The problem picture

One of the last bays of our exhibition Edwardian Opulence was dedicated to that now forgotten phenomenon the “problem picture,” in other words paintings in which, quite contrary to the academic conventions of Victorian history painting, the moral purpose of the scene or narrative was deliberately occluded. This was also the subject of an excellent essay in the catalogue by Pamela Fletcher. At best these Edwardian problem pictures raised more questions than they answered, and for that very reason achieved widespread popularity. Their meanings were the subject of much speculation in the popular press. I suppose no coincidence, however strange, ought to surprise me these days, yet I was astonished this morning to discover a reference to the problem picture in the concluding portion of a confidential dispatch from Sir Andrew Noble, British Ambassador to Mexico, to the Earl of Home, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, dated Mexico City, October 1960. Not perhaps the most obvious source of light entertainment on a glorious morning in the fall, but the reason for this is that I have been doing a little work on the Castle of Chapultepec in Mexico City, which in 1864 the Emperor Maximilian made his official residence. Anyway, the relevant passage reads:

…The first post abroad in which I served was Rio de Janeiro, almost thirty years ago. In those days the Diplomatic Service regarded Latin America as a jungle, better perhaps than Central Africa, but no more important in the scale of world values. We paid lip service to the importance of the A.B.C. countries, Argentina, Brazil and Chile, largely because of the important British investments, and therefore dividends, to be protected; to be sent to any other Latin-American post was banishment. The Service view was aptly parodied by a small picture hanging in the room of Mr. Collier (now Sir Laurence Collier [1890–1976], the Head of the Northern Department [and sometime British Ambassador to Norway, 1939–50]). This reproduced one of his father’s problem pictures, which showed an older man sitting behind a desk in serious pose; opposite him was a young man clearly struggling with tortured apprehension. The caption below described the older man as the Diplomatic Private Secretary, then master of our postings, and put into his mouth the ominous sentence: “We want a really good man for Bogotá.”

If only I had fastened upon this, much as one might snatch a precious jewel from the dustbin, in time to craft a suitable footnote for the catalogue, or, better, to lob it to Pamela—so that she (and we) could demonstrate the long shelf life of the problem picture, even at the heart of Whitehall. Note that Sir Andrew did not feel it necessary to name Sir Laurence’s artist father, the Hon. John Collier, or indeed to apostrophize “problem picture.” Further evidence, if any were needed, that almost everything is connected and nothing much dwells in isolation.

The consul-general

Old Hanoi

Every bit as engaging as His Honour Mr. Craig in Dubai, Daphne Park (the late Baroness Park of Monmouth) furnished her valedictory dispatch to the Secretary of State from the British consulate-general in Hanoi on October 25, 1970—St. Crispin’s Day. Although she was H.M. Consul-General, it is now openly acknowledged that she was also a high-ranking, experienced, and extremely effective officer of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), so her tour of duty in Hanoi was a dangerous one. Yet even if she had not been a British spy, Lady Park’s despatch reveals a keen eye for the conditions of life and the almost inconceivable hardships endured by ordinary people in North Vietnam, even while she and all the other western diplomats were prevented from making more than the most superficial contact or communication with anyone. Even so, she was alert to the stoicism and cheerfulness and the domestic economy of families, and, above all, the mood and appearance of Vietnamese children—and reported everything she saw in the absence of anything more politically useful or diplomatically promising. Except for Pyongyang it is difficult to imagine a tougher or more trying “hardship post” than Hanoi during the later stages of the Vietnam war.

Sir,

The Residence was formerly a house of ill-fame. Handerchiefs are boiled in the saucepans, other dirty clothes in the dustbin. When the household cat disappeared, opinion was divided whether she had been eaten by the neighbours or the rats. When even more water than usual flooded the bathroom floor, and even less (though more noisome) water came from the tap, and the plumbers eventually came, they withdrew for three days to attend cadre meetings before removing the dead rats they found in the pipes. No rodent extermination exists because, officially, rats have been eliminated. Unfortunately the rats do not know this. When Ambassadors come to dinner and it rains, the drawing-room floor is covered with buckets and saucepans to catch the water from the ceiling. The major-domo at the Residence has been at some earlier time an inmate of a mental institution; the misfortune is that he was ever released. Nearly every necessity of life must be imported, though only upon receipt, after some months, of import permits listing each jar of herbs, each bundle of toothpicks. The Director of Customs has sometimes refused a permit, or proposed to allow in only part of the order, on the ground that Her Majesty’s Representative “has had enough this year” and does not need it. The presents most prized by local staff, when they dare to accept them, are razor blades, bicycle repair outfits, bottles (empty) and Aspro…

The small but fortunate number of those who have served here will find no difficulty in guessing that this dispatch comes from Hanoi. They too have been Non-Persons, issuing visas on affidavits, and yearly Queen’s Brithday invitations to Viet-Namese, who do not come, on cards without crests. They have received warnings not to enter forbidden areas, but no map defining them. Out of tender Viet-Namese regard for their lives and health they have been yearly refused a bicycle, as well as being denied access to the swimming pool, the International Club, the diplomatic shop, and, for nine years, permission to travel outside the city. But like me, most of them have wanted to come here and have left with some regret—though never quite enough to ask for another year. The very great political interest of the post is still not enough to account for its fascination; I have tried therefore in this valedictory dispatch to define the peculiar flavour of Hanoi, and to communicate what it is possible to learn about the North Viet-Namese from the sheer physical fact of living here.

The disagreeable and restrictive features of life in North Viet-Nam which I have cited are no more than incidental, though they wear away time, temper and sometimes health. The real hardship lies in the fact that, surrounded by Viet-Namese, we can know none of them. It is in part our non-recognition of North Viet-Nam which creates this special vacuum round us, and it is a wise policy which limits our tour here to a year: it might be difficult to report objectively for longer. Yet even if the end of the war should bring about the establishment of diplomatic relations and hence the relaxation of the present restrictions upon us, isolation from the Viet-Namese will continue, I believe, to be the rule. The unconsciously arrogant reserve which the Viet-Namese display at home, even towards their friends, will be increasingly reinforced by the defensive security processes of a Communist society. The shooting war over, the ideological war will go on, and there are few grounds for believing that Communism has been a temporary expedient here and that the rulers of North Viet-Nam are merely waiting to slough their Communist skin and appear in fresh and uncommitted nationalist colours. It may be a long time before this snake changes skin again…

When I arrived here 13 months ago buffaloes grazed on the grass in front of the Consulate-General, the factory defence militia practiced unarmed combat and grenade throwing there, an occasional cyclo-pousse creaked past carrying a family and its chattels, and at night the bats swooped and the cicada were noisy. None of this has changed. But the sentry outside the Algerian Embassy has planted a garden round his sentry-box, Hanoi is full of new lorries, the shape of Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum is under debate, and the State Plan for 1970 has allowed the Residence roof to be mended; my successor will not need to catch the drips in the drawing room. A new kitten appeared at the Residence this month, and may one day kill rats if it survives. We have moved a few steps out of Limbo for we have been allowed to travel, and perhaps even hell is a little less hot than before. The children are back from the country and Hanoi is a year further from the war. I do not yet know, and neither do the Viet-Namese, whether that means they are a year nearer to peace.

I am sending a copy of this despatch to to Her Majesty’s Representatives in Saigon, Washington, Paris, Moscow, Vientiane, Phnom Penh, Bangkok, Peking, Tokyo, Canberra, Wellington and Ottawa and to the Political Advisor to the Commander-in-Chief at Singapore.

I have, &c.,

Daphne Park

Officially Lady Park (known to her friends and colleagues as Daffers) went from the Belgian Congo to Hanoi, and proceeded thence to be British chargé d’affaires in Outer Mongolia. Unofficially, however, in 1975 she rose to become Controller, Western Hemisphere, of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), the highest rank then attained by a British woman in the espionage community. She died in 2010.

The Political Agent

Old Dubai

I have been reading Parting Shots, an anthology of extraordinarily entertaining extracts from British diplomats’ valedictory despatches from posts all over the world. Edited by Matthew Parris and Andrew Bryson, these lively documents were mostly never intended to be read outside the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in Whitehall. Indeed, their contents would probably have caused a great deal of embarrassment to H.M. government had they achieved wider distribution at the time of their composition. Tempus fugit, however, and the comparatively recent Freedom of Information Act has provided the editors with the best tool with which to harvest their selection from hitherto classified Foreign Office files. My favorite—though the choice has been exceedingly difficult—is the wistful dispatch furnished on September 27, 1964, to Her Britannic Majesty’s Acting Political Resident (Bahrain) by the Political Agent at Dubai, in other words not very long before the creation of the independent United Arab Emirates, not quite fifty years ago:

Sir,

The title of Her Majesty’s Political Agent, I have the honour to submit, is an exceedingly romantic one. Even the dourest would not deny that it carries a less prosaic, less workaday ring than Commercial Officer or Second Secretary (Information). It has to begin with (despite a lamentable increase of one-third in our numbers over the past three years) a growing scarcity value. To the best of my knowledge only four of us survive; and there is at times an enjoyable feeling of political agents contra mundum. The name, too, is rich in associations. It belongs with those other old and evocative titles: Collector, Resident, District Commissioner. It suggests remoteness in time and place. One feels that a Political Agent is (or should be) at the end of the line, one of those originals on whom the sun used never to set, the final, executive blood vessel in the network of arteries that stretched out, long, efficient and complex, from the distant heart of empire; the true ultima ratio regum. The ghosts of dead colleagues rise up: in the club at Mandalay, saddling their horses in Peshawar, haranguing the tribes in the Kalahari. And the nostalgia grows with the awareness that one is very nearly the last of that very long line, those thousand men who month by month sent back their despatches to the district headquarters, to the provincial capitals, and finally to the red boxes of Whitehall…

I take the view, it will now be evident, that, having been given a title, one might as well enjoy it. But the times are changing. There has been criticism, as Your Excellency knows, of the imperialist flavour of the name, and talk of adopting something more consonant with our egalitarian world. The nature of the post is also changing. Already the functions of my colleagues in our sophisticated neighbours, Bahrain and Qatar, are inclining more to the ambassadorial and less to the pro-consular. Dubai has begun to take the same well-trodden road and perhaps before long will be catching up [!]. The gunboats still call, but they are less peremptory than before. The Political Agent still commands, but more often now he suggests or advises.

Yet on the Trucial Coast, more perhaps than anywhere else, the old regime persists. The atmosphere is on the one hand imperial India. The guard at the compound gate hoist the flag at sunrise, and all day long it looks down upon the dhows an ferryboats in Dubai Creek. Below the windtowers the bazaars are crowded with Sindis and Baluchis, Bengalis and Pathans, dhobi-wallahs, babus, and chokidars. The Agent sits in court below the Royal Coat of Arms and sees the old procession of clerks and petition writers. His servants wear turbans and puggarees and long shirwani coats. He inspects gaols and pursues smugglers, runs hospitals and builds roads. He takes the salute from the Trucial Oman Scouts, on a sandy barrack square, amid ornamental cannon, pennants on lances, bugles and pipes and drums. He makes State tours with reception tents and dining tents and sleeping tents, trestle tables, carpets and military escorts. He is very much a bara sahib.

But he is also a sheikh. All year round he sits and receives his callers: Rulers with business of State; tribesmen with pastoral complaints; conspirators with offers of partnership; wealthy merchants seeking agencies; gold smugglers seeking passports; schoolboys seeking scholarships to England. To each he offers, through his coffee-maker girt about with the great silver dagger, the tiny, handleless cups of black spiced coffee. Twice or thrice a year he sits in full majlis while the visitors pour in with congratulations, sweetmeats, Christmas cakes and fat goats. His letters are addressed to “His Honour, the Most Glorious, the Magnificence of Her Majesty’s Trusted One in the Trucial States, the Revered.” He decides fishing disputes, negotiates blood-money, examines boundaries, manumits slaves. He presides over the Shaikhs’ Council. He exempts, pardons, appeases, exacts, condemns, ordains. Over a large but undefined field he in effect rules. It is all a far cry from the third room and the Foreign Office canteen.

It is important, I may break off to remark, that the sheikhly nature of the Political Agent should be thoroughly appreciated in the department. It may well be difficult for his fellow clerks, who have often seen him—and will no doubt see him again—making the office tea in a drab Whitehall corridor, to picture him as an oriental potentate among they grey-haired dervishes. The effort, arduous and even comical though it may be, must nevertheless be made. Without it, not only will the Agent seem intolerably pompous when he goes home on leave; his colleagues for their part will fail to understand the curious necessities which his post involves. What can he be doing with two maunds of cardamom and a bag of charcoal? For what purpose has he had his censer repaired? Why does the coffee-maker need (of all things) a dagger? Such questions, Sir, are pardonable. But they must be asked from a deferential and an understanding heart.

The Political Agent has, forbye, more orthodox functions. He must persuade Rulers and influence public opinion. He must justify (stern task) the workings of the United Nations and intercept the policies of the Arab League. He must help to negotiate oil concessions. He must expound the need for a law on workmen’s compensation and even, in settling sea frontiers, explain to an illiterate sheikh the principle of constant equidistance involved in the trigonometry of the median line. He must be severe and masterful when he feels insignificant and ill-assured. He must at times be as diplomatic as any conventional diplomatist.

But above all he must travel: in a long and ceremonious caravan or in a solitary Land Rover; in his own dhow or in an R.A.F. aeroplane; at speed across the gravel desert, slowly and painfully through a mountain wadi, or stuck altogether in the mud of the salt flats. This is his St. Crispin’s Day that will live into his old age. Long after the minutes and the submissions and the subcommittees have faded, he will remember waking on the great plateau to the scuffle and the mutter of the bedu at their dawn prayers; coming out of the tent to see them huddled in their skimpy cloaks round the fire waiting for the blackened coffee-pot to heat up; the hawks behind them on their perches, now huddling in against the cold, now fluffing their feathers to dry off the night-dew. Or being called out from a party with a message of shooting in the hills; the scurry round for a driver and a bed-roll and then out of the Agency gate and away across the salt flats into the dunes; sleep in the sand beside the track, then up at first light and through the mountains to where two groups of bandoliered tribesmen wait for him nervously. Nor will he forget the incense and the rose-water proffered by his host at the end of a stiff and dusty journey, or the chanted, stylized greetings, strophe and antistrophe, of the desert bedu, or the Agency dhow at anchor in the bay of Dibba with the Red Ensign fluttering improbably over those unheard-of fishermen.

All this will pass one day and we shall be centralised and standardised. The powers and the privileges, the discomforts and the eccentricities—all will vanish, and with them the fun. Meanwhile, Political Agent Dubai is a splendid job in a splendid place. When the name is changed and the first consul or Ambassador arrives, it will indeed be the end of a very auld sang.

I am sending copies of this dispatch to all Gulf posts, to Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and en titre personnel to Mr. Balfour-Paul at Her Majesty’s Embassy in Beirut.

I have, &c.

A. J. M. Craig

Her Majesty’s Political Agent

I find it quite impossible not to like His Honour Mr. Craig, to rejoice in his enjoyment of his soon-to-be-defunct office, and also to react with sympathy and a little sadness to his appeal to civil servants in Whitehall seriously to seek within themselves “a deferential and an understanding heart”—was ever such a thing farther distant from any and all corridors of power than it is today? The Trucial States (along the Trucial Coast of Oman) were a British protectorate from 1820 until 1971, when they became the independent United Arab Emirates. Ultima ratio regum means the last argument of kings. According to Hobson-Jobson a dhobi-wallah is a washerman; a babu a native clerk who could write English; a chokidar a watchman; a puggaree a type of turban, and a bara sahib a “white, i.e. British colonial master.” The majlis, meanwhile, was a formal audience with legislative functions mostly by instant edict, or decisions and/or proclamations issued verbally. St. Crispin’s Day (October 25, the anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt and of the Charge of the Light Brigade) is, of course, a reference to Shakespeare’s Henry V: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” Though drafted more than fifty years after the death of King Edward VII and almost twenty years after the end of World War II, there are in this beautifully drafted despatch strong, nostalgic chords of imperium—it is very much Sir Edward Elgar gamely competing against the Beetles. His Honour Mr. Craig reminds us also that the ethos of empire, once implanted, lingered powerfully and long after the exhaustion of Britain’s part in two World Wars in rapid succession; the terrible upheaval of the partition of India; the humiliation of Suez, and Harold Macmillan’s speech about the “wind of change” blowing through Africa. It is scarcely believable, meanwhile, that in less than fifty years Mr. Craig’s Dubai could have been transformed from a smallish Arab fishing village into the oil-driven orgy of real estate we see today. What, I wonder, does the future hold in store for her?

The bag

I cannot now recall how I came into possession of an empty British diplomatic bag, but I fancy Charlie Curwen gave it to me more than twenty years ago. I must remember to ask him. It is a fine buff calico model, with four pairs of brass eyelets along the top for ease of fastening with a lead seal; the faded impresa HBM—Her Brittanic Majesty’s—DIPLOMATIC SERVICE, and the number 2 floating up at the top left-hand corner. Perhaps this indicates some second-class designation as might befit documents destined for a colonial outpost, but why then resort to the diplomatic pouch in the first place? Though scuffed in places—the evidence of rough handling at Cairo, Addis Ababa, or the Porte, or else a leaky corner of the freight depot at Croydon—the bag is perfectly intact and could easily resume service, such is the quality of the stitching—indestructible. Until I discover a secure method of restoring it to the Foreign Office, I shall continue to use my diplomatic bag for loose change, of which there is a surfeit in the United States. It is also a much cherished reminder that communications between the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in Whitehall and Government House, Melbourne, must once have been conducted through diplomatic channels, just as, even in 1986, my own late and much lamented Governor, Dr. J. Davis McCaughey, A.C., was appointed by letters patent from the Queen that were counter-signed by Sir Geoffrey Howe, the Foreign (and Commonwealth) Secretary, a fact that would surprise most Australians. That my bag ended its last journey at Government House, Melbourne, suggests that the return communiqué was entrusted to more conventional post or telecommunications. I recall reading somewhere years ago that between the wars the diplomatic pouch was used by some officials to bypass H.M. customs and excise, and that a traffic in gowns and accessories from Paris couturiers, upon which duty was otherwise payable, provided much of the padding that surrounded official communications to the Foreign Office. I cannot imagine that this was true for more than a few second secretaries struggling with a flock of daughters, and therefore I suspect this was a figment of the imagination of Evelyn Waugh or Nancy Mitford, yet I suppose there existed the possibility of abuse. However, you would need to be confident that the bag would end up in the right hands, and that one’s motives for shuttling from a British legation to the Foreign Office pale pink tulle, the finest-quality lace smalls (hand-stitched by French nuns), or elegant high-heeled shoes were sufficiently innocuous, although I suppose there could be in this a rich seam of comedy.