students at sight of the British flag, I again thought that our troubles were at an end. But optimism is always premature in Africa. At that point the heavens opened in a cloudburst worthy of the tropics. The rain descended in a solid sheet. The chauffeur prodded a button, but the roof refused to close again. The Chief of Protocol wrung his hands and exclaimed ‘O là là’ any number of times. Through the deluge I sought to assure him that he must think nothing of it and that, as an Englishman, I was entirely used to wettings.
I arrived therefore at the palace, through a double line of guards in red and blue with drawn sabres, in the condition of a sponge, with a steaming morning coat, a smell of wet serge, and water running off both elbows. The Chief of Protocol made ineffectual attempts to dry me with a handkerchief. So I advanced and delivered my speech under the klieg lights while the cameras whirred. President Tombalbaye stood motionless with a rigid and forbidding expression on his face. I thought at the time that he was seeking to make an impression of dignity, strength and independence, but on reflection I think he was probably determined not to be the first to burst out laughing at the spectacle of this bedraggled Ambassador emerging like a newt from the waters and proceeding to declaim a formal address. He replied to my speech in very much the same terms as my own – indeed I thought I recognised some phrases out of mine, conveniently appropriated, no doubt, by those who had had to draft the reply. I then handed him my credentials and Mr Edden’s letter of recall.
Afterwards I had a conversation with the President, who was relaxed and agreeable and seemed to me to be alert, realistic and shrewd … He spoke of the administrative reforms being instituted in the country (by the French) and of the importance of trained administrators. Speaking with some feeling, he said that the situation was altogether different in the former British colonies in Africa. Britain had really trained their peoples for independence, whereas ‘we’, he observed, ‘started from zero’ …
So, after photographs, I departed, driving to the airport in my sodden morning coat and, I imagine, leaving behind a damp patch on the President’s sofa.
I came away with an impression of friendliness and goodwill, of a desperately poor country with some of the world’s highest prices, on the border between the desert and the rain forest, still dominated by French soldiers, French administrators and rapacious French businessmen – ‘the last French colony’, as the United Nations Representative called it. The French have sadly neglected it for the 70 years they have run it since they defeated and slew the Sultan of Bornu and cut the country off from Nigeria, despite its romantic associations for them with Generals de Gaulle and Leclerc.2 When the French Chargé d’Affaires was describing to me the great effort France was making in the administrative field, with 600 experts in the country, I wondered what the French had been doing since 1900 and why it was necessary to mount a crash programme now …
I am sending copies of this despatch to Her Majesty’s Representatives at West African posts, in Libya, the Sudan and Ethiopia, to the Chargé d’Affaires at Her Majesty’s Embassy in Paris, to Her Majesty’s Ambassador in Washington and to the Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York.
I have, etc.,
JOHN WILSON.
‘We all feel like that, Reggie, now and then’
SIR ARCHIBALD CLARK KERR, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE
SOVIET UNION, APRIL 1943A hoary old favourite in Whitehall and Westminster, but not every reader will have encountered this unashamedly vulgar document. In recent years, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr’s marvellous one-pager from Moscow to his friend Lord Pembroke in Whitehall has gained considerable currency, not to say notoriety, on the internet. It first came to light long before that, having been published in 1978 in the Spectator and in the Far Eastern Economic Review. Though often suspected to be the FCO’s equivalent of an urban myth, it’s almost certainly genuine. Donald Gillies, the ambassador’s biographer, attests to its existence.
The central character in the despatch appears elsewhere, too, in Clark Kerr’s private papers. Douglas Stuart, a former BBC correspondent in Austria, still has the great man’s actual calling card (embossed ‘Secretaire de l’Ambassade de Turquie’), which had been left at the British Embassy. ‘On my return to Vienna,’ he wrote, ‘my wife put [it] in our scrapbook with a simple paper covering on which she wrote, “For Adults Only”. This was intended to warn off our children. It didn’t.’
Clark Kerr had the distinction of serving as ambassador to three global powers: China, Russia and, lastly, America; and was raised to the peerage in 1946 as Baron Inverchapel. In the USSR during the darkest days of the Second World War he formed a firm friendship with Stalin. Clark Kerr recalled his chats with the Soviet leader as the chief ‘delight’ of his time in Moscow.
LORD PEMBROKE,
FOREIGN OFFICE,
LONDON
6 April 1943
My Dear Reggie,
In these dark days man tends to look for little shafts of light that spill from heaven. My days are probably darker than yours, and I need, my God I do, all the light I can get. But I am a decent fellow, and I do not want to be mean and selfish about what little brightness is shed upon me from time to time. So I propose to share with you a tiny flash that has illuminated my sombre life and tell you that God has given me a new Turkish colleague whose card tells me that he is called Mustafa Kunt.
We all feel like that, Reggie, now and then, especially when spring is upon us, but few of us would care to put it on our cards. It takes a Turk to do that.
Archibald Clark Kerr
‘The next time we want to import a horse to Russia it will be a doddle’
LAURA BRADY, THIRD SECRETARY AT HM EMBASSY
MOSCOW, OCTOBER 1993In October 1993 the main event in Moscow was a bloody constitutional crisis that culminated in tanks shelling the Russian White House. The stand-off between parliament and Boris Yeltsin’s troops demanded the full attention of most foreign diplomats in Moscow.
Laura Brady, a junior diplomat in the British Embassy in Moscow, had a different problem to deal with. It involved some large melons, the Moscow railway – and an unusual fiftieth-birthday present given to John Major by the President of Turkmenistan, a newly de-Sovietized state on the periphery of what had until recently been the USSR.
On an official visit to London earlier that year, President Niyazov presented Mr Major with a framed photograph of a horse called Maksat. Turkmenistan was justly proud of its wonderful Akhal-Teke stallions, and Niyazov was fond of making gifts of them to foreign leaders. Diplomatic correspondents on newspapers inevitably dubbed the practice ‘equine diplomacy’, after China and its globetrotting panda-envoys.
That evening Major took the book with him to his audience at Buckingham Palace. The Queen told him Turkmen stallions were much prized as breeding stock, and that she herself had been given one some years before. A single Akhal-Teke was worth £30,000. The Prime Minister was persuaded not to look a gift horse in the mouth, so to speak – although protocol meant he could hardly have refused such a present, anyway.
But the horse was still in Turkmenistan and the only route out was through Russia. The Foreign Office soon established that the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs shared their predicament, because President Mitterrand had also been offered a stallion. An Anglo-French plan was hatched. The two horses were to be sent with local grooms by train to Moscow. On arrival the Third Secretary at the British Embassy was to meet them, in liaison with the French horse attaché. Once in Moscow the horses were to enter quarantine before their eventual transit to the UK and France. A stable was waiting for Maksat in the Household Cavalry.
Laura Brady therefore spent this crucial juncture in modern history battling with the bottom rung of Russian bureaucracy in order to take successful delivery of a pair of thoroughbreds. Several days’ train travel across the vastness of the rapidly crumbling Soviet empire had done little to improve the temper of the two Akhal-Teke, a notoriously skittish breed. Brady, however, had simply to take care of the customs and excise formalities. What could possibly go wrong?
A copy of the telegram Brady wrote at the end of her resulting ordeal was released to us in response to our FOI request in 2011. It is a testament to the effectiveness of the Freedom of Information process, and to the rectitude with which it is applied at the Foreign Office that this wonderful and still quite recent telegram was released to us with only the most minor amendments – identifying marks and names, shown here as redactions. We know, because we do in fact have a complete copy of the original document, obtained by other means. We shall, however, observe the FCO’s redactions.
In 1993, Brady’s telegram was circulated around Whitehall and read with pleasure – not least by John Major, who sent a personal reply congratulating her on her resourcefulness. Brady’s account is evidence if evidence were needed of the difficult and unglamorous nature of much of the work of junior Foreign Office staff abroad – contrary to the stereotype.
Eventually the horse did reach Britain. A military career was not to be, however. After a short trial the Household Cavalry found him too frisky for ceremonial work – which worked out quite well for the stallion, who was put out to stud at an equestrian centre in Wales. Since then his excellent genes have also won him sporting laurels: he is a champion endurance racer, the Turkmeni record holder over one and one and a half miles on the flat, and a British show champion. Maksat still lives happily in Carmarthenshire as we write.
HORSES: THE DEFINITIVE END OF AN ERA
As I reported to you on the telephone today, the Turkmen horses have arrived in Moscow. They are now in the quarantine stables, no doubt reliving the excitement of the last week. The last few hours leading up to this momentous event are as follows.
On Tuesday morning I got an excited phonecall from [REDACTED] of the Russian Horse Society (RHS). He had found the horses’ carriage. The reason he had not been able to find it the day before was because the carriage hadn’t been there. The Turkmens had got the day wrong and the train had only arrived on Monday night, not Sunday night. [REDACTED] said that the Railway Authority’s vet had already inspected the horses and passed them as fit. We were now free to begin the customs formalities. We phoned the [REDACTED] Diplomatic Customs Post in northern Moscow and were given an appointment for one o’clock.
At one o’clock we presented ourselves at the customs office. Apart from two mangy dogs and a receptionist the place was deserted. The receptionist told us that it was lunch time. We should return at three o’clock. We explained our mission, pleading the case of two poor Turkmen horses that had been standing up in a railway carriage for four and a half days. This elicited in response the sad tale of the Finnish ambassador’s parrot, the only other living thing that had fallen in to the hands of the [REDACTED] Diplomatic Customs Post during her memory. The receptionist, an animal lover and close to tears at the thought of the parrot, relented and led us through a maze of ceiling-high packing cases in the enormous warehouse. And there we found the staff of the [REDACTED] diplomatic customs post playing poker.
Fifteen dollars poorer but with the customs formalities completed we hotfooted it to the station accounts office in south Moscow, arriving there at 16.45. We presented the vet’s certificate of fitness and our stamped customs declaration. We were told that staff had stopped work to get ready to go home at 17.00. Nothing could be done until the following day. We again trotted out the pitiful story of the horses. The soft-hearted and enormously fat clerk relented. But after one glance at the papers on her desk and a quick twiddle on the office abacus she announced that we owed the Russian Railway Authority eight and a half million roubles. We explained that the Turkmens had paid for the transport in advance. She replied that they had added up the figures wrongly and we had to pay the balance. We pointed out that the Turkmens had provided their own railway carriage for the journey. They did not want the carriage back. Could we not come to some arrangement? After some deliberation her boss finally agreed. But now it was after five o’clock. We would have to return the next day.
At 08.30 Wednesday morning we were all back at the accounts office. Could we now have the bit of paper that would allow us to drive out of the freight yard with the horses? In principle, yes, said the fat clerk. In practice, however, no. As the horses had been at the station for 24 hours they would have to be seen again by the vet. The vet was in her office adding-up extremely slowly a long list of figures on a calculator with dodgy batteries. The numbers kept fading, at which point she began again at the top of the list. We waited an hour. The vet then pushed across the table a signed declaration saying that she had inspected the horses again and that they were fit. All without leaving her desk. For this we paid precisely R7,614.
At 10.00 we got to the station itself. Within 20 minutes we had the horses loaded into the horse-box. I thought that we were ready to go. But out of the railway carriage the three grooms, who had travelled with the horses, began to carry countless sacks of potatoes, onions, carrots and at least 200 large yellow melons. One groom explained that as Turkmenistan had no post 1992 banknotes they were forced to bring wares to sell in Moscow to be able to buy the return ticket to Ashkhabad. The groom also told me how they had lost some of the melons when armed bandits had broken into their carriage at a rural station in Kazakhstan. The bandits had been disappointed to find no cash at all amongst the three grooms. The main cargo (the horses) had been unwilling to dismount from the train and make off into the Kazakh darkness. So the robbers had made off with as many of the legendary Turkmen melons as they could carry.
As the last few sacks of vegetables were loaded alongside the horses we made our way to the office of the head of the freight department of the station to get the document allowing us to leave the station with our ‘freight’. He told us that we had to return to the accounts department to arrange for a sticker to be stuck on the carriage saying that the freight had been removed and that the carriage was ready for disinfection. We trooped back to the accounts department. It was 11.40. Predictably they were again packing up their papers in order to begin the lunch break on the dot of 12.00. We found the fat clerk who abandoned the woman she was dealing with (giving as explanation the same pitiful story of how long the horses had been standing up that we had given her the day before). We paid R5,084, for which we received a little old lady armed with the afore-mentioned sticker. We accompanied her back to the railway carriage. She took one look inside and screeched that she was not going to stick her sticker on such a dirty carriage full of horse manure. We would have to remove it. And no, we were not allowed to put it in the station dustbins. She stomped back to the accounts department. By this time the French horse attaché was getting hysterical.
I contemplated putting the manure in the boot of my car and taking it back for the roses at the residence. But we didn’t have a spade, and the amount of manure produced by two highly-strung horses over a period of five days is considerable. Luckily the melons again came to the rescue. Bribed with several particularly large ones the driver of an engine was persuaded to shunt the carriage a couple of miles down the track where the offending material was unceremoniously scraped out on to the track. The carriage was returned to the freight yard, the sticker was stuck and we were allowed to leave the station. The horses are now installed in the quarantine stables. The e.t.a. in London will thus be early January.
On an administrative note, the breed papers for our horse, Melekoosh,1 were apparently presented to the Prime Minister by President Niyazov2 himself. Before Melekoosh leaves Moscow they will have to be sent here so that they can be incorporated into his ‘passport’. I took photographs throughout the day and will forward to you copies for the household cavalry. I will be in touch about any other points that arise. I have made some useful contacts over the last few days so the next time we want to import a horse to Russia it will be a doddle.
SIGNED … [REDACTED]
‘Flunkeys in red, orange and green livery, gilded state coaches, and champagne’
WILLIE MORRIS, HM AMBASSADOR TO ETHIOPIA, NOVEMBER 1972
Nowadays the name Haile Selassie is pronounced most often by men in dreadlocks. In the 1930s, Jamaican followers of the Rastafari sect settled on the belief that the Emperor of Ethiopia, a country 7,000 miles away, was the Second Coming incarnate. The die was cast. When in 1966 he visited Jamaica he was greeted at the airport by some 100,000 members of the sect hailing him as the reborn Jesus, a title which, despite the pleas of the Jamaican government, he never abjured.
An other-worldly quality never seemed far from the imperial throne. Sir John Russell, one of Willie Morris’s predecessors who served in Addis Ababa from 1962 to 1966, described Ethiopia as: ‘a country which has two hundred thousand and fifty priests and thirty one doctors, the priests teaching a doctrine that the earth is flat and who are about to worship St Pontius Pilate’s day’.
In 1972, when Morris arrived in Addis, Haile Selassie was well into his fourth decade on the throne. It is no surprise that the ambassador found the atmosphere there strange. A reading of Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief (1932) had primed him to expect a touch of the ridiculous, too. A satire on Ethiopia, the novel sees Emperor Seth of Azania bent on dragging his country up by its bootstraps with a Ministry of Modernization.
Willie Morris is no Waugh but his subject was without modern parallel. This is a rambling despatch, going frequently off at a tangent to reminisce on other bizarre episodes in Morris’s and others’ careers, as well as comparisons with Waugh. Back in Whitehall, the Third Room will have found the writing self-indulgent; but nobody will have committed the thought to paper.
‘No doubt modernisation will in the end do away with the Evelyn Waugh aspects of the country,’ wrote Simon Dawbarn from the Foreign Office in London back to Morris, after reading the despatch. ‘But this seems bound to take a very long time, and in the meanwhile it is nice to know that not too much has changed.’
Dawbarn and Morris were not to know, but when Morris presented his credentials to Haile Selassie in 1972, the Emperor’s reign had less than two years left to run. He was deposed by a Soviet-backed junta called the ‘Derg’ led by Mengistu Haile Mariam, who turned Waugh’s Azania into a one-party Communist state of an exceptionally brutal kind. King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, another redoubtable monarch who features in the despatch, was assassinated the following year. This despatch deserves reading not only for its exoticism but also – in retrospect – for its melancholy.
CONFIDENTIAL
BRITISH EMBASSY,
ADDIS ABABA,
| 25/56 | 9 November 1972. |
The Right Honourable
Sir Alec Douglas-Home KT MP
etc etc etc
Sir,
ON ARRIVING IN ETHIOPIA
I have the honour to report that, in accordance with the instructions in your despatch of 11 October 1972, I delivered to the Emperor on 1 November the Letters addressed to Him by Her Majesty The Queen accrediting me as Her Majesty’s Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary at Addis Ababa and announcing the recall of my predecessor. My arrival had been timed with the hope that I would be able to attend the Coronation Day celebrations and the Opening of Parliament on 2 November; I was therefore in the nick of time … My first three days of official existence in Ethiopia were therefore quite busy, and, given the Ethiopian Government’s penchant for dressing up, I felt by the end of them that I could have profited from a short training course with Danny la Rue in the art of quick costume changes: my uniform and white tie have already been worn as much here as during the previous twenty years in the less dressy places to which I have been accustomed.
The credentials ceremony was ‘as described by my predecessor’ (that leitmotif of reporting on Ethiopia). It was punctual and dignified. I was fetched to the Palace by the Vice Minister of Court and, having inspected a smartly turned-out Guard of Honour, I was presented, after three ceremonial bows, to the Emperor by the Minister of Court. After presenting my Letters, I was introduced to the Minister for Foreign Affairs and the Minister of the Interior, and in turn I presented four members of my staff to the Emperor. I was then invited to sit and had ten minutes of friendly but very formal conversation …
In new surroundings one instinctively gropes for the familiar with which to make comparisons and draw contrasts; in my case the comparisons have to be with Saudi Arabia, my last post, and with the Ethiopia I have previously known – that of Evelyn Waugh. Though King Feisal is ten years younger than Haile Selassie, he is visibly ageing, and the Emperor’s features are less ravaged than his. The Emperor’s are certainly those of an old man, yet they are not all that different from the pictures which were so familiar when those of my generation were first becoming aware of international affairs 37 years ago. Both rulers have great presence and dignity, but the Emperor gives the impression of a serenity and repose which are absent in the great Saudi worrier. (I mean ‘worrier’.) I think this impression may be deceptive, when I recollect that, while Feisal was sowing his wild oats, and even before, Ras Tafari was with craft and ruthless energy already establishing control of his ramshackle empire; that in his eighth decade he has established himself so improbably as doyen among the present generation of African leaders, and that in his own country even yet no dog barks in his presence.
When it comes to ceremony, the contrast between Wahhabi puritanism and this court of flunkeys in red, orange and green livery, gilded state coaches, and champagne, could not be more complete. King Feisal, when I presented my credentials to him, wore a double breasted jacket over his thob. It is the incongruity between the ceremony, based on nineteenth century European courts, and the Afro-Ethiopian milieu that brings Evelyn Waugh to mind. It was a Waugh touch that when the Emperor seated himself between President and Mrs Tolbert1 at the Opening of Parliament last week, he waited in dignified silence for fifteen minutes while someone went to fetch the gracious speech which everyone had forgotten to bring along. On the occasion of that coronation 42 years ago, the visiting Royal Marine band drank champagne for breakfast, luncheon, tea and dinner all the way from Djibouti. I note that it is still served almost as regularly on all royal occasions. And at the actual Coronation ceremony, Waugh noted that ‘there was plenty of room for all, except, as it happened, for the Abyssinians themselves’. As, sandwiched between the cars of His Excellency from Reykjavik (Long live Icelandic–Ethiopian friendship!) and Her Excellency from Trinidad and Tobago, one looks through the car window at the mixed racial features and variegated dress of the Ethiopians in the street (some of them earning a few extra cents by carrying pictures of President and Mrs Tolbert, or yesterday, even more improbably, of King Baudouin and Queen Fabiola2) then the Ethiopians in the street seem very far removed from the charade in which one is taking part. It must take quite an effort to cross the divide.
Returning to this most beautiful of Embassy compounds, I am also reminded of that fictional predecessor, the Envoy Extraordinary in ‘Black Mischief’, who took such care to insulate himself from the unpleasantness going on outside its happy life. I can now see his temptation. Perhaps it is as well that there exists one feature of this charming Embassy that I do not immediately take to. By a tradition too hallowed for me to think of breaking it, my predecessors’ names and dates are carved and gilded on the grey stone pillars in the front hall, suggesting some graveyard or memorial to the glorious departed. Faced when I come home with this memento mori, I still find myself humming the old A. and M. hymn
‘A few more years shall roll
A few more seasons pass …’
(Fortunately, it has disappeared from the modern hymn books, and I cannot accurately complete my quotation3 with the warning of the narrow grave that awaits me, too.)
I have the honour to be
Sir
Your obedient Servant
Willie Morris
‘I am now entitled to 10 wives’
PETER PENFOLD, HM HIGH COMMISSIONER TO THE
REPUBLIC OF SIERRA LEONE, JUNE 1998On the surface this appears to be a cheery tale. The High Commissioner writes of a memorable return to his post in Sierra Leone after a spell in London. But the events surrounding this anecdote were extremely serious. Far from blowing his own trumpet out of vanity, in this despatch Penfold was in fact trying to shore up his reputation against formidable odds.
Penfold addressed his report to his bosses in the West Africa Department in Whitehall, but he also copied it – classified as ‘unrestricted’, allowing for further distribution – to eleven other diplomatic posts, including Bonn and New York. Penfold’s peers and colleagues across the Diplomatic Service could learn that the people of Freetown held him in high esteem.
Though the account is highly readable, some of the humour in this telegram comes across a little forced. This is unsurprising given the nature of the ‘Other preoccupations’ that had been demanding the High Commissioner’s attention, and presence, in London. For the very events that made Penfold a hero on the African street were to ruin his Foreign Office career.
At issue was the markedly proactive role the High Commissioner had played in helping restore democracy in Sierra Leone. In 1997, thugs from the Revolutionary United Front were on the streets hacking people to death. When the democratically elected President Kabbah fled the country, Penfold was at his side, and in the months that followed the High Commissioner worked to return Kabbah back to power.
In doing so Penfold chose to cooperate with Sandline International, a mercenary organization which provided weapons to help the government-in-exile oust the rebels. These were choppy waters for a diplomat, and they proved to be Penfold’s undoing. Sierra Leone was subject to a UN arms embargo, which the High Commissioner suddenly found himself accused of contravening.
The subsequent controversy, known as the ‘Arms to Africa’ affair, provoked an official inquiry. Penfold was back in Freetown by the time Sir Thomas Legg published his report. Legg exonerated the Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, and his senior officials, while criticizing Penfold. The High Commissioner was blamed for giving Sandline’s plans ‘a degree of approval which he had no authority to do’. But the episode also highlighted management failures within the FCO, and Tory MPs railed against the ‘monstrous injustice’ they saw in the report that made Penfold the ‘fall guy for everyone else’s shortcomings’.
Sierra Leone was a dangerous post, and Penfold was accompanied in his duties there by a team of Close Protection Officers from the Royal Military Police (RMPs). After 1998 the situation in Freetown continued to deteriorate. The following year UN peacekeepers were deployed and eventually British combat troops, who finally defeated the rebels.
Penfold could have expected one more big job in the Diplomatic Service before retirement. Returning to London in 2000, he applied for sixteen posts but did not get any of them, and left the Foreign Office shortly afterwards.
SUBJECT: RETURN OF HIGH COMMISSIONER
I have been asked by the department to send a report about my return to Freetown (c/f FCO teleletter dated 15 June). Other preoccupations have prevented me from doing so until now.
I returned to post on Sunday 14 June … We were given clearance to fly direct from Conarky to Hastings airport, on the outskirts of Freetown. We landed around 11 a.m. On arrival we were greeted by representatives of government and the civil societies, accompanied by the Defence Adviser and the Close Protection team. A number of Sierra Leoneans, including members of the S L Women singing, cheering and carrying placards and banners. In a short ceremony in the customs hall of the airport, I was appointed an honorary Paramount Chief by the Paramount Chief of the Western Area, Chief Naimbana. I was presented with a ceremonial suit and hat made from local cloth and a staff of office made of wood and brass, and given the name ‘Chief Komrabai Penfold’.
We then drove in cavalcade to Freetown, and along the way there were people, including schoolchildren and various organisations, carrying placards, welcoming my return, praising Britain and the British Government and waving Union Jacks and the Sierra Leone flags. At the PZ roundabout in Freetown, I was transferred to a specially made hammock with a wooden awning painted as a Union Jack. A hammock is the traditional way for Paramount Chiefs to travel. We processed through the streets of Freetown with a throng of cheering and singing Sierra Leoneans, estimated to be several thousands, waving flags and banners, up to the Law Courts Building alongside the Cotton Tree in the centre of Freetown.
After thanking the 4 bearers of the hammock I was carried to the steps of the Law Courts from where a ceremony was arranged in front of the assembled crowds. Speeches were delivered … interspersed with prayers and singing … In my remarks, partly delivered in Krio, I thanked the people for their warm welcome and for all their support in recent weeks. I told them that I was privileged to accept the appointment of Paramount Chief on behalf of Her Majesty, the British Government and the British people. (I understand that this is the third time that someone from Britain has been appointed a Paramount Chief – The Queen and Prince Philip were appointed during their visit to Sierra Leone in the 70s). I noted that their reception was a clear indication of the gratitude to the British government and people for their role in restoring democracy to Sierra Leone and promised that we would continue to help where we could to develop a peaceful and prosperous democratic society.
I finally reached the residence, where some of the organisers of the rally and members of the local staff joined me for drinks. President Kabbah later telephoned to welcome me back. (He now addresses me as ‘Chief !’)
My appointment as ‘PC Komrabai Penfold’ has several implications, on which I may need to seek official advice :-
a) I understand that I am now entitled to 10 wives. I have reported this to my wife, who now also has an official title of ‘Yabomposse’. It is her duty to choose them for me. But what is the position over married allowances?
b) The hammock has been presented to me for my official travel, but what is the official mileage rate for travel by hammock? How many porters am I allowed?
c) I am checking about my seat in Parliament alongside my fellow Paramount Chiefs, but as a Chief I am entitled to select a group of tribal hunters, and, under President Kabbah’s plans for the recruitment of the new army (on which I will be reporting separately), I will have to select candidates from my Chiefdom. Can I use the Close Protection team for this? …
d) The RMPs will be writing to Longmoor1 to seek advice on the drills for close protection when escorting hammock travelling High Commissioners.
e) The DHC2 would welcome guidance on substitution pay for Paramounts Chiefs. He will require an extra porterage allowance for the hammock!
PENFOLD
‘Weary figures in dripping tails and sodden ribbons wandered forlornly under the rain searching for their vanished cars’
SIR JOHN RUSSELL, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE
FEDERATIVE REPUBLIC OF BRAZIL, MARCH 1967Sir John Russell was famous in the Foreign Office for his witty, florid despatches, brilliantly composed and rather self-indulgent. Below are two fine examples. The first, an account of the inauguration of a new President of Brazil, made Russell’s reputation. The second, the better for not being over-worked, is a less formal set of notes written the following month, describing an airborne sightseeing trip the ambassador endured over the jungles of northern Brazil. This gives a sense of the vastness and variety of the country.
The 1967 inauguration in Brasilia of President Costa e Silva was a state occasion where pageantry and pomp came undone, thanks to disorganization and a downpour. Despite the air of farce, for Whitehall the inauguration was no laughing matter; London had sent a Foreign Office Minister, Lord Chalfont, as Special Representative of the Queen. On both sides national pride was at stake and decorum was important.
The visit was a fiasco. This could have damaged the career prospects of the Ambassador, who was supposed to ensure things went smoothly. Instead, Russell rather cleverly seized the initiative by – instead of slinking embarrassedly away – trumpeting the farce and penning a warts-and-all account of every disaster that befell the delegation on their trip through the Canaries, Rio and Brasilia. Implicitly the reader absorbs the impression that none of this was the Ambassador’s fault – which it almost certainly wasn’t. In London, the despatch was ‘printed’ – FCO-speak for a widespread official circulation across Whitehall. In the file a senior clerk notes that Russell’s account ‘so well brings out the mixture of magnificent achievement and hopeless incompetence of the Brazilian character’.
Having found success with his early efforts from Rio (see also his First Impressions on pp. 179–90), Russell kept on writing funny despatches from Brazil and from Madrid, his next posting – a habit which began to irritate some colleagues: ‘increasingly tedious’, remarks a diplomat on the receiving end.
CONFIDENTIAL – GUARD
THIS DOCUMENT IS THE PROPERTY OF HER BRITANNIC MAJESTY’S GOVERNMENT
| AB 1\2 | Foreign Office and Whitehall Distribution |
BRAZIL
29 March, 1967
Section 1
PRESIDENTIAL INAUGURATION: BRASILIA 1967
Sir John Russell to Mr Brown. (Received 29 March)
| (No 12. CONFIDENTIAL) | Rio de Janeiro, |
23 March 1967
Sir,
I have the honour to report on the visit paid last week to Brazil by the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs and Lady Chalfont on the occasion of the inauguration of President Costa e Silva.
I hope that the Minister of State feels that the experience was worth the discomfort. Both were startling. But I take consolation from the reflection that it is important to us to have a Minister handling our affairs in London who has seen for himself the extraordinary range in the human endeavour of this country.
If agents of Fidel Castro or some other bitter enemy of the Brazilian regime had taken over the programme, they could not have devised a performance better calculated to discredit Brazilian claims to a place amongst the advanced and efficient countries of the world. The arrangements were chaotic and deplorable. It is indeed hard to reconcile the genius which created the near-miraculous city of Brasilia with the grotesque confusion that attended almost every moment of last week’s ceremonies. But in that contradiction of extremes, I am told, lies the charm of Brazil.
Brazil has long been proud of her Foreign Service: it is indeed recognised throughout the world as a well staffed, trained and directed example of its kind. And yet last week it fell flat on its face in the puddles of Brasilia with a splash which has left a sadly tarnished image on the unlucky spectators. Brasilia is the most modern and the best planned city in the world: there is not a traffic light or a right-angle intersection in the whole place: yet on Wednesday night the authorities managed to tie up the Presidential guests in one long, snarling, binding traffic jam. The Brazilians are the most polite and hospitable of people: yet they managed to give their guests the impression that no one was interested in their welcome or their welfare.
The arrival of Lord and Lady Chalfont (accompanied by Mr Paul Buxton of the Foreign Office) was only too true to what turned out to be subsequent form. The British United VC-10 developed engine trouble an hour this side of the Canaries and had to turn back to Las Palmas, where the party waited all day for a relief aircraft. They thus did not get to Rio until nearly midnight on Monday, the 13th of March, instead of breakfast time that day as planned. This unfortunate initial reverse not only meant the loss of all the official engagements arranged for that day, including a large Ministerial lunch party at my house, but also deprived the visitors of any chance of seeing Rio. However, as the city was blanketed all day in tropical rain, they did not really lose much. After a short night here we left the Embassy at 8 o’clock the next morning, Tuesday the 14th, to catch the special aircraft to Brasilia. Here the visitors received their baptism of Brazilian incompetence. Together with 69 other Special Missions, we waited 3 hours and 20 minutes: we waited on the tarmac of the military airport, at a temperature of 90°F. and a humidity of 90 per cent: we waited without chairs, without drinks, without parasols, without information and without apologies. But all things have an end and eventually we took off and had an agreeable flight to Brasilia …
The next morning Wednesday, the 15th of March, we started with a pleasant short round of sightseeing: but our troubles soon began. After being waved half way round the city by the traffic police, we eventually ploughed our muddy way on foot into the Congress, where three or four thousand more guests had been invited than the building could possibly accommodate. The space reserved in the gallery had long since been invaded. Eventually we fought our way, elbows and knees, to a position in the gangway at the rear of the floor where, by holding on tightly to the backs of the last row of seats in front of us, we were able more or less to see and hear the ceremony of swearing in the new President and Vice-President.
Emerging buffeted but still buoyant from the Congress, we walked across to the Planalto Palace to witness the handing over of the presidential authority. Here we were herded into a roped-off section at the back of the floor, from where we could neither see nor hear anything that was going on. There was no public address system and the words of the ceremony were lost in the roar of Brazilian conversation all round us. At this point my Swedish colleague left the palace in a rage, and I heard my Norwegian colleague threatening the Chief of Protocol that he would advise the King of Norway to cancel his imminent visit. But tempers were to become more frayed than this before our longest day was out.
At 4.30 that afternoon Lord Chalfont and the delegation took part in a short and reasonably well-organised ceremony at which the Special Missions were presented to the new President. The Minister of State read out the message of greeting from Her Majesty The Queen: also the message from the Government of New Zealand. (The unhappy Special Ambassador of Trinidad and Tobago had not received his credentials but, on my advice, handed over a heavily sealed empty frog-footman envelope, which did just as well.) … The Americans presented a complicated and hideous silver writing set: the Japanese handed over what looked like a Jack-in-the-box: some other Orientals gave the astonished President a sort of yo-yo …
After supper we returned to the hotel to struggle into our white ties. And then our troubles really began. My wife and I and Mr and Mrs Sheridan were lucky in that our car only took one hour to cover the four miles from the hotel to the Alvorada Palace where the President was giving his great reception. It was raining heavily, there appeared to be practically no police attempting to control the traffic and the vast avenues so brilliantly designed by the greatest urbanists of our day for the unimpeded flow of practically any number of vehicles were within a few minutes choked with traffic driving every way regardless of direction. Even the President got stuck: and eventually, fought his way through to his own reception an hour late. Lord and Lady Chalfont took two and a half hours to make the journey. It speaks well for their endurance and good humour that they then joined the reception: a large number of delegations simply stayed in their cars and went straight on round and back home. Amongst those who thus cut the party were the Swedes and the Dutch, the French led by the former Gaullist Minister M. Jacquinot, the Pakistanis, and the Americans led by the former Governor Brown of California. But the party was worth seeing, if only for the real beauty of the ladies’ dresses. And one could only feel sorry for Dona Yolanda, the wife of the new President, when the unabated rain drowned out the beautiful supper which she had prepared in the Palace gardens. But a child of three could have told her that it was bound to rain.
At this point I felt that patience and good manners risked defeating the wider purposes of diplomacy. I accordingly sought out the Vice-Chief of Protocol and told him in clear and cogent terms that Her Majesty The Queen did not often send Ministers of the Crown to represent her abroad and that, when she did, she assumed that they would be treated with some attention and consideration. Lord Chalfont had now been kicked around (in some instances literally) for 24 hours and I felt that, unless rapid and adequate steps were taken, he would return to London in a mood somewhat less than gruntled. The Vice-Chief took the hint: and a few minutes later Lord and Lady Chalfont were summoned to the Presidential presence …
This tattered day was now at last drawing to its tattered close. Weary figures in dripping tails and sodden ribbons wandered forlornly under the rain searching for their vanished cars. We found ours after an hour and forty minutes. But fate had one sweet in store for us. The Spanish Special Mission was led by the Head of General Franco’s military household: this splendidly bemedalled figure, in a beautiful white uniform and scarlet sash, pardonably tired and perhaps a little unobservant, mistook the ornamental water in front of the Palace for the gleaming wet pavement and stepped right into it, disappearing with dignity up to his Golden Fleece. This restored the evening for me. ‘Gibraltar to you!’ I thought as we climbed into the car for home …
For all its reverses and discomforts, I hope that Lord Chalfont will feel that his visit was worth while. From this Embassy’s point of view it was eminently rewarding. The Brazilians were much flattered by this attention from Her Majesty The Queen; whilst on his side I believe that Lord Chalfont found the occasion interesting and his hosts friendly and alert, for all the grotesque incompetence of their organisation. The pity is that they had to demonstrate it so blatantly for all the world to see.
But then Brazil is like that: great brilliance at the top, apathy and sloth in the lower levels, endless good humour throughout.
I have, &c.
JOHN RUSSELL.
‘One thousand miles from anywhere in any direction’
SIR JOHN RUSSELL, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE FEDERATIVE
REPUBLIC OF BRAZIL, MAY 1967
Notes by H.M. Ambassador, Rio de Janeiro, on North-East Brazil: June 20 to 29, 1967.
Rio – Brasilia – Manaus – Belém – Recife – Paulo Afonso – Petrolina – Salvador – Rio.
10,750 kilometres (6,735 miles): 35 hours flying time …
Tuesday, June 20.
Rio to Brasilia: 2 hrs. 40 mins: 900 km.
7 p.m. Santos Dumont Airport. Punctual take-off in ‘Avro’ of Brazilian Air Force.
A motley crew: 9 Ambassadors: a U.N. representative: various journalists: the Minister of the Interior: the Director General of ‘Sudene’ (the North-East Development Agency): our three bear-leaders named respectively Makarios, Abuyaghi and Rudolf Valentino: one gentle retired Ambassador, Afranio de Mello Franco (his first time north of Rio!): the President of the Federal Housing Bank: the Editor of ‘Cruzeiro’ magazine: various hangers-on.
Much jovial seat-hopping and beginning-of-term banter. I feel we should sing ‘Lord behold us with thy blessing’ … I hide behind ‘Brazilian Adventure’,1 but Rudolf Valentino has a strong sense of duty: he perches on the arm of my seat: ‘It is very well, Yes? We have a beautiful voyage?’ ‘Yes, Mr Valentino, it is very well, we have a beautiful voyage,’ I reply, gazing doubtfully down into the inky Brazilian night.
Mr Abuyaghi (who must have started life as a citizen of one of the sleazier cities of Asia Minor, perhaps Aleppo) is wearing Old Etonian cuff-links. He reminds me of Mr Loukoumian in ‘Black Mischief’.2
A disgusting T.V. dinner. We plod slowly on through the night.
9.40p.m. Brasilia.
Drinks at our Beau-Geste3 ‘staging post’: then early to bed in the familiar second-class semi-comfort of the Hotel Nacional.
Wednesday, June 21
Brasilia to Manaus via Belém – (2,800 kms: 8 ½ hours)
5 a.m. call.
A delicious peeled orange for breakfast but Allah protect the unwary pilgrim who calls for a boiled egg! That really throws the ‘Nacional’.
6 a.m. Class gathers punctually at the airport: slightly subdued, as always on the first day of term. Back into the ‘Avro’. Seats, of an unrivalled discomfort, by the well-known British firm of Procrustes4 Ltd. The Avro is too slow for those distances: but, we hope, safe …
6.30 a.m. take-off.
Dawn over the high veldt … Somewhere below us to the West lies Bananal, the largest alluvial island in the world. And somewhere again West of that the bones of Colonel Fawcett, last heard of on May 30th 1925. He was 60 then: so he must be 102 now. (And tonight, as Mr Todd said in ‘A Handful of Dust’, we will start ‘Little Dorrit’.5)
Four and a half hours over scrub-forest: finally our first sight of the Amazon Delta.
11 a.m. Belém.
Unscheduled stop to refuel: the Brazilian Air Force are disturbed by the recent loss up here of a C.47 and are taking no chances.
The usual scruffy Brazilian airport: but delicious hot fried crabs in the buffet, washed down with an appalling white cane-alcohol of a truly industrial proof …
3.20 p.m. Off again: due West along the Amazon, just South of the Equator. A long, pleasant afternoon (except for the excruciating discomfort of the Avro’s seating): road and sleep: and look down at an unchanging world of green jungle and turgid brown waters: like ‘the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever trees’.6 Not a sign of human life.
After a jolly, gossipy start my companions relax; and sleep. The Italian Ambassador wears both braces and a belt. (He is a near-albino: are all albini pessimists?)
7.15 p.m. Manaus: population: 174,000: – capital of the State of Amazonas (which is larger than the whole of Europe less only Germany: or, as John Gunther7 puts it – the area of Mexico, and the population of Milwaukee).
Manaus is an exotic extravaganza. One thousand miles from anywhere in any direction …
[T]he immortal soul of Manaus is its Opera House … a magnificent, florid monument to the Second Empire: a piece of ‘bel canto’ in Aberdeen granite and gilt and plush and ormolu, marble from Carrara, the curtain by Visconti, the ceiling painted by de Angelis who did the Municipal Theatre in Rio; seating 1,200: the stall fauteuils wicker-backed and wicker-seated against the perspiring heat, with slides under them for opera-hats. (What is the plural of gybus?) At the back the jungle reaches in with hungry green fingers to the stage-door, whilst from the front terrace you look straight out across the enormous expanse of the Rio Negro, a sheet of water as broad as the Solent at Cowes. (And even then you are 11 miles up from the Amazon proper.) …
The Booth Line still connects Manaus, twice a month, to Liverpool. Manaus cannot be reached from anywhere at all by road … As the crow flies (if any crow were so rash) Rio is more than 3,000 miles away to the South: the nearest Brazilian city is Belém, 1,000 miles due East on the Atlantic: the same distance and another six days due West upstream the Booth Line steamers take you to Iquitos in Peru: British Guiana is a mere 500 miles North – through totally impenetrable jungle: the ‘Boa Vista Highway’ stops despondently at the 10th kilometre stone, brought to an abrupt halt, by a solid green wall of palmetto and liana.
We have an Honorary Consul here, whose real (though it can hardly be full-time) job is local Manager of the Bank of London and South America. I beat the telegram, sent him five days earlier from Rio to announce my visit, by a full day.
But for me Manaus will always be the Opera House in the Jungle – a thing of rich Victorian beauty and pathos in this tiny rubber-sick town, rotting on its mud-bank in the heart of the world’s greatest primaeval forest. The Opera House: and the Amazon River, inviolate by dam, bridge, tunnel or fixed ferry in the whole 4,000 miles of its course down to the Atlantic Ocean.
(If turned into Texas, the Amazon would flood the whole place one inch deep in a day: John Gunther.)
Thursday, June 22.
Manaus to Recife: via Belém and Fortaleza: 3,500 kms: 10 hrs.
7.30 a.m. take-off.
From a few hundred feet up the confluence of the clear black Rio Negro with the muddy Amazon is momentarily interesting. Then four hours back again down the Amazon to Belém, all over solid jungle.
No wonder they cannot find the C.47 which disappeared here six days ago. Eventually they found the wreck: with five survivors. Pure incompetence to lose it: great persistence to find it; real skill and courage to get the survivors out.
Endless swamp and forest: little timber of any value, and that economically inextricable.
The classic ‘Green Hell’, untouched by civilisation, its only inhabitants a few Indian tribes, living off fish and game, wandering stark naked as they did four hundred years ago – surviving only if they avoid all contact with the white man: but fortunately they seem to realise that this to them is the deadliest animal of all. Thanks to this commendable precaution there are still about 70,000 Indians surviving in their wild or ‘bravio’ state out of the 3 or 4 million who were happily living in Brazil when the first white man intruded.
11 a.m. Belém: pop: 450,000: capital of State of Pará (which exceeds the total area of England, France, Belgium, Italy and Portugal).
The Englishman’s grave, where he made his fortune: but where he also left his fevered bones.
Ghosts of the Rowing Club, the Tennis Club, the Skittles Club in the moat of the old Portuguese fort. Everything in Belém was built by us – the docks, the waterfront, the railway station: this last is a thing of Gothic-Industrial beauty to rival King’s Cross: the sleepers are of Scotch fir, the cast iron balconies and staircases were imported whole from Liverpool. (There were British trams running in Pará before the first tram ran in Manchester.) Only the splendid Opera and the Customs House predate us … Everything else was made by us: the very pavements are of Aberdeen granite, brought in as ballast in the westward empty rubber ships: the shut and dead Grande Hotel, from the roof-tiles to the urinals in the Gents’ washroom, is decked in black slate imported from South Wales …
In boom days there were 200 English families here: their children went home (by Booth Line) to school in England, as it was nearer than Rio.
Belém still has a certain melancholy charm – more than Dar-es-Salaam, less than Mombasa.
All too short a time to see the town: driven briefly round by our active and well-informed Consul (hon.) Bolivar Kup Esq. Lunch at the Air Force Base, which took two hours to be served to 75 people by two women with one spoon – never have so many been served so slowly by so few …
On the airfield two Catalinas: date – 1938? A beautiful aircraft, like some great streamlined dragon-fly: and ideal for the Amazon.
A glimpse from the air of the island of Marajó in the delta: the island is slightly bigger than Belgium.
12.30 p.m. take-off.
Fuel stop at Fortaleza.
7 p.m. arrive Recife: pop. 921,000: capital of Pernambuco.
Lodged at the Grand Hotel: very second-rate and grubby: evening off: early and wearily to a hard bed.
Recife
Wake to a light rain on a dirty unattractive town, caught between two worlds: a smelly riverfront, the harbour rapidly silting up: the main bridge permanently closed: the centre of life seems to be the rubbish-strewn market where the only commodity on sale today, St. John’s Eve, is fireworks.
Recife, I am reliably informed, boasts 40,000 registered prostitutes. I can well believe it. There cannot be much else to do.
A soft muggy climate like Singapore: and a really ‘mean’ temperature. Little worth seeing: altogether rather charmless …
3.30 p.m.
Meeting of SUDENE Council (‘Superintendence for the Development of the North East’): the Superintendent, General Euler Bentos, in the chair. We attend as guests. A surprisingly business-like performance. Main item on agenda naming of firms to qualify for tax-exemption on investment in North-East. ‘Intoxication with music of own voice department’ strongly represented: and the stabbing forefinger of equatorial oratory.
As later unkindly revealed on television, the Italian Ambassador catches up with lost sleep. I stay, heroically, open-eyed, if glazed. A long hot session, but not uninteresting …
After a very official supper at the Governor’s Palace we go off hoping for gaiety and local colour to the São João fiesta at the Portuguese Club. Sedate and dull: even the young of Recife seem rather old. In the hotel they are very up to date and have television: this evening it is showing ‘Desert Victory’. I find my bed standing in a flood from the air-conditioner: but l calculate that I shall still be above high-water mark at 7 a.m.: so hopefully to bed with the St. John’s Eve firecrackers popping away below my window; like a quiet night in Tombstone, Arizona.
Saturday, June 24:
Recife, via Boa Esperança to Paulo Afonso: 1450 kms: 7 hours: DC. 3.
Depart Recife 8 a.m.
Today is to be a day in the country and we have been told accordingly to dress ‘desportivo’. Interpretation of this instruction varies widely: the French Ambassador wears a white cotton beret, avec ‘chemise flottante’; the Italian is in shiny black alpaca, but has insouciantly discarded his tie: the Dutchman is very pukka in belted and brass-buttoned shirt, club scarf and desert boots looking more than ever like a motor-car salesman on the Great West Road: Makarios appears in a Pompey football jersey: Mr Abuyaghi sports a hunting costume which would have aroused comment in Sherwood Forest.
D.C. 3: seats much more comfortable than ‘Avro’: (great loss of face for British Aviation and for me). Four hours over the ‘sertão’ – not jungle anymore, but upland scrub …
Boa Esperança to Paulo Afonso.
Three hours’ flight over forest: dusk as we fly in: much relieved at last to see landing lights on strip by power station: short drive to Company’s guest-house.
After an excellent dinner I notice that all the Brazilian members of the party have quietly disappeared one by one, leaving us foreign guests to our own devices. Unworthy suspicions of riotous night-life with local Indian ladies are dispelled when we realise that our hosts have simply slipped off upstairs to hog the single rooms. We are thus left to dispose ourselves three to a room on the ground floor. Germany, Belgium and Holland move in together: Italy and France next door: kindly inviting me to take the sixth bed with them.
And so we entered the Common Market!
India is left to doss down with Poland and Czechoslovakia. India turns stuffy. Remembering his country’s attitude of unctuous disapproval during the recent Middle East crisis, we told him happily: ‘As you vote, so you sleep!’ India is not amused.
France and Italy are two rather maidenly old gentlemen: but at least neither snores.
Paulo Afonso: Sunday, June 25.
Out early to look round. The guest-house is a large, pleasant, stone-built sort of Swiss chalet. The dripping garden is full of rubber trees, hibiscus, poinsettia, golden mohur, a copper plum, those revolting ‘kaki’, giant aspidistra – and all the lush sub-tropicals of which you get so tired in this country …
Paulo Afonso via Petrolina to Salvador: 800 km: 2 1/4 hrs …
Back to Petrolina for lunch at the Governor’s mother’s house … This is the last stage of our trip and there is a hilarious end-of-term atmosphere. We should sing ‘Lord dismiss us with thy blessing’.
A tremendous meal, served by the Governor’s sisters and cousins and nieces, with wonderful local dishes and excellent French wines.
Makarios has put a mango on top of his glass to keep the flies out of his Chateauneuf du Pape. Mr Abuyaghi, plainly smelling his stable, is working with single-minded concentration on cane-alcohol and Pouilly Fuisse, evidently an effective mixture. Funny hats and speeches. A ‘Lolita’ band from Petrolina high school plays a vaguely familiar tune on green plastic mouth-pianos: enquiry reveals that it is ‘a Scotch song called Timperary’. The Governor’s mother, aged 84, has gone to sleep … Rudolf Valentino is pursuing the conductor of the band round the garden. Mr Abuyaghi sings quietly to himself in Arabic. The Italian Ambassador pleads sunstroke and makes a dash for the Gents.
Finally Makarios calls plane-time and we sway dizzily out into the blinding sunshine and the cheering populace of Petrolina, who greatly approve of nine ambassadors at high noon in paper hats.
3.45 p.m. off, on my last lap, to Salvador.
‘A big, fat spoilt child’
SIR ERIC PHIPPS, HM AMBASSADOR TO GERMANY,
JUNE 1934In your editors’ view this despatch is in a league of its own, placed there not only by Sir Eric’s psychological insight and powerful prose but by the circumstances of history.
British ambassadors are expected from time to time in their reporting to compose pen-portraits of important politicians in the countries in which they are posted. Often vivid personality studies, these descriptions help ministers and more senior diplomats in London prepare themselves for important face-to-face meetings on overseas visits as well as helping policymakers anticipate political responses.
Eric Phipps acquitted himself of this duty with exceptional aplomb in his June 1934 letter to the Foreign Secretary. Known to historians of the Nazi era simply as the ‘Bison despatch’, it describes a day in the countryside with one of the twentieth century’s most infamous political figures.
Hermann Göring was Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe and the founder of the Gestapo. In the Nazi hierarchy, Göring stood second only to Hitler. In a speech to the Reichstag in 1939 on the outbreak of war the Führer designated the General his successor ‘should anything befall me’.
When Phipps wrote his despatch in 1934, Göring was merely Minister of Civil Air Transport, but the Ambassador was not fooled, correctly attributing (as did others) hostile intent to German rearmament. It was only a year later that Hitler repudiated the Treaty of Versailles, unveiling the Wehrmacht; and the aeroplanes that Phipps memorably describes here as Göring’s ‘winged toys’ were repainted with military decals. Acting as flying artillery to fearsome Panzer tanks, Göring’s Luftwaffe went on to score a string of decisive victories in the blitzkrieg campaigns in Poland, France and Russia in the early years of the Second World War, and bombed many British cities into rubble.
When Hitler became Chancellor in 1933 he made Göring Prime Minister of Prussia. Göring kept the title – to which Phipps refers at the beginning of the despatch – as an honorific when Hitler scrapped the devolved Prussian administration two years later, in the cause of a united Germany.
General Field Marshal Göring did not start as a slob. Phipps does not need to remind his expert readership of Göring’s talent but today we do need to remind ourselves (as the last paragraph of the despatch so chillingly hints) that the buffoon the ambassador describes did also have outstanding ability. He was once himself an ace fighter pilot, trim and athletic, but by the 1930s he was obese. As well as the General’s physical appearance, Phipps’s portrait in this despatch bears witness to some of the unpleasant character traits which have since become associated with Göring, notably his extravagance and greed.
Göring built up a large personal fortune, some of it from confiscated Jewish property, and in 1933 acquired the country estate where Phipps was invited, along with other ambassadors, to witness the wonders of Germanic country life. At Schorfheide Göring enjoyed playing the aristocrat, decorating the walls with coats of arms and ceremonial swords, which he had made up for him.
The General’s fetish for costume, so vividly captured in Phipps’s despatch, is backed up by other contemporary accounts. Witnesses attest to Göring meeting subordinates dressed in a toga, and relaxing in medieval hunting garb. The Italian Foreign Minister, Galeazzo Ciano, recalled Göring wearing on one occasion a fur coat of the kind that ‘a high grade prostitute wears to the opera’.
Arriving in Berlin in 1933, Phipps took a strong dislike to the Nazis1 and in his reporting back to Whitehall sought to portray them in as negative a light as possible. His hostility towards the regime (which was by no means uncontroversial at that time) did not escape the notice of the Nazis. An aide to Von Ribbentrop, the Foreign Minister, thought the British ambassador was ‘inspired by a hatred of the Nazis, if not for the German people in general’. Hitler thought ‘Sir Phipps was a thug’.
This approach made Phipps less effective as Ambassador, and the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, eventually had him recalled. By 1936, according to a senior official in Downing Street, Phipps had ‘no telephone line to Hitler, who despises him’.
Göring, on the other hand, had become quite useful to Phipps towards the end, despite the ambassador’s obvious distaste for the man. Phipps wrote back to London that he had developed ‘very helpful points of contact with General Göring, who is an old army officer with few Nazi proclivities in his saner moments’.
Even today, apologists point out that Göring was never as ardent an anti-Semite as Heinrich Himmler, for example, or Joseph Goebbels, and that the General’s enthusiasm for Hitler’s war-making was mainly of the professional – rather than ideological – kind. But the judges at Nuremberg, where Göring was tried after the war, were far from convinced. According to their judgment:
There is nothing to be said in mitigation. For Göring was often, indeed almost always, the moving force, second only to his leader. He was the leading war aggressor, both as political and as military leader; he was the director of the slave labour programme and the creator of the oppressive programme against the Jews and other home races, home and abroad … His guilt is unique in its enormity. The record discloses no excuses for this man.
At Nuremberg, Göring was sentenced to death, but escaped execution by suicide, swallowing cyanide in October 1946, on the night before he was due to hang.
| [C 3911/3911/18] | No. 102. |
Sir E. Phipps to Sir John Simon.—(Received June 21.)
| (No. 696.) | Berlin, June 13, 1934. |
Sir,
I HAVE the honour to inform you that General Göring, Prussian Prime Minister and ‘Head Ranger of the Reich’ (‘Reichsjägermeister’), was so good as to invite Lady Phipps and myself last Sunday, the 10th June, to visit the new bison enclosure in the Schorfheide, about 70 kilom. from Berlin.
We arrived at our destination at 3 o’clock in the afternoon by motor, being shown the last part of the way by keepers posted at all cross-roads. Our host, as usual, was late, but eventually arrived in a fast racing-car driven by himself. He was clad in aviator’s garments of india-rubber with top boots and a large hunting-knife stuck in his belt. The American, Italian and French Ambassadors, Herr von Papen, General Blomberg, the Minister of Finance and Countess Schwerin von Krosigk were also present, the number of guests amounting to about forty.
General Göring opened the proceedings by a lecture delivered to us on the outskirts of the bison enclosure in a stentorian voice with the aid of a microphone. He celebrated the beauties of the primeval German forest, in which roamed the primeval German animals, and announced his intention of reconstituting such a forest, ensuring to the animals the necessary forest peacefulness and to the German citizen the possibility of glancing at primitive German animals in German surroundings.
On the conclusion of General Göring’s address, three or four cow bison were driven towards a large box containing the bull bison. A host of cinematograph operators and photographers aimed their machines at this box preparatory to the exit of the bull. Those who, like myself, have seen the mad charge of the Spanish bull out of his ‘torril’ looked forward to a similar sight on this occasion, but we were grievously disappointed, for the bison emerged from his box with the utmost reluctance, and, after eyeing the cows somewhat sadly, tried to return into it. This part of the programme, therefore, did not fulfil our expectations.
The guests were then taken for a long drive across the Schorfheide in open carriages, General Göring heading the procession, accompanied by the wife of the Italian Ambassador in a small vehicle drawn by two powerful horses. After about an hour we alighted at a spot between some swamps, where General Göring made another address on the beauties of bird life. After a further drive we got into our motors again, which had been sent on to meet us, and General Göring disappeared alone at breakneck speed in his racing-car. Some twenty minutes’ motor drive brought us eventually to the shooting-box which General Göring has just completed building for himself, overlooking a lovely lake. Our host met us here in a costume consisting of white tennis-shoes, white duck trousers, white flannel shirt and a green leather jacket, with the large hunting-knife still stuck into his belt. In his hand he carried a long harpoon-like instrument, with which he punctuated the further address that he then proceeded to deliver, expatiating on the beauties of his shooting-box and all the purely German materials of which it had been made. We were then taken through every room. The chief ornament in the living-room was a bronze medallion of the Führer, but opposite to it was a vacant space, reserved for the effigy of Wotan.2 A tree grows in the living-room, presumably ready to receive the sword to be placed there by Wotan and eventually to be removed by Siegfried3 or General Göring.
After this an excellent and purely Germanic collation was served at small tables in the open air and presided over most amiably by the actress, Fräulein Sonnemann,4 introduced by our host as his ‘private secretary’. By this time it was past 7 o’clock and we were about to take our leave, but were told that the pièce de résistance was yet to come.
The concluding scene in this strange comedy was enacted at a lonely and very beautiful spot some 500 yards distant, overlooking the lake, where a mausoleum has been erected by General Göring, to contain, as he told us in his final and semi-funeral oration, the remains of his Swedish wife5 and his own (no mention was made of Fräulein Sonnemann). Under an oak tree General Göring planted himself, harpoon in hand, and celebrated to his guests, drawn up in a semi-circle round him, the Germanic and idyllic beauties of these Germanic surroundings. The mausoleum was placed between two German oak trees and flanked by six Druidical (but Germanic) sarsen stones reminiscent of Stonehenge, which itself must be Germanic though we do not know it. The stones are to have various appropriate marks engraved upon them, including the swastika, but no sign of the Cross. The only blot in an otherwise perfect, and consequently Germanic, picture was the tombstone itself, which is made of Swedish marble; but this could not be avoided, as General Göring explained to me apologetically, for it was the original tombstone on his wife’s grave in Sweden. ‘She will rest here in this beautiful spot, where only swans and other birds will come; she will rest in German earth and Swedish stone. The vault will serve for all eternity, as the walls are 1 metre 80 centimetres thick.’
On the return walk to our motor General Göring told me that the interment will take place on the 20th June in the presence of numerous detachments of the S.A., S.S. and Reichswehr, and also a number of aeroplanes. At times he stopped and drew me pictures in the sand with his harpoon of the mausoleum as it will look years hence, when newly-planted German trees will flank it yet more worthily. The whole proceedings were so strange as at times to convey a feeling of unreality; but they opened, as it were, a window on to Nazi mentality, and as such were not, perhaps, quite useless. The chief impression was that of the almost pathetic naïveté of General Göring, who showed us his toys like a big, fat, spoilt child: his primeval woods, his bison and birds, his shooting-box and lake and bathing beach, his blonde ‘private secretary’, his wife’s mausoleum and swans and sarsen stones, all mere toys to satisfy his varying moods, and all, or so nearly all, as he was careful to explain, Germanic. And then I remembered there were other toys, less innocent, though winged, and these might some day be launched on their murderous mission in the same childlike spirit and with the same childlike glee.
I have, &c.
ERIC PHIPPS.
‘One in Three, and Three in One’
SIR HUGHE KNATCHBULL-HUGESSEN, HM ENVOY
EXTRAORDINARY AND MINISTER PLENIPOTENTIARY AT
RIGA, TALLINN AND KOVNO, 1930SThe Book of Common Prayer was the inspiration for Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen’s elegant complaint about the difficulties of what is known in the Diplomatic Service as the system of Multiple Representation. From 1930 to 1934 Knatchbull-Hugessen was minister to Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia (at the time Britain sent ambassadors only to great powers, where she maintained embassies; lesser countries had to make do with ‘ministers’, working out of ‘legations’). The letter he sent colleagues in the Foreign Office recounting this experience was titled ‘One in Three, and Three in One’ – as in the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.
A take-off of the Athanasian Creed (Quicunque vult – ‘whosoever wishes [to be saved]’) Knatchbull-Hugessen’s letter suddenly started doing the rounds again in the Foreign Office sixty years later, when the Soviet Union fell to bits. Newly independent states were springing from the wreckage, among them the very same Baltic trio Knatchbull-Hugessen had once found himself stretched across, each requiring some sort of British diplomatic presence on the ground or at least near by. An entirely new generation of diplomats faced anew the challenge of covering several states from one base. A 1992 despatch by Richard Samuel, the new British ambassador in Latvia, ably portrays the sense of a logistical puzzle every bit as hard as the logic of the Catholic Trinity (see pp. 313–16).
The cleverness of Knatchbull-Hugessen’s parody will have been especially apparent to a generation to whom the wording of the Athanasian Creed was either familiar or at least to hand. But even readers hazy about the original text will appreciate the way he echoes the metaphysics and the rhythm of Church language.
A few years after Knatchbull-Hugessen wrote his creed, his career reached its peak (in so far as it was all downhill thereafter) when he was ambassador in wartime Istanbul. While the diplomat was taking a bath, his valet stole a set of keys to his safe, and wasted no time in selling the contents to the Nazis. Impressed by this sudden windfall of intelligence, the Germans gave him the code name Cicero. Over the next two years, as the unwitting Knatchbull-Hugessen dutifully refreshed the contents of the safe, Cicero copied and passed on to the Nazis everything from precise details of Allied bombing raids to an outline of the D-Day landings.
Quicunque Balt
Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the Baltic post.
Which post, except a man keep for a few years, without doubt he shall go to Bogota or La Paz everlastingly.
For the Baltic post is this, that we have one Minister in three capitals and three capitals in one Minister.
Everyone confounding his person and dividing his substance.
For there is one Minister for Lithuania, one Minister for Latvia and one Minister for Estonia.
But the Minister for Lithuania, for Latvia and for Estonia is all one; the uniform uncomfortable and the travelling almost eternal.
Such as Riga is, so is Tallinn and so is Kovno.
But Kovno in particular is uncreate and incomprehensible.
As also Riga is a Legation, Tallinn is a Legation and Kovno is a Legation.
And yet there is not three Legations but one Legation.
So also Riga is expensive, Tallinn is expensive and Kovno is expensive.
And yet there are not three salaries but one salary.
For like as we are compelled by the Private Secretaries to say there is one Legation and one Minister, so we are forbidden by the Chief Clerk to say that there are three salaries or three frais de representation.1
So likewise there should be one Secretary for Riga, one Secretary for Tallinn and one Secretary for Kovno.
And yet there are not three Secretaries but no Secretary.
No Secretary, not by reduction of the Chancery work into nothing, but by taking the Secretary to Moscow.
Absolutely none; by confusion of the Private Secretaries and not by desire of the Minister.
The Minister is made and created but forgotten.
The Secretary is neither made nor created, but proceeding to Moscow.
So there is one Minister, not three Ministers; one salary, not three salaries; no Secretary, not even one Secretary.
And in this Legation none is afore or after the other, although a good many people seem to be continually after the Minister.
The whole thing is most unequal and incomprehensible.
He therefore that would be saved, might sometimes think of HM Minister at Riga.
Such is the Baltic post – although any reasonable soul will find it hard to believe faithfully.
‘The Spanish Ambassador grabbed his suitcase and joined the rush’
RONALD BURROUGHS, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE
DEMOCRATIC AND POPULAR REPUBLIC OF ALGERIA,
OCTOBER 1971Within diplomatic circles the ‘Spanish Ambassador’s Suitcase’ despatch is by impute probably the greatest ‘funny’ of them all. Ronald Burroughs’s peerless sketch of a night’s entertainment in the Sahara Desert was not in fact a despatch – these were, strictly speaking, always addressed to the Foreign Secretary – but a letter. The recipient was Burroughs’s colleague and fellow Arabist Sir James Craig, then head of the Near East and North Africa Department at the Foreign Office in Whitehall. Despite its irreverence and irrelevance to official business, the letter was given the honour of formal printing and circulation throughout the FCO in London and to posts abroad. Craig’s own fine sense of style (see pp. 283–6) may have had something to do with the recognition accorded Burroughs.
A slightly sanitized version of Burroughs’s tale has appeared in print before, in Sir John Ure’s Diplomatic Bag. As a piece of comic writing the despatch has aged well except for the tedious jokes about skin colour which sit oddly within the rest of the piece. Today one finds it hard to believe that worldly, highly educated diplomats would find jokes about black people being hard to see in the dark actually funny, even in 1971. But standards shift. Judged by modern standards, other despatches of the time from Africa and elsewhere occasionally strike the same flat note.
Burroughs wrote a second very readable letter from Algiers the same month, which follows on here. James Craig, to whom both letters were addressed, went on to become an ambassador, first to Syria and then to Saudi Arabia. His dazzling valedictories from Damascus and Dubai are in Parting Shots. Readers may care to compare their responses with mine. I think the second (‘Wallpaper’) letter the finer, though uncelebrated: a bitter and disillusioned reflection on diplomatic life – for all its hilarity.
CORPS – IN CONFIDENCE
| Ref. No. NAA3/548/1 | Departmental Series |
NORTH AFRICAN DEPARTMENT
D.S. No. 1
Algiers: The Spanish Ambassador’s suitcase
(Her Majesty’s Ambassador at Algiers to Mr A J Craig)
BRITISH EMBASSY,
ALGIERS,
6 October 1971.
Having sent you in my previous letter an account of the Opening of the Judicial Year, I realise that I should have written to you somewhat earlier about the Affair of the Spanish Ambassador’s Suitcase; an affair which has passed into local diplomatic legend.
It took place on the night of 19/20 June. The 19 June is a day which is always celebrated in Algeria as marking some event, which I have forgotten, in the Struggle for Independence. This year it was decided that against the background of the quarrel with the French Government over oil, the celebrations should most appropriately take place at Hassi Messaoud in the Sahara, where oil was first struck by the French. A pleasing note of additional insult would be given to the occasion by celebrating also the nationalisation of French oil interests on 24 February of this year.
For the purpose it was of course necessary to have all foreign Ambassadors present. I am never sure whether this insistence on our presence springs from a misplaced but delicate desire to give us pleasure, or whether it is an expression of Algerian xenophobia. The way these affairs are organised may be not the result of inefficiency but rather of fiendishly clever planning designed to torture the bloody foreigners. The previous year was, by all accounts, of such prolonged horror that it could only have been effected by design.
As 19 June approached the Corps began to speculate about what might lie in store for us. By the 17th nothing had been revealed. Protocole Department would only smile roguishly and say that it was to be a surprise. Indeed, when we were all informed of what had been arranged for our delectation it was a surprise; rather a pleasant one. It might have been another steelworks entailing a 5.00 a.m. start, and a return home at 3.00 a.m. on the following morning. Instead we were to be flown down to the desert at the civilized hour of 4.00 p.m., and beds were to be provided for the night.
As the special plane was due to start at 4.00 p.m., we were instructed to be at the airport at 3.00 for the traditional ceremony of standing on the tarmac for an hour or so in the blazing sun. We arrived variously equipped. Most Ambassadors brought brief cases containing a toothbrush, razor and pyjamas. A few brought rather elegant little dressing cases, and a certain Ambassador’s case gave out the sound of clinking whisky bottles every time he put it on the ground.
The only exception was the Spanish Ambassador, who is a Lieutenant-General ‘still on the active list my dear’, as he assures everyone. He brought, not a brief case, but an enormous, splendid and expensive portmanteau, made of heavy leather with gold fastenings, and bound with elegant straps each with a heavy gold buckle. He arrived late, panting and sweating profusely as he deposited his case on the tarmac. Those of us who had got there earlier were standing under the shadow of the wings of our aircraft. There was no room for the Spanish Ambassador to join us, and he had to protect his bald head with a handkerchief knotted at the four corners, while the Greek Ambassador made remarks about fried brains being one of his favourite dishes.
Having stood around for an hour and a half the Chef de Protocole looked at his watch, asked Their Excellencies to group themselves before him, clapped his hands and said ‘Prenez vos places dans l’avion. Vite, vite.’ He urged us up the ladder at a gallop wringing his hands and saying, ‘Nous sommes deja en retard, Excellences.’1
The Spanish Ambassador grabbed his suitcase and joined the rush. He got it half-way up the steps, fell over it and said something very rude in Spanish. With the Chef de Protocole yapping around the heels of the pack we pressed forward stepping over the suitcase and round the Spanish Ambassador who is of a shape that makes this operation difficult. Finally he was left alone on the gang-way ascending slowly backwards and dragging the suitcase up step by step.
He was installed in the rear, with his suitcase occupying the neighbouring seat. The doors closed and we took off. We were comforted by the announcement that as it was a day of National Celebration, this type of aircraft was being flown for the very first time by an all-Algerian crew. Some of us were more touched by this delicate attention than others.
Apart from one or two rather dashing tight turns designed to show off the burning flares at various oil well heads, we had nonetheless a comfortable and safe journey, punctuated by offers of bottles of Coca-Cola with the tops wrestled off by an air-hostess of quite remarkable plainness. There is much to be said for the wearing of the veil.
We landed at an airstrip in the desert, and the Spanish Ambassador had found the answer. It was easier this time to descend backwards sliding his suitcase towards him. Naturally, we had all been speculating about the contents. Some Ambassadors leaned to the view that it contained several gold-braided uniforms and loads and loads of medals. Others thought that he had brought a white tie and tails. The Greek however, believed that he had brought his wife ‘en cas de besoin’.2
Standing on the sand, the Spanish Ambassador ran round and round his suitcase demanding to know where was the orderly who was to carry his baggage. He was ignored by the Chef de Protocole and the welcoming party. Rather we were told that our presence was urgently required in the salon d’honneur for a lecture on the oil-field and its operation. ‘Where is the salon d’honneur?’ we asked, ‘Over there.’ we were told, and a small hut in the far distance was indicated to us. ‘Vite, vite Excellences.’
We trudged off through soft-sand for our lecture, with the Spanish Ambassador losing contact with the pack, and leaving a furrow behind him like a light plough. We heard our lecture. In Arabic, a language with which the speaker was himself not too familiar. Most of the Ambassadors identified it as Arabic simply because it wasn’t either French or English.
As question time started, the Spanish Ambassador appeared through the door, clutching a couple of hernias acquired between the aircraft and the salon d’honneur.
For the next lecture, we had to move to another hut, mercifully quite near this time. Then into a bus to be conducted to our air-conditioned aluminium huts ‘Pour une demi-heure de repos, Excellences. N’oubliez-pas vos baggages.’3
By this time it was black-dark with one or two oil-flares on the horizon. Our sleeping huts were scattered among oleander bushes in the artificial oasis created by the oil-engineers. They were numbered from 1 to 60 on what appeared to be a totally random plan, and each Ambassador was issued with a numbered ticket. As I stumbled between the bushes in the gloom I fell over an African Ambassador who affects a black Homburg hat, black clothes and shoes, and is only distinguishable in the dark when he smokes a startling white pipe.
As the most recently accredited Ambassador I was allocated Hut No. 60, which was the most distant and the most obscure. When I finally found it and opened the door it was already occupied by the Greek Ambassador, in the process of removing his trousers. I showed my ticket with the number 60 printed on it. He extricated his ticket from his trouser-pocket around his ankles, and it too bore the number 60. There ensued a diplomatic negotiation in which I made great play of the fact that since he had presented his credentials a full hour before me, I was obliged to yield him precedence. Plainly therefore he should be in Hut No. 59. Having satisfied himself that HM Government was a signatory of the revised Vienna Convention which reaffirms the rules of diplomatic precedence, the Greek Ambassador had no alternative but to pull up his trousers and depart into the Saharan darkness.
We had been instructed to parade at a certain spot among the oleander bushes at 8.30 p.m. The Chef de Protocole had insisted that we should be there ‘exactement a l’heure prevue’.4 He need not have bothered. We were full of impatience to see the Spanish Ambassador, and to learn what his suitcase contained. Would he be in full military uniform, or were the theories about the evening dress and the diamond studs and the insignia of many Spanish and Catholic orders to be confirmed? Perhaps he had been made a Field Marshal and would arrive with a little jewelled baton.
We assembled. The Chef de Protocole lined us up and counted us. We were two short. We didn’t like to point out that one of the supposed absentees was the African Ambassador who affected a black costume, and who out of politeness had put away his white pipe.
A prolonged wait, while we considered who might be missing. It was the Spanish Ambassador. ‘He ’ave great trouble with ’is corsets,’ said the Bulgarian. ‘No soldier to give the pull’. But he was wrong. At long last the Spanish Ambassador arrived through the bushes, and to confound us all, wearing the suit in which he had started out.
‘Vite, vite,’ said the Chef de Protocole, spotting the whites of the African Ambassador’s eyes. ‘We will now proceed to have un meshaoui.’
A meshaoui consists of a recently slaughtered sheep, impaled on a long pole and roasted slowly over charcoal. Its head, its hooves surmounted by short woolly socks, and what the Bible delicately describes as ‘the appurtenances thereof’ are all included in the dish. Having been escorted to a vast open tent in the desert where we passed between us convivial, family-sized bottles of Pepsi-Cola, and listened to numerous speeches, the meshaoui finally arrived.
The ration was one sheep to every three Ambassadors. I shared mine with two African Ambassadors. I had the head end and the horns kept catching my sleeve as I pulled pieces of hot meat away with my fingers. His Excellency at the rear end made a grab for the ‘appurtenances’ and rolled up the sleeves of his robe. He was nearly up to his shoulder in the interior of the animal, and kept saying ‘Le gout de dedans est meilleur.’5 As the meal progressed I became more and more alarmed. He showed every sign of disappearing up the rear end of the sheep, and I had visions of having to seize a pair of black ankles to recover His Excellency.
A nationalistic play was succeeded by hours of greatly entertaining music. Much of it consisted of three old nomads blowing down flutes which had been imperfectly constructed and which allowed air to escape from cracks in the side. The effect was rather peaceful and wistful. The bit I liked best however, was the appearance of a Western style orchestra. It was not the excellence of its rendition, but rather the fact that it contained a left-handed violinist. There is something satisfying about the concerted sweep of violin bows. But it is as nothing to the excitement of a row of violinists containing a Southpaw fiddle. The quick bits are the best, when his right-handed neighbour has to keep on ducking like a demented wood-pecker.
I will not trouble you with the rest of the night’s entertainment, full though it was of delightful vignettes. We managed to get three hours sleep in our air-conditioned huts before reporting at our aircraft shortly after dawn.
The sun rose with its accustomed splendour over the desert horizon. The Spanish Ambassador made a parallel track in our wake through the sand with his suitcase.
The Saudi Arabian Ambassador watching him outlined against the reddening sky, twitched his worry beads and said to me ‘Excellency, you know that His Excellency the Spanish Ambassador is a member of the S.S. twice over?’. ‘No’, I replied ‘I know that he is a Lieutenant General. You mean that he resigned from the S.S. and rejoined it later?’.
‘No Excellency,’ our esteemed doyen replied, ‘’e is Self-Service Sahara Suitcase. I must tell the other Excellencies my little joke’ he added departing. He has been in this post for eight years, and his amusements are few.
The Spanish Ambassador left immediately thereafter for leave in Spain. He has only returned within the last few days and no-one has seen his wife. Was the Greek Ambassador’s theory perhaps right and has the Spanish Ambassador lost the keys of his expensive suitcase? It is clearly a highly-prized object, and it must have given him great pain to bore air-holes through that expensively grained leather.
Yours ever
R A Burroughs
‘Algerians use Ambassadors as wall-paper’
RONALD BURROUGHS, HM AMBASSADOR TO
THE DEMOCRATIC AND POPULAR REPUBLIC OF
ALGERIA, OCTOBER 1971
CORPS – IN CONFIDENCE
BRITISH EMBASSY
ALGIERS
1 OCTOBER 1971
A J M Craig Esq
North African Department
In the belief that the Head of a Department should know his territories in depth I send you the following account of this afternoon’s doings. It was nothing out of the ordinary, and this is just why I recount it to you.
The first of October is ‘l’ouverture de l’année judiciaire’1 whatever that may mean, but it is obviously something important. On these ‘important’ occasions the Algerians use Ambassadors as wall-paper, and we were all duly summoned by the Ministre de la Justice, Garde des Sceaux2, to attend the Palais de Justice at 4.00 p.m.
This does not of course mean that one goes to the Palace of Justice at 4.00 p.m. On the contrary, we all drive in the opposite direction to be in the street outside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at 3.15 p.m. There we get out of cars and gather in groups. The African Ambassadors form a small group on their own higher up the hill. Those of us who are anxious to demonstrate that we are not racists shake them all briefly by the hand and descend to the white men’s group a little lower, where we are joined by the Russian Ambassador, the North Vietnamese and other unidentified Orientals, while the Chinese hang about in the middle. The Russian Ambassador, who speaks nothing but Russian, is always accompanied by one or other of his polyglot Secretaries. The Chinese Chargé d’Affaires speaks only Chinese and is always accompanied by two of his monoglot Secretaries with beautiful smiles.
We enquire anxiously about each other’s health, and lead each other off by the button-hole to ask whether there is any confirmation of the rumour that M. Bouteflika3 was so exhausted by his trip to China that he has been obliged to go off to the South of France to chase young girls and thus ‘regagner ses forces’.4 The Japanese Ambassador, who always keeps his ear very close to the gutter, is sure that this is the case. ‘And Excellenssy’ he adds, ‘he has been seen wearing a very broad tie.’ Unfortunately just as we feel we may receive some even more juicy revelations, a whistle blows and we run for our cars.
The Doyen, preceded by a squad of maniacal motorcyclists, moves off. We all follow, and for the honour of our various sovereigns (or presidents) there is a jostle reminiscent of the first fence at a not very well considered Irish point-to-point. Through streets temporarily devoid of traffic we drive at 60 miles an hour. The crowds line the pavements to see the Ambassadorial cortege of 60 cars go by, to be followed in due course by the President who drives even faster in a black Citroen surrounded by motorcyclists like blue-bottles around a piece of bad meat.
The Ambassadorial wall-paper is unrolled in the Palais de Justice. I find myself between the Moroccan Ambassador and the Jordanian Chargé d’Affaires. Officially all relations between Jordan and Algeria have been severed, but the Jordanian explains to me for the sixth or seventh time that this does not mean what it says. With courtly grace and in fractured English he always addresses me as ‘Excellency the Ambassador of Great Britain and Ireland of the North’. I am at a loss for a suitable formula in reply, so with typical English courtesy I always say ‘Er – hello.’
In front of me sits a Slav. The back of his head is so flat that were it not for a bunch of curls at the nape of his neck, his ears would stick out behind, like the fins on a 1950’s American car. His neighbour is a Latin-American. Like many Latin-Americans exposed to the light of any Continent but their own, he looks yellow, faintly dirty and consumptive.
So far we are well ahead of schedule. Only 15 minutes’ wait in the street outside the Ministry of Foreign Affaires. Par for the course before the President’s arrival would normally be a further hour. I bet the Moroccan ten dinars that today it will only be half-an-hour. He is even more optimist than I, and wins his 10 dinars with about 30 seconds to spare.
The President and his Ministers file in. All the Ambassadors stand to crane rudely, trying to spot the errant Minister for Foreign Affairs. He is not there. ‘Il aura beaucoup de force, quand il rentre,’5 whispers the Argentine Ambassador who talks French like a zip-gun, spraying the room with his Spanish ‘R’s.
The speeches begin. In Arabic, which few of the listeners understand. The first speaker gives us a mercifully short allocution of 20 minutes by the Moroccan’s watch. He pouches a second 10 dinar note from me as a result. He is followed by a stone-faced legal luminary, speaking a language I don’t recognise. I ask the Moroccan what it is. ‘C’est un Arabe très très pur.’6
‘But what is he saying,’ I enquire.
‘Je n’ai aucune idée. Il a un très mauvais accent.’7 We leave it at that, while the Slav in front of me explores his curls, his little round fingers moving like white piglets through the undergrowth.
The hands on the Moroccan’s ostentatious gold watch creep round and round, until there is a splatter of applause. The President and his Ministers leave without greeting anyone. The Ambassadorial wall-paper is rolled up and we have another point-to-point start. A by-stander spits at the Egyptian Ambassador’s car, but does not give enough forward lead, and hits the windscreen of a Scandinavian colleague.
As the cortège jostles homeward, urged faster and faster by frantic whistle-blowing police, we collide with the President’s entourage. The meat-safe and the blue-bottles scream across our bows, as we leave much Governmental rubber on the road with our sudden halt.
We separate, none the wiser. Certainly I have no idea of what has happened except that the Judicial Year has commenced, which I suppose is a good thing.
Yours ever,
R A Burroughs
‘Tyranny, oppression, tortures, assassinations and palace intrigues’
EDWARD ‘NICK’ LARMOUR, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE
REPUBLIC OF HAITI, OCTOBER 1970Dr François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier was one of recent history’s more appalling dictators. Some 30,000–60,000 Haitians are thought to have perished during his fourteen-year rule at the hands of the Tonton Macoutes. The President-for-Life’s straw-hatted personal paramilitary force, wearing blue denim shirts and mirror glasses, sometimes stoned or burned victims alive.
The personality cult Duvalier fostered around himself was enhanced by voodoo, the traditions of which he helped to revive, and which is still practised by huge numbers of Haitians today. Papa Doc claimed to be a houngan, or voodoo priest, modelling himself on Baron Samedi, the spirit of death.
Having presented his credentials as non-resident Ambassador to Haiti, Nick Larmour returned to Kingston, Jamaica, where he flew the flag as resident High Commissioner. I met him there (my father had been posted to Kingston by his company) as an undergraduate, and remember his amused intelligence at the dinner table. His genial lack of pomposity helped persuade me that a career as a diplomat might be for me. The minutes show Larmour’s Papa Doc despatch was warmly received by officials in Whitehall for conveying admirably ‘the atmosphere, both comic and more than slightly sinister, of this particular corner of Graham Greeneland’.
Larmour was correct in his prediction that Duvalier’s ill health would soon bring about a change of leadership in Haiti. Papa Doc’s death came in fact just six months after the ambassador’s encounter with him. The long list of potential successors to Papa Doc in Larmour’s despatch had, however, one key omission. Franc¸ois Duvalier was in fact succeeded by his nineteen-year-old son, Jean-Claude, a possibility which Larmour’s first impressions failed altogether to consider. ‘Baby Doc’ ruled until 1986, and, after a long exile in France, returned to Haiti in 2011, seeking power once again.
The brain drain caused by decades of violent misrule still blights Haiti today, as it also struggles to rebuild from the utter devastation caused by a tremendous earthquake in January 2010.
CONFIDENTIAL
| (HA 1/1) | BRITISH EMBASSY TO HAITI, |
C/O BRITISH HIGH COMMISSION, KINGSTON,
19 October, 1970.
Sir,
I have the honour to report that I have at last been able to carry out the instructions contained in your Despatch No. PF 21542 of the 30th of April and that on the 6th of October, I presented my Letters of Credence, and the Letters of Recall of my predecessor, to Dr. Francois Duvalier, President-for-Life of the Republic of Haiti.
As you will observe, I have been kept waiting for an appointment for five months. I had made many attempts and had suggested various blocks of dates during this period but none of them had proved convenient. This is in part due to the unbelievable inefficiency of the Haitian Government machinery and in part to the fact that, as a Note from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs quaintly informed me, the President-for-Life ‘had granted himself a well-earned leave during July and August’ and had decided to undertake none but the most urgent tasks of Government …
The summons to Haiti came at two days’ notice but the organisation surprisingly worked and the protocol was impeccable. Although everything was a bit behind the advertised time, I drove in a motorcade with motor cycle escort, was received with all due honours by a whole battalion of the Presidential Guard, whose band made a very creditable shot at ‘God Save The Queen’, and was passed through a succession of more and more elevated officials and Ministers until I was ushered into the Presidential Presence. His office, where the ceremony took place, is a modest enough little room. He sat behind a large and imposing desk on which I looked surreptitiously (but in vain) for the mummified head of one of his would-be assassins, which popular legend (and some recent publications) have alleged that he keeps permanently by him for Voodoo purposes.1 A suite of Ministers and senior officials stood by whilst I presented my Letters, all dressed (like myself) in tropical white suits of varying degrees of cleanliness and all, except the cheerful Chief of Protocol, looking, I thought, distinctly unhappy and ill at ease. Papa Doc himself was beautifully turned out and received me with much dignity and some warmth. Although I had been told that there were to be no speeches and had therefore, putting my text aside, limited myself to some very brief politenesses, the President did in fact deliver a short speech; but in a voice so low and a delivery so mumbling that I had some difficulty in following it. He referred to ‘clouds in our relationship in the past’ which he hoped had now been dispelled and ended by wishing me a successful mission and sending his greetings and best wishes to The Queen. We then sat down tête-à-tête and I was able, at this shorter range, to hear a little more clearly what he had to say … At the end of the interview I withdrew and received again in reverse order the courtesies with which I had been welcomed.
The whole business had a certain air of unreality. Apart from a curious sheen on his face like black parchment, which gives him a slightly ghostly appearance, Papa Doc looked exactly like anybody’s family doctor or solicitor or retired diplomat. His incredibly low speaking voice, his hesitant delivery and his general air of mildness made it difficult to remember that I was shaking one of the most bloodstained hands in recent history. This was the man who had personally taken command of a firing squad which shot nineteen officers of the Presidential Guard, some of whom he suspected, probably with justice, of being his daughters’ lovers, and who had ordered the execution out of hand of a whole family of seventeen for failing to report the arrival in their village of allegedly unfriendly agents. These are but two of a hundred examples that could be quoted of acts of similar ferocity …
I had never before met Papa Doc … [He has] suffered at least one heart attack on top of his chronic diabetes and my impression was of a man of eighty rather than the 63 years to which he admits … [M]y Guyanese colleague, Mrs Gaskin, Mr Laister, my First Secretary (Information) who accompanied me, and I all shared the quite definite impression that he is a very sick man, that he has gone rapidly down hill in recent years, and that he is perhaps not likely to be with us too much longer.
I questioned my diplomatic colleagues about the likely succession and got, as one might expect, a variety of guesses. Some thought that the Minister of Finance, M.C.M. Desinor, was a likely candidate; but most agreed that, though able enough, he was unusually corrupt, even for a Haitian Finance Minister, and that he might, despite his present, perhaps ephemeral, popularity with the President-for-Life, before long be exiled or at least dismissed. Another name mentioned was that of the President of the National Bank …The Commandant of the Presidential Guard, Colonel Gracia Jacques, an ex-Tonton Macoute thug who, as the President-for-Life’s personal and apparently trusted bodyguard, in fact controls the instruments of power, might seize the imperial purple: but he has neither the brains nor the education for the job and if he were to try to stage a coup, seems more likely to meet the fate of Sejanus,2 Prefect of the Praetorian Guard under Tiberius, who was so unwise as to make a premature bid for power. I slip thus into the Roman past because I have been lately reading the preface by Graham Greene to the recently published ‘Haiti and its Dictator’ by Bernard Diderich, in which he compares Haiti with the Rome of the late Empire. This is by no means inapt: besides the tyranny, oppression, tortures, assassinations and palace intrigues, Haiti has its counterpart to the Senate and the aristocracy in the mulattos, a lively and talented race who, powerful in the past, now however no longer, like their Roman precursors in their time, either play, or will be allowed to play, any part in the Government of the country. That is conducted in a corrupt and remarkably inefficient way by the President and his immediate advisers, mainly trusty blacks who might be compared with the freedmen who used to run the Imperial Roman machine and kept faithfully enough the arcana imperii.3 Whoever succeeds, I imagine that the same quality and colour of Government will continue, though just possibly in a more merciful and more enlightened style. My noble and unhappy Italian colleague, whose wife lives permanently in Italy because she does not, as he sadly put it, like the heat or the germs, speculated about the succession and thought it not impossible that Madame Dominique, who is apparently indeed a formidable woman and the only person of whom the President is said to stand in awe, might in the event win power for herself and her husband after her father’s disappearance from the scene. But, though dominated by his wife, Colonel Dominique loves the fleshpots, and will not easily be persuaded to quit Paris. A more likely possibility, in the short term is a combined Tonton Macoute/Army junta, such as has temporarily taken power in the past. But all bets are open: in Haiti anything can happen.
‘5 hours and 11 minutes’ notice’
RONALD BAILEY, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE KINGDOM OF
MOROCCO, APRIL 1972Being kept waiting in Morocco has been the fate of mightier personages even than Mr Bailey. When Queen Elizabeth and her Royal entourage paid a goodwill visit to Morocco in 1980 her composure was strained by King Hassan II’s eccentricities. After enduring a desert performance of ‘falcons savaging live pigeons’ she was kept waiting for three hours in ninety degree heat, while Hassan ‘saw to arrangements’ in his air-conditioned trailer. ‘Going to Morocco is a bit like being kidnapped,’ commented one of the Queen’s associates.
Three months ago today I presented my Letters of Credence to His Majesty King Hassan II of Morocco and so ended 10 weeks’ ‘purdah’. The ceremony, although recently much simplified, still had the touch of the ‘Arabian Nights’ – the guard of honour in red and gold with flowing cloaks, the giant black-faced halberdiers lining the stairs and the King himself in the simple monk-like burnous that he and his Court affect on these occasions.
For the first two and a half months of my stay in Morocco it was made clear to me that I should make no calls on officials or foreign colleagues until His Majesty had accepted my credentials. Neither could I leave Rabat. I was regaled with stories of other Ambassadors who had dared to do so for even a day or so and who having failed to attend the unexpected and instant summons had to wait another three months. After a false alarm in December I received 5 hours and 11 minutes’ notice of the presentation ceremony. I understand this is generous notice by Moroccan standards.
‘My washerwoman handed in her notice together with a segment of her behind’
GLENCAIRN BALFOUR PAUL, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE
HASHEMITE KINGDOM OF JORDAN, FEBRUARY 1973More from, and about, Balfour Paul can be found on pp. 277–83.
RESTRICTED
BRITISH EMBASSY
27 February 1973
The Right Honourable
Sir Alec Douglas-Home KT MP
etc etc etc
THOUGHTS ON THE PROTECTION OF DIPLOMATIC AGENTS
No matter can be of more lively concern to an Ambassador, however marked the degree of Wisdom, Loyalty, Diligence and Circumspection he may exercise in other fields, than the security of his person. Nor is this concern peculiar to himself: the abduction, temporary or permanent, of an Ambassador by terrorists is almost bound to impose on your hardpressed administrative departments an unwelcome measure of overtime.
It was with these twin considerations in mind that I was prevailed upon, towards the end of 1972, to propose to the Department that they should furnish me, for my protection, with a Large Dog – the local breeds, as I argued, lacking both discipline and decorum. The response was generous and instantaneous. (It was also, I learned later, experimental.) And so it was that, just in time for the Christmas festivities, there arrived at Amman Airport in a moderate-sized lift-van – thoughtfully inscribed, in order to facilitate its passage through Customs and Immigration, ‘This Side Up. Very Vicious’ – the scion of a long line of Cruft’s champions, Auslander of Druidswood (now abridged, to reflect the undertone of human sacrifice, as Druid).
In this despatch, and in response to an enquiry from Security Department, I have the honour to submit some observations on this experiment, which may be of value to those considering its wider application.
Druid was accompanied by a Guide to German Shepherd Dogs, published by the Pet Library Limited and movingly dedicated by its author, Madeleine Pickup, to ‘All those Beloveds who have gone on Ahead to where Separation is Unknown’. It has proved an even more absorbing vade mecum1 than Druid himself. My interest was quickly engaged by reading, in its historical chapter, how ‘Rittmeister (cavalry captain) Max Emile Friedrich von Stephanitz, having recognised the potential beauty of the native sheepherding breeds of Wurttenburg and Thuringia founded the Verein für Deutsche Schäferhunde’2; and how ‘lack of sex character is strongly condemned by the Germans, and in America it is marked as a serious fault if the male is bitchy or the bitch doggy. No mention,’ Miss Pickup continues, ‘is made by the British.’ (She was writing of course some years ago.) It was, however, less encouraging to turn to the chapter on Training and to discover that an Alsatian is ‘made’ in his first six months – less encouraging, since Druid was seven months old on arrival; and his ‘making’ seemed, at least to someone as cushioned from brute realities as a Head of Mission, to be distinctly incomplete.
For within a few days, despite my rigorous attention to Miss Pickup’s injunctions and my continuing to share with him what is left of my bedroom, Druid had left his mark indelibly on most of my household furnishings and staff. My washerwoman handed in her notice together with a segment of her behind. Though quickly mastering sundry arts, such as opening locked doors with his teeth, Druid has proved unable to distinguish between lightly boiled cubes of red meat and other vaguely comestible objects, such as antique silver ash-trays, ladies’ footwear or the toys of my Head of Chancery’s baby daughter who happened to be lodging with me – the whole range of the latter, together with the whole range of my Social Secretary’s nylon tights (at the average consumption rate of one every three days) having been successfully ingested. His louche proclivity for dancing unmonitored on the dining-room table, against which even Miss Pickup omits to recommend a specific, has enlivened its sober patina with baroque striations, has materially affected the complement of damask napkins on the Residence inventory, and has even reduced to scrap metal several of the silver napkin rings once lavished on my children by godparents at their baptism. Locked on one dramatic evening in my bedroom – for he is not yet sufficiently representational to accompany me to such occasions as the South Vietnamese National Day reception – he located in a chest of drawers and consumed a year’s supply of vitamin powders, proceeded high-spiritedly to lay a paper chase of foam rubber mattressing round and round the Master Suite and to masticate the major part of the top blanket on the double-bed on which, after recovering from a bout of nausea on the carpet, he remained comfortably ensconced till my return, relieving himself in it at intervals.
It should be noted, when considering the postings of Guard Dogs, that the excreta of animals are regarded by Moslem domestics as haram (forbidden); but, as Miss Pickup might put it, an Ambassador enterprising enough to dispose strategically through his premises a supply of worn towelling and buckets of ready diluted Lysol (in the recommended proportions of 1:4) will soon adjust himself to his guardian’s foibles and learn to manage their removal on his own.
This further observation from my experience may be in place. Whereas the general run of grocers’ boys, by now at least twice shy, have learnt to park their bicycles by the gate, deposit their merchandise by agreement in a remote cache and pedal swiftly away, Druid is otherwise conspicuously courteous to unexpected visitors with whom he is unfamiliar, licking their extremities with great friendliness when he has opened the door for them. Only towards my domestic staff does he maintain an attitude of stern suspicion, resolutely protecting me from (at any rate) my Early Morning Tea.
Some early reluctance was shown at having to accompany me daily to my office, and particularly at having to ascend its several flights of marble stairs. However, this was soon overcome by stationing my Defence Attaché, whose trousers have long been impregnated with the necessary aroma, two or three steps higher up and thus, bit by bit and bite by bite, enticing my protector to make the ascent.
But it is not easy, even in a relaxed and freightless post like the Hashemite Kingdom, to accommodate the two or three hours training exercises for a Guard Dog recommended by Miss Pickup into an Ambassador’s modest daily schedule.
A request for the addition to my staff of a Third Secretary (Dog Handling) has not found favour and would in any case be a breach of the essential dog/ambassador intimacy. Fortunately a continuous stream of political reporting is, in these post-Plowden3 days, no longer imperative; and since the successful exploitation of my Defence Attaché’s trousers on the stairs to my office, the number of human callers there has conveniently decreased. So within a year or two I hope to have moved on, during my idle moments, to Pickup page 157 and to have embarked on the more advanced lesson in which the pupil, after being gently scratched on belly and chest for some minutes, submits to the order ‘Die for your country’! Meanwhile, I confess there are moments when I feel it might be more convenient for everyone if I simply did it myself.
I am sending a copy of this despatch to Her Majesty’s Representative at Ulan Bator.
I have the honour to be Sir
Your obedient Servant
H. G. BALFOUR PAUL
‘The free condom policy causes him alarm … His solution is to request manfully large numbers’
PAUL BRUMMELL, HM AMBASSADOR TO
TURKMENISTAN, APRIL 2002When diplomats write letters of complaint to London, certain tropes tend to appear time and again. One is the bewilderment felt by ambassadors in countries very different to the UK on receipt of blanket instructions issued by well-meaning officials in Whitehall. The National Salute to the Sultan of Muscat and Oman, the first despatch in this collection, is the finest example. The tele-letter (secure email) below is another, which adds a modern, politically incorrect twist.
It was sent by our ambassador in Ashgabat to the Medical and Welfare team in Personnel Command, in response to an official circular instructing posts to start issuing free condoms to their staff. To British eyes this doubtless seemed like a responsible initiative designed to halt the spread of HIV. The trouble was that many of the staff on the receiving end were not British. UK embassies overseas are staffed at the lower levels by a considerable number of foreign nationals: ‘locally-engaged’ (LE) staff who draw a pay cheque from HMG but may be presumed to remain culturally attuned to their own country. And of course the sexual revolution that has transformed British society since the 1960s passed much of the developing world by.
When the FCO released Brummell’s letter to us, they explained that ‘its tone is light hearted and its circulation was limited to two people, who received it in that spirit’. We understand that the FCO COMCEN (Communication Centre) gave it a far wider distribution than that, however, and it was soon being forwarded and copied high and low throughout the Foreign Office and to posts overseas. Brummell wanted his despatch to make his colleagues think, as well as laugh, something the Foreign Office readily acknowledge: ‘It does make some important points about the potential impact of limited prior consultation,’ they told us, ‘and the need to be culturally sensitive in promulgating a policy which applied to all FCO employees worldwide.’ It’s hard to believe the characters that Brummell so graphically describes were as hypothetical as claimed; one senses the Ambassador knew some of them quite well.
Jack Straw was Foreign Secretary at the time. In 2010 without naming names he told us of an ambassador to ‘one of the “Stans” ’ whose despatches could bring ‘tears of laughter to your eyes’. The humour was ‘at the expense of the dictator where he was, and this kind of pantomime – but actually very serious pantomime – at which he has a ringside seat’. Straw recalled the Ambassador describing ‘having to attend the national day banquet, and seeing this man who had gold statues all over the capital prance around in self glorification … It would have been good if he and his acolytes had read it. Because it might have made them realise just what lunatics they were.’ Straw insisted every single one of this ambassador’s despatches went into his ministerial box for personal reading. No prizes for guessing who wrote them (the regime also fits the bill – see pp. 46–53 for more on Turkmenistan).
Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan … Could our embassies in the ‘Stans’ turn out to be a new goldmine of comic despatches, the successors to earlier hotspots like Vietnam and South America? Possibly. But these countries are also resource superpowers so the FCO is understandably careful about what it releases. The Foreign Office took the unusual step of refusing outright our FOI request for four First Impressions despatches from the region (including two from Brummell), saying that they contain sensitive political and commercial information which is exempt from disclosure.
TO TELELETTER FCO
TELELETTER 16
OF 101100Z APRIL 02
From: Paul Brummell, HMA
To: [name withheld]
And To: [name withheld]
SUBJECT: A CONDOM CONUNDRUM
Summary
1. New policy on condoms is welcome, but local implementation is not straightforward.
DETAIL
2. FCO Circular 104 of 3 April (some here wondered whether it was sent two days late) sets out new policy regarding the distribution of condoms to staff. This is welcome evidence of the Administration’s willingness to respond to the public health concerns of all our staff, LE and UK-based. But implementation is not entirely straightforward. Consider the following hypothetical members of an Embassy:
– Young Miss T, of a deeply conservative family, has a new boyfriend. She has recently discovered that he once dabbled with injected drugs, and is worried that he may be HIV Positive. She is, in short, exactly the kind of member of staff the new policy is designed to help. But she is terrified that her work colleagues might discover that she is actually having sex. She would never place an order for condoms from her employer, and is nervous of taking condoms from a ‘help yourself’ basket in the ladies toilet as she believes her two female colleagues will quickly work out her secret.
– Vivacious Miss U has no regular boyfriend. She enjoys clubbing on a Friday night, and will occasionally end the evening with male company. The new FCO policy cannot, however, help her.
The local night clubs are frequently subject to police raids, with all customers searched. Under local practice, any unmarried women found in possession of condoms are liable to be arrested as prostitutes. Miss U therefore has to rely on a responsible attitude from her male partners.
– Pious Mrs V believes that all forms of contraception are a sin. She is angered by the new FCO policy, which she believes to be evidence of declining British moral values. When a basket of condoms appears in the ladies toilet, she flushes them all down the loo. The resulting blockage of the plumbing is resolved at a cost of fifty pounds to local budget.
– Corrupt Mr W is newly married. He and his wife are desperate to start a family. He has, in short, no need for condoms. But he is not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. He takes as many free condoms as he thinks he can get away with, which he then sells on to his brother, who runs a market stall.
– Pug-faced Mr X has many attributes. Unfortunately, none of them have brought him any success with women. Not his stamp collection, his heavy metal, his gurning. The free condom policy causes him alarm. He has no need for them, but certainly does not want his colleagues to know that. His solution is to request mannishly large numbers. They then lie in the back of his wardrobe where, at Her Majesty’s expense, they sit moving inexorably towards their three year expiry date.
– Raffish and experimental Mr Y (known to friends as Mr Y Not), would like to see more consumer choice, to include French ticklers and assorted fruit flavours.
– And well-endowed Mr Z is concerned at the FCO’s apparent one size fits all policy.
3. Decisions regarding local implementation of the policy can address some of these problems; but no method seems to solve all. A requirement for staff to sign for condoms would for example help placate Mrs V, and thwart Mr W’s crimes, but at the considerable cost of failing to help Miss T. Conversely, anonymous means of distribution, such as a free-vend machine in the toilets, may eventually come to be trusted by Miss T, would resolve Mr X’s concerns, but would offend Mrs V and provide Mr W with a licence to print money. I fear this telegram must conclude lamely not with a solution but with a caution: this is a positive and welcome policy, but its implementation locally in the very different cultures in which FCO posts find ourselves is not nearly as straightforward as FCO Circular 104 implies.
Signed ......... Paul Brummell
‘The hotel’s electric clocks were made to go, even if in some cases with only one hand’
SIR REGINALD HIBBERT, HM CHARGÉ D’AFFAIRES
IN ULAN BATOR, AUGUST 1965The very name ‘Outer Mongolia’ is a byword for somewhere impossibly remote and off the beaten track. Being sent as a junior diplomat to Mongolia might not have struck Reginald Hibbert as a great career move. But, the first British envoy in the modern era to be posted there, as Chargé d’Affaires in Ulan Bator Hibbert managed to turn the situation to his advantage.
Hibbert ‘made his name’, say some who read his despatches the first time round, on the quality of his reports from what was then a Communist satellite state, a country about which most of his readers in the Foreign Office knew nothing.
After enduring two freezing years in Mongolia, Hibbert came in from the cold, rising rapidly through the ranks to become Political Director in Whitehall, a job at the very heart of great-power diplomacy. He ended his career on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, in the most beautiful and lavish British Embassy in the world, as Ambassador to France.
BRITISH EMBASSY,
ULAN BATOR.
27 August, 1965.
U.N. Seminar on the Participation of Women in Public Life
Sir,
Miss Sheila Harden, the United Kingdom observer at the recent seminar on the Participation of Women in Public Life which was arranged in Ulan Bator by the United Nations in cooperation with the Government of the Mongolian People’s Republic will I think be submitting a report on the proceedings of the seminar. I have the honour to report on the significance of the seminar as an event in the diplomatic life of the M.P.R.
The seminar was the first international conference with delegates from non-communist countries ever to be held in Ulan Bator … The seminar, no doubt a minor event by U.N. standards, was an important new achievement in the M.P.R.’s policy of obtaining recognition on the world stage as a fully sovereign and independent state.
The Mongolian authorities made very careful preparations. The eight Mongolian English language students at Leeds University were not allowed to stay in England more than six months, so that they could be available in Ulan Bator as organisers and interpreters during the seminar. The sessions of the seminar were held in the hall and rooms of the Great People’s Khural. The national ballet, opera and circus were re-opened in the middle of the holiday and provincial tour season to entertain the delegates. All Foreign Ministry officials capable of speaking western languages were concentrated on servicing the seminar and its delegates. The Ulan Bator hotel was partly refurnished and extensively redecorated in the days preceding the seminar. The hotel lift was made to work for two weeks and the hotel’s electric clocks were made to go, even if in some cases with only one hand. The menu improved gratifyingly and the service for residents deteriorated sadly as a result of the prodigious effort to feed and serve the delegates in their segregated dining-room in a manner which would not shock them. The picturesque but impoverished and shabby Sunday market was closed by the police for the duration. An east German woman who claims to be the only trained hairdresser in Mongolia and who usually does business privately with the ladies of the diplomatic corps was brow-beaten into becoming the official hotel hairdresser for a fortnight. The postal and telegraph services remained open for excessively long hours (but the service did not improve correspondingly because the girls spent most of the time contriving to have their hair done by the east German). A comically vain effort was made by the police to enforce good road drill among pedestrians in the neighbourhood of the hotel. Special and exceptional arrangements were made for most delegates to be entertained privately by some of the Mongolian women associated with the seminar.
All these efforts were concentrated on a dozen Asian ladies, three Asian men, three American observers, a British observer and a large contingent from the U.N. Secretariat. The operation was generally successful. The aim seemed to be to keep the seminar participants totally occupied and totally segregated in the company of a fixed staff of approved Mongols of both sexes … The Mongolian Government managed to have its cake and eat it, in the sense that the seminar went off successfully and the participants were overwhelmed with well-organised hospitality, while the chances of wrong thoughts being spread in simple Mongol minds by the presence of so many representatives of non-communist Asian states were reduced to a minimum.
Miss Harden will no doubt report on the effect of the Mongolian hospitality technique on the minds of the visitors. My own impression was that the delegates, thanks in large part to the robust and humorous leadership of Mrs Lakshmi Menon, and in the closing stages after her departure to that of Mrs Ambhorn Meesook of Thailand, were not deceived by it. Besides, the seminar lasted two weeks; and ten days is about as long as most people can remain blind to the real nature of the system here, deaf to the absurdity of the claims of perfection made for it in the name of Lenin, and insensible to the meagreness of such modern, material civilisation as exists in the M.P.R.
‘A changing world of challenging change’
UNKNOWN DIPLOMAT, APRIL 1994
Certain aspects of modern life seem almost deliberately designed to get up the noses of British diplomats. One, as previous despatches showed, is political correctness. Another is management-speak. Like much of the public sector over the past thirty years the Foreign Office has been subjected to wave after wave of efficiency reviews led by management consultants; and their misuse of the English language has reliably enraged even mild-mannered diplomats.
The backlash reached its apotheosis in a 2006 valedictory despatch by Sir Ivor Roberts, who was ending a distinguished diplomatic career as ambassador in Rome. ‘Too much of the change management agenda,’ wrote Sir Ivor, ‘is written in Wall Street management-speak which is already tired and discredited by the time it is introduced. Synergies, vfm, best practice, benchmarking, silo-working, roll-out, stakeholder, empower, push-back and deliver the agenda, fit for purpose, are all prime candidates for a game of bullshit bingo, a substitute for clarity and succinctness.’ The phrase ‘bullshit bingo’ unfortunately leaked, along with much else, into the Sunday papers – and thus (as we recount in Parting Shots) began the end of the valedictory despatch, which the then Foreign Secretary was persuaded by senior officials to ban forthwith.
What follows is proof that Roberts was tapping into a long-established vein of similar dyspepsia. Unlike other extracts in this collection the circular below is not genuine diplomatic traffic, however; rather, it was an April Fool’s Day spoof. Nevertheless, it is said to have been carried, forwarded from terminal to terminal, in the same Foreign Office communication system that enabled real despatches to be read right across the Diplomatic Service.
The circular is deliberately stuffed with ghastly acronyms, not all of them fictitious: the PUS for instance is the Foreign Office’s civil service chief, the Permanent Under-Secretary; the DUS and AUS are his deputy and assistant under-secretaries. The Diplomatic Service career ladder is inverted so that the most senior staff are on pay grades 1–3 and under-secretaries are dozens of rungs above secretaries (who are by no means the same thing as private secretaries and who are now called personal assistants, anyway). DS10s are therefore at the bottom of the heap. The anonymous author of this circular would appear to sit somewhere in the middle.
FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH OFFICE
CIRCULAR 1 /14 / SPOOF02
TARGET AUDIENCE: ALL STAFF, EVEN DS10s
If you are a secretary, please ask a friend to read this circular to you.
FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH OFFICE MANAGEMENT PRIORITIES AND OBJECTIVES ASSESSMENT PROGrAMME: MAKING THE CHANGE TO MEET THE CHALLENGE OF A CHANGING WORLD OF CHALLENGING CHANGE
Management is about change. Many changes are likely in the FCO as a result of the Whitehall-wide, ocean-deep, mountain-high, pencil-thin, thorough-going, wide-ranging, across-the-board, up the creek and underneath the arches Whitehall Review of Whitehall (WRW), recently conducted by the Management, Objectives and Operations Cabinet Office Working Group (MOOCOW).
Meeting the challenge of this change will be a challenge for all of us, requiring, as it will, change, and bringing with it, sometimes radical, challenge. This circular is to let you know how the FCO is meeting this changing challenge. The Board of Change Management and Challenge Assessment (BCMCA: chaired by the PUS, consisting of all DUSs and AUSs), has identified the following processes which must guide our approach to the challenge of change and the opportunity of options:
(a) change management: assessing which changes to manage,
(b) managing change: the process by which changes are first identified, then assessed, then managed;
(c) the management of change: where managers, having identified and assessed change, and assessed and identified how to manage it, set up a committee(s) to ensure that both the change management and managing change processes are managed in order to produce the desired managed change;
(d) challenge management: it is essential that we distinguish between change (see above) and challenge; a challenge is a change which, while being managed, changes, thus producing further change and the challenge of channelling the process of change in a direction which optimises our opportunities, while not prejudging our priorities for action, in the Post-Cold War, after-the-Berlin-wall, pre-EMU, run-up to the IGC world of the future.
Challenging the change of future challenges.
The main challenges which will need to be met by FCO senior management are the following:
Senior Management Review: the Senior Management Review (SMR) has challenged the FCO to assess what changes should be made to the FCO structure at Grades 1–3.
A Working Party (WP), meeting daily, chaired by the PUS and consisting of all Deputy and Assistant Under-Secretaries has begun an independent and wide-ranging review of the activities of Grades 1–3 (now known as the Senior Grade Cadre Management Group Stratum (SGCMGS)). Its work continues: it is scheduled to produce its report by 30 March 2007. But its initial, preliminary, indicative and firm initial, provisional conclusions are:
– that all staff in Grades 1–3 make a full and appropriate contribution to the FCO’s work;
– that all staff in Grades 1–3 are at least satisfactorily loaded: for example, each DUS or AUS attends at least one meeting every day for consultations on important management issues with other members of the Senior Grade Cadre Management Group Stratum (SGCMGS);
– that structural inefficiencies in the FCO appear to be tightly concentrated in Grades 4–10. And S1, S2 and S2A. And Security Officers. And messengers. And those people who drive those vans.
– that the Senior Grade Cadre Management Group Stratum are paid much less than their equivalents in other professions (results of survey by independent management consultants Dimwit, Dolalley and Workshy covering senior management remuneration in the diamond-broking, narcotics trafficking and popular music production industries).
The Working Party’s initial, preliminary and provisional final conclusions are:
– to establish a separate, independent Change Management Committee, or CMC (chaired by the PUS, consisting of all DUSs and AUSs) to oversee the production of a report on the likely implications of the Senior Management Review for staffing at Grades 4–10;
– that, separately, the Board of Management (BOM) should commission a paper from a new-entrant DS9 in Starting Pay Section, PSD on how best to adapt the FCO’s entire personnel management system for Grades 4–10 in the light of the Change Management Committee’s paper on managing the challenges of this change; this paper to be written by 3 April 1995, and to focus on the introduction of flexibly-graded, job-centred, objective-focussed, short-term contracted, exponentially-oscillating ‘work bands’ to replace the outmoded, outdated and overstretched grading structure: officers will be freely able to move within their core work band from operational function to operational function better to optimise our flexibility to reconfigure the spatial geography of our work resource environment and to minimise dislocation at the all-important human resources/financial perspectives interface; this paper to take note of the likely implications of the forthcoming Treasury Uplift and Regressive Downsizing Study (TURDS);
– that the Policy Management Board (PMB), and, separately, the Board of Policy Management (BPM) should reflect on the likely implications of the managed change process in the wider perspective of the FCO’s overseas commitments;
– that we should not rush into the upcoming environment of managed change, changed management and planned challenge without a wholescale, hewn-from-the-solid, salt-of-the-earth review of the FCO’s future policy priorities. The Policy Management Board have therefore commissioned Policy Planning Staff to produce a number of papers, for early discussion by the Board of Policy Management, to include the following:
(a) Is America a large country?
(b) Foreigners: why they aren’t English;
(c) Germany after the Berlin wall: did it get bigger?
(d) Ethnic imperialism, tribal nationalism and loose big-power confederation in a globalising economy: implications for British consular policy;
(e) The Commonwealth: kindly aunt or sex-crazed stepmother?
(f) Japanese economic power: Pacific Rim or lavatory bowl?
(g) The challenge of China: opportunities for the British trouser press industry; (joint FCO/DTI paper);
(h) The Pope: is he really a Catholic?
The Board of Changing Management Challenges (BCMC) are confident that this process will result in a tighter, more focussed, objectively-objectivised, goal-oriented, target-chasing, foot-dragging Service better suited to meet the challenges of the post-national, pre-global ‘wash and go’ world of the future.
Junior staff Expenditure-Saving Process (JESP). The Junior staff Expenditure-Saving Process is a result of the King Charles St-wide Policy Review of Staffing Management Procedures. I know that the JESP has caused some worries among staff, who fear that it will result in jobs being cut simply to save money. That is not the JESP’s intention. Rather, it will contribute to our ability to challenge the changes of future challenge by restructuring our expenditure on staffing levels at the middle, middling, junior and juniorish Grades by a gradual process (lasting, perhaps, many days) of re-assessing our job requirements in the light of diminishing real-terms resource availability. There is no intention that any staff will be dismissed, though the Policy Board of Managers’ Management Board (PBMMB) is unable to rule out the possibility that, at some time in the future (perhaps 27 February 1995), structurally-enforced voluntary early career curtailment procedures may have to be instituted in a very limited number of cases (probably affecting about 837 officers).
I know that there is apprehension in the Service about these changes. You should not be worried. The process of change offers new challenges for us to change to deal better with the challenges of a changing world of challenging change. I can assure you that the Policy Management Managers Policy Assessment Board has the interests of the Service as a whole as its highest priority …
A M Woodforthetrees
Chairman of the Board of Change Policy Management
The big office with the nice furniture and the view over Horseguards
King Charles’ Street
1 April 1994