BDOHP Biographical Details and Interview Index THOMSON, Sir John Adam (27 April 1927-3 June 2018) GCMG 1985 (KCMG 1978; CMG 1972) Career (with, on right, relevant pages in interview) [Note that Sir John Thomson died before this interview could be completed, so it does not include his whole career, but ends in 1964]. Entry to Foreign Service, 1950 pp 1-2 MECAS, 1951 pp 3-4 Third Secretary, Jedda, 1951 pp 4-43 Damascus, 1954 pp 43-49 Foreign Office, 1955; Private Secretary to Permanent pp 49-78 Under-Secretary, 1958-60 (Suez Crisis, pp 68-77) First Secretary, Washington, 1960-64 pp 79-110 Foreign Office, 1964 Acting Head of Planning Staff, Foreign Office, 1966 Counsellor, 1967 Head of Planning Staff, 1967 Seconded to Cabinet Office as Chief of Assessments Staff, 1968-71 Minister and Deputy Permanent Representative to North Atlantic Council, 1972-73 Head of UK Delegation to MBFR Exploratory Talks, Vienna, 1973 Assistant Under-Secretary of State, FCO, 1973-76 High Commissioner to India, 1977-82 UK Permanent Representative to United Nations, 1982-87 1 BRITISH DIPLOMATIC ORAL HISTORY PROGRAMME RECOLLECTIONS OF SIR JOHN THOMSON GCMG, RECORDED AND TRANSCRIBED BY CATHERINE MANNING Copyright: Sir Adam Thomson CM: This is 20 July 2016 and I am Catherine Manning recording an interview for the British Diplomatic Oral History Programme with Sir John Thomson. John, you have always resisted doing a recording for the oral history programme up till now, but once a few years ago, I heard you giving an account of your first posting in Saudi Arabia in 1951, I think it was, and I was so struck by it that I have succeeded in persuading you to give us the story. JT: Well, you’re a charming persuader and you’re persistent too. CM: Before we go to your first post, perhaps it would be a good lead in if you would tell us a little bit about how you chose the Foreign Office as a career and how it was that you chose the Arab language. JT: Those are unexciting answers. The answer to the first one, how did I choose it as a career, was largely because I was at Trinity College Cambridge and I really wanted to do historical research, but I thought that would be a presumptuous answer to a question that was put to me quite unexpectedly. What happened was this. There was a young man, a colleague of mine at Trinity who wanted to marry, I am sure, the elder of my two sisters, Clare. I got back from the long vacation, slightly late. I was ticked off for this; that I was doing some work in the Vatican Library was not regarded as an adequate excuse. At any rate, scarcely had I recovered from that, than this young man said that he would like to talk with me. I knew him well, no problem about that. I invited him to tea - you either invited someone to tea or to sherry in those days - I invited him to tea and he quite quickly said, ‘John, what are you going to do when you go down at the end the year?’ As I’ve indicated I felt I shouldn’t quite say that I was going to stay on and do historical research, so I said, rather on the spur of the moment, that I was thinking about going into the Diplomatic Service, actually I think it was called the Foreign Service in those days. He said, to my annoyance, in a triumphant voice, ‘It’s too late. You’re too late.’ I said, ‘How can I be too late in the first week of our 2 last year? Anyway, how do you know?’ He said, ‘I know because I’ve applied and the application deadline was a week ago.’ I was really rather annoyed about that. I thought it was very unreasonable that it should be quite so early before even the last year had started. So I went out next morning promptly to the Post Office and got a form to apply and filled it in, in the Post Office, and sent it off, because the Post Office told me that my friend was wrong: the deadline for the application was a week hence. So that’s how it came about. Then I passed the exams and got appointed, and I thought it was too interesting a thing to pass up and maybe I’d go back to academia later, which, as I had a succession of interesting posts, I never did. The answer to the second question about Arabic was something that was beyond my control. The results from the exams for the Home Civil Service and Foreign Service were not announced until some date early in June and by that time several of us had made engagements for things to do during the summer. I was engaged to go and do some archaeological work in Turkey. Johnny Graham was engaged to play the pipes at the Portree balls and Michael Weir also had some reason for not being able to join the Service until sometime in late September or early October. So the three of us were all sent to learn Arabic. It was sort of a punishment, we felt, as a result of our refusal to join on whatever date they suggested - I think it was the 1st July. Any rate, we all did interesting things over the summer; we were then appointed to go to the Arabic course. CM: So that happened absolutely immediately? You joined the Foreign Office in October and immediately they sent you away to learn Arabic? JT: In a sense, yes. Strictly speaking, not quite like that. What happened was that I arrived at Personnel Department by appointment in the middle of the morning one day, I think it was probably in the first week of October, and I was met by two distinguished gentlemen in a rather small room and they each had a big desk, so there wasn’t much space around them. Adams, who was looking after me, rather grandly introduced me to his colleague, and said, ‘Willan and I divide the world between us.’ He took one half I suppose and Willan took the other half. I was told that my first Arabic lesson had been arranged for 2:30 that afternoon with a teacher from SOAS, I think it was. CM: No test to find out if you were gifted for hard languages? 3 JT: Not at all. They might have discovered that I was not gifted because I never did languages at university. Any rate, that’s how it started. But then it very quickly turned into a sort of disaster because I was brought down with jaundice about three or four days later. The result of that was that I was confined to bed at home. I was lucky that my father had a house in central London, in Kensington, and so I was put in bed and told not to move and not to eat various things. Yes, I could have some fish, and apples I think, but not much else. So I read a wonderful book probably the second greatest biography in the English language, Lockhart’s Life of Scott, in about eight volumes, which has been a pleasure to me all my life. Eventually, it was judged that I was well enough to continue with some Arabic lessons, so I had the same teacher from SOAS, who came to see me for not very long. Then I was told we were to go to MECAS, the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies, at Beirut, actually it was in the hills above Beirut, and this was to be about the middle of January or maybe a little bit earlier. CM: John, I ought to anchor this to a year. JT: This was 1950 when I joined the Foreign Office and 1951 when I went to MECAS. Yes, that’s right. It’s as well to get the dates straight. It was January ’51 and there were five of us from the Foreign Office on that course. There were the three that I’ve named, Johnny Graham, Michael Weir and myself, and then there were two others, who were of a more junior grade. Then there were three or four Army officers; one Navy officer, I think; two or three RAF officers; a British Council man, very good, John Muir; an Australian, also very good. About half of us, I think we were about twenty in total, half were married and lived in lodgings in the village nearby. The bachelors all lived in the central buildings at MECAS. I won’t go on about what happened in that year in which one was supposed to learn Arabic. Michael Weir was a good linguist and he did learn Arabic. He had a bit of a start because he’d already learned Persian. The RAF had taught him that. Johnny Graham is good at everything, so he was good. I was rather poor and my interest was at first a little bit mixed, because here we were in Lebanon with lots of castles around and quite close to the part of Turkey, namely Cilicia and out to the Euphrates, where I had been working as a very amateur archaeologist, looking at castles. But to my surprise we were then given quite a lot of Foreign Office material to read. It came in hunks. Every two weeks, or something of that sort, we were given half a dozen dispatches, but they were important ones and interesting and I got really rather hooked on the problems they described.