A Different Kind of Diplomat by FCDO Historians

ADIFFERENT KIND OF DIPLOMAT

The Story of Branch B of HM Foreign Service

Michael Hodge

Foreword

One of the many surprising facts about the Second World War is that in the middle of it, in 1943, the Foreign Office1 under Sir Anthony Eden managed to find time to reform itself. The reforms were wide-ranging but included dividing the Foreign Service into four branches,A, B, C and D.Awas for the high-flying graduate entrants who had always run it, B was for recruits entering without degrees straight from school, either on the basis of their A-level results at grammar school and an interview, or by sitting a special entrance exam, C was for the secretarial grades and D for security officers.

Branch B was intended as theentrypoint forabroaderrangeof candidates, focusing onmiddlegrade roles that require practical skills for diplomatic, administrative, consular and commercial work. Some Branch B officers sat the exam, passed and entered the Foreign Office at the age of16 without even goingintothesixth form. But themainrouteto BranchBtargetedpromising candidatesleavinggrammarschoolsoncompletingtheirALevels orScottishequivalents.They were typically aged 17 to 18 and selected by interviews conducted by the Civil Service Commission or Foreign Office panels. These interviews assessed character, aptitude, personality, and potential for diplomatic work, rather than deep academic knowledge. A high value was placed on qualities such as intuition, sympathy and interpersonal skills, all of them essential for consular work

This method of entry was seen as a way to “tap the great reservoir of talent in the secondary and grammar schools.” It aimed to recruit from diverse backgrounds. Many of those who entered were from thoroughly working class backgrounds who had grown up on council estates and passed the 11 Plus. In the 21st century they would probably have gone on to university. But relatively few did so in the 1940s and 1950s usually for financial or family reasons. The aim was to bring the full breadth of British society into the Service and to include young men and women who knew what life was really like for ordinary people, not just for the elite. And it worked.

This Branch B of theForeign Service existed until the 1960s when both BranchesAand B were merged, nominally although not in fact, by the Plowden Report on Overseas Representation.

1 SeeAppendix 1 for changes in the Foreign Office’s name

Acknowledgements

This book relies heavily on the work of others. Former members of Branch B formed themselves into a cohort called The Old Bs, recording their career experiences in a quarterly newsletter, The Bs News. This book draws heavily on those accounts. In recent years the newsletter has been edited by David Cockerham. He has given me an enormous amount of help, not only by describing his own eventful career, but also by categorising the anecdotes in The Bs News and offering many helpful suggestions on my drafts. I am also grateful for the detailed background given to me on their family upbringing by John Cummins and Peter Cross and by Julie Horrocks on her father, Jim. Similarly I was provided with detailed information on his hair-raising adventures by John Kelly. I have also benefited from advice from Sir James Hodge (no relation). I wanted to get a fast stream perspective on the contribution of Branch B officers. Sir James kindly provided it.

Without these contributions it would not have been possible to develop the theme of this book.

Many of the personalities mentioned in this book received well deserved honours for their efforts beyond the call of duty. I have not included all of them. This is not intended to be disrespectful. It is more a fear of unintentionally leaving someone out if I tried to name all.

Michael Hodge December 2025

Chapter 1 Dangers Come in Various Guises

It sounded like a train hurtling through the house. The wall opposite the bed quivered violently from side to side - square to rhombus one way and then the other. David, the British Consul General, had been rudely awakened by this horror. To his relief the house did not collapse, but all over the city buildings were down and burning; elevated expressways keeled over on to their sides; railway lines buckled. It was 1995 and an earthquake had struck Kobe in Japan.

David more than earned his money in the next few weeks. No manual of diplomatic procedure detailed how to handle the aftermath of a major earthquake.And David’s job description made no reference to anything of that kind. But in no time it became clear what needed to be done. The British community in Kobe was relatively large. The folks back home wanted reassurance that their loved ones were alive and safe. David moved around the shattered city trying to find out; providing reassurance wherever he could and distributing relief supplies trucked down by the Embassy in Tokyo.

Liaison with theAmbassador resulted in a decision to support the sending of a rescue team by the British charity International Rescue Corps to help victims of the catastrophe, and in David having to organise its transportation, securing the loan of a truck for it from a Japanese charity. But the Japanese authorities were so deeply focused on their own massively complex contingency plans, based on centuries of having to trigger them following devastating earthquakes, that the rescue team could get no clear directions from them as to how they could help most effectively. David knew and, with a cry of “follow me”, took the team to those parts of the city that had suffered most damage.

David was dismayed when this incident led to much criticism of the Japanese authorities in the British media, the impression being spread of incompetence or, worse, a nationalistic unwillingnesstobeseen asneeding foreign help.Interviewedlivedown-the-lineonBBCnews, David tried gently to correct this by expressing disappointment that people could find it in their hearts to be critical of the Japanese at such a dire time for them, and describing the stupendous efforts they weremaking andthefantasticallyrapid restorationofservices theywereachieving. David learnt later that this had been deeply appreciated by the Japanese foreign ministry, and that his action in steering the rescue team to sites needing help had also led to a letter to the Prime Minister from anAmerican observer of it, applauding his “cut-to-the-chase” spirit.

Thanks in no small part to David, UK/Japan relations came through the crisis unharmed – if anything strengthened – and maybe a few brownie points for the FCO from 10 Downing Street were won too

The earthquake in Japan was not the first time David’s work as a member of the Diplomatic Service had brought him and his wife into serious danger His first posting had been to Saigon. He had been working in the FO’s Finance Department in London when the Inspectors discovered that a Chinese bookkeeper assisting theAccountant in Saigon had been fiddling the books, using totally fictitious outstanding cheques lists to disguise the missing money. David had just determinedly helped a colleague figure out why his own books were out by exactly one penny. Such minute inaccuracies could not be ignored as they could be the first sign of a

much bigger problem This was perhaps why he was deemed ideal for a posting to Saigon to work out how much had been stolen so that HM Treasury could be given a figure to write off.

Saigon’s airport was both civilian and military and the skies were full of fighters and bombers as well as passenger planes.Acolleague was there to meet David and his wife. He was spotted striding across the apron from the terminal building to greet the couple as they descended the steps of their aircraft, swatting aside South Vietnamese troops armed with sub-machine guns who tried to stop him.

After a few weeks pouring over the books David managed to come up with a figure to be written off. His reward was to have to serve in Saigon for a full year as Accountant when he really wanted to go to Tokyo as a Japanese language student.

In Saigon one Sunday David decided to pop into the Embassy to see if the diplomatic bag had brought him any personal mail. He was puzzled when he opened the front door to see that the metal gates to the little car park at the front of the block were closed. They had always stood open. David was about to discover how living as a member of the Diplomatic Service overseas did not bestow any kind of immunity from danger. The unexpected often lay in wait.As he slid the bolt to open the gate, a colleague came charging out from the block and asked him what on earth he was doing. Did he not know that the Viet Cong had invaded Saigon (it was to become known as the Tet Offensive); that there was a 24-hour curfew and if he went out on the street he would be shot dead; and that there was in fact a dead body just on the other side of the gate? This belonged to a Viet Cong who had thrown a bomb at the PhilippineAmbassador’s nearby residence from the pillion of a motor bike. He had been shot dead off the pillion by the guards in a sentry box opposite as the driver made his escape David answered no. He knew none of this because nobody had told him or his wife! Yet they must have been sleeping extremely soundly that night not to have heard the bomber being shot.

The next night the couple hardly slept at all, because by then the guards opposite were firing at anything that moved in the dark, even if it was only bushes blowing in the wind. The noise was terrifying. Everyone was shaking with fear. The next day some of the walls of the accommodation block immediately above David and his wife’s living room window were pocked with bullet marks. One bullet had gone through the speedometer of a colleague’s Mini parked inside the gates. The Embassy security officer living above the shop in the Embassy building had an even scarier time because the Viet Cong used a corner wall of the Embassy compound as cover to attack the American Embassy diagonally opposite. The Gurkha guards on the Embassy gates had to be hastily ordered inside for fear they would take on theViet Cong with their kukris.

Eventually the curfew was lifted and the staff of the Embassy were able to get back to what passedfor anormal lifein Saigon Interspersedwith theroutinework ofthe post andenjoyment of the available recreational facilities came the threat of bombings and visits to restaurants of various qualities including one where the leavings on plates were just thrown on the floor by waiters for the rats to enjoy. One day David’s little Simca car was pushed a little way down the road with him and his wife in it by the blast wave of a bomb that had gone off at a radio station around the corner as a colleague drove past it, blowing all his car doors open and bouncing his back window in one piece on to his back seat. Miraculously he was unscathed.

Having been regaled with stories of how great the beach was at Vung Tau, David and a few others decided to take a trip there one day. It was in an area under the control of theAustralian military, not theAmerican.Clearancehadto besought from theirHQbeforesetting off.Having been assured the road was safe, the party were surprised suddenly to find themselves driving between dozens ofAustraliantroopsprostratein thericepaddiesonboth sidesoftheroadfiring into the trees. One of their helicopters buzzed over the party for a closer look, apparently unimpressed by the giant Union Jack on the roof of their vehicle. David has never been quite sure whether it really was an unexpected encounter with the Viet Cong or just the Aussies giving some Poms a scare for a laugh. The rest of the day lived up to expectations and was much enjoyed by all.

David did not fit the British public’s image of the typical diplomat, the Carlton-Brownes of the FO. It is an image that persists to this day to a limited extent though the great efforts to broaden much further the inclusivity of the intake has certainly paid off Even so, an obituary on a formerBritishAmbassadorwhichappearedin TheTimes inJanuary2024 referredtoa “Foreign Office steeped in establishment conformity”. But David had not been to a public school. Nor had he gained a degree at Oxford or Cambridge or any other university for that matter He had grown up on a council estate and been educated at a grammar school. Like many others, he was a member of Branch B of the Foreign Service formed by bringing together the Diplomatic and various Consular Services and some Overseas Trade officials in a new Foreign Service open to people of all backgrounds. They had entered this oft criticised but, in Prime Minister Jim Callaghan’s words “Rolls Royce” department of state, usually straight from school. The entry process was based on A levels and an interview, or by sitting a special exam for school leavers. Branch B was created to diversify the staffing of the Foreign Office. It came about in 1943 following the Eden Reforms. This proposed a Foreign Service separate from the Home Civil Service with the field of entry broadened to recruit members representing the country as a whole. Their background was not important. Their innate abilities very much were. In many cases the experience they gained through work compensated for their lack of university education and they developedtheintellectualmusclewhich enabledthem to competewith their fast stream colleagues and go on to senior positions. David fitted this mould exactly

There were many others like him. SirArchie Lamb was moved to write to TheTimes to set the record straight when one-time Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, complained of FCO elitism and suggested that “people should be able to get in on the basis of drive and effort, not the basis of which school they went to.”

SirArchie commented:

“Inmyexperienceandin myownparticularcase,theForeignOfficeandtheDiplomatic Service have done in the past what Mr Cook wants. I joined the Foreign Office at the age of 17 as a Clerical Officer (filing clerk) from Swansea Grammar School.After war service I returned to the Foreign Office and proceeded steadily up the career ladder, retiring as Her Majesty’s Ambassador to Norway (Deputy Secretary grade), having on the way been our Political Agent in Abu Dhabi, Chief Inspector of the Diplomatic Service (Under-Secretary) and HMAmbassador to Kuwait.

I am not the only non-graduate to have been brought along by the Foreign Office to meet its demanding requirements in the highest posts.”

SirArchie certainly was not the only non-graduate.There were many like him and a significant proportion of them really did make it to the highest levels One would-be candidate for the Foreign Service did not even bother to apply for entry until he met some people already in the Service who were educated at independent schools. He had been convinced that his state grammar school education and his working-class background – his father had been a bus conductor for most of his life – would automatically weigh against him. It was only when he realised that his grammar school had given him almost everything that was available in an independent school that he sought an interview, was accepted and went on to head up a major post in the United States.

Most, but not all, such applicants were young men. In the 1940s to 70s women were required to resign from the Foreign Service on marriage which may have been a deterrent. Such discrimination against women apart, the Eden Reforms were more successful than politicians over the years seem to have realised. The Plowden Report on Overseas Representation, published in the early 1960s made further adjustments. Among other things it proposed measures to ensure that British diplomats received allowances to help them with the financial challenges of uprooting a family every three or four years on a worldwide basis. This is important to recruits with limited private resources. It also changed the Branch B grading structured (detailed in Appendix 2) to reflect the amalgamation with the Colonial Office and the Commonwealth Relations Office. This had the effect of obscuring the distinction with the old Branch A fast stream. The difference between the streams remained, however, very much alive.

This book sets out to tell the story of some of these diplomats who entered via Branch B, the work that they did, the danger and discomforts they faced and the overall contribution they made to the formation and discharge of British foreign policy including the promotion of British trade and the protection of British subjects overseas. This is not to take anything away from their Branch A fast stream colleagues who faced the same dangers, challenges and inconveniences as those described in the following pages. Many diplomatic posts were run by a small team of UK based Diplomatic Service officers from both streams. They had to get on witheachotherifthepost wastodoitsjobproperly.Forthemostparttheydidandtheproblems in Libreville describe briefly in Chapter 6 were rare. Almost always they formed an effective and mutually reliant team.

Chapter 2

The Branch B Officer’s Work: Start with the Basics

It is unlikely that any new entrants to BranchAof HM Foreign Service (as the fast stream was onceknown)in thedecades followingWorldWarTwo.Thelatteris not thesameas tradepolicy work where diplomacy is required to negotiate mutually beneficial trade agreements or to dissuade foreign governments from introducing measures which would harm the ability of British companies to export their goods. Perhaps the ultimate example of trade policy work would be the enormous effort expended in persuading the then European Economic Community, and particularly France, to allow the United Kingdom to become a member (and then negotiating its way out some four decades later!). Or persuading newly elected President Trump not to impose import tariffs on British exports to the United States.

Fast stream officers were expected to do such work, known generically as “political work”. Abroad they would learn what was making the host country tick and how its government’s actions were likely to impact upon Britain. They would explain to the host government and its agencies why Britain was acting as it did in any particular field. At home they would use the information derived from posts overseas to brief ministers on the behaviour of a foreign government and the options available to best ensure that the bilateral relationship was mutually beneficial. Drafting advice for the Prime Minister on how best to reply to questions submitted by MPs forhis weekly questiontimein Parliamentwas atypical taskfor apolitical desk officer. Branch B officers were rarely allowed anywhere near such work until, usually some way into their career, they were deemed to be “policy capable”. However, in the 1970s there was a growing realisation that this approach was denying the Foreign Office a ready resource perfectly capable of coping with most political issues. As a result the Office embarked upon a programme which came to be known as “executivisation”. There were a significant number of Branch B officers who may not have enjoyed the intellectual benefits of tertiary education. As already noted, in the decades immediately after the Second World War relatively few pupils went on to a university education. But they were actually well up to the challenges of political analysis. Their grammar school years had taught them well and they had, after all, entered the Foreign Service after gainingAlevel passes or after passing an entry exam.

So they were offered the chance to show what they could do in the FO’s political departments. For example, one Branch B officer found himself on the Northern Irish desk of the FO’s Republic of Ireland Department in the 1970s. There were those, including the Reverend Ian Paisley, who were inclined to question whether Northern Ireland was any business of the Foreign Office at all. In fact there was a wide range of issues requiring careful diplomacy with the always sensitive Government of the Republic of Ireland, including the assassination of the British Ambassador in Dublin; border incursions by the British military not least when eight SAS soldiers strayed over the border and were arrested at a Garda road block for the illegal possession of weapons in the Republic the control of detonators moving from quarries in the South to terrorists in the North, and ensuring that the United States Government did nothing to encourage fund-raising by Irish Americans for the Provisional IRA. Branch B officers who could prove their ability to navigate such issues and submit well considered papers on them to senior officers and ministers were likely to find their career prospects enormously enhanced in later years when the prospect of a posting as Head of Mission beckoned.

But this is to jump ahead. There were many other tasks to be performed at home and abroad for which Branch A officers had not been specifically recruited but which suited well the new entrants of Branch B. At the beginning of their careers in the Foreign Office they would typically be assigned to an administrative department or work as a filing clerk in a political department’s registry, or “division”, as the FO preferred to call them. Other common tasks included packing secret materials into diplomatic bags for handing over to the Queen’s Messengers who would deliver them to overseas posts; checking and correcting the deciphered and typed texts of incoming telegrams from posts and getting them to those who needed to see them; checking post accounts and performing various clerical duties. Ordering office supplies and the administration of office and residential accommodation was another suitable task for the new entrant. Overseas they might find themselves deciphering telegrams. One new entrant initially worked as a clerk responsible for compiling a daily file of relevant press cuttings. He later advanced to the senior and highly influential position of Post Inspector and eventually became the British High Commissioner in two Commonwealth countries. Another found himself booking travel arrangements for officers posted overseas and travel for their children when they went out to join their parents during the school holidays.

Toilet paper, strangely enough, provided the kind of administrative issue that had to be tackled. It took 17 years of debate and an inch thick file of correspondence before the tough shiny variety provided in departmental toilets finally gave way to something a little softer. The saga beganin1964withaletterfrom aChelseadoctorto theCivilServiceMedicalAdvisoryService saying that a patient blamed his piles on Government lavatory paper (stamped “Government Property”). Could it be changed to a softer type? He got short shrift. The Medical Adviser replied that anything softer was too costly. In 1967 the Foreign Office entered the debate, calling for the demise of the hard stuff. (This may possibly have had its origins in a complaint the US Secretary of State made to the Foreign Secretary during a visit to the UK. He made clear that he did not think much of the toilet paper he had had to use in the latter’s office lavatory.) The request was resisted on the grounds that a change would increase the risk of “intestinal infection”. Also HM Stationery Office claimed that “using soft tissue results in a threeorfourfoldincrease inconsumption” In1970abacteriologistfromtheSchoolofHygiene and Tropical Medicine was asked to carry out tests on both types of paper. The hard type won again. Apparently the desire for something softer had “Freudian overtones”. Complaints continued.The Central Health Laboratory did more tests and concluded that the hard paper was too slippery to use hygienically. Soft paper was finally adopted in 1981.

Toilet paper could lead to other interesting interludes too.Asked by a post account checker why theywerespending somuchontoiletpaper,thepostinSaigon replied: “Don’tyouknowthere’s a war going on here?”

This was the pre-computer era and little of the work was automated. For accounting purposes one Branch B man found himself having to convert rents paid in a variety of exotic Latin American currencies into GB Pounds. For the purpose he was expected to use the kind of mechanical calculating machine used in Thomas Cooks when selling customers foreign exchange.

Until an officer was posted overseas for a specific role, there was precious little training apart from a rudimentary “New Entrants” course and a security course. Ironically the latter left out arguably one of the more important aspects of security. MI5 and MI6 were in those days kept

so muchunderwraps thattheywerebarely mentionedespecially to newofficers,most ofwhom were under 21 and still children in the eyes of the law. This lack of training could have unintended consequences. A lightly supervised new entrant, expected to liaise with the then Ministry of Works over the layout of some new embassy offices, could all too easily overlook points of detail. After all, the officer had never set foot inside a diplomatic mission. So in one instance no order for a strongroom door was placed meaning that the staff of the mission had to mount a 24 hour guard until a door arrived. Similarly the new entrant was unlikely to have a reasonable answer to a seemingly inane query from HM Treasury when asked to approve the purchase of tumble driers so that Embassy staff could dry their washing instead of it being stained by the ash spewing out of the local volcano. “How long is it going to erupt?” “I’ll go and ask it” was the tempting response. In fact wiser counsels sought out reports from local volcanologists to satisfy the parsimonious guardians of the public purse. Office relationships could be testing too. The wet behind the ears, just out of school, officer did not always work well alongside an ex-wartime commando coming up for retirement.

Eventually the day dawned when the Branch B new entrant would be old enough to be posted overseas and perhaps freed from the daily task, as the most junior in the room, of lighting the coal fire in the morning and keeping it stoked up. This was the fate of many in the FO’s buildings in Downing Street, King Charles Street and Carlton HouseTerrace, all of which were heated by coal fires in those days. The pre-posting preparation would require attendance on a commercial, consular, administration or cypher course depending on the job to be done. It might entail a hard or medium difficulty language course which could last many months. Many were sent, along with their fast-stream colleagues, to the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies (MECAS) at Shemlan, a village south east of Beirut in Lebanon. The school closed in 1978 because of the political and security situation in that country. But graduates of the school in effect formed a service within the service: the Foreign Office’s cadre of Arabists. Studying there was not without its physical dangers. These are described elsewhere in this book.

There would be a security course where an ex-burglar demonstrated how a yale lock could be picked in a matter of seconds, and dire warnings were given not to get compromised in hostile communist countries. This point was illustrated by a teasing refusal not to show the final photograph of a series featuring a Moscow prostitute going about her business. The lecturer then stressed that, when caught in this way, the only answer was to publish and be damned. One senior officer did!

The security course was obviously vital, no more so than when the officer was posted to a communist, and therefore hostile, host country. One Branch B officer posted to the so-called German Democratic Republic, aka East Germany, has described awareness of the activities of the Stasi, the East German secret police in these terms:

“Ever wondered what your local staff really thought of you? I was in post at the Embassy in East Berlin between 1975 and 77.Anyone who has served in a communist country knows that the local staff have to write reports on foreign diplomats for the secret police. When the GDR collapsed and it became possible to see papers from the Stasi archives with your own name on them, I decided I’d like to see mine. So I applied to the felicitously named Bundesbeauftragter für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, who kindly sent me forms in gloriously official German which even German friends could

not completely make sense of. However we struggled through and in June 1999, at a very reasonable cost of DM23.50 (about £8) I received a fat envelope of 50 Stasi documents.

Aha! Having been the first member of staff at the recently opened post to have passed Higher German and having a job in the Commercial Department which allowed me to travel about the country quite a lot, I had thought I might have been of interest to the Stasi. At the very least I would find out what Frau S, the Rosa Klebb of the local staff, and my own commercial staff had said about me. What a let-down! Most of the paperwork was tediously banal - copies of notes to the MFA requesting ID cards or driving licences, reports of customs clearance of our effects, photostats of the few official and personal letters sent to our house in Karlshorst (they even copied the envelopes for their files!) The only joy lay in a couple of reports from the twice-yearly LeipzigTrade Fairs, where Commercial Department had a large stand. On my first visit a certain O. Reinholz (probably a codename) wrote an “evaluation” including this insight, “He makes relatively many notes in conversation, so must be assumed responsible for a certain level of information. So far nothing has come up to suggest he might have links with Intelligence”. (Yes, that’s Intelligence with a capital I, thank goodness).

A year later I really got it in the neck. “Uschi” reported that I could be ‘cynical and unfair’.ApparentlyIconstantlyinsistedthatthehelpersonthestand,providedofcourse by the GDR authorities, should be punctual and not leave before the Fair closed at 6. I kept asking where they were while they took their lunch breaks or went out in the car with our driver. (Totally unacceptable behaviour. I can see how it would have offended the East German work ethic.) “Uschi” also called me ‘arrogant’, citing my brusqueness with a citizen of Leipzig who had approached me to get him ‘a ticket to Australia and an Englishwomanto marry’.Funny,Idon’t rememberhim at all.Notmuchofaninsight into the Stasi’s methods, then. Nothing from the local staff, nothing from our neighbours, with whom we used to talk at the bottom of the garden so as not to be overheard.And what a colossal waste of paper. Two wholeA4 pages on why our heavy baggage was delivered an hour late. Two more on a minor incident when the officer’s car was carved up by a cement-mixer and couldn’t avoid aTrabant (“no damage ensued to the vehicle” - I should think not. Ours was of steel, theirs of pressed cardboard). A waste of eight pounds, perhaps? No. Even these few papers provide confirmation of how our unfortunate contacts had to scrabble around to find something to report so as to stay out of trouble. Anything would do. I quite like being described as a “linguistic genius”, even if they did report that I only had intermediate Arabic. (Cheek! When I think what the Higher cost us all!)And the report by “Uschi” referred to my “piercing blue eyes” - and neither adjective fits. Come to think of it, surely our Third Secretary had blue eyes? Perhaps it was him she fancied.”

It is clear from this account that the Branch B new entrant had certainly not embarked on a runof the mill career. It was so easy to make a behavioural mistake with consequences well beyond what they might have been at home in the UK. The challenges will be more fully described in the accounts of individual experiences overseas; lots of fun to be had, certainly, but also exposure to hardship and danger. One officer has never stopped talking of the pleasures of working alongside the British military in the Gulf in the early 70s. It was hard and critical work

but lightened somewhat by the occasional drinks party on the quarter deck of the Tribal Class frigate on station and by the pleasures of landing on desert airstrips courtesy of the RAF in the remoter parts of the Musandam peninsula.

Chapter 3 Flight from Khorramshahr

The best known Branch B officer was arguablyAlan Grey.Throughout his careerAlan devoted a great deal of his time, energy and considerable intellect in working to improve the terms and conditions of service of his colleagues. In retirement he worked assiduously on behalf of his retired colleagues.

Alan had many stories to tell. One of them illustrated well that just working overseas on behalf of the British Foreign Office did not make you immune from the normal dangers faced by an expatriate abroad. The risks to a diplomat, as the representative of a country with which a government or terrorist group had grievances, could actually be greater. This made them a target. There were regimes that had little respect for international conventions on the treatment of diplomats.

In 1951 the nationalisation of the Anglo Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), said to be the UK’s largest single overseas asset, led to the blockading of the port of Abadan by a Royal Navy cruiser with its guns trained on Abadan Town. At the time Alan was serving in the post at Khorramshahr which was nominally a Consulate subordinate to the Consulate General in Ahwaz, the provincial capital some 90 miles away. At this time Persian Gulf posts were still partly staffed by officers of the pre-independence Indian Civil Service. Presumably because of the relative importance of Khorramshahr due to its proximity to Abadan, the Consul General forAhwazactuallyresided at theConsulateat Khorramshahr.Atthetimeofthe nationalisation, he was on leave in the UK and his Consul (another former IndianArmy officer) also moved to Khorramshahr as Acting Consul General. The Consulate General in Ahwaz was left in the hands of one Vice-Consul.

When the Attlee Government and the AIOC decided to evacuate all the AIOC’s personnel it involved some 8000 people from two main areas: the very large refinery complex on Abadan Island and the oil field areas near Ahwaz. The Vice-Consul at Ahwaz pointed out that the evacuation plan for the oil fields staff required him to leave his post temporarily and station himself at a crucial bridge which all the field staff would have to cross. There would be no-one at his consular office to maintain communications So it was hastily decided to bring a junior officer from Baghdad to take care of the post. When that part of the evacuation was completed Khorramshahr sent its small Bedford truck on the 90 mile track across the desert to bring him to Khorramshahr The post’s small motor launch was then deployed to take him up the Shattal-Arab river there to meet the launch from the Basra Consulate General. In pre-crisis times this was a regular trip to take a confidential bag to Basra to be handed over to the King’s Messenger on his way to and from the Far East.

The trip required the launch to pass an Iranian customs post and, if it happened to be manned, a friendly wave to the usually sleepy Custom Officer on duty was normally all that was required. But on this trip the launch had to pull into their jetty to allow a couple of officers to come aboard to check passports. They also searched the temporary officer’s luggage – a zipped canvas carrier bag. Suddenly there was great animation, much shouting and pointing of weapons.The young officer and his luggage were hauled ashore.Alan, who was accompanying him, had to sit tight because he had hidden a small diplomatic bag under the cushion on his

seat As a consular rather than a diplomatic post, it had recently been ruled that there was no entitlement to diplomatic bag facilities.

The cause of the trouble soon emerged A clip of 303 rifle ammunition had been found in the young officer’s bag. He explained that he was instructed to get to Iran at short notice and that hehadnotspottedtheammunitioninthebagheusuallyusedtogohunting.Thisdidnotimpress the Iranian court and he was charged with having come to Iran “to arm the tribes”. He was found guilty and sentenced to one year and a day’s imprisonment. This apparently caused hilarity in the court since under Iranian law a sentence not exceeding 12 months’imprisonment could be paid off in a fine.

The conviction was appealed and the officer freed on bail. The procedure was not helped by the reluctance of the Foreign Office to permit the use of official funds for bail money. It was then agreed that he should be got out of the country. Khorramshahr is on the north side of the Karun River which joins the Shatt-al-Arab at Khorramshahr and has to be crossed to get on to Abadan “island”. Nowadays there is a bridge – or was until it was damaged during Sadam Hussein’s Iraq/Iran war But in 1951 a boat of some sort was essential. So at dead of nightAlan and the young officer crossed to the Abadan side where a car awaited them. This took them about half-way to Abadan Town where there was a small yacht club with an anchorage on the Shatt. There a boat awaited the pair. In pitch dark they got out of the car at the gate of the club only to get quite a fright to see an armed Iranian soldier at the entrance. They quickly realised that he was fast asleep so they tip-toed past and found their next conveyance. As quietly as possible the launch took them out of the anchorage and a few miles down-river to where the Royal Navy cruiser was lying. The pair went aboard and enjoyed a stiff drink after their hairraising adventure.

Alan was born in Liverpool in 1925. He was very proud of the city and a life-long supporter of Liverpool Football Club. He served with the RAF from 1943 to 1948. Following the ‘Eden Reforms’ of 1943 Alan was appointed a Grade 6 Officer in Branch B in May 1948 and was posted toTelAviv.Hewas promotedto GradeB5andmovedtoTabrizin 1950.Herosethrough theranks ending his careerasAmbassadorto Gabonfrom whichpost heretiredin 1985.During his diplomatic career of thirty-seven years he served in Khorramshahr, Belgrade, Dakar, Helsinki, Paris, and Lille as well as several stints in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

As well as being an effective and proud member of the Diplomatic Service, Alan was a longstanding and active member of the Diplomatic Service branch of the Society of Civil Servants (SCS), in effect the Trade Union for many of the Branch B grades. He was chairman of the branch for three years in the 1970s when the branch membership was over twelve hundred, more than 70% of those eligible. His analysis of issues, his fertile mind and his sharp wit made him a formidable opponent in debate with the management (and occasionally with his fellow union members). He contributed significantly to discussions on issues affecting the clerks, communicators and secretarial grades and defended Branch B officers’ interests whenever these were threatened. In 1973, during the national pay dispute between the government and civil service, Alan persuaded the SCS headquarters to call out on strike the 300 cryptographers who were a separate SCS branch within the FCO. This tactic shut down the telegraphic communication between the FCO and its embassies for three months. The consequent relief in paperwork was appreciated, even by senior members of the office!

On retirement Alan was made an honorary life member of the union and its successor. For several years after his obligatory retirement at age 60 Alan worked as a part-time Assessor where his task was to review the annual reports on individual staff. It was not unknown for Alan to consult other colleagues in confidence to get some background on a reporting officer when he sensed someone’s annual report may have been subject to personal bias. For many years after he retired,Alan maintained an interest in the staff associations and spent some days each week helping out in the Trade Union Side office. In 1999Alan was awarded the OBE for his contribution to post retirement FCO activities. He served on the Diplomatic ServiceAppeal Board for six years andAlan was also much involved in discussions about the formation of the wider retirement association, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Association (FCOA), founded in 1999. But his main interest lay with the Old Bs. Alan was the longest serving member of the Old Bs committee which he joined in 1985. The Old Bs provided group activities for former members of Branch B and Alan was instrumental in organising many of them. He was particularly pleased to have been the driving force behind the regular quarterly lunches in London and the annual Christmas gathering in Bournemouth. Alan Grey was seen by many as the patriarch of the Old Bs. He died in 2015 and was widely regarded as the very embodiment of Branch B officers and their contribution to the Diplomatic Service.

Chapter 4 Administrative and Consular Work; Often Humdrum, but Sometimes Challenging

Hair-raising flights from real danger as in Khorramshahr were, however, exceptional. Branch B officers were generally assigned, on their first posting overseas, either to a registry/cypher job where they would file the post’s papers and decipher incoming telegrams, or to an administrative and vice-consular role. The latter function would entail dealing with the day-today operational needs of the mission and maintaining the post account and preparing it for monthly submission to, and signing off by, the sub-accounting officer, normally the Head of Mission however exalted his status. One officer was asked by his Head of Mission to what extent he, as Head of Mission, could be held responsible for any discrepancies. He received an unambiguous reply: “Totally.”

The administrative role could be testing. Colleagues were rarely wholly satisfied with their accommodation and keeping everyone happy in this respect, with limited resources, was not something for the faint-hearted. It was particularly difficult when such a junior officer was confronted with challenging demands from the Ambassador, or “HE” – short for His Excellency – as they would then be known. It was often even more challenging when the demands came from the Ambassador’s wife. (There were no female ambassadors actually in post until 1976 when DameAnneWarburton took up the reins in Copenhagen.The first woman to be appointed Ambassador was unable to take up her post for health reasons.). An old and wise officer once put it to a raw new entrant in these perhaps slightly exaggerated terms:

“You may be under the impression thatAmbassadors spend their time writing long and learned reports on the politics of their host county. This is not so. They spend a lot of time writing long, and not particularly realistic, reports about their residence!”

Even so, occasionally a Branch B officer might be asked to undertake an especially demanding task. Eric had already been called upon to help set up the Embassy and Residence in Libreville, Gabon. Not much later he was tasked to do the same thing in Antananarivo in what is now known as the Malagasy Republic. He wrote an account of the experience. It reads as follows;

“My next mission was toAntananarivo in Madagascar where I was to open another new mini embassy in advance of the arrival of the new ambassador. A member of the Ministry of Public Building and Works had been out previously and bought a house to be used as a residence and a first floor office to be the Chancery (Embassy). I was met at the airport by a German businessman who was acting Consul for British Interests and his Mauritian pro-consul, André. André had been the Commercial Officer at the old embassy and would be taking up his post once relations were restored. We had broken off diplomatic relations with Madagascar several years previously and our political masters had decided that we should again have an ambassador there. I was put in a centrally based hotel and the next morning taken by André to be introduced to the Minister of ForeignAffairs. He was a jovial person with a massive sense of humour and very pro-British. He said he would call me Jean le Baptiste like the prophet as I had come to say that His Excellency the BritishAmbassador was coming soon. He said that if I had any problems I should immediately ‘pop in’ to see him personally. I was told that there was a large level of thieving and so, at the insistence ofAndré, I employed a

couple of local people as security guards at the new residence. These guards came from a tribe in the south of the island and were noted for their ferociousness. They were armed with a long spear on which was impaled a lump of rotting meat. It was said that just a scratch from the spear would lead to blood poisoning and eventual death.Ahedge of thorns that not even a cat could get through surrounded the house.These same thorns are grown in the UK as pot plants and are referred to by some as ‘Crown of Thorns’ (Euphorbia splendens).

My first task was to arrange clearance for a British aircraft to land at the airport at night, to be unloaded and cleared for take-off before morning. At that time British aircraft were not allowed to land because they might have been to SouthAfrica. Once clearance was obtained from the Ministry of Aviation I had to arrange for lorries, plus labour to remove the cargo to the compound of the Consul. He was in fact the agent for Land Rovers and his compound was guarded by the same type of person as I had hired for the residence. The Tradewinds aircraft arrived soon after dark and we loaded up the ‘wigwams’ (shaped containers to fit the aircraft) on to a fleet of lorries and took them back to the Land Rover compound. We finished this task about three o’clock in the morning. I took the rest of the day off to gather strength for the next phase. I had been told that my priority was to get the new residence set up and then the office. With a couple of semi-skilled labourers, who had been taken on byAndré, I spent the next five days building up the flat-pack furniture, unpacking all the plates, linen, household utensils etc and putting it all away.

At the same time Ihad to prepare an inventory and supervise the installationof an alarm system. Once this was done I could then concentrate on the more complicated task of turning a commercial office into a ‘mini embassy’ with all the items that would be required. Top of the list was to prepare a room to be used for secure communications and strong room by placing expanded metal sheets (XPM) to the walls, floor and ceilings and getting them welded up and then earthed. These were then covered with plaster and the room redecorated. A standard mahogany door was then faced on both sides with steel sheets and then I had to fit it with a combination lock, a skill I had obtained after a short course with the FCO Locksmiths. I also had to fit another metal reinforced door at the main entrance together with a couple of built in combination key boxes. The next requirement was for a telex and small eight-line telephone exchange which I had brought out from England with me to be wired, both tasks to be supervised by me at all times. I had been ‘trained’in this by experts in the UK

Once the terminals and internal wiring had been done, I discovered that there were no incoming lines available for us. The Minister of Telecommunications kept saying that none were available so it would not be possible for us to have communications.After a couple of days of metaphorically beating my head against a brick wall I decided that I should ‘pop in’and see the Minister for Foreign Affairs. I told him that it looked most unlikely that HE would arrive as, without telephone lines, an embassy could not operate. He asked who else were in the building and I told him that the Bank of France, who had plenty of telephones, occupied the ground floor offices. He picked up his telephone and told the Minister ofTelecommunications that six of the twelve lines used by the Bank should be disconnected and wired into the new embassy immediately or he would be speaking personally to the President. I thanked him and on returning to the

office I bumped into the bank manager. He told me that half his telephones had been cut off but no explanation was made to him. I commiserated with him and said that these types of occurrences were not uncommon in developing countries. He never did find out who had got his lines!

Once I had completed the work in the office I sent a telegram to London giving a situation report and received a reply that the Second Secretary, who would be the other person at post besides theAmbassador, would arrive within a couple of days. I therefore booked her into the same hotel as myself and then met her at the airport. When she had settled in I had to fly over to Port Louis in Mauritius to collect a diplomatic bag containing the communications equipment and other classified items vital to setting up an embassy. At that time female staff were not allowed to travel as couriers. All of the stationeryrequiredhadbeenpackedinoneofthewigwamsthatcameoutontheaircraft. I was met at the airport at Port Louis and taken to a hotel on the beach where I could get something to eat before collecting the bag from the Queen’s Messenger.

On the return flight to Antananarivo we ran into a tropical storm, which was a bit frightening. We were on final approach to the runway to Antananarivo and the aircraft had rotated ready to touch down when there was a terrific flash and bang outside. The centre of the plane lit up like a fluorescent tube – I think the term is that it ionised – the pilot accelerated to full power, took up the undercarriage and we climbed clear of the runway. The captain, a Frenchman came back and told me that we were repositioning to Tamatave on the coast. He hoped that the storm would pass over Antananarivo and that we would not have to overnight in Tamatave. Had we done so I could have had a problem as at no time would I be able to leave the bags to get a meal. When we landed he came down to have a chat and said that just as he was about to touch down he was told that there was about two inches of water covering the runway and, had he touched down, the plane would have aquaplaned right to the end of the runway which was covered by the flooded lake. The lightning strike was just as he had hit the throttles to get up into the air and was more picturesque than dangerous. It was the same effect that used to be seen on the masts of sailing ships duringstorms at sea and is called St Elmo’s fire.

After about two hours on the ground in Tamatave we managed to fly back to Antananarivo, much to the relief of two of the beautiful young Malagasy stewardesses who had been told by the Captain that, if we had to stay in Tamatave, they would have had to look after me and all my needs at the hotel because I was a Very Important Passenger and personally represented the Queen of England!!

I took the opportunity while I was in Madagascar to take a trip one Sunday down to Antsirabe, which had been known as ‘TheVichy of Madagascar’during the French rule but was now very run-down and neglected. André came with me and explained some of the things unique in Madagascar. When we approached a bridge he sounded the horn loudly.This was to inform the devils that hid under the bridge that we were coming and were not frightened of them. As we passed through one village we saw lots of bundles of white rags being carried into the village. These apparently were the bodies of people who had been buried during the last year. They were traditionally dug up and taken to the village to be washed and recovered in white grave clothes. They were then set

around the village square where a meal was cooked and eaten in their honour before they were taken back and reburied. It was of course the day beforeAll Saints’Day.

I tried the waters atAntsirabe but didn’t think much of them. They tasted very strongly of iron and sulphur. I also managed to purchase a very nice pair of aquamarine gemstones inAntsirabe, which I had made up for my wife, Marjorie, into drop earrings on my return home.”

Eric’s tale makes an important point about the life of a Diplomatic Service Officer: they never knew what they were going to be asked to do next or what they were expected suddenly to be capable of or expert on. Determination, resourcefulness, ingenuity and even DIY skills all played their part. Job descriptions when they existed were vague and little more than an approximate guide

Consular responsibilities were often combined with the administrative function. What this might entail varied from one day to the next and that could provide interest, horror and terror for these not so keen on daily routine. The customer was the “Distressed British Subject” (DBS), normally one who had lost, or had stolen, his or her passport and/or money. But there could be more challenging and distressing cases; for example, victims of motor accidents or people who had fallen foul of local law. Identifying bodies of deceased persons was one of the more unfortunate jobs that had to be done.

One Consul in a European post in a less serious mood summed up his work as follows:

“They come into my office hitch-hiking to the furthermost reaches of the continent suffering from sore feet and broken guitar strings. I just tell them to hitch hike on.”

This very much played down the extent of that post’s consular workload which had included dealing with a major air accident with many lost British lives, a serious coach crash killing many British students returning to the UK from a study trip to the Middle East and countless other road accidents on one of the most dangerous roads in Europe, especially at night when unlit horse drawn carts could all too easily be encountered.

Arrests for drug offences were common in some countries and a consular officer in, say, Bangkok would quickly get to know their way to the local prison. Some British subjects may have deserved to be there but there were others who deserved some compassion, perhaps because they had been duped by “boyfriends” into carrying drugs illegally. Whatever the background, they were all entitled to the attention of the consular officer who would do what they could, within the limits of the possible and local law, to ensure that the prisoner was not treated unreasonably.

Dealing with theDBS and/ortheirrelatives could beas demanding as negotiating with thelocal authorities. Expectations were often unrealistic, especially when, as was often the case, what passed as normal locally fell below the standards that would have been demanded in the UK. Sometimes too the DBS themselves could be surprisingly naïve. Ayoung Voluntary Overseas Officer arrested for drug possession in Northern Nigeria refused to seek help from her parents, or engage professional legal representation, on the grounds that in Britain she would only get a warning for a first offence. Yet in Nigeria she could expect a minimum jail sentence of 10 years. A consular officer faced with this kind of attitude needed to be creative with the rule

book if they were to save the DBS from themselves and indeed longer-term problems for the post.

Nigeria did tend to generate some tough consular conundrums. In the 1970s a German car manufacturer had marketed a vehicle powered by a Wankel rotary engine. It was revolutionary and depended on really fine tolerances for the new shape of cylinder where combustion took place. A group of four Britons set off in such a vehicle to cross the Sahara and down through the length ofAfrica to reach SouthAfrica. They broke down in Niger. Needless to say nobody there was familiar with this design but somebody suggested that the group get the vehicle to Northern Nigeria where no doubt there would be a mechanic who knew how to tackle whatever the problem was. This was totally unrealistic. But the group somehow reached Kano where they were stuck.

Then the one female member of the party fell ill and had to be taken to hospital where she was unwise enough as to make racist comments to the staff.At this point the local Deputy Chief of Police became aware of the problem. At that time there were still British colonial officers serving in Nigeria and he was one of them. He contacted the nearest British consular officer and, with imaginative foresight, pointed out that if something was not done quickly to get this group out of the country a much bigger consular problem, and possible a diplomatic one too, would be created. The consular officer (a Branch B man) could see the point. He told the group that he intended to repatriate all four of them to theUK by the first available British Caledonian flight He ought to have required them to sell their car to provide a contribution to the fares. But this was clearly unrealistic as the car was never likely to be reparable with its unique and unfamiliar type of engine. Therefore it would just have to be abandoned. This proposal was met with a refusal and some indignation. The group wanted to be flown to SouthAfrica. It was explained to them politely, but clearly, that this was impossible. So off they went to Gatwick worrying about how, by now completely devoid of funds, they were going to get out of the airport. They were advised to ring Social Services! In the 2020s this problem of what to do on reaching the UK is much more common and the FCO has contracted a private company, partly staffed with a former consular officer, to deal with it.

Tricky consular cases could crop up in any part of the world. These are some that Branch B officers in Singapore, Italy, Yugoslavia and Uganda had to deal with.

The Duty Officer in the British High Commission in Singapore was contacted at about 9pm one evening by a young Englishman speaking from the immigration control office on the Singapore side of the border with Malaysia. He explained that he was in his swimming trunks and his wife was in a similar state of undress. The couple had spent the day on a quiet beach in Malaysia. They had sought the most secluded spot they could find and after changing into their swimming gear had locked their clothes and valuables in the boot of the car, keeping with them only the car keys. When they returned to the car, they found that its boot had been broken into and all their belongings stolen. But they could at least drive back to Singapore, or so they thought.

They had not counted on the Malaysian police whose Islamic sensibilities were offended at the sight of two scantily glad foreigners. It did not help that they had a Singapore registered car and no identity papers. So the police arrested them for offending public decency and not having papers. Things looked extremely serious and appeared to get worse when it was proposed to send them to Kuala Lumpur.Asenior officer then had second thoughts and decided it might be

better, and would certainly save a lot of hassle, to leave it to the authorities on the Singapore side of the causeway to sort things out So the couple were allowed to drive on. Unfortunately the Singaporeans chose to stick to the rules: no papers, no entry and no option but to return to Malaysia

The young man at this point asked to call the British High Commission and that is when the duty officer became involved. He did not know the distressed couple personally and it took an appeal to theofficerin chargeto findasolution:thecouplewould beallowedto proceed against a written undertaking from the High Commission certifying that they would be given new passports and their affairs regularised. To this end the duty officer drove up to the border at about 10 pm and gave a hand-written official statement that he knew the couple concerned and that the High Commission would comply with the undertaking. The next day the couple visited the Consul to have their passport problem resolved and, no doubt highly relieved, had their life returned to normal.

The precise statutory obligations of a consular officer are not well defined and anyway rarely relate well to the situation with which the officer is confronted. In the end it often comes down to the exercise of generous helpings of common sense and compassion for fellow citizens frequently in trouble through no fault of their own. Going the extra mile can be difficult when, as is usually the case, there are no official funds available to smooth the path.As a member of theFCO’s ConsularDepartment disarmingly put itto anofficerabout to bepostedto theUnited States: “If you are faced with a British Citizen in hospital without medical insurance to cover the inevitably hefty bills, don’t pay for them but, whatever you do, don’t let the patient die!”

Take this unusual case. In the 1970s the Vice-Consul in Genoa was one morning told that a young British man was being brought to his office by two policemen. He had been intercepted at the border with a little boy. The police clearly thought that the boy had been kidnapped. The young man said that in fact he had been asked to escort the boy to Rome by a couple who had approached him while he had been buying a rail ticket in Nice. Rather rashly he had agreed, understanding that the boy would be met in Rome by his uncle. The couple explained that they were unable to travel with him as they had insufficient funds and would have to hitch hike. Stupidly the young man had not asked the couple for any of the obvious details; names, contact numbers and so on.

The policemen released the escorting young man with a caution and were happy to leave the little boy in the care of the Vice-Consul as a responsible authority. The little boy was unable to provide his surname or age. He could only say that he had a grandmother who worked as a cleaner in Crawley. The Vice-Consul’s wife gamely took over the role of foster mother for the next few days while Interpol set about identifying the grandmother.The uncle who was to meet the boy in Rome was never traced and probably never existed. The boy’s mother and her boyfriend in Nice had also unsurprisingly disappeared. The little boy actually proved an entertaining young guest during his stay with the diplomatic couple, including making it clear that he expected the Vice-Consul to return from a diplomatic party in a state of inebriation as his mother always did when she went to a party.

Eventually the grandmother was traced and the Vice-Consul was instructed to put the little boy on a flight to Gatwick. He was last seen skipping towards a Caledonian Airways aircraft without so much as a backward glance and a thank you. His “escort” too was never heard of again; no thanks from that quarter either. There was no statutory obligation for the boy to be

looked after in this way.He could have just been left in the care of the Italians and receive visits from the Consulate. Kindness and a feeling that it was the right thing to do in the circumstances were what mattered.

Itis not an exaggerationto saythatsomeBranchB officershadexperiences duringtheircareers that changed their attitude to their fellow human beings. This was not of course unique to them but the kind of work they were required to do, particularly as Vice-Consuls, made them especially prone to taking a more sceptical view of the stories they were told. For example, Peter was a young Vice-Consul in Belgrade, then in Yugoslavia, in the mid-sixties. (He ended his career as BritishAmbassador in Honduras). In Belgrade he had particular responsibility for attending to the needs of Distressed British Subjects.

The Yugoslav Government were required under the Consular Convention to inform the Embassy whenever a UK Citizen was arrested. This happened infrequently, but on one particular morning the Foreign Ministry telephoned with the news that such a person was in prison in a small town in Macedonia, close to the Greek border. He had been sentenced to one month’s jail for “immigration offences”. Enquiries failed to elicit much more than this from the various authorities, so Peter set out for the town in question accompanied by his interpreter and consular adviser, Vuki Popovic. The DBS, Sean Maguire (not his real name) was an appealing young man in his mid-twenties from Londonderry in Northern Ireland. He had been working for some six years as a merchant seaman. He explained that he had been serving on a British registered vessel which had stopped in Trieste in Northern Italy to discharge cargo. Not unnaturally, given his age and profession, he had gone out on the razzle, only to wake up late the following morning to find the ship had sailed without him.

Seamen in those days were not issued with passports. Instead they simply showed their seaman’s paybook when required to prove their identity. This contained a photograph and record of the ships on which they had been employed. Unfortunately, Sean had left his current paybook on his ship and was only carrying a previous one, which had expired in 1964.Armed only with this, and as a conscientious crewman who had never been in trouble before, he decided that rather than seeking help in Trieste he would try to rejoin his ship at its next port of call, Salonika in Greece. Somehow, he had managed to slip through the Italian/Yugoslav border (well-guarded in those days) and hitchhike the length of the country. It was only on the last stage of his journey, trying to get into Greece, that the Yugoslav frontier police had caught up with him.

He was actually treated relatively well for those times. He was not shot! And a month as a privileged prisoner in a Macedonian jail was no real hardship for a tough young seaman. Peter took the paybook back to Belgrade, having arranged for the prison authorities to put Sean on a train as soon as his sentence had been served. He then followed standing orders in respect of seamen by sending a telegram to the Board of Trade, then responsible for the Merchant Navy, giving all the details of his situation, and seeking authority to return him to the UK on a temporary passport, charging all the expenses to them.

Some two weeks later Sean turned up in Belgrade, bright and breezy and as charming a young man as you could wish to meet. He immediately posed a problem, since he arrived on a Friday evening. Hotels in Yugoslavia at this time had a standing instruction from the Government not to accept as a guest any foreigner who did not have a national passport containing a valid Yugoslav visa.Although Peter could issue him with a passport at any time, it was not possible

to obtain a visa until the office re-opened the following Monday. This was not the first time this had happened, and several DBSs had spent nights on Peter’s sitting-room couch! On this occasion however it was Vuki who came to the rescue. He was bilingual because his mother, Betty, was Irish. She had been left stranded in Yugoslavia during and after the war when her Yugoslav husband had been killed, was now disabled and had never been able to return to Ireland. Both she and Vuki were enchanted by the idea of having a fellow Irishman, albeit from the wrong side of the border, for the weekend. So he stayed with them, in their extremely pokey apartment.Theygoton well SeanevenwenttotheEmbassyClubfordrinksonSaturdaywhere everyone liked him. Others took him out on Sunday. He had a ball. However, he continued to pose a dilemma. The Board of Trade had never replied to Peter’s telegram, nor to a reminder sent a week later. Sean had no money at all, and public funds has already been used for his rail journey. Vuki and his mother could not be expected to sustain him indefinitely.

So the decision was taken not to treat him under the special arrangements for sailors but as a regular DBS. He was given a temporary passport valid only for return to the UK, provided with the necessary Yugoslav exit visa, given a rail ticket and some money for incidental expenses. He was asked to sign the usual undertaking to repay and arrangements were made for him to leave the next morning. The ticket would only take him as far as London, not to Northern Ireland, but he said that would not be a problem as he knew people in London. A whole gang of the small British community descended on the railway station to see Sean on his way, with fruit and other supplies for his long journey. After he had gone, everyone reflected on what a pleasant young man he was. He had promised to keep in touch and Peter in particular had a really good feeling about having helped someone like this out of his trouble. Subsequently Peter received a postcard from Ostend, reporting that the journey had gone well, and thanking everyone for their friendship and support.

The postcard arrived several days after the reply from the Board ofTrade!This declined to take any responsibilityforSeanwhohadnocurrent paybook andhadnot beenaregisteredmerchant seaman since his discharge on the expiry of his previous paybook. The ship to which he had referred did indeed exist but had for some time been plying Far Eastern routes! Subsequent attempts to contact Sean proved abortive. Letters to his Londonderry address were returned endorsed “not known”. The Foreign Office never received any re-payment so far as the Embassy in Belgrade knew. Was he even Sean Maguire at all? The photo on his ID was certainly not a close likeness, although nothing was made of this at the time. But for many years Peter continued to look at Provisional Sinn Fein leaders and ex-detainees and wonder!

With the exuberant confidence of youth Peter had always felt fully confident of his capacity to judge his fellow human beings.After this experience, he was never so sure again!

The behaviour of DBSs when consular officers were called upon to help them could certainly be disappointing. The Duty Officer in the British High Commission in Kampala did not expect to have to deal with any significant problems on Boxing Day. It was IdiAmin’s Uganda. Most British expatriates had left and there were no tourists or business visitors. Then he received a telephone call from the port of Entebbe. It was a young man who explained that he was a VSO student in Tanzania and was on a Lake Victoria cruise during the Christmas holiday. He was with his youngwife and baby.Theyhadgone ashoreat Entebbeto have a look around but when they returned to board the ship, it had left. All their possessions including the needs for the baby were on the ship.

The Duty Officer, a Branch B Second Secretary, quickly established to his relief that the wife was still feeding the baby herself because there was no baby food available in the shops. He drove the 20 miles to Entebbe and brought them back to his house. He and his wife made them comfortable. It turned out that both the young lady and the Duty Officer’s wife came from Northern Ireland, which no doubt added to the warmth of the welcome for the unexpected guests, even though were of different persuasions. Getting them back to Tanzania proved problematical so they were accommodated in the unused guest suite (visitors to Uganda were almost non-existent) for a couple of days and then put up for a few more nights by the post Vice-Consul. Eventually they were able to leave on a bus using a designated border crossing for foreigners. They were never heard from again in spite of enjoying generous hospitality which went well beyond the call of duty; not a word of thanks. Presumably they assumed this was all part of the Government’s service to its citizens to which they were entitled. In fact there are not too many rules; just solutions which vary in their degree of comfort and are really dependent on the consular officer’s discretion.

Chapter 5 Flying to Iraq 1950s Style

Not least of the hardships in the 1950s, and even the 1960s, were the problems officers could encounter in getting themselves, their families and their possessions to their new post. For many years rail and sea travel was the option preferred by the FO.The idea was that the greater free baggage allowances offered by shipping lines avoided some of the heavy costs of moving an officer’s heavy effects. In fact they were not as heavy as they might have been because the assumption was always that the officer would be provided with furnished accommodation during their posting. Also this was not the era of cheap air fares. Air travel was then regarded as unreasonably expensive and its use required special authorisation, for example if an officer’s early arrival was deemed essential. Air travel in the early days was not a particularly comfortable option either.

Jim is no longer alive but he would certainly have vouched for the discomforts of air travel and of the physical environment of the post itself; and for that matter the dangers an officer could face. Jim was a Yorkshireman whose father worked as a warehouseman. He was educated at Batley Grammar School where he was supported by a grant from the County Council. He left school at 16 years and moved to London in 1949, just before his 17th birthday, where he was to work as a clerk in the FO. He was pleased to note that his statement of service was published in the FO Year Book alongside that of Ernest Bevin and other luminaries, though he acknowledged that Branch B officers only got a few lines each. Their entries were most useful for giving away their colleagues’ages.

Jim continued with part-time education at the Kingsway Institute where his studies included Latin and German. (Part-time day release classes were readily available to young civil servants at that time and Jim may well have benefited from this facility.) He took the exams for the Civil Service executive grades but did not get high enough for entry into the FO. He commented in a letter to his parents, “I have thought about this and I realise that if I take this interview [for an Executive Officer position] and qualify . . . I shall be in the Home Civil Service for the rest of my life and frankly my heart won’t be in it . . . I shall turn it down and stay in the Foreign Service as a Clerical Officer and try to get promotion by purely Foreign Office exams.” It was a good decision. He ended his career as the FCO’s well respected Chief Welfare Officer. There wereseveral newsworthyadventures ontheway.Jim was always amost conscientious consular officer ready to go the extra mile.

After National Service with the RAF Jim was posted in 1956 to Baghdad with his 20 year old wifeAnne and their 5 month old baby daughter. Their journey began at Heathrow, which then boasted no more than a metal Nissan hut as a terminal. The aircraft that was to carry them to their destination was a petrol engined Argonaut. The flight began at 10.00pm with their baby swinging gently in a sky cot suspended from the luggage rack. By 7.00am they had got no furtherthanNicefollowingarefuelling stop in Frankfurt.Poorweatherhad preventedtheflight reaching Rome as planned. Rome was reached on the second attempt and the next stop was Damascus. This was spent in a fly infested transit room before moving on to Baghdad, reached just before midnight. The whole journey had taken more than 24 hours.

The family’s first night was spent in a colleague’s spare bedroom, notable for its temperature in excess of 100 degrees Fahrenheit and the abundance of cockroaches, some scuttling over

their daughter’s mosquito net. Accommodation remained a problem over the ensuing months, both finding somewheretoliveandacquiring furnitureto put in it.Theposting cameto amessy end with a coup d’etat and the murder of the Iraqi royal family.Anne and the baby, along with other Embassy wives and children were evacuated to Cyprus. Jim was left to suffer a miserable bachelor existence enlivened only by being fired upon while driving home at speed after breeching the nightly curfew. The posting came to an end in 1958, 5 months after the change of regime.

After further postings, including one in LosAngeles which Jim particularly enjoyed, he found himself in Idi Amin’s Uganda as HM Consul. He was ideal for the job, relating well to the problems of a harassed British Community. He shared some adventures with Michael whose experiences in this now chaotic former British protectorate are described in a later chapter. Jim stayed on in Uganda for a year or two after the evacuation in 1974 of the staff from Kampala as part of the residual British mission there. It was not without its excitement for this was the time when the Israelis made their dangerous but successful raid on Entebbe airport to rescue a plane full of hostages. One of those hostages was Dora Bloch who was taken ill and transferred to Mulago Hospital where she died, believed murdered. She had claims to British citizenship and, ever conscious of his consular responsibilities, Jim had set out to investigate. He didn’t get very far for the Ugandan military arrested and detained him until the raid was over.

Jim’sresourcefulnesswasclearwhenhehadtodealwiththebodyofadeceasedBritishsubject, believed murdered, in Uganda. The man’s mother insisted that he be cremated. But there were no facilities for this in Kampala. So Jim sought the help of what was left of the Hindu community and borrowed their cremation site. After completing all the local formalities for a burial, Jim ordered a ton of wood and some ghee and, with the help of a colleague in the High Commission, humped the coffin up on to the pile of wood. That should have been the end of it. Unfortunately, because the wood was freshly cut and not dried out, it proved difficult to get the pyre to light. Throwing a can of petrol on to the heap would have been offensive to the Hindus and, as Jim said, “We might need these facilities again”. More ghee was obtained and eventually the fire was persuaded to do its job. The next morning Jim returned to the site and collected some ashes which he posted off to the deceased’s mother. The FO’s recruitment literature certainly made no mention of having to tackle this kind of task.

Jim ended his career as the FCO’s Chief Welfare Officer. Sadly by this time he was suffering from a majordeteriorationto his eyesight.Ithadbeengetting worse since his timein theCongo though the condition was not attributable to his time there. Now he could barely read files and decided to call it a day, probably after an incident when he fell trying to board a train. He was made an OBE in recognition of his efforts in Uganda but his contribution was really more than that.This was aman whofoundrealisticsolutions to themost challenging problems, undaunted by the dangers he sometimes had to face.

Chapter 6 Making the Best of what you have

A fine example of the Branch B officer as regards background and achievement was John. He was born and brought up in the East of Scotland, His father, a REME Sergeant and skilled tradesman,worked at the RNdockyard in Rosyth Forthefirst 10years of John’s lifethefamily lived in a rented tenement flat which, like many in Scotland, had long been earmarked for demolition. Following the mass house-building programme, they were re-located in 1956 to a new housing estate in the town and enjoyed the luxury of a two-bedroom terraced house with an indoor toilet, bathroom, and a small garden.

After Primary School where John passed the 11 plus examination, he went to Dunfermline High School, similar in those days to an English grammar school. O-level and Higher exams followed. He pursued various job options and in 1963 took the Open Civil Service exam for Clerical Officers. Later he attended an interview in Edinburgh and was offered a position as a B6 officer in the FO. His childhood was a happy one but he felt ready for a new challenge. His parents were supportive though his mother was disappointed that he had chosen not to go to university. His father was from London. The family had made summer visits to his relatives there so John was familiar with the capital. At first a hostel in Bloomsbury provided his accommodation. Thereafter he shared rented accommodation in houses in North London with people he had met in the hostel. In 1966 he moved with a friend to a studio flat in West Hampstead. This was a fairly typical progression for teenagers recruited by the Civil Service to work in London. Departmental Welfare Officers relied heavily on the London Hostels Association to provide somewhere for young new recruits to live.

John joined the Foreign Office in July 1964 two months short of his 18th birthday. He worked in registries for the first two years, initially in Personnel Department in No 8 Carlton House Terrace, then to the Main Building for a few months covering a staff absence in UN Department.Ayear in Protocol Department in Lower Regent Street followed. The work was a mix of the interesting and the occasionally dull, but he had good colleagues, some of whom became close friends. He was then asked by the official who had conducted his original interview for entry to the FO to consider a spell in Communications Department.This involved shift and weekend work, so more money in the monthly pay packet. He worked in the Telegrams Unit for three years before being posted overseas.

John enjoyed the work in Communications Department. He had a good circle of friends and enjoyed an active social life. Shift and overtime allowances meant that he was better off financially. He came to know London well. He played football regularly, initially with a couple of sides in North London and later for the FCO football team for three seasons. The nearby Swiss Cottage library, leisure centre, swimming pool all provided good amenities.

John still has the letter of appointment from Personnel Department reminding him that “this appointment involves the obligation [after the age of 21] to serve as the Department may require, either in the UK or anywhere abroad.’’ It meant that he should have been posted overseas towards the end of 1967. If only it could have worked out like that. The various mergers between the FO, Commonwealth Relations Office and the Colonial Office threw a spanner in the works creating a bottleneck for overseas postings, particularly at DS10 level as

the old B6 grade was now called. Many of John’s contemporaries were affected by this and he was on the way to his 23rd birthday by the time he was posted to Budapest in July 1969.

Until age 21, John received concessionary rail tickets to travel home three times a year which allowed him to stay in touch with family and friends in Scotland. By that age, however, he was well established in London. A friend introduced him to Gillian who was working in the FCO. They married in 1969 and soon after left NW6 for Budapest.

As for all junior new entrants, as noted elsewhere in this book, John received little formal training Hewas taught thebasics of registry work at thedesk by amoreexperiencedcolleague. There was also a registry training course. John then went on to United Nations Department for several weeks to help sort out a paperwork backlog, and finally to Protocol Registry where he worked for a year.

Itwas all abit random andlacking anysortofstructure. His elderly B5linemanagerin Protocol lackedimaginationandwasastonishedthatheshouldwishtodo anysortoftrainingorpersonal development. Fortunately, a more experienced colleague suggested a night class and pointed John in the right direction. He went to night classes for the next three years, initially at a school in Westminster and later at the City Literary Institute in Holborn. He had always been a keen reader and made good use of the Westminster and Hampstead library services. The registry course was John’s sole training event until he was sent on cypher training courses in advance of his first posting.Afair number of new entrants left the FCO at this time. Poor pay, delays in overseas postings and the lack of serious career development must all have played a part in this.

John’s first two overseas postings, to Budapest and Luxembourg, were mainly registry and communications work but he was also the post accountant in Luxembourg, a new experience. He and his wife enjoyed their time in both. Gill encouraged him to sit the DS9 examination. He managed the exams reasonably well and was successful at the second interview. But he had to complete his full tour in Luxembourg as a DS10 before he could be considered for a DS9 job. Fortunately, he was chosen for the CommercialAttaché post in Tunis. It helped that he had made the effort to improve his French in Luxembourg. The job was mainly export promotion but he also did some information work and looked after a small aid programme. The Head of Chancery gave him a lot of autonomy and support.

He and Gill were posted back to London in 1976. By then, they were a family of four living close to Gill’s family. It was not an easy time to be back in the UK. Money was tight but the family (just about) coped. From a career point of view, however, it was an interesting and productive period. John spent a year in Southern European Department on the Cyprus desk. Then came a longer stint in Personnel Operations Department (POD) where he did two jobs as a postings officer, the second on promotion to DS7.

John began learning Spanish at lunch time classes at the Diplomatic Service Language Centre This paid dividends as in 1980 he was posted to Santiago as the 2nd Secretary Consul/ Administration Officer. It was probably his and Gill’s favourite overseas posting. They were there for four years. Chile was a fascinating country, the work was interesting, and for a couple of years Gill worked for a local company. The couple also managed to travel to other parts of Latin America. In 1982, the Santiago Embassy found itself playing an unexpected role during

and after the Falklands conflict. The posting came to an end in late 1984 with regrets and a mixture of good and not so good news.

The next posting was as Deputy Head of Mission in Libreville, Gabon on promotion to DS6. He had been in POD in the late 1970s when mini missions such as Libreville were being established. He knew these were staffed by two UK based officers plus some local staff. He was also aware that an unjustifiable amount of the Deputy’s time was taken up with low level work. It hardly required a DS6 middle manager to issue visas, carry out routine administrative/consular tasks or encipher/decipher telegrams. He made his views clear. But his arguments cut no ice and, after brushing up his French, he with his wife set off for Libreville in early 1985.

He learned that theAmbassador wasAlan Grey whom he knew well and whose adventures are described elsewhere in this book. This bode well. Unfortunately, Alan’s posting was curtailed before John and Gill’s arrival because of his wife’s ill-health. John’s predecessor had also left some time earlier. But the DS7 and DS9 temporary duty officers left in charge seemed to be making a good fist of things, which rather confirmed the reservations John had expressed to POD. The new Ambassador was a likeable man whom John knew slightly from the FCO Inspectorate. Unfortunately, he had health problems and left post after 6 months. So John became Chargé d’Affaires while the FCO tried to find a replacement. He enjoyed his spell as HeadofMission particularly whentheFCOsent atemporaryassistant to help.Theinterregnum included a successful visit by the then Minister of State for Transport, Linda Chalker. UK Ministerial visits to Gabon were a rare event.

It took about 8 months to appoint a new Head of Mission but eventually the new man (previously a not entirely successful Commercial Counsellor in Lagos) turned up. They did not get on. John did the trade promotion, some political reporting, and the routine duties. What the Head of Mission did was unclear. Then came a post inspection. The Inspector needed little convincing that John’s post should be downgraded to DS7 (DS9 might have been more appropriate). John and his wife left with few regrets in the summer of 1988 and returned to London for a home posting.

John was offered a job as a Section Head in WestAfrican Department. The only drawback was that he could not take much end of tour leave. His predecessor had already left the department and the Ghanaian Prime Minister was making a visit to the UK for which the preparatory work would fall on John’s section. So back on the roundabout he spent the next 3 years working on WestAfrican affairs. It was a good department with good colleagues, though the Head left after a year and sadly her successor died in a car accident after less than a year in the job. Thereafter the African departments were reduced from 4 to 3. This was at a time when the FCO had to find resources to open new missions in the former Soviet republics and the Baltic states following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Several small African missions, including Libreville, were also shut down at this time.

John spent more than three years in WAD and eventually left in autumn 1991. During that time, he and Gill sold their house in Carshalton and bought a new one in the same area where they lived until retirement. Gill found work locally in a GP surgery. John had been promoted sur place to DS5 and was in discussion with his postings officer about the next move. He was keen to return to Latin America where there were jobs with commercial content. At this time the Office had introduced new arrangements whereby officers could bid for postings. John made

known his choices. In fact, he was being considered for the Head of Commercial Section post in Prague. This was a surprise; so much for Latin America. Still, Czechoslovakia seemed a good option and that’s where John found himself in May 1992. It turned out to be one of the most satisfying jobs in his career. There were two good and supportive Ambassadors and lots of activity including the peaceful split of the country into the Czech Republic and Slovakia The commercial section was a busy one and included frequent official and business visitors including one by the Minister of Trade.

John and Gill returned to the UK in late 1995. Personnel thought he should do a DS5(S) Assistant job with the carrotof eventual promotionto DS4. (Deputy Heads ofDepartment were known asAssistants.) Initially there was noAssistant post available but after a discussion with Michael, another Branch B officer who appears elsewhere in this book, he took on a Training and Education role for the Resources Command in support of the new Financial and ManagementAccounting Services ITsystem whichwas about to beintroduced Hehadasmall, motivated team of FCO staff and Price Waterhouse consultants who had put together the training strategy.This lastedforabout 18months bywhichtimethesystemwas upandrunning. John then persuaded Resources Command to take over responsibility for ongoing training. It had proved a very different but worthwhile assignment.

In 1997, he took over asAssistant in Personnel Services. He had several areas of responsibility, all worthy but generally unexciting in a sizeable department which offered various challenges, not least relating to staff terms of service. But he also managed to insert himself into some of the wider and more interesting HR issues. John hoped it would be a stay of no than two years, but personnel changes and the timing of annual negotiations with the unions on pay meant that two became three.

John handed over the reins in mid-2000 with no obvious sign of the next and probably last overseas job. He had bid, unsuccessfully, for a few overseas jobs. He was doing some ad hoc project work for the Personnel Command and had visions of that extending up to his eventual retirement. But he was then asked if he would be interested in bidding for the Counsellor (Management)/Consul General post in Moscow. The recently appointedAmbassador wanted a new face for this job and asked to meet the possible candidates. This duly happened and the appointment was confirmed. John started doing some Russian language training and various bits of briefing as well as completing the HR project work. After some delays he finally got to Moscow at the beginning of September 2001. He spent over three eventful and fascinating years in Moscow not least because British relations with the Russians were really positive in the period 2000-2003.

John eventually left in December 2004 having decided to take early retirement from the Service. But events conspired to keep him going until well into 2005. On his arrival back in theUKfromMoscowhespenttimewiththeConsularDirectorateintheEmergency Unitwhich was handling the consequences of the Indian Ocean Earthquake and Tsunami, which particularly affected British nationals in Thailand and Sri Lanka. This involved coordination with the overseas posts, other government departments, the British Red Cross and the Metropolitan Police which provided the main call centre facility. Then John liaised with the police team at the Hendon Police College where the call centre was based, an unexpected location for the end of his career. John finally retired with some 41 years’service to his credit.

John’s story encapsulates the typical career progression of a successful Branch B officer. Of modest background, he did not go to university, started at the bottom and worked his way right up to the senior management grades. He did it first and foremost by working hard and being good at the jobs he was asked to undertake including the political work in West African Department. Branch B officers had to show that they were “policy capable” if they were going to break through to the top. He also took advantage of career development opportunities as they were offered him on his way up. He greatly valued the course he attended at the Manchester Business School. This course was identified by another Branch B officer working in the FCO’s Training Department who saw it as a good way of improving the career prospects, and value to the Office, of those who had not benefited from a university education but had the innate ability to shine and eventually become Commercial Counsellors or even Heads of Mission

Chapter 7 Start by Selling Bottles in Blackpool

Few members of the Diplomatic Service had humbler origins than Peter. His early days were in Blackpool, where he lived in a boarding house until he was 13 years old. It was near the sea and where he had his first three ‘jobs’. One was collecting bottles and taking them back to a stall and getting a penny for each one. In those days they were glass bottles and, if you bought a drink with the bottle, you paid a deposit. Peter got this back with each bottle returned. It was really quite lucrative for a seven year old boy. Then, after his father had built a trolley for him, he took himself off to the station to carry the bags of visitors to their hotels. Next he was a butcher’s boy delivering to all the hotels and houses in the area of North Shore. He was about 14 by this time.

Peter’s mother and father were born and bred in Oldham. His mother had a decent upbringing but his father, his sister and his aunt were orphaned when they were children. His paternal grandfather was killed in the 1914-18 war and his grandmother died in late 1918. His father and his aunt were brought up by some kind neighbours who took them in. They came to Blackpool in 1939 where his mother ran a boarding house until 1953. His father was a fireman. It was very much a working class family.

In 1957 Peter managed to pass 3 O levels, one of which was Religious Knowledge. The others were Mathematics and English. He would be the first to admit that his academic talents were sadly lacking. He left school at 16. Peter’s aunt advised him to join the Civil Service. He took the exam in autumn 1957. In completing the application form, by mistake he put ‘F’ (Foreign) instead of ‘H’ (Home) in the box at the top of the page. He thought that Customs and Excise was part of the FO because they dealt with foreigners. He did well in the exam and, as the FO were taking only the top ones, his application was sent to them. He was next invited to an interview in Leeds where he was accepted into the department after a medical. He reported to the FO’s Personnel Department at 8 Carlton House Terrace (once the German Embassy) in January 1958. Peter’s father accompanied him to London and took him to the hostel in South Kensington where the FO had arranged a place for him. Within a day or two he was at work in the FO’s Monthly Salaries Section. He was not yet 17.

In time Peter was posted to Rome to work as a filing and cypher clerk. It proved an excellent training place for a young lad who needed to learn what it was to be a member of a British diplomatic mission. The Ambassador in Rome was of the ''old school''. He held a cocktail party every three months or so to welcome the new arrivals at the Embassy, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, British Council and others and to say farewell to those leaving. Not long after Peter’s arrival, he was invited to such a gathering, so dressed in his ''Sunday best'' and well scrubbed up, he presented himself, along with his invitation, at the door of the Residence. The butler took his card and, when Peter came to the head of the line, he read his name out in a deep sonorous voice and ushered him forward to shake hands with His Excellency and his wife who were standing about ten yards away. “Blimey”, Peter thought. Having his name announced was really something for a lad from Blackpool who, only a few months earlier, had been in a hostel in South Kensington

After two and a half years Peter learnt that his next post was to be Khartoum. The work was similar to that in Rome. He and his family were to spend four years there, although during the

six-day war between Israel and Egypt, his wife and children had to go back to the UK. Postings to Lima, London, Managua, San Salvador, Doha, London, and Chicago followed.

Peter finished his career as HM Consul in Mallorca where he spent four years. He found it a remarkable ending. This was the man who had once earned pennies claiming the deposits on empty glass bottles in Blackpool. Now he found himself shaking hands with members of the British Royal Family and other VIPs including George Bush senior. When Prince (now King) Charles and Princess Diana came out to Mallorca for their private holidays as a guest of King Juan Carlos, Princess Diana insisted that Princes William and Harry shake hands with the Consul. This touched Peter greatly. He also recalls meeting the Spanish King at a buffet supper party when they found themselves in the same queue.

Diplomats routinely find themselves in contact with royalty, politicians, high level businessmen and women and famous musicians and actors whom they would only rarely, if ever, meet in most walks of life in the UK. For those officers brought up on council estates and educated in state schools, this can generate a great feeling of achievement and pride, and provides exactly the kind of contact for which the Eden reforms were designed.

Chapter 8 Supporting British Exporters

Many Branch B officers made their mark as Commercial Officers helping British exporters to sell their goods in countries throughout the world. The work took many forms. It was deemed to be a priority for the FO and, from the late 1960s onwards, became a standardised service for exporting companies.

At the heart of the system, from about 1968 onwards, the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI),thegovernmentdepartmentthatthenledonsuchmatters,hadintroducedacomputerised system designed to match British exporters with foreign importers seeking whatever the exporter produced. The system used the Brussels customs nomenclature to achieve the match. In theory it was a sensible idea. To an extent it also seemed to achieve good results. An evaluation of the system carried out a few years after the system’s introduction, suggested that it had generated many millions of pounds worth of income, adding significantly to the nation’s wealth. But many Commercial Officers were reluctant to use it. The placing of an export opportunity in the system could all too easily generate a large number of replies, often in the wrong language and, in the early days, using imperial measurements in a metric country. This hardlyplacedBritishindustryinthebestoflights.ButtheservicewassoldtoBritishcompanies as something British Embassies could offer so Commercial Officers were obliged to seek out suitable opportunities.

They were also expected to provide status reports on foreign companies. Sometimes the exporterwould specifythat theirnameshouldbewithheld from thetarget company.This meant that the Commercial Officer would have to find a way of gaining access to the importer without giving away why they wanted to talk to them. It was actually much more sensible in most cases to inspire a discussion based on the true motive for the enquiry. Commercial Officers were left with the impression that this particular service was one that had been dreamt up in London by officials who had little feel for the practicalities. For this reason it was good that the DTI ran a programme of attachments for their staff to Commercial Departments in selected countries to gain some experience of the realities of export promotion.

Help with finding an agent was another service that the Commercial Officer was expected to provide. Twelve sets of a company’s literature would land on the officer’s desk to underpin the search for a suitable importing company.The literature was almost invariably in English which was obviously of little use in a country such as France where the people were so proud of their language. Even so, agents were sometimes successfully identified, but not always with the desired result. Michael, working in Paris, managed to find a French importer keen to act as agent for a British manufacturer of laboratory equipment, located in the North East of England. He triumphantly telephoned the company urging the manager to make an early trip to France to seal a deal. The suggestion was met with little enthusiasm based largely on the cost of the trip. “Are you sure you are really ready for exporting?” was Michael’s response.

There was a time when British Weeks were deemed to be a productive way of generating new British exports. The idea was to bring to a selected city symbols of British culture, for example red London buses or the British “Bobby” and to fill the shops with suitably promoted British goods. The event would be opened with some fanfare by a prominent British personality. The problem for the Commercial Officer was to persuade the local stores to stock new lines. One

unfortunate officer found himself tramping around the backstreets of Lille talking to owners of really small shops asking them to consider buying British products. He generally did not get an enthusiastic reception and found himself at one point so defeated by the whole experience that he simply took the opportunity to buy from the proprietor a rather pretty little dress for his baby daughter. British promotions of this kind were discontinued after some years as entailing more effort than they were worth.

Avariation on this kind of publicity-based effort was the store promotion. The idea was to get a major store in a big city to bring in a number of new British lines. For the Commercial Officer this was much more targeted approach and involved establishing a close relationship with whoever was responsible for purchasing policy in the store. A top-level personality from the UK, perhaps even a member of the royal family, would then be invited to open the promotion with maximum press coverage. The benefit to the store could be substantial and to British exports too, especially if new products were found to be popular with local consumers and regular orders established. This was an area where more than one level at the Embassy or High Commission would be involved; the Commercial Officer would set it all up and the Head of Mission would then visit the shop when the promotion was in full swing attracting yet more publicity. SomeAmbassadors were better at it than others.

Major trade fairs in countries which imported big quantities of British goods invariably had a British stand. This provided a subsidised presence for British companies not wishing to go to the expense of exhibiting at the fair under their own steam. It was the job of the Commercial Officer to visit the companies and to deal as far as practicable with any problems they had. By and large the system worked well. But there were inevitably the occasional complaints, often relating to the position ofa company’s stand. Usually it was too late to domuch about it beyond sympathising with the company and, where possible, suggesting ways to make the best of it.

There was the occasional total disaster. The Salon de la Chimie (chemical industry trade fair) held in Paris in 1968 fell foul of the infamous “Events of ‘68” when some observers believed France came close to another revolution. Virtually no potential customers were able to get to theexhibition. Someexhibitorswerethere.Theyhadusedtheirchemical know-howto get over the problem of empty fuel stations, but for the most part they were reduced to playing “Pétanque” in the corridors between the stands.There were other potential pitfalls as well. One ofthesewasprovidedbytheSalondelaLingeriein Paris.ItwasthecustomfortheAmbassador to visit major British stands. But the underwear show was known for its skimpily clad models. It was all too easy for an enterprising photographer to snap a visitor at the wrong moment and produce a shot which the press could have fun with. One BritishAmbassador always declined to visit that particular show!

Occasionally the Commercial Officer might be called upon to assist the Export Credits Guarantee Department (ECGD). This could sometimes produce bizarre results. ECGD, now known as UK Export Finance, covered a variety of risks for British exporters financing their exportsand investments overseas. Onesuch was theconstruction of acement factoryinTororo, Uganda. When the factory was expropriated by theAmin government, it was handed over to a local company to manage. The project finance had been underwritten by ECGD. So when the roof of the factory collapsed, a substantial sum of British taxpayers’ money was at risk. The Commercial Secretary at the British High Commission was despatched to find out what had happened. He discovered that the incoming managers, not understanding the need for some of

the maintenance precautions, had simply ignored them. The effect of the frequent rainfall and thetropical sun had meant thata build-upof dust that had been allowed to gatherhad solidified. This added more weight to the roof than it was designed to bear. The incident also illustrated the gap which sometimes existed between the most senior officials in the FO, whose acquaintance with commercial work tended to be confined to international trade agreements and Branch B Commercial Officers who worked more closely with the needs of individual companies. The Acting High Commissioner asked why it had been necessary to visit Tororo. “Because ECGD backed finance is at risk”, came the reply. “Who are ECGD?”, the AHC retorted. In fairness it must be said that he was not too proud to acknowledge his lack of familiarity with trade promotion work when he encountered the Commercial Secretary a year or two later in the corridors of the FO in London. “I can see now what you had to put up with”, he said.

The FO was often criticised for the way it went about assisting British exporters. But much of the criticism appeared to be based on a misunderstanding of what commercial departments at diplomatic missions were actually offering. It was not intended that Commercial Officers should do the exporters’ work for them but, put simply, to point them in the right direction This misunderstanding was well illustrated in the 1980s when matters came to a head at the highest level. The course offered to Diplomatic Service Officers about to do a commercial job for the first time was dismissed as a mere briefing. What was really required, or so the thinking went, was training in selling overseas. So a new course was produced which attempted to do that. It’s not clear how successful that was but as the Diplomatic Service has contracted, more and more commercial slots have anyway been filled by locally engaged ex-businessmen and women. They are probably best placed to speak to visiting business people in terms that are familiar to them. They are recruited with a knowledge of the local market which a UK-based officer will need time to acquire. The latter’s first six months could be a nightmare as they found their feet, especially if they had to do it in a foreign language.

As already noted, other training opportunities were offered to help British diplomats relate better to the challenges faced by British exporters. In addition to courses at the Manchester Business School and at INSEAD (a business school in Fontainebleau, France offering marketing courses in English), there were some secondments to British industry. ICI regularly offered them. One Branch B officer spent two years on loan to ICI Agrochemicals where he became acquainted with the worldwide operation of one of Britain’s most prestigious companies He travelled widely to study, in his case, the marketing of pesticides in the Americas. The experience enhanced his standing greatly, both with the locally engaged commercial staff and visiting businessmen and women, when he went on to manage the Commercial Department of a major European post.

Challenges notwithstanding, it was perfectly possible for Branch B officers to succeed in this field given the right conditions. When the Danes were starting to exploit their oil field in the North Sea, the Commercial Department at the British Embassy in Copenhagen was able to establish such close relations with the relevant Danish Government Department, and the Consortium responsible for bringing the field onstream, that it was always able to provide up to date information on where the opportunities lay for British companies. One such company described them as “a model Commercial Department”.The necessary contacts and information were established by aBranchB officer whoestablishedsuchamutuallyproductiverelationship

with the Danish energy department that he was flown out to one of the completed rigs to see for himself what had been achieved.

There was plenty of room for imagination and creativity in export promotion. Copenhagen was also thepost where astatevisit bythelate QueenandtheDuke ofEdinburghwas used to derive maximum benefit from an exhibition of British design. Its opening by His Royal Highness guaranteed maximum publicity. Similarly a visit by HMS Hermes was used to enhance a promotion of British goods at Illums, the upmarket Danish department store. The hangar deck of this giant aircraft carrier was put to use for a British fashion show with music by the Royal Marines. Such a novel venue made it easy to attract influential Danes to this display of the best Britain had to offer in fabric design. A Branch B Commercial First Secretary played a large part in setting both of these events up.

Chapter 9 Troubles inAfrica

BranchBofficers,oncetheyhadgotintotheForeignService, couldtakeadvantageofascheme that enabled them to “bridge” to BranchA, the fast stream. If this could be achieved, it offered a better chance of eventually acceding, as Ambassador or High Commissioner, to the more prestigious posts the Diplomatic Service had to offer. Success was by no means a given. One such applicant was Michael. He tried three times to make the fast stream (the maximum permitted) and three times failed. It was made clear to him that he lacked the intellectual sharpness that he would have gained from a university education. His own view was that he had been unduly complacent and had not put enough effort into preparing himself for the interviews, especially as he had managed to pass the written examination pitched at degree level. For instance, when he was asked for his views on the return of Hong Kong to the Chinese Government he had no option but to duck the question completely. He knew virtually nothing about the issue and really ought to have boned up on it in advance It was a hot topic at the time.

But he could perhaps be excused for his lack of intellectual application. He too had spent his early years on a council estate. He went to a state grammar school in Bristol and, following a short spell as a Clerical Officer in the Prison Commission because he was too young to become an Executive Officer, joined the Foreign Service at the age of 18 years thanks to his three A Levels and an interview. This process was no walk in the park. The Chair of the interviewing board opened proceedings by explaining that he had little chance of acceptance. “There are four places and 200 applicants”, she cheerfully pointed out, no doubt hoping to test Michael’s mettle from the outset. He responded by politely enquiring whether he should leave immediately if the odds were so stacked against him, so as not to waste everyone’s time. This was probably the right rejoinder because he was eventually accepted and rose three decades later to be British Consul General in Chicago

This followed a position in London as Head of Department where he was responsible for the administration of more than 1,000 officers in specialist grades and for the budget of more than £100 million which went with them and their work. It was a demanding role which included the challenging task of closing down one the FCO’s communications centres and dealing with the consequent redundancy of a group of wireless operators on whom the Office had so depended in the days before the arrival of online working. Michael was also tasked with developing a revised IT strategy for the FCO and with introducing a major management information system for use by FCO staff in London. It was installed within budget and on time. None of this was work for the faint-hearted. It demanded an understanding of the pressures on officers and their families when they were faced with redundancy and a willingness to work hard on their behalf to obtain the best possible deal for them. Michael with his own home background was perfectly equipped for this. Managing a major ITproject required not only the ability to ensure that the supplier fully understood the needs of their customer but also the determination to resist calls from the end users, including senior officials, for specification changes after the contract had been signed. Specification changes were a sure way of losing control of the budget for the project. There are, and were, some formidable personalities at the highest levels in the Foreign Office. Resisting any demands from them required a certain strength of character.

1974 found Michael in Uganda One evening he was in Kampala listening, as he always did, to the 8 pm news on the Voice of Uganda. The programme was regularly used by the Uganda Government, totally dominated by President Idi Amin Dada VC (self-awarded), to convey important news or instructions.Amin had been welcomed by the British Government when he overthrew Milton Obote in a coup in 1972. But he soon gained notoriety for the expulsion of theAsian community, mostly to the UK and killing anyone courageous enough to oppose him. By the time Michael arrived in Kampala most of the British community had packed up and left too Anormal life had become impossible Uganda had descended into chaos. There were food shortages in one of the most fertile countries on the African continent and its nascent and potentially lucrative tourist industry lay dormant. Opponents of the regime were frequently seized in the street and thrown into the boot of an unmarked car, never to be seen again or turning up a few days later floating in the river. Private cars were being stolen at gunpoint. Ugandans who had been gifted businesses or factories expropriated from their Asian owners were struggling to make them work And the Ugandan Ministry of Finance faced the problem of finding hard currency to pay for imports in advance when previously payment was often settled using 180-day bills of exchange. The environment for Britons was hostile and threatening, at least from the Uganda Government, rather less from the people of Uganda as a whole(though theActing HighCommissionerwas fora fewhoursheld hostagebythe pygmies in the south west of the country).

It was not uncommon for the President to summon his ministers to a meeting using the radio service’s Voice of Uganda. But on this occasion Michael paid more attention than usual to the presenter’swords.AMilitarySpokesman(akaPresidentIdiAmin Dada)haddeclaredthatthere were more staff in the British High Commission than could possibly be justified by the state of Anglo-Ugandan relations. Therefore most of the staff had to be spies and they would have to leave with their families by the weekend, except for the Defence Attaché who was required to leave immediately This gave the majority of the staff about 72 hours notice.

As with the Kobe earthquake there was no manual of instructions on how to handle a situation like this. A successful and safe evacuation of the staff depended on the initiative, resourcefulness, organisational ability and energy of those who had to deal with it. Michael spent the next few days arranging transport to the airport at Entebbe for more than 20 staff and their dependents, organising with British Airways for the staff to be flown out before the deadline, and with British Caledonian for their possessions to be transported to London after being brought into the High Commission and repacked in relative safety It was not straightforward. Cars and other high value possessions had to be disposed of. The mission’s sensitive documents had to be destroyed. Shredding them proved too slow. So they were burnt in the High Commission courtyard sending an extremely large plume of black smoke across the city.

At first it appeared that there was not a single serviceable coach available, capable of getting the evacuees to the airport; British Airways and British Caledonian only flew into Kampala once a week and it was not on the right day. And getting the possessions into the safety of the High Commission was in the end only made possible by the generosity of the British Leyland agent who put a lorry and driver at the disposal of this distressed diplomatic mission for three days. Thanks to the energy and resourcefulness of the High Commission staff all that needed to be done was done hours before the deadline set by Amin, ready for a convoy to set off for EntebbeAirport late in the evening. They were to board the “non-stop” flight to London from

Nairobi which the BritishAirways agent had arranged to call additionally at Entebbe, no doubt to the displeasure of the passengers who had boarded in Kenya expecting to wake up at London Heathrow. There was one anxious moment when a Ugandan border force official started quibbling that the passengers did not have correct exit visas. Michael dealt with this by asking the official whether he should tell the President that Ugandan officialdom had prevented the party from making a timely exit, or perhaps the official would like to tellAmin himself? There was no further argument.

This was not the first time Michael had faced a serious challenge during his posting to Uganda. The High Commission in Kampala also fulfilled the functions of the non-resident British Embassy in Kigali, Rwanda. On his first visit there he found himself trapped overnight in the buildingthatserved astheofficebecausetherehadbeenacoupandacurfewhadbeen declared. The problem was that neither he nor Jim, the colleague who travelled with him (whose adventures in Iraq are described elsewhere in this book), had had much to eat during the long drive from Kampala.This was in anticipation ofbeing invited to dine with the head of the small British community there, a Mr Patel. On contacting Mr Patel, the two visitors were firmly told to stay where they were unless they wanted to be shot. Any attempt to reach the hotel for a meal would end just as catastrophically. Nor would the hotel staff be able to deliver food unless they too were prepared to be shot. The two diplomats dined that night on half a raw carrot each, enhanced by the sharing of a bottle of whisky

Facing danger is not something unique to diplomats. Travel carries an additional risk for all. Some countries pose an unfamiliar threat from their fauna. Highly venomous reptiles like Spitting Cobras lived in Michael’s back garden in Kaduna, Northern Nigeria. He lived there with his wife and daughter (5 years) and son (4). It was relatively soon after the civil war had ended and there were few amenities, unless you played polo. Accommodation was a problem but Michael’s family was eventually housed in a newly built bungalow on the outskirts of the city with the garden carved out of the bush. He applied for a telephone but never got one, such were the shortages. When he put his third air conditioner on, it blew the whole street. He would have to drive down to the local electricity office to get something done about it.

But the main worry was the wildlife. At dusk one evening the garden boy announced that he had seen a big black snake trying to get into the house through a window. These were louvre windowswhich didn’t fit too well.Michael was concerned. His twosmall childrenwereasleep. He made it clear that the snake would have to be found. There were plenty of deadly ones in the area. Green Mambas and Cobras were the venomous examples. But Pythons were a problem too. This became clear when friends described how they had witnessed a python devouring a monkey at a picnicking spot by the river which families used to visit on a Sunday. Since the children were not much bigger than a monkey these picnics from then on were not viewed as quite such a good idea.

To locate the big black snake Michael organised a search party. The Steward, Deputy Steward, theTuareg tribesman who acted as the family’s nightwatchman, the Garden Boy and the Nanny all joined in. (Expatriates, especially diplomatic ones, tended to be big employers in Kaduna at that time!). Michael led the party around to the back of the bungalow. To his horror there was the snake, about two metres from his foot. He froze. So fortunately did the snake. Neither he nor it quite knew what to do. Then out of the corner of his eye Michael spotted the

nightwatchman and, with a gentle shake of his head, signalled to him to do something. The nightwatchman strode over, bashed the snake and killed it. It was a Spitting Cobra. The next day the Garden Boy took its carcase to the market and sold it for its meat to his Ibo brothers.

The incident troubled Michael. It was obvious that a dangerous reptile could easily get into the bungalow. As it was, anybody living in Northern Nigeria had to guard against scorpions and a nest of hornets outside a front door was not unknown. So from that evening on Michael went to bed equipped with a long bamboo pole and a tribal sword ready to deal with any unwelcome intruder.

He also wrote to the FCO suggesting that Deputy High Commission (DHC) families be equipped with a supply of anti-venom. The request was not granted. The Office replied that nobody would be able to administer the antidote and in any case there was a supply held in the DHC office.Therewas no mention ofthethreecombinationlocksthatwould haveto beopened by a highly stressed individual to get to it. With their reply, no doubt trying to be helpful and reassuring, the Office included a paper composed from the safety of Liverpool University suggesting in effect that the danger from snakes was exaggerated.And the clinching argument was that nobody in HM Diplomatic Service had died from snakebite yet. For some reason Michael did not find any of this reassuring at all but was left to reflect that there was more to this foreign service thing than he had realised when he sat before the recruitment board.

Other risks come from tropical diseases, particularly Malaria, and remain a constant problem in many of the cities where British diplomats are required to live. Violent crime brings other dangers. Serviceable cars were in short supply in Uganda inAmin’s day so, if you had one, you were all too liable to be relieved of it at gun point. That said, diplomats perhaps enjoy better protection than most people from some of the unavoidable dangers in the world. The Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations severely limits what a host government can do to accredited diplomats. But no convention will protect them from the gun-toting soldier at the checkpoint with no feel for diplomatic niceties. And, contrariwise, because diplomats are the named and accessible representatives of their country, they are automatic targets for their country’s enemies. Christopher Ewart Biggs (not a member of Branch B but that is irrelevant in this context), British Ambassador in Dublin who was blown up in his car by the IRA is just one sad example of this risk.

Chapter 10 Diplomatic Uniform No Protection

Jim, whose journey to Baghdad was described in Chapter 5, was not the only Branch B officer to find himself in Iraq when the royal family there was overthrown. Geoff was posted there in May1958.Eventhoughhisjobwastoberelativelylowgrade,hewasaskedbytheAmbassador to bring with him Diplomatic Service uniform. It appeared that there was going to be a royal wedding that year. The young king of Iraq was to marry a Turkish princess. The Diplomatic Corps was expected to attend in full uniform. Geoff took himself off to Savile Row where he was fittedout,including with acockedhat andswordand aspecial caseto pack it in. He arrived in Baghdad in June. The next month an armoured column of the Iraqi army commanded by Colonel Abdul Karim Qasim, passing through the city on a routine transfer, stopped off and launched the revolution. The King, together with the rest of the royal family and the King’s fiancée, were all killed as was the Prime Minister (who had been one of Lawrence ofArabia’s Brigadiers). The Embassy was looted and set on fire. The Comptroller of the Ambassador’s household was killed.

Staff in the Embassy in Baghdad were not the only Diplomatic Service Officers to feel the effects of the Iraqi revolution. From the late 1940s to 1978 many members of the Foreign Service, including those in Branch B, were trained in the Arabic language and culture at the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies (MECAS) at Shemlan, south east of Beirut in Lebanon In July 1958 MECAS was home to seventeen dependents of the students studying there. They were evacuated leaving their partners to enjoy or suffer (depending on your point of view) a bachelor existence. They, along with the unaccompanied Foreign Office students were, on 15 July, asked to report to the British Embassy immediately. There they were shown a large room full of firearms and ammunition. The Military Attaché explained that American marines were about to land as part of a western decision to maintain the status quo in the Middle East. It had been decided to defend the Embassy against any retaliatory attack from the Lebanese. Three of the MECAS students decided that this was improper and took their case to the Chargé d’Affaires.Heindicatedthatanyonewhowishedtodosowasfreetoleave.Thethreeprotesting in fact stayed on and one of the three actually volunteered to accompany the Military Attaché as a bodyguard on a liaison trip to theAmerican Embassy. TheAttaché, presumably impressed with such fortitude and with an apparent change of mind, said no more about the protest and the three were returned to London as soon as the airport reopened.

It was later made clear by the FO that the three protesting students were correct. The approved course of action, faced with an imminent threat, was to destroy sensitive documents and leave the building. Subsequent events elsewhere, for example when the Embassy in Beijing was sacked by Red Guards in the Chinese cultural revolution many years later, showed how impracticable these instructions could be. Staff in Beijing were abused and molested when they were forced to leave the building. One of the secretaries was sexually assaulted by the mob.

A few years later Geoff found himself in the British Consulate General in LosAngeles. There the anti-Castro Cubans, annoyed by the sale of British Leyland buses to the Havana municipality, put a stick of dynamite under the Consulate door though they were considerate enough to do it outside of office opening hours. But the risks to staff were all too clear and dangers lurked in unlikely cities.

Geoff’s diplomatic uniform did not go to waste. The braid on it was wider. But it was still in its case and Geoff was in Moscow. The new Ambassador put out an appeal to his staff for anyone who happened to have a uniform. Geoff naturally answered the call. Escorts were needed for theAmbassador’s presentation of credentials. It was the only time the uniform was worn, ironically in the Soviet Union, the great egalitarian society and the grave of privilege; but where they liked to dress up!

Chapter 11 Problems with Local Staff

Danger and intimidation were challenges often faced by all officers in HM Diplomatic Service. Branch B officers seemed to attract at least their fair share. Reg arrived at the British Consulate General in Shanghai as Consul (Administration) with his wife Cecile in November 1948. It was not a good time. Chinese Communist forces were approaching from the North and nobody knew what the future held. He had a reputation for getting things done. The communist forces arrivedinShanghaiinApril1949 ItwasthetimeoftheYangtseIncidentwhenHMSAmethyst, badly damaged and with many wounded and dead on board, had taken refuge behind an island on the river and settled on a sandbar. There she remained for the next hundred days while protracted negotiations with the new Chinese Government proceeded. It was clearly the time for staff of the Consulate General to be reduced to an absolute minimum. The post was no longer recognised by the Chinese authorities as a diplomatic mission which obviously dramatically reduced its effectiveness.

Reg was told to leave with his wife. But departing foreigners about to leave were required to settlewith theirdomesticstaffappropriate“terminationbonuses” Thesefollowed aset formula based on the length of service in the employ of the officer. Knowing that Reg and Cecile were about to depart on one of the now rare passenger vessels, their staff decided that they were in a strong position to claim more than they had been paid. Reg could not give way on this as it would set an expensive precedent for the other staff leaving, not only from the Consulate but from the wider commercial community. Reg and Cecile were about to set off for a farewell reception in their official car when their domestic staff tried to prevent them from doing so. A melée followed during which Reg’s coolie attacked Cecile. Reg went to his wife’s defence and beat off her attacker. For his pains he was arraigned before the local court quite quickly so that the compensation issue could be settled in time for him and his wife to leave on the ship on which they had been booked.The coolie demanded a reference for his future employment. Reg gave him one. It began with the usual routine statements but Reg added “This is the finest coolie I have ever struck”.

Reg ended his career in a senior position as head of a Foreign Office department.

Chapter 12 Glutton for Trouble

Staff at British diplomatic missions are an automatic target for those with reason to hate Britain and British government policies. Recognising this, the French government issued officials in the British Embassy in Paris with local number plates for their cars at the outbreak of the First Iraqi War as the diplomatic vehicle registration system revealed the identity of the Embassy. Unfortunately they provided plates with 75 in the number which indicated that the driver came from Paris. These were no more popular to French people outside the capital than were the CD plates that diplomats normally carried. So the traffic abuse from other drivers continued; it was just for a different reason! On a visit to Dunkirk, One officer was confronted by a local driver shaking a fist at him and calling him a “Bloody Parisian”.

The consequences of such international hatred could be fatal. The assassination of the British Ambassador in Dublin has already been noted. The British Deputy High Commissioner in Bombay, was assassinated in 1984 by Abu Nidal’s Palestinian terrorist group as he drove to work the morning after hosting a reception for the England test cricket team. As a result of that tragedy British Deputy High Commissioners in India were provided with bullet-proof Range Rovers, a driver trained in emergency evasion techniques, and an escorting gunman. Until then there was no such protection. In 2004 an Al Queda attack on the British Consulate General in Istanbul claimed the life of the Consul General along with about thirty others. Neither were Branch B officers but these tragedies illustrate all too well the dangers faced by all Diplomatic Officers simply because they are serving in a British diplomatic mission.

The staff of the British Embassy in Cairo were faced with such a threat when the so called Six DayWarbrokeout in 1967 betweenIsrael andEgypt.Staffhadbegun theprocess of destroying sensitive documents well before the start of hostilities But when the war broke out there was still so much to destroy that they organised a shift system.

On the morning of 5 June the quiet was shattered by the sound of explosions. The Six Day War had begun. All morning Cairo radio carried eyewitness reports of attacking aircraft being shot down as they dropped their bombs. There was joyful cheering in the streets. The official propaganda was of a glorious victory ahead. But as the day wore on the mood became sombre as the enormity of Israel’s success began to circulate. A curfew and a blackout on house and streetlights was imposed. Car headlamps had to be covered with blue film. It was quite eerie moving around the streets of Cairo at night. Britain and the United States were accused of supporting Israel. The Embassy was advised by the Ministry of ForeignAffairs to evacuate the buildings. Before doing so John had the task of destroying the cypher equipment. This was not unlike a teletype machine. Few have been called upon to smash such equipment and there is no specified way of doing it John used his strength, initiative and a sledge hammer

Atypical diplomatic mission is full of combination locks. There was no guarantee that any of the existing staff would ever return to the building. So the resourceful John took the precaution of sending to the FO all necessary combinations. He, with his wife, volunteered to stay on in Cairo to help maintain the British diplomatic presence and to await better days.

John certainly seemed to go where trouble erupted. In 1982 he was posted to Grenada for what might have been a routine three-year diplomatic appointment. It turned out rather differently

and allowed John to experience an exciting and critical period in Grenada’s history. He remained there until September 1986.

The responsible Foreign and Commonwealth Office Minister of State had asked John to ‘Raise the profile of Britannia and keep track of what the Soviets and Cubans were doing’.

‘Be a good man in Grenada’, he said.

From the date of John’s arrival the Union Flag was again flown proudly in St George’s, Grenada’s capital. He embarked on a heavy schedule of calls and visits and built up a valuable network of reliable contacts in all sections of the community. Looking back, he realised that he had attended more boring political rallies and ‘emulation’ ceremonies than was necessary. As a consequence he had had to listen with distaste to the vitriolic anti-American and antiimperialist ranting of New Jewel Movement (NJM) supporters.

By early 1983 the People’s Revolutionary Government was in crisis.Anew airport project had proved a huge drain on the government’s resources. Tourist numbers had dropped. The agricultural sector was not performing well.The NJM was losing its way and dissension within the party was to lead to its downfall.

On 8 October 1983 Prime Minister Maurice Bishop returned from a trip to Eastern Europe to face challenges from disgruntled fellow ideologues in the NJM. During the next few days informants advised John that there were problems in the NJM and that Bishop was under house arrest. John warned London of an impending crisis. On 15 October, he saw the Minister for LegalAffairs, Kendrick Radix, on his protest march with placards calling for Bishop’s release. Radix was later arrested, as were a number of prominent people, including Bob Evans, the manager of the airport project; Einstein Louison, a senior army officer; and Tony Munro, manager of the Coca Cola plant. John had first-hand accounts of the experiences of Evans and Munro after their release from two nights in a smelly dungeon. Larger demonstrations culminated on 19 October in St George’s market square.

John was there to hear Unison Whiteman address the crowd, which then marched on the Prime Minister’s residence and forced his release. The triumphant cavalcade went on to Fort Rupert. Mayhem followed which John and his wife witnessed. Just before 1.00pm three Armoured Personnel Carriers went up the narrow hill to Fort Rupert. Within minutes shooting started and lasted until 1.15 pm. People fled from the Fort. Some jumped over the ramparts. Many of the injured John saw were schoolchildren. At about 2.00pm there was another burst of gunfire. That was when Bishop, Whiteman and others were killed. A deathly silence fell over St George’s. ‘Radio Free Grenada’ announced a four-day shoot-on-sight curfew imposed from that evening. Later, General Austin announced that a Revolutionary Military Council (RMC) had taken over the government.

On 20 October the Venezuelan Consul called on John to deliver a permit allowing him to drive during the curfew, provided he flew the UK flag on his car. The island was eerie, with not a soul to be seen except for the military barriers at the main road junctions.An army officer came to discuss arrangements for the protection and evacuation of foreign nationals. Over the next few days John’s office became a call-in centre for those permitted to drive during the curfew. The callers provided useful information about the army dispositions and supplies, which he was able to relay to Barbados by VHF radio. He called on Governor General Sir Paul Scoon every day until the US-led military intervention began on 25 October.

At first light on 21 October John and his wife called at all of the hotels in the main tourist area to collect details of British tourists. They already had a warden system to keep in touch with the resident British community in times of emergency. The Vice Chancellor of the St George’s University School ofMedicine,DrGeoffreyBourne,asked John to call in advanceofameeting he was to have with Hudson Austin later in the day. Afterwards Bourne told him that Austin was completely stressed and uncertain what to do next. One benefit of their meeting, which came at John’s suggestion, was that Bourne convincedAustin to lift the shoot-on-sight curfew on the Saturday.The curfew was lifted for four hours, during which John’s office was swamped by manyBritish, CommonwealthandEuropeannationals wantingto register.Volunteerhelpers had to be called in.

An interesting diversion was a plea from Dr Jensen Otway for John to call on him at his home in Mount Airy. He was a dual British/Grenadian national and was in fear for his life. He had signed the death certificates of Bishop and the others killed at Fort Rupert. He had been roused from his bed late in the evening of19 Octoberby members ofthe People’s RevolutionaryArmy and instructed to prepare the death certificates. He said he had no option but to comply, even though he had not seen the bodies.

On 22 October David Montgomery, the British Deputy High Commissioner in Barbados, flew in with fourAmerican diplomats to have discussions about the safety of foreign nationals and arrangements for their evacuation with Major Leon Cornwall and other representatives of the RMC. John took Montgomery to call on the Governor General. He intimated to Montgomery that he would welcome outside help, a message Montgomery later passed on to Tom Adams, the Barbadian Prime Minister. When the American diplomats returned to Barbados they left CIAofficer Linda Flohr behind. She stayed at John’s house for the next week.

On Monday 24 October, British and other foreigners went to the airport to await evacuation flightsthatnevercame.TheyreturnedtotheirhomesorhotelsandremainedtrappedinGrenada during the following tumultuous days. John called on the RMC Minister of Foreign Affairs to hear his lengthy explanation of what had happened, and what the RMC’s intentions were with regard to the restoration of civilian government. On Tuesday 25 October John and his wife were awakened at 3.40am by the drone of C130 aircraft. From their roof they witnessed much of the combat action and later saw the US paratroopers dropping on to the runway of the new airport. All day long and for the next four days the fighting continued. For their own safety John and his wife restricted their movements to the immediate neighbourhood of their house. On 27 October they had 15 ‘refugees’ staying with them, Grenadian friends who lived nearer to the airport and fled to the safety of their house. They also took in an American Baptist minister and his family. Tony Munro brought his family He had his ham radio equipment with him, which provided a link to the US naval commander on the Thursday afternoon. That was important as the Island’s telephone system had failed soon after the start of the military action. In this way much useful information could be provided to help with the evacuation of the students on the peninsula. On the Friday afternoon it was a relief to see a platoon from the 82nd Airborne walk up the drive.

The month of October 1983 was an extraordinary experience. But, in its aftermath, life for the Resident Representative was even more frantic. Grenada remained under the international spotlight as political parties and would-be prime ministers battled for dominance in the leadup to the parliamentary elections. John’s office was extremely busy with issues of interest to

the international community, such as the ongoing presence of foreign military and police contingents; the reconstruction of the Royal Grenada Police Force; the repatriation of Grenadian students from Cuba and the USSR; the appointment of anAdvisory Council and the formation of the Interim Government; and the trial of those charged with the murders of 19 October. There were also numerous visitors, including HM The Queen, President Reagan, the UN Deputy Secretary General, the Commonwealth Secretary General, the Foreign Affairs committee, FCO Ministers, MPs, officials, journalists, academics and lawyers. Such is the life of a diplomat but the VIP visitors do not normally come in quite such quick succession

In December 1984 the electorate returned a middle-of-the-road party headed by Herbert Blaize as Prime Minister. John knew him well and was left with a feeling of satisfaction that he had been so closely involved in the restoration of parliamentary democracy. In the process he had been able to maintain Britain’s good standing with the people and government of Grenada even if there had been some hair-raising, not to say downright dangerous, challenges along the way John certainlydid not fitthepopularimageofaForeign ServiceOfficer. Hewas bornin County Galway in the Irish Republic and was educated at a secondary school in Dublin. He emigrated to England. After various jobs, he sat the Civil Service open competition, passed (just!) and was assigned to the Foreign Office, he claims because he ticked the FO box. His subsequent career was full of excitement, not always of the welcome variety. John finally retired in 2000 after three years as Governor of the Turks and Caicos Islands and with an LVO and CMG after his name. He gained a degree from the Open University some 12 years later.

Chapter 13 Challenges in Indonesia

Dorien found herself flung into a similarly unpromising environment for the second time in her career when she arrived in Indonesia in 1962 to take up her post as Vice-Consul. The country had not changed much since Joseph Conrad wrote his novels set in it a half century before. Apart from the foetid canals of Jakarta, the only atmospheric pollution came not from the blazing jungle, nor from the traffic much of which outside the capital was foot or hoof propelled, but from the archipelago’s myriad volcanoes. Her job this time was unusual. She was to spend three months in each of the two consular districts, touring extensively to promote favourable publicity for Britain.

Her mission required an onward journey to Surabaya, on Java but nearly 500 miles to the east. She declined to take a flight, not as might be supposed because of the dubious safety record of the local airline, but because previous experience suggested that a good supply of solid and liquid comestibles would be required to make life tolerable. They would be hard to come by locally and the only sure way of getting them there was to take them with you. That meant using the train. Not that this was a noticeably safer mode of transport. The train had on occasions included a marksman atop to repel bandits. It was not an unfamiliar scenario for seasoned diplomats. Diplomatic liqueur could only be transported from Lagos to Kaduna in Nigeria with any certainty of getting there if the driver of the lorry was accompanied by somebody riding shotgun, Wells Fargo style. Similarly a car could only be transported by train to Northern Nigeria with a reasonable prospect of arriving in one piece if a man was paid to sleep in it when it was aboard the flat truck So Darrien visited the Embassy commissary, acquired what she thought she would need and set off by rail accompanied by some thirteen pieces of baggage, mainly crates and packing cases.

The journey took 24 hours. Arriving at her destination Dorien scanned the platform for a welcoming face. Her luggage had been retrieved via the windows of the train by an assortment of individuals hanging around with nothing much else to do. It formed an impressive row on the platform. It soon became clear that there was nobody there to greet Dorien. But there was a working telephone in the station master’s office. The Consulate was duly informed of her arrival.After a longish wait a bicycle rickshaw turned up with a local member of the consulate staff on board. With Dorien seated alongside him, it set off for the office pursued by a procession of similar vehicles carrying the thirteen items of luggage. Lunch followed. The tension at it was palpable. Dorien assumed it was because of the botched arrival arrangements. But it was not. It turned out that the Consul’s wife was leaving that very afternoon, not just the post but forever.

After lunch Dorien was shown to her accommodation. Entering it was difficult and involved much wrestling with rusty locks. The door opened into a miasma of dust and flies. The house had been empty for some time. Essential services had long been cut off. So more rickshaw trips were required to induce local authorities to restore gas, electricity and water. An allegedly experienced cook was recruited and sent to the market to obtain ingredients for supper. It was hardlyaculinarydelight; justafewwizenedcarrotsfloatinginathingruel. Shethenannounced that the night watchman had failed to turn up – essential in those parts – and perhaps sensing that Dorien was surrounded by malign influences (the Javanese had a strong belief in spirits) the cook promptly departed, never to return.

Things looked up after that unpromising beginning. The consular district was a sprawling one with thousands of islands including Bali. But Dorien’s remit was to concentrate on East Java The funding provided by London was inadequate to say the least. But support from one of the few remaining British firms in the area, to mutual advantage, made up the shortfall and worked well enough except for those periods when the local authorities requisitioned all private cars for government use.

The unexpected is part of a diplomat’s life. Just as Dorien was about to embark on one of her promotionaltours,theConsulfellillandwasremovedtoahospitaloutsidetheconsulardistrict. This left Dorien as the sole official British presence in the district. It meant that she had to take over a difficult consular case involving the captain of a dilapidated copra ship. He had been caught smuggling bullion and threatened with violence by the customs officer who had found it.After the captain tried to cut his own throat with a grapefruit knife, the Consul had persuaded the police to allow him to stay in an hotel rather than the gaol, against a consular guarantee that he would not try to escape.

Dorien was clearly not going to be able to carry on with her original mission. The Merchant Shipping Act required answers to certain questions and an overdue report to be made. The captain was called into the office. The interview began unpromisingly with:

“What’s a nice little girl like you, doing in a dump like this?”

Dorien pressed for the name of his next of kin which he seemed surprisingly reluctant to give. He finally whispered in her ear, in those more prudish times:

“Alittle Chinese widow in Hong Kong.”

On the day set for the trial the captain as the accused, the consular lawyer and Dorien gathered outsidethecourthouse. But thejudgedid not turnup.Afewdays laterthesamething happened. It was only on the third date allocated that all were assembled sardine fashioned in a tiny courtroom. The captain was asked to account for his actions. To everyone’s dismay he responded by seizing exhibit A. This was his revolver which like everything else in the room was well within reach. Brandishing it wildly he shouted:

“I said fuck off ”

To nobody’s surprise the verdict was guilty. But this was a poor country so a swingeing fine was imposed instead of a jail sentence. Dorien, with an eloquence she didn’t know she possessed, managed to persuade the shipping agent to pay the fine, which the court accepted. The Embassy hastily arranged for the captain to be put on a plane for Jakarta and out of the country before anyone had second thoughts.

Anotherskipper arrived to takeoverthe ship and a secondviceconsul was onhis way,nodoubt thinking that he was exchanging Kuwait for something better Dorien was finally free to get started on what she had originally been sent out to do. She may well have added a new element to her job description requiring her to cope with British subjects so distressed that they were willing to use gun toting violence to get their way.

Chapter 14 You can’t argue with a Gun

Most people living in Britain rarely encounter firearms except perhaps those legitimately held for sporting or farming purposes. British diplomats by contrast quite often come across them. Michael was asked by his American GP in Chicago whether he held a handgun like most Chicagoans. He replied that he did not, first because the Office would not allow it and secondly he would not know what to do with it if he had one.

“Where do Chicagoans keep these guns”, he enquired.

“Mostly in the glove box of their cars”, came the brisk reply.

“Different world”, thought Michael

Inthelate1960s Alanwas servingin Bujumburain Burundi. Themercenary forces ledbytheBelgian Colonel, Jean ‘Black Jack’ Schramme, were occupying the town of Bukavu in the South Kivu Province of the Congo. He warned the Burundi Government not to allow Federal Congolese troops to pass through Burundi to reinforce operations against them. Alan’s colleague, the Vice-Consul, decided to respond to a plea for help from a BBC reporter who had arrived from Nairobi without a Burundi visa. Not surprisingly, the local Immigration Officers were not prepared to let him into the country. As the plane on which he had arrived had now left and there were no further flights leaving that day, the reporter had no option but to spend an uncomfortable night without any creature comforts. Arriving in the Embassy Land Rover armed with their Diplomatic Identity Cards, the two diplomats duly approached the officer in charge of the troops guarding the airport. A polite request to see the unfortunate British Citizen was met with a firm refusal. Without actually quoting Article 6 of the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, the Vice-Consul insisted that he had a right to see a fellow national and to be able to provide him with some food and a blanket. At this point machine guns were pointed at the diplomats’ backs and they were told to leave. Rather than falling victim to a trigger-happy African soldier, Alan encouraged the Vice-Consul to err on the side of caution and to return to the Embassy. The two men did so with sighs of relief.

Respect for diplomatic convention cannot always be relied upon. Consular officers normally do their best for their fellow citizens. But sometimes discretion just has to be the better part of valour.

Chapter 15 Living with Discomfort

Ifmanypostings brought danger,theycould also featurediscomfort. By thesecondhalfof June 1955 Fred was getting usedto thestrangesensation offreedom aftertwoyearsNational Service in the RAF and was on demob leave staying with his parents in North Wales when the fateful telegram arrived from Personnel Department, instructing him to telephone for news of a posting. It was a long walk to the nearest phone so he had plenty of time to mull over some of the more attractive possibilities, but when the voice at the other end said “Jedda” the sound of his little world crashing down around his ears must have reverberated down the line. “Are you still there do you know where it is?” said the by now anxious voice. Fred knew only too well where it was. He was also aware of its dreadful reputation at that time in every Foreign Service

Did he have a choice?

In those days you went where you ordered. So, unsurprisingly, the answer was a firm “No”. Personnel said that they would contact him again shortly.

Events moved swiftly after that. Arrangements were made for him to visit London for “briefing” which amounted to a morning reading filesonSaudiArabia ASaudi visawas issued on 22 June and a transfer grant for first appointment overseas plus climatic clothing addition. It amounted to the princely sum for those days of 100 guineas (£105). It was paid on 24 June (and spent within three days) and a flight was booked for 4 July.

The journey as far as Cairo was uneventful but trouble loomed when the Aden Airways flight failed to turn up for the second leg. The Egyptian authorities insisted on retaining Fred’s visaless passport whilst he was accommodated in a run-down transit hotel, with just the clothes he was wearing. It was extremely hot. Fortunately there was another passenger in the same predicament but much more experienced He quickly advised Fred to sign chits for everything and to make the most of any alcohol available as it would be the last he would see for the 18 months of his tour.

Itdidn’tquitelastthatlong.TheSaudisbrokeoffdiplomaticrelationswiththeUnitedKingdom in late 1956 over the Anglo-French invasion of Suez. For most of the staff diplomatic rupture and the idea of having to leave Saudi Arabia did not come a moment too soon. After a frantic few days burning every document in sight (as the Embassy had no idea who the Protecting Power would be until quite late on) staff were flown to Aden where they eventually boarded the SS Itinda, due to reach England before Christmas. Things could hardly get worse. But they did. The ship broke down off Cape Town, spent part of Christmas Day hove-to in a force 9 gale in the English Channel and eventually struggled into Liverpool on Boxing Day.

The Embassy had consisted of only three buildings in a small compound bordering the sea: the Ambassador’s Residence, a residential block of six staff flats and the Chancery with a bachelors’ mess above There was a fourth building which was the Pakistani Embassy. Jedda had lived up (down?) to its reputation. The climate amounted to heat plus extremely high humidity 24 hours a day. This was hard to bear for those not used to it. The power supply was grossly inadequate and the Embassy was on the first circuit to be regularly cut when conditions became intolerable. Fred blessed the availability of paraffin driven fridges. Worst of all for a single man, there were no single females, either in the office or anywhere else. Not that there

was anywhere to take them There were no cinemas, clubs, bars or even halfway decent restaurants There was just nowhere to go even if you had a car. And there was of course no alcohol to drown your sorrows. Even ginger beer was banned.

Uncomfortable existence though this was, there were just a few compensations. On Fridays Embassy staff could sometimes take out the Embassy launch for a fishing trip or swimming, and there was once a rather unique game of cricket played in the middle of the desert with the crew of a Pakistani ship bringing pilgrims on the Hadj.

With Jedda closed, another post had to assume the mantle of “worst in the world”. That title fell to Conakry, the capital of Guinea in WestAfrica. Fred was destined to find out why. Seven years later, and with Jedda still closed, he was given, as he viewed it, the unenviable opportunity of judging why Conakry was more than qualified to inherit that unfortunate crown. Conditions were uncomfortable in the extreme. The Embassy’s Chancery was situated in a former dental surgery. The Ambassador had a pleasant villa on the outskirts of the town, but theremaining staffwere expectedto exist (“lived” wouldbethewrongword accordingto Fred) in a dilapidated sixteen storey block of flats in town. This provided accommodation for two married officers on the second floor (Head of Chancery and the Administration Officer), the Ambassador’s Personal Assistant on the fourth and the Archivist on the fifth. Fred was left isolated on the eighth.

Unfortunately the lifts hardly ever worked and the water pumps broke down with such frequency that invitations to dinner often bore the legend “Bring your own towel”. There is a limit to the amount of water that can be carried up all those flights of stairs. So occupants never left anything behind when they went out. As if all that wasn’t bad enough, the power supply failed all too regularly so there wasn’t any air conditioning when it was most needed. Food was a particular problem too as there could be no reliance on the local market for anything, not even bread. At one stage the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent a chef to their Embassy to teach the wives how to bake bread, the necessary ingredients and equipment having been especially imported; together with a TV team!

Practically everything staff of the British Embassy needed had to be imported from France via a regular fortnightly ferry service from Bordeaux. But even that posed problems. There was only one, communal, deep freezer for the entire staff, not much bigger than one a family would take for granted for their own use. Officialdom even imposed obstacles to paying for food The pound wasn’t convertible and neither theTreasury nor the FO could entertain the idea of giving all the staff convertible bank accounts. The Head of Chancery alone was to be trusted so he collated staff orders and their sterling cheques which were paid into his special account. Medical facilities were virtually non-existent. A decrepit building was called a hospital, and the only doctor Fred ever came across was a Yugoslav specialist. The nearest dentist was in Freetown. TheAmerican Embassy had a full time nurse on their staff, but Federal Law forbade her from treating non-Americans. Fortunately for Fred the British Ambassador’s wife was a qualified GPand when he contractedmalaria(all too easy in sub-SaharanAfrica) shepurchased quinine and other medication from the Americans, injected him and generally helped his houseboy to nurse him. Fred always preferred not to think about what would have happened had she not been there. To recuperate, he went to stay for a while with a colleague in Monrovia (Liberia) which was paradise compared with Conakry

Fred often asked himself whether the FOAdministration could have done more to alleviate the conditions under which staff were expected to labour. Clearly there was not a lot that could be done about the tiresome climate and in any case staff tended to adjust to that after a time. That was certainly true of life in the Persian Gulf where an arrival at Bahrain airport in the 1970s provided a most unpromising start to a posting in that part of the world. Local weather conditions could be exceptionally uncomfortable, with high humidity and temperatures. Airconditioning at that time was not always available and that included at the airport. Incoming passengers were expected to stand around in the customs shed awaiting their luggage’s arrival at the carousel, their bodies steadily dripping with ever increasing perspiration.

Adjustment to the climate was essential as cheap flights home were simply not available fifty or so years ago. This also meant that it was normal for officers and their families not to see the UK for at least 12 months at a time. But maybe some of the “man-made” difficulties could perhaps have been alleviated; better accommodation and furnishings for example. The FO Administration was not totally unsympathetic. They, for instance, once supplied new curtain material for all the staff accommodation in Havana, even though it was the responsibility of landlords, to replace the rags that served for curtains in the aftermath of Castro’s revolution. But overall the amount of money available for such things was never anywhere near enough.

In Baghdad one diplomatic family were accommodated in a building where, fully exposed to the sun, their galvanized cold water tank on the roof produced piping hot water by midday.At other times they relied on a primitive kerosene drip-fed system built on to the rear of the house. The brick casing housed a water cylinder. On the outside an inverted kerosene container controlled by a small tap dripped the fuel into a funnel fixed into a horizontal metal pipe a few inches in diameter. Lit by a match the flaming kerosene was sucked along the pipe towards the cylinder. The contraption was temperamental. The wife of one occupant one morning heard an explosion and found her husband, minus eyebrows, contemplating a pile of rubble. It happened to everyone sometime, friends murmured consolingly.

Once a month the DDT man arrived to fumigate the house. The family were banished for six hours until the fumes thinned sufficiently for safe breathing. What residues of DDT were absorbed afterwards is an open question. In that era there was no understanding of such dangers. The more immediate concern was to prevent the family’s daughter, then a toddler, from consuming the dead insects before a cleanup has been completed. Why the little girl had a penchant for deceased hornets is an interesting question but she was eventually weaned off this suspect diet.

Chapter 16

Momentous Events: The Unexpected and Unfamiliar

One of the most interesting aspects of diplomatic life is that there is no immunity from the consequences of the more momentous events in history if you just happen to be serving in the country where they take place John’s experiences in Cairo and Grenada have been told in a previous chapter. Margaret was serving in Budapest in 1956 during the uprising there, so ruthlessly suppressed by the Soviet Union. She returned there fifty years later and reflected on what she saw:

“I stood for some minutes looking at the white impressive building and thinking ‘Could this possibly be the same building I worked in every day in 1956/57?’I could scarcely believe it, but looking up at the shape of the second floor windows I knew that these were indeed the ones we barricaded with filing cabinets and filing boxes to protect us from flying glass.

In October I made my first visit to Budapest since 1956, exactly 50 years after the uprising of October 23, 1956. Walking around the city I felt I was in a completely different place. I remembered buildings which were black with pollution and scarred by shell-holes and bullet marks, a legacy of World War II. Nothing had been done about this. Now I looked with admiration at the beautifully restored architecture. The same sort of restoration has taken place in the Embassy building. The former Banking Hall in particular had been transformed, with its prismatic glass ceiling, bronzed chandeliers, and black, white and red marble floor. The presentAmbassador kindly took me on a tour of the Embassy. We even went down to the cellars where, on November 4, 1956, that fateful day when the Russian army returned in full force, I remember sitting on the floor with my cipher books and sending “It is now 12 noon and we have descended to the cellar . . . ”

Events could take Embassy staff by surprise. Paris in 1968 seemed a comfortable enough prospect. Michael arrived there in the January to take up a position as a Commercial Officer. Out of the blue in the Spring of that year, France erupted. It began with a seemingly routine protest by students in Nanterre on the outskirts of Paris that male students were not allowed to access the female dormitories. Students at the Sorbonne joined in the protests and violent clashes with the Compagnie Républicaine de Sécurité (CRS) became a routine feature of the evenings over many nights. Then the workers opportunistically joined in with the red flag flying over the Renault works at Boulogne-Billancourt. Food disappeared from the supermarkets and fuel from the petrol stations. There was no television service. Rubbish flew around the empty streets in the Parisian Spring breeze. There was a real possibility of wider andmoreseriousviolenceif,asseemedlikely,theCRSbattledtheirwayintotheRenaultworks to rescue the managers locked up in their offices there. British visitors were advised to give France a miss for the time being. For businessmen there was little prospect of anything being achieved anyway.

The Embassy had its own supply of petrol and Michael kept his car’s tank full. If there was to be something approaching a civil war, he would have to get his little family out quickly. He had a year old daughter and his wife was pregnant. A dash for the Belgian border seemed all too likely a prospect. Then the Prime Minister, but not President De Gaulle, addressed the

nation on television, fuel reappeared in the petrol tanks so that Parisians could go off on their Whitsun holidays and it all fizzled out Everyone could breathe again. Danger had appeared, and then passed, in the most unlikely of countries.

Phil’s first posting was to Havana in the early 60s. On a quiet and peaceful balmy Sunday Autumn evening, he was gently passing the hours in the company of a colleague just a few months after his arrival. They had both been out on the Friday afternoon to meet the Queen’s Messenger (QM) to pick up the diplomatic bags. Receiving news from home put them both in good humour. Then the telephone rang. It was the local Embassy guard to say that an “Immediate” telegram had arrived. (Diplomatic telegrams were graded according to their urgency. Only a “flash” telegram took a higher priority than “immediate”) The pair were astonished. Neither could remember ever having been called out for an immediate telegram before, and certainly never on a Sunday. They dutifully made the half-hour drive along the seaside “Malecon” to the Embassy, then situated opposite the prison in the fort area of the old Havana town, (Havana Vieja).

The telegram emanated from Washington. The two junior diplomats groaned. Telegrams from the U.S. were generally of little interest. But this was a very short telegram which began: “The State Department have advised us that in the light of the serious situation developing in Cuba, President Kennedy intends with immediate effect to …” and here any readers with book cypher experience will know the feeling of despair when, instead of a group of 5 digits, only 4 arrived. In fact in this case there were just two groups of 4 together instead of 5, making it virtually impossible to decipher or work out what was being said. All the possible combinations were tried without success.

The Ambassador was consulted but he was just as puzzled A serious situation was clearly developing, but what was it? There had been nothing in the newspapers nor on the BBC World Service to suggest there was anything dramatic occurring in Cuba. There were all the usual rumours, generally to be taken with a pinch of salt and normally emanating from Miami; the U.S. was about to invade the island, Fidel Castro was on his deathbed, widespread cholera epidemics, collapse of the economy and so forth. Something new and important in Cuba had obviously upset President Kennedy, but was it really necessary to send a telegram on a late Sunday evening bringing Embassy staff out from the comforts of a quiet evening spent at home? Well, it really was.

History records that on that Monday, President Kennedy imposed an embargo on Cuba (the word had defied the book cypher!). The island was to be blockaded. And this meant that the lives of those serving in the Embassy in Havana at this time would be completely transformed. The QM would never again come to the post, all normal mail deliveries from overseas to the Embassy would cease immediately, nobody would be coming to, nor leaving, the island for a very long time Staff departing for new postings would have them cancelled or postponed.And the Embassy and its staff would run out of supplies, no less.Apparently, right under everyone’s noses, the Russians had arrived. They had installed inter-continental ballistic missiles, pointed them at the US ninety miles away, and all in all had managed comprehensively to upset the Americans.

From high in the Embassy building it was possible to see theAmerican naval ships arriving to patrol three miles and one inch off the coast of Cuba. US fighter jets began flying over Havana so low that the pilots faces were visible. Yet all the talking, all the negotiations, all the action

and all the developments were taking place outside of Cuba, principally in Washington, New York and Moscow In Havana there was nothing to be done; a classic instance of “stay calm and carry on”. Most people in the Embassy could remember the war years; a little local difficulty in Cuba was not going to get them down. Phil and his colleagues continued to live amongst, and enjoy the company of, the local Cuban people. The parties continued The beer ran out but there was still plenty of Bacardi. A taste was acquired for rice and beans. But for two weeks the world stood still as those in Havana waited for the expected US invasion and bombing of Cuba.

And then, just as suddenly as the crisis started, it ended. The Russians agreed to remove their missiles. The Americans agreed not to invade Cuba. But the embargo, now being quaintly referred to as a “quarantine”, continued. Nothing and nobody was coming to, nor leaving, Cuba (except the missiles!). Embassy staff reflected on whether they would be seeing their children at Christmas Were they ever going to be able to leave Cuba? When would normality return?

But these unfamiliar obstacles were one of the reasons why diplomatic life could be so interesting and in the longer term offer a wider perspective on global conditions than living one’s life out in the United Kingdom alone could do.

Chapter 17 UnusualAssignments

Most Branch B officers overseas were employed on administrative, consular or commercial duties. But there were a few exceptional jobs. For example, in the 1960s there were two Third Secretary posts in Belgrade, then the capital ofYugoslavia, where two Branch B officers would alternate every six months, first as general “dogsbody” in Chancery (the political section of the Embassy) and then six months as the British representative on the Joint Translation Service with the Americans This produced in English a daily digest of the news in the two major Belgrade newspapers, Borba and Politika, which would then be distributed to most of the western diplomatic missions in the city. Two of these officers later moved into the fast stream where they finally ended up one asAmbassador in Finland and the other inAustria

There was a devastating earthquake in Skopje, the capital of what is now known as North Macedonia in 1963. One of the Third Secretaries drove down to the city to help with rescue work. In doing so he got to know many of the local officials unusually well, unusually because this was the most remote and secretive state that made up communist Yugoslavia. Access to officialdom there was particularly difficult for a British diplomat. But this particular officer, thanks to his contribution to the city following the earthquake, was always accorded a warm welcome.

A good working knowledge of Serbo-Croat was obviously required for this kind of work and for the Joint Translation Service For this the selected officers received intensive training in the languageoverninemonths beforeleaving London.Thetraining was given forfour days aweek at his home in Wimbledon by one Oton Grozdić, a Yugoslav national employed by the BBC World Service and by Mirijana Kendall-Taylor on the fifth day. She too was a BBC employee. Her husband was an internationally renowned pianist. Both Oton and Mirijana were patient and capable teachers. Oton often cynically remarked that his pupils thought they would be going to Yugoslavia but, in his experience of the FO’s postings policy, it would probably be anywhere but! While he had plenty of tales to tell, he rarely spoke of the great tragedy in his life. He had lost most of his family inAuschwitz.

Even intensive language training on this scale was barely enough for what was to be expected of the trainees. One of them found this out the hard way. The then Archbishop of Canterbury came on an official visit to Belgrade for talks with the Patriarch of the Serb Orthodox Church. The latter gained the impression that the Third Secretary concerned spoke quite serviceable Serbo-Croat and asked him to interpret for him and the Archbishop. The conversation did not run smoothly.SaidThird Secretary rapidly learned the first rule of interpreting which is to bone up in advance on the subjects likely to be discussed. It is hard to convey ecclesiastical thoughts in a foreign tongue when you do not even know what they mean in English. Still, the next day was taken up with an enjoyable trip to a monastery in Southern Serbia on the presidential train kindly made available by President Tito. The linguistically challenged Third Secretary was assigned to the second coach of the train with the “also rans” in the party. It was a convivial journey mostly in the company of a group of Serb Orthodox priests who had quite a penchant for the local beer.

These were quite exceptional jobs for Branch B officers and it may not be by chance that two of these officers went on to beAmbassadors in European posts and another as Consul General

in a major mission in the United States. The latter’s spell in Belgrade was, however, followed by a spell as a Commercial Officer which was much more in keeping with Branch B practice. He spent two years in Yugoslavia and never returned, though it was vaguely planned that one day he would fill the First Secretary Commercial slot. Overall it was a poor return for the FO on a nine month training investment. One unpredicted consequence of his posting to Belgrade is that his daughter, who was born there, often has problems with drop-down computer menus. Her documentation says ‘Yugoslavia’but that no longer exists.

It is worth noting that poor returns on intensive language training were certainly not the norm. David, whose story is told in the opening chapter of this book, went on to be a full-time Japanese language student, having previously studied Japanese at his own expense at Holborn College in London for a year after joining the FO. He qualified in the language at the FO’s Advanced standard, equivalent to an honours degree. This was put to very good use when he laterfoundhimselfinterpretingatHMtheQueen’s statebanquetforEmperorHirohitoinTokyo as part of Her Majesty’s state visit in 1975. Altogether David spent some 15 years in Japan as Vice-Consul in Yokohama, Vice-Consul in Tokyo, First Secretary Commercial in Tokyo and HM Consul General in Osaka. He also spent 5 years on Japan related work in London as Head of the Department of Trade and Industry’s Exports to Japan Unit where he organised the Opportunity Japan campaign which was credited with having a significant impact on the development of UK-Japan trade relations. He was also appointed International Director of InvestUK where he oversaw the activities of the FCO’s Inward Investment Promotion Officers worldwide, but with a particular emphasis on Japan and the United States. The time he had spent as ExecutiveAssistant to Sir Hugh Overton, HM Consul General & Director-General of UK Trade and Investment USAin NewYork, earlier in his career, served him well in that role.

AuniqueBranchBpostwasthatofThirdSecretaryintheofficeoftheBritishPoliticalResident in Bahrain. In the days before the British Government abrogated its 150 year old treaties with the Emirates in the Persian Gulf, the Political Resident was responsible for the discharge of the British Government’s defence and foreign policy obligations under those treaties. At the time Michael arrived to take up the position of Third Secretary, the decision had been taken to withdraw from the Gulf once certain outstanding issues had been resolved. Because of the defence commitment, there was a substantial British military presence in Bahrain and Michael’s job was to provide a day-to-day link with the army, navy and air force. In practice this meant such tasks as organising with the RAF flights for the Political Resident to remote areas of the Gulf. It also meant occasionally representing the Political Resident on the Commander’s Committee Gulf, a high powered military body where Michael, as the most junior diplomat available, was seriously outgunned and had to tread warily. It was a curiosity of the posting that, while Michael came to know well the workings of the military, the only Arabs he met during the entire posting were at the occasional dinners given by the Ruler of Bahrain for the Resident and his staff. Bizarrely too he acted as the Amateur Radio Licensing Authority for the Gulf! The job came to an end with the independence of Bahrain and Qatar, the successful creation of the UnitedArab Emirates and the withdrawal of British forces.

The journey home for Michael and his young family was by the approved route: air to Beirut, Adriatica Line to Venice which included an excursion in Alexandria and then Orient Express Paris to London. Meanwhile Michael’s heavy luggage had been despatched on a rare sailing to Manila to where Michael understood he had been posted. Not so, he was told on arrival at the FCO in London; the job had been abolished and he was going to Nigeria instead. He managed

to get the luggage offloaded in Kobe, Japan and then placed on ship going direct to Lagos. Many Japanese cars were being transported to Nigeria at that time so there was a surprising number of ships on the route.The other concern was that Michael had ordered a left hand drive car for use in the Philippines. However, by a stroke of good fortune for him the Nigerian Government had decided only months before that traffic should run on the right side of the road rather than the British colonial influenced left.

Chapter 18 The Bs’Contribution

One of the objects of the 1940s Eden reforms was that the FO should recruit personnel in a way which would provide it with a workforce more representative of British society than the public school/Oxbridge intake which had hitherto been the norm. This was a worthy and significant aim but, by the standards of the 2020s, hardly far-reaching. In 1963, following the Plowden reforms, Branch B was abolished.At that time, and for some time afterwards, women still had to resign on marriage, homosexuality had to be concealed and there were few, if any, faces from minority communities. But the stories in the preceding pages show that in the post-war years it was perfectly possible to join the Foreign Service no matter what your father did for a living and how basic your family circumstances might have been and no matter if you had been educated in a state grammar school or its Scottish equivalent.

This enlightened recruitment process, reflecting the fact that relatively few young people went on to university in the decades immediately following the Second World War, unquestionably proved of benefit to the FO. The work of the Diplomatic Service is not just about the big policy issues such as EUmembership,Americantariffs, warin EasternEurope andintheMiddleEast, but about finding outlets for British goods and services, protecting British citizens abroad, dispensing British development aid and managing in the widest sense British diplomatic missions overseas. To discharge these duties diplomats need qualities over and above the intellectual agility demandedbypolitical observationandanalysis. Itneeds themto beresilient, adaptable, resourceful and even, on occasions, to display raw courage. The preceding chapters show how officers recruited to Branch B, most of them from the old state grammar schools and Scottish senior secondary schools, could offer these very qualities. More often than not they developed the mental equipment to tackle the policy work too. Work experience tended to compensate for the absence of tertiary education.

A Branch B officer’s years of work experience overseas sometimes offered unexpected benefits. The distinguished diplomat, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, who served as British Ambassador in Israel, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, joined the Diplomatic Service as an A stream new entrant. He was first posted to the FCO’s Republic of Ireland Department where he was made desk officer for UK relations with the Republic. Opposite him, responsible for the FCO’s interest in Northern Ireland affairs, sat a Branch B man who had served in Belgrade, Paris, Bahrain, Kaduna and Kampala in a variety of jobs, mainly trade promotion but also some political, consular and military liaison work. In his book EverTheDiplomat Sir Sherard wrote of this Branch B officer:

“[He] gave me more wise advice than he will ever remember, about drafting, about what he called officemanship, about good and bad postings, and about good and bad ambassadors ”

A highly experienced Branch B officer helping to compensate for the lack of training for fast stream new entrants was never part of FCO planning, but it happened and should be counted as another Branch B contribution.

Branch B officerswereto befoundeverywhere,occasionally servingin posts wherefast stream officers did not. In any post they would normally outnumber their fast stream colleagues. In their dealing with a British diplomatic mission, members of the public were much more likely to encounter a Branch B officer than BranchA since their business was most likely to involve

consular issues, trade promotion or passport work. Until the 1980s, Branch B officers were on the whole better trained for their overseas assignments than were Branch A. There was no training for political work until the 1980s, apart from a drafting course, as Sir Sherard discovered But, as already noted, there was for commercial, consular and administration roles. If a Branch B officer succeeded in eventually becoming a Head of Post, and many did, they would arrive with much broader experience of the post’s many functions than would a fast streamer. The role of Commercial Counsellor was usually filled by an A stream officer. Many of them did so with no previous experience specifically of trade promotion work and often found themselves on a commercial course at a relatively late stage of their career. The course was always run by a Branch B officer. One such trainer went on to be posted as First Secretary in a large commercial department headed by a Counsellor who had once attended the very course the Branch B man had run.

Surviving former members of Branch B of the Foreign Service are now in their 80s and 90s. They are known as “The Old Bs”. They still meet for lunch twice a year and swap memories. Regrettably that is likely to come to an end in 2026 when the years will have caught up with so many of them that these meetings are no longer sustainable.

Appendix 1 The Foreign Office’s Name

Branch B new entrants were recruited to the Foreign Service, known widely by the public as the FO, or simply “The Office” to its staff. The Foreign Service had been formed in the 1940s by merging the Foreign Office and Diplomatic Service with the Consular Service. In 1965 the Foreign Service merged with the Commonwealth Service to create a new Diplomatic Service In 1966 the Commonwealth Office was formed by combining the Commonwealth Relations Office with the Colonial Office, followed in 1968 by its merger with the Foreign Office to create the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO).

A further change was made in 1997 when the Department for International Development (DFiD) was formed. From 1964 there had been, variously, an Overseas Development Administration or Ministry with its own Minister sometimes under the aegis of the FCO. In 2020 DFiD was merged with the FCO to form the FCDO.

The Commonwealth Relations Office was technically a home department with its staff holding Home Civil Service grades. When the Foreign and Commonwealth Office was created CRO staff were given DS equivalent grades e.g. an Executive Officer (EO) became a DS9.

Abbreviations are used in this book according to usage prevailing at the time.

Diplomatic and Civil Service Grades

The reforms of the Plowden Report in the 1960s introduced a new integrated system of grades designed to unify the Diplomatic Service, at least cosmetically, by doing away with the oldA(fast stream) and B (B stream) prefixes. In practice the two streams continued to exist. DS8 was the old fast stream entry grade. DS5 was intended to be a totally integrated grade but in reality an informal distinction developed as DS5A and DS5B. Total integration really only existed at DS4 level.

The grades used in this book vary according to their context. The personalities generally entered the Foreign Service at B5 or B6 level. As they progressed upwards they assumed the appropriate new DS grade.

There is a universally recognised system of diplomatic ranks. Those given in the table below are typical for the grade. But it was perfectly possible for a DS5 officer to enjoy the rank of Ambassador in a less important post or, for example, a DS9 officer to be a Third Secretary.