The Patriotic Art

By Martin Rickerd

Martin Rickerd considered accountancy, the Merchant Navy and journalism before joining the Foreign and Commonwealth Office a month after his eighteenth birthday as a filing clerk. Promotion soon followed, and there followed 38 years of adventure and challenge in the diplomatic service in countries around the world, from New Zealand to Barbados, Italy to Singapore and Liberia to the USA, interspersed by spells back at HQ in London. By the end of it all he had risen to the rank of Consul General, the senior resident British Government representative in an area of the southern USA three times the size of the United Kingdom. Despite all this responsibility Martin has never taken himself too seriously, as this book shows.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mereo Books
• Release date: May 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9781909304673

Martin Rickerd

At some stage in my diplomatic career, my late father gave me a paperweight bearing the motto “Diplomacy – the art of letting someone have it your way”. This brilliantly and succinctly encompasses centuries of relationships between nations and the work of countless men and women employed to advance their countries’ interests. In my 37 years, 6 months in Her Majesty’s Diplomatic Service, I came across few better definitions. I joined the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in September 1972, a month after my eighteenth birthday and straight from school – this was still a time when only the very clever or very well-connected went to university, although it was still free. My two A-levels (English and, appropriately for a would-be diplomat, French) were enough for me to set out on a peripatetic career different in every conceivable way from the life of my father, a professional man who was born, worked and died in one town. I started out with low, if any, expectations of actually becoming a “diplomat”. I had applied to join the Diplomatic Service before sitting my A levels, having already rejected the idea of working as a journalist (though the love of the written word has never left me); an accountant (I got as far as having an interview for that); a merchant sailor (partial colour-blindness meant that I could not tell a starboard light from port); and a technical draughtsman (my simplistic designs for a “new generation” of heavy goods vehicles having been politely returned by a major truck manufacturer). On 11 September 1972 I joined the Foreign Office at the bottom, as a registry file clerk, having passed an interview following my application in response to an advert in a national paper seeking “Travel-minded teenagers”.

Book preview

The Patriotic Art

Random Recollections From A (Mostly) Diplomatic Career

Martin Rickerd

Smashwords Edition

Copyright ©Martin Rickerd, December 2012

Published by Memoirs

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The moral right of Martin Rickerd to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

First published in England, December 2012

Book jacket design Ray Lipscombe

ISBN 978-1-909304-67-3

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of Memoirs.

Although the author and publisher have made every effort to ensure that the information in this book was correct when going to press, we do not assume and hereby disclaim any liability to any party for any loss, damage, or disruption caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident, or any other cause.

The views expressed in this book are purely the author’s.

Contents

Preface

Caveat

1 Starting out

2 Only just abroad

3 Godzone

4 At the heart of government

5 Trouble in paradise

6 Il bel Paese

7 Challenging times in a changing world

8 No man is an island

9 A fish out of water – working in the private sector

10 Into Africa -Côte d'Ivoire

11 Warlords, Wells and Ouaga – Liberia, Niger and Burkina Faso

12 Two special relationships

13 The other side of the pond

14 Out with a bang … then a fizzle

15 Learning to be a better diplomat

16 Being different

17 From outside – a reflection on change

18 P.S. -Envoi from a former Envoy

APPENDIX 1 -Career chronology

APPENDIX 2 -Secretaries of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs 1972–2010

APPENDIX 3 -Letter of Appointment

For Charmain, my rock, without whom

I would not have survived it all.

Preface

At some stage in my diplomatic career, my late father gave me a paperweight bearing the motto Diplomacy – the art of letting someone have it your way. This brilliantly and succinctly encompasses centuries of relationships between nations and the work of countless men and women employed to advance their countries’ interests. In my 37 years, 6 months in Her Majesty’s Diplomatic Service, I came across few better definitions.

I joined the Foreign and Commonwealth Office¹ in September 1972, a month after my eighteenth birthday and straight from school – this was still a time when only the very clever or very well-connected went to university, although it was still free. My two A-levels (English and, appropriately for a would-be diplomat, French) were enough for me to set out on a peripatetic career different in every conceivable way from the life of my father, a professional man who was born, worked and died in one town.

I started out with low, if any, expectations of actually becoming a diplomat. I had applied to join the Diplomatic Service before sitting my A-levels, having already rejected the idea of working as a journalist (though the love of the written word has never left me); an accountant (I got as far as having an interview for that); a merchant sailor (partial colour-blindness meant that I could not tell a starboard light from port); and a technical draughtsman (my simplistic designs for a new generation of heavy goods vehicles having been politely returned by a major truck manufacturer). On 11 September 1972 I joined the Foreign Office at the bottom, as a registry file clerk, having passed an interview following my application in response to an advert in a national paper seeking Travel-minded teenagers.

In those days, one could join at the bottom and still have some hope of making it to the higher echelons of the service. I discovered early on several examples of people who had done just that, progressing all the way from registry officer to Ambassador. But they were few and far between, and never in my wildest dreams did I think that I would finish my career as the most senior resident British government representative in an area three times the size of the United Kingdom.

The Office has changed almost beyond recognition since I joined. As the rest of Whitehall moved towards more private-sector models, the FCO adopted Objectives in order better to match its Resources, both Human and Financial, with its Outputs. (As a Person, I still prefer to be managed by a Personnel Department rather than a Human Resources Directorate.) It was only just before I married my wife, also a member of the DS, that the rule requiring women to resign upon marriage was abolished. There were very few women in senior positions then, and they were all unmarried. Now we have more than 20 female Heads of Mission, including two whose husbands are Ambassadors to neighbouring countries.

Communications have changed beyond recognition. In 1973 I felt privileged to witness in action the FCO’s first fax machine, centrally located in the Communications Department and used only to send the most pressingly urgent texts to Washington and the UK Mission to the UN in New York – at the impressive rate, I seem to recall, of a page every four minutes. As I left the Office nearly four decades later, email was the communication of choice, and even the time-honoured telegram – an agreed message sent formally over the signature of either the Ambassador or the Foreign Secretary, depending on which direction it was travelling – had been replaced by something called the e-gram, a bastard child of both systems.

At the personal level, the way DS officers were selected for appointments at home and overseas also moved to copy the private sector model. In the 1970s and 80s, you simply received a phone call from Personnel telling you where your next posting would be, and when you should be there. You didn’t question how the decision had been reached, and a refusal to go would have serious consequences. A phalanx of other personnel officials would then swing into action to take care of everything from your pre-posting training (including languages, because the Office would often be sending you to a country not speaking any of the languages you already had) to arranging the packing and transport of your personal effects and car. In the 2000s the postings system mixes personal preferences, expressed up to two years in advance, with vacancies advertised – sometimes against external competition – and involves interviews held by busy policy (as opposed to personnel) officials, sometimes on the phone thousands of kilometres away, in a system intended to encourage better-informed decision-making. It seems to work, after a fashion, but I fear at the expense of placing too much emphasis on potential over experience.

Tighter budgetary control has led to the need to reduce the number of UK-based staff overseas, to the extent that in 2009 the decision was made to do away with all such middle-ranking staff in the management cadre. The mind boggles at the future findings of the National Audit Office, called in to investigate fraudulent activities at some of our posts in less transparent countries.

At the top, the Foreign Secretary and his Ministerial colleagues appear to travel more and more to less and less familiar places.

Through all these changes, the essential role of the British diplomat has evolved relatively little in broad terms. It is still to represent British interests overseas to his or her best ability. They may be called upon to do that using a laptop in a hotel room in a nation that few of their compatriots could name, let alone find on a map. But the basic task is the same – to protect Britons abroad when they need it; to promote British business and seek foreign investment in Britain; and to ensure that the UK’s myriad international links are fostered for the benefit of the country as a whole.

Most of this work never makes the headlines, and doesn’t need to. I remember somebody telling me once that the military takes over when the diplomats cock it up. It’s not that simple, of course, but the great majority of diplomacy does not need publicity – and, indeed, a lot more could be achieved without it (Wikileaks take note). In my career, I was fortunate to serve in circumstances that brought a relative balance between quiet diplomacy and the right sort of headlines. Sometimes they were the wrong sort, but not – as far as I know – as a direct result of anything I did.

It follows that much of this collection of anecdotes is about things that happened away from the news stories; they sometimes contributed to them, perhaps, but were not the story itself. I hope that the following pages bring an informative, occasionally light-hearted, perspective to my small part in British diplomacy during the 1970s, 80s, 90s and Noughties. But more than anything I hope the book will demonstrate that a diplomat is a normal human being, not some breed apart.

Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire

Summer 2012

diplomacy: n. the patriotic art of lying for one's country. -from The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce (1911); originally published as The Cynic’s Word Book (1906)

An ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country. -Sir Henry Wotton, English Ambassador to Venice 1604-24

Caveat

This book is an accumulation of personal recollections from my career, and is not intended to be a kiss-and-tell exposé of the secrets of the world’s leading figures or an analysis of key foreign policy issues. Anyone expecting such a narrative may put the book back on the shelf now.

I do recount some moments in the company of people the reader will recognise. Where I do so, I have chosen discretion over notoriety and anonymity where identification is unnecessary. Often the reader will be able to deduce who is the subject of the piece; in other cases, the mystery may even add something to the reading experience.

Though retired, I am still subject to the Official Secrets Act, so to avoid the red pen of the FCO information police I have omitted reference to any topic that might be considered sensitive or prejudicial to national interests. I have also observed Buckingham Palace Rules (in both senses), exercising the required prudence in relating my interactions with members of the Royal Family.

I have been careful, too, in identifying associates in the FCO and other foreign services, mainly by allowing most of them to remain anonymous. But undoubtedly I could not have done my job without my colleagues, British or from other nations, and most of these stories would not exist without them. Thanks to them, whoever and wherever they may be.

Chapter One

STARTING OUT

Are you a travel-minded teenager? Join the Foreign and Commonwealth Office as a Grade 10 officer, and you could be dealing with correspondence from around the world in less than a year. And a career of service overseas beckons...

An advert with wording something like that caught my attention in the Daily Telegraph one April morning in 1972, when I was still two months away from taking my A-levels at my school in Warminster and undecided what career to pursue. Having grown up since the age of four with a stepfather who spent most of his working life in the British Army, I had little interest in any job that did not involve travel. By the age of eight I had lived in three countries – England, Malaya and West Germany. Even in his second career following retirement from the Army, my stepfather and mother had moved house every three years or so. Moving was in my blood.

So I wrote off to the Civil Service Commission in Basingstoke (Alençon Link, I recall; even that was foreign), more in hope than expectation. Several weeks later, an OHMS envelope arrived with the news that I had been invited for interview in London on a date in May. I took a day off school and travelled up from Wiltshire on the train, reading the Telegraph on the way (the family would not have approved of my buying anything else). I scoured the paper for foreign affairs stories, preparing for the grilling I was about to receive in the Commission offices in the Standard Chartered Bank building in Northumberland Avenue.

The interview board comprised three people, as I had been led to expect: two Foreign Office officials plus one, a psychologist probably, from the Commission. The last of these said nothing throughout the interview, silently taking notes. As I recall, things went fairly smoothly, with questions based on my background – which I imagined must have been somewhat unorthodox compared to some of their applicants – about my experiences abroad and so on. Then they came to the nub – my knowledge of foreign affairs.

I had been preparing for this moment for days, reading all the foreign news the Daily Telegraph deigned to publish and listening with special interest to the BBC’s foreign correspondents in the news bulletins. I was ready for anything.

What interests you in foreign affairs, Mr Rickerd? asked the suit in the middle.

Mentally recalling the front page of the Telegraph, I calmly responded I think the most important issue at the moment is what Idi Amin is doing to the Asians in Uganda.

Ah, really, said Middle Suit, apparently taken aback that someone applying for such a lowly position as registry officer should even have heard of Idi Amin. What in particular?

I proceeded to recount the gist of the Telegraph’s front page article and associated editorial, and the board seemed satisfied (I wouldn’t go as far as saying impressed; they had probably read it too). They asked a question about Dom Mintoff and Malta, which I answered with ease – that must have been something else I had read beforehand – and that was that. The psychologist stopped scribbling, and may even have smiled.

Some days later another manila OHMS envelope flopped on to the Warminster doormat and I learned that I had been successful. There remained the formality of the Security Interview but, barring an unexpected Red Under The Bed, I was in.

After a couple of weeks a phone call informed me that a vetting officer would call at home for the interview. I wasn’t sure what to expect – some George Smiley type, mackintosh collar turned up, or a man in some unrecognised uniform? In the event, when I opened the door I found a sixtyish man in a grey suit, trilby and black tie.

Mr Rickerd? Sorry about the tie. Just come from a funeral, you know.

I sympathised, in the way one does, not knowing whether it had been the funeral of a family member, friend or (my suspicious mind wondered) a colleague from the Security Service who would lie forever in an unmarked grave.

Over tea and biscuits provided by my mother – who I assumed to be listening on the other side of the lounge door – I was asked the standard 1970s security questions: had I ever been to any Communist country or met/spoken/seen any person from such a country; had any member of my family ever been to any Communist country... you get the idea. I replied truthfully that I had only been to fine, upstanding Capitalist countries (the Communist Emergency in Malaya having been successfully put down before the family briefly moved there in 1961).

Good. One last question. Do you have a girlfriend at the moment?

I imagined that, if so, I was about to be asked whether she had ever been to any Communist country, etc. I replied, again truthfully, and perhaps (with hindsight) a little sadly, no.

That’s all fine, then, Martin. Thanks very much, he said, and stood up to leave, packing his notebook into his government black briefcase. As he stood on the doorstep, he turned and asked, Oh yes, one more thing. No boyfriends, at all?

No.

Jolly good, jolly good. Well, bye-bye.

And that was it. Last hurdle jumped. In the Valete of the school magazine, former students were listed with their life choices next to their names. Among polytechnic and accountancy, Foreign Office looked good.

* * * *

With a mix of excitement and some trepidation, I travelled up to London with my mother and stepfather on a Sunday afternoon to start my working life. They delivered me to a hostel in South Kensington, where I was to share a five-bed room in which each occupant had a chest of drawers and a narrow wardrobe. There was a single washbasin in one corner. Other facilities were along the corridor, shared with other rooms on the floor. It was more basic than I had anticipated but, at £6.50 a week including breakfasts and evening meals, I couldn’t complain. The room also had a small balcony looking out over some open land and a short exposed stretch of Circle Line track towards a building that was then the West London Air Terminal. That night, my first in London, I fell asleep early and didn’t hear my roommates come in.

The following morning, 11 September 1972, I stepped across the threshold of the Curtis Green Building, then occupied by the FCO administration departments, on the Embankment, to begin the new chapter of my life. The personnel officer who met me was an attractive blonde, an encouraging first impression of potential work colleagues in this alien new world.

She gave me a brief introductory chat and handed me a formal letter of appointment. I didn’t read this until later in the day, when I was struck (as I still am) by its gentlemanly tone, as if welcoming me to some sort of club². I then signed a declaration on the Official Secrets Act.

You’ll be working in the Communications Department, my host announced. Report at 1.30 to room K109. That’s in King Charles Street; I’ll point it out to you as we leave the building.

After a sandwich from Barclay Brothers in Derby Gate (whence I would obtain many lunches over the subsequent two years) I made my way across Whitehall and along King Charles Street, holding my temporary security pass proudly in my hand. With the FCO on one side of the road and the Treasury on the other, this was the centre of government and it was an imposing sight for a green 18-year-old just about to begin government service. I arrived at the Clive Steps entrance with three minutes to spare and made my way with confidence up to the first floor, where I was sure I would find room 109. At the top of the stairs was 168; to the right 170; logically, I thought, 109 would be the other way.

Eight minutes later I was back at 168 having found no number lower than 120. The Foreign Office was not as well laid out as I had expected. I arrived breathless, and expecting a cool reception for being late, at room 109 – which turned out to be on the ground floor – at 1.35, to find its occupant returning from the tea point with a steaming mug in his hand.

Oh, are you Martin? Sorry I’m late; went to get a cuppa and got talking to someone.

* * * *

It seemed to me that the Communications Department would be the ideal place to start a career in the Foreign Office: at the heart of things, the nerve centre. Reality turned out to be rather different and I found myself filing papers about radio links between Embassies and the Office, Queen’s Messenger services and arcane disputes between British Airways and the FCO Outward Bag Room.

Determined to learn as much as possible about the exciting new world of diplomacy, I concentrated on subjects that brought exotic parts of the globe to my desk. The Office was in the middle of a survey of its own communication links in an effort to improve them (the first of many exercises I would encounter over my career in which London asked its Embassies questions to which it should already have known the answers). The detailed responses were too technical for my interest, so I took to removing and collecting the compliments slips attached to the completed questionnaires. My love of geography meant that I knew where almost all of the Posts were on the globe, although a few stumped me and I had to look them up in the Diplomatic Service Overseas Reference List, an internal quarterly stapled publication that listed all British Embassies, High Commissions, Consulates and Delegations and their key staff. I soon had a collection of compliments slips from nearly every Post in the world.

As a young new entrant, I marvelled at this, my own miniature global gazetteer. Exotic place names like Kuching, Beira, Izmir and Recife conjured up images of the far-flung diplomatic network and I longed to serve in these places. But as I read some of the detail sent with the communications returns, I realised that everything might not be as alluring as it seemed. Some of the Posts had also sent extracts from their Post Report, an annually-updated note of local conditions intended to inform staff heading there what to expect. One of the standard sections was entitled Restrictions on Movement. Reading the report from Asuncion, Paraguay, with rising interest, I was disappointed to read There are no restrictions on movement. There is, however, nowhere to go.

* * * *

I struck up a relationship with one or two of the Queen’s Messengers, a Corps of some 75 men, mainly ex-Services, who spent their lives in planes escorting diplomatic bags containing classified material between the Office and overseas Posts. Their silver greyhound logo and many stories, some of them undoubtedly embellished in the retelling, of exciting encounters with awkward border guards and dangerous excursions into unfriendly territory made the QMs an exotic topic for a newbie. Added to which, one of my stepfather’s former army colleagues had been a QM and had reputedly had a nervous breakdown from the stress, ending up talking to the bags sitting in the First Class seats next to him.

One QM appeared to take pity on me, an impoverished (take-home pay for October 1972: £74.60) junior officer, and brought me a carton of cigarettes back with him from a trip to Peking. I gave him a token amount in recompense and looked forward to sampling the exotic oriental blend from the No.2 Shanghai Tobacco Factory when my current supply – about five John Player Specials – ran out. I was disappointed to discover that China’s best burned down like dried straw and smelt like a bonfire.

One of the communications questionnaires had been from Stockholm. On the question about diplomatic couriers, the Embassy had reported that the Swedish Foreign Ministry had one lone King’s Messenger. When something really, really important and secret needed to be sent from an Embassy to Stockholm, he would get a call to fly to the relevant part of the world to pick it up. Otherwise, the Swedes did everything by phone, the person at each end of the call simply making their own record of the conversation.

By contrast, the FCO (which admittedly had a rather larger overseas network than Sweden’s) had a complex array of communication methods, from letters sent by bag to telegrams to the new-fangled fax machine. And the phone, of course; but the phones all had bold labels stating Speech Not Secure, like something from the Second World War. Being in Communications Department enabled me to see something of this network and I used to enjoy meandering through the jumble of dust-covered interconnected Portakabins covering the floor of Durbar Court, a large open area in the King Charles Street part of the main FCO building.³ Here all telegrams were photocopied for distribution around the Office and Whitehall, with white for incoming, pink for outgoing and yellow for Saving telegrams – typed in telegram format, but sent in the diplomatic bag. (I never quite saw the point of those.) The FCO internal messengers, a generally cheerful band of middle-aged individuals, carried locked boxes of printed telegrams from Comms to every department along with the regular mail. Advance copies of urgent telegrams, and some other urgent papers, would be sent to distribution points around the building by Lamson tube, a labyrinth of pipes through which messages rolled up in cylindrical plastic containers were fired by compressed air. In all, the Office used millions of sheets of paper a month in this process; apart from the few file copies of each telegram, the vast majority ended up being burned.

As the years passed, paper distribution was reduced, then ended as the Office was computerised. Trees everywhere must have heaved a sigh of relief; in efficiency terms, the upside was that every desk officer in every department could receive telegrams direct on their computer screen, rather faster than the average messenger could make their way along the tiled corridors.

* * * *

Those tiles had mostly been laid at the time of the building’s construction in the 1870s and 1880s. The building now known as the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has at various stages housed the Foreign Office, India Office, Colonial Office, Commonwealth Relations Office and – at the Whitehall end – the Home Office. The disparate parts of the building had been joined as the Departments had morphed or moved out, with the result that by the 1970s it contained all sorts of weird half-staircases and mezzanines, each with small offices tucked into corners. Work-friendly it was not, but somehow it worked.

My office, K110, was in the corner of the Main Building overlooking St James’s Park and Horse Guards Parade. It is a sign of the times that such a prestigious location was then occupied by two Grade 10 officers filing paper, and their Grade 9 supervisor. (It is now a Minister’s office.) In my early days in the Office I was keen to explore the rest of building, and learnt my way through the Hole In The Wall to the rooms beginning with W – for Downing Street West – and, if I was feeling adventurous, E (yes, you guessed it – Downing Street East). In between were EMS and EMN (Downing Street East Mezzanine South and North, since you ask).

One day on my travels I was walking at some speed along the shiny first-floor tiles of W, past the Ambassadors Waiting Room, when I literally bumped into Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the Foreign Secretary, as he came the other way through the swing doors. I muttered an embarrassed apology but he and the Private Secretary were already halfway to the steps into the courtyard where their car awaited. My first brush with power.

* * * *

A year to the day after joining the Office, I was transferred to Defence Department. Like Communications, this department has enjoyed a variety of supposedly contemporary nomenclatures over the years; but in 1973 it did what it said on the tin, dealing with the whole FCO relationship with the military world from getting places on UK defence training courses for overseas officers and seeking clearance for Royal Navy ships to visit foreign ports, to big-ticket bilateral defence issues and the relationship with NATO. In September 1973 I took up duties as Assistant Desk Officer for Military Training.

I shared a desk with (literally, sitting opposite) a more senior officer and there were two others in the room. Unlike Communications Department registry, this new office had no panorama of the park; indeed, its only daylight came through a single window, looking out across ten metres to the windows of inward-facing offices in Downing Street East.

From this turret-like part of the building, we organised the world’s military’s requirements for places on British defence training courses. I was impressed with some of the course titles on offer, as I had no idea that such people existed or needed training. Ab initio aircraft artificer, Senior bandsman advanced and Advanced IED give an idea of the huge range. (This was well before IED – Improvised Explosive Device – became sadly commonplace in the language.)

The job naturally involved a lot of liaison with the Ministry of Defence, an organisation about which I knew nothing other than that it was vast and on the other side of Whitehall. It turned out that even that was wrong (the location), as the MOD occupied numerous other nondescript buildings around the capital. I got to visit the MOD Main Building and Old War Office to talk to Army training people, the Old Admiralty Building for the Navy and Adastral House in Holborn for the RAF. For a very junior officer with only a year’s experience in the FCO, all this was a great deal more interesting than filing.

As if to confirm my elevation to greater things, I was asked to draft my first telegram. FCO telegrams were in theory formal communications from the Foreign Secretary to the Head of Post overseas and went over the FS’s name. My drafts required clearance by someone at least two grades higher than me (which my desk companion conveniently was). So I embarked on my first telegram, imagining how Alec Douglas-Home would put my important message into words.

The issue involved a request from the High Commission in Suva, Fiji, for a place on a course at the Royal Military School of Music, at Kneller Hall in Twickenham, for a member of the Republic of Fiji Military Forces band. The incoming telegram had stated the name of the bandsman who wished to attend, the dates of the course in question and confirmed that the RFMF could arrange and pay for travel. It requested confirmation that a place was available and that the FCO would pay the tuition cost from its military training assistance scheme. After checking with the relevant officers in the MOD, I drafted the following succinct reply:

FROM FCO

TO ROUTINE SUVA TELNO ...

OF ... NOVEMBER 1973

INFO ROUTINE MODUK

YOUR TELNO ...:

MUSIC TRAINING COURSE FOR BANDSMAN ...

YES AND YES. DOUGLAS-HOME

It may only have been three words, and of course the Foreign Secretary never saw it, but it was my first telegram and it meant a lot to me.

* * * *

One of the benefits of printed copies of communications was the ability to write comments on them, in order to suggest further action to another officer or simply for posterity. When the file copy of my Suva telegram came up from Comms I just wrote PA (Put Away) and gave it to the registry clerk to file. In my previous job, it had been me responding to someone else’s PA instruction. Although I was now in a position to give the instruction, I decided there and then that I would never forget where I had begun. I would always bear in mind that there was someone at the bottom.

Throughout the years when paper was still the main medium for communication and document storage, I saw some enlightening, bizarre and plain funny written comments. For example, it was standard practice for all outgoing correspondence to be carbon-copied to a Float folder, which would be circulated once a week to other members of the department to ensure that senior colleagues knew what their juniors were doing. It was tacitly understood that only senior officers would write marginalia. Carried away by a comment in a letter by a head of department, a junior officer once wrote in the margins of his boss’s letter Round objects, which he thought was a witty and polite way of expressing his less than complimentary view of his master’s words. As chance would have it, the head of department had been away and only saw the float after it had completed its circulation. On seeing the junior’s comment, the head wrote underneath Who is Mr Round, and to what does he object?

Defence Department correspondence threw up one or two witty or sarcastic comments. One letter received from the Embassy in Kinshasa began: The Ambassador has asked me in his absence to reply to your letter... Someone in the department had written the marginal comment: Psychic? This reminds me of the story, possibly apocryphal, of a telegram from an Embassy which took the formality of telegrams to its logical conclusion. Observing the stricture that telegrams were nominally from the Ambassador to the Foreign Secretary, a distraught number two sent an immediate signal to the FCO:

I WAS INVOLVED IN A ROAD ACCIDENT TODAY AND AM CURRENTLY IN HOSPITAL, UNCONSCIOUS.

* * * *

Although I didn’t see much of my colleagues outside working hours, I did get involved with some extra-curricular activities as a way of meeting people beyond my immediate circle. One such was my involvement with a slightly scurrilous in-house magazine for younger members of the FCO called Serendip. I saw a copy of the thin Gestetner-produced leaflet quite early on and discovered that someone in my department was on the editorial committee; when I mentioned that I had written some pieces for my school magazine, I was invited to get engaged in its production.

The magazine received some form of official sanction, or at least the Administration generally turned a blind eye to it, and there was an editorial office in the basement of the Treasury building (the St James’s Park end of which was in those days occupied by some FCO departments). This windowless broom cupboard with a single, shadeless light hanging from the centre of the ceiling contained a couple of cast-off desks and chairs, a filing cabinet, a manual Gestetner machine and associated consumables such as boxes of coloured paper liberated from the stationery cupboards of various departments. When I first ventured along the poorly-lit basement corridors to find the room, I had no idea that I was passing the blocked-off entrance to the Cabinet War Rooms, where Churchill had hunkered down and which would later be renovated and become a major tourist attraction.

Due to several people being posted abroad, I soon found myself as de facto editor – in fact by this stage it was reduced almost to a one-man show, with help from one-off contributors – and set about reinvigorating its slightly shabby formula in the hope of broadening its appeal. I also suggested a new title, Dipsomacy or something similar, to distance the publication from the less scrupulous aspects of its past. But the limitations of writing most of the content myself, as well as typing the stencils and producing the hard copy, meant that it got thinner and thinner and, although I found somebody to take it on after I left, I don’t think it survived long.

* * * *

My roommates in the hostel in South Kensington introduced me to the local alehouse, the Hoop & Toy, a chain pub with a basement snug in addition to the main bar on the ground floor. Over the two years I was in South Ken I spent a good number of evenings in the Hoop, not least because I struck up an entirely platonic friendship with one of the barmaids in the snug. Although my favourite tipple of the time (and for many years afterwards) was draught Guinness, my gallantry towards the young lady behind the bar was such that I used to consume any drinks she mis-poured, rather than see her pour them away. Hence I once found myself drinking the unforgettable – not in a good way – concoction of whisky and blackcurrant, which Kate had mistakenly prepared for a customer instead of the traditional rum and black. Such tribulations had their benefits, however. When I announced that I was leaving the area to move to Battersea, the staff gave me a Guinness pint glass as a memento of many happy hours spent in the Hoop.

There was another watering hole I visited with friends from the hostel, although only once – the Chelsea Drugstore on King’s Road. Made famous by a reference in a Rolling Stones song, the Drugstore had acquired mythical status and drinking there was a must-do for any self-respecting 18-year-old starting out in London SW. I never set foot in the ancillary parts of the establishment, and the beer was overpriced, but at least I could say I had been.

While at school I had dabbled in amateur dramatics and I was pleased to learn that the FCO had its own dramatics society. Through a colleague in Defence Department I got involved and had a small part in one production, staged in a room in an MOD building on Northumberland Avenue. I do not remember the play, but recall that the female lead – who in real life married the leading man, who went on to become Ambassador to Algeria – had a strange way of pronouncing daiquiri, making the ending rhyme with Roubillac.

A further distraction, of which I am less proud, was my brief involvement in trade union affairs. A colleague who was on the branch committee of the Civil and Public Servants Association (the trade union for junior and middle-ranking civil servants) persuaded me that I should join the picket line at the Whitehall end of King Charles Street on a day of national CPSA action in support of the latest pay claim. I duly stood there handing out fliers and attempting to persuade staff not to go to work. The succinct refusals directed at me were an object lesson in the strength of feeling on