1 BDOHP Biographical Details and Interview Index Sir (Henry) David (Alastair Capel) Miers, KBE 1985; CMG 1979 Born 10 January 1937; son of late Col R D M C Miers, DSO, QO Cameron Highlanders, and Honor (née Bucknill). In 1966 he married Imelda Maria Emilia, daughter of Jean-Baptiste Wouters, of Huizingen, Belgium, having two sons and one daughter. Career Details (with, on right, relevant pages in interview) Entered Foreign Office, 1961 pp 2- 3 Reporting Officer UNGA 16 and UN Department FO, 1961-63 pp 3-12 Tokyo, 1963-65 pp 12-22 Treasury Centre for Administrative Studies, 1965-66 pp 22-24 Ventiane, 1966-68 pp 24-34 Private Secretary to Minister of State, FO, 1968 pp 34-38 Paris, 1972 pp 38-43 Assistant in Energy Department, FCO, 1975-76 pp 43-46, 48 Counsellor, Tehran, 1977-79 pp 49-73 Head of Middle Eastern Dept, FCO, 1980-83 pp 74-78 Ambassador to Lebanon, 1983-85 pp 79-102 Assistant Under-Secretary of State for Middle East, FCO, 1986-89 pp 102-107 Ambassador to Greece, 1989-93 pp 108-120 Ambassador to the Netherlands, 1993-96 pp 120-130 2 RECOLLECTIONS OF SIR DAVID MIERS KBE CMG RECORDED AND TRANSCRIBED BY ABBEY WRIGHT Copyright: Sir David Miers AW: It is 9th September and this is Abbey Wright in conversation with David Miers recording the recollections of his diplomatic career. David, thank you so much for your wonderful CV and notes, you’ve done just about everything! You have such a broad base. Perhaps we could go back to the beginning, you entered the Foreign Office in 1961, what made you decide to do that? DM: I lived in the north of Scotland and didn’t have much contact with the swinging world of London and the South. My father was a soldier. I didn’t have a clear idea about a career or any profession that I was being directed towards and so I took advice from friends who were also considering their careers. I was with a group of people at school and university many of whom thought that joining the Foreign Service might be an agreeable thing to do. Of course some of the considerations turned out to be completely false. One was that you were quite well paid! But I don’t think that in retrospect we were particularly well paid although when you were abroad you were certainly paid enough to do your job and save a bit. There were many considerations. There was quite a stiff exam you were supposed to pass, a bit of a challenge. You felt that if you passed it and joined the Foreign Service, in those days anyway, it was quite a decent thing to have done so that if you wanted to change your mind and were offered other, more attractive careers, your entry to the Foreign Service would be a good thing on your CV. You could travel. One forgets that in those days the era of cheap travel hadn’t arrived and it was quite an adventure when I was a school boy to go abroad. People wanted to travel. My parents had both served abroad, so I quite wanted to see the world. The public service ethos was also influential. In those idealistic days one thought one might be able to do some good by placing one’s services at the disposal of the community. I was also told that it was a secure employment, which it was I think, and you got a pension at the end of it. I don’t think anybody thought the pension was a particularly lucrative one but actually now that pensions are collapsing, it’s a good thing to have. 3 When I was at university there were friends who had joined the Foreign Service and when I talked to them they seemed to think it was interesting. They were sent abroad to learn a language and they seemed to regard it as a challenging and an interesting career. I did the exam and I was accepted and found myself in the Foreign Service and was never under any strong temptation to change course. AW: Did they still do the “country house weekend” selection for your entry or was it the exam and interviews? DM: There was a thing called Method One and Method Two. Method One was the Victorian exam where you got something very similar to your finals as a university student to do. This has been replaced, I think since World War Two, by a thing called Method Two which was quite wrongly called the “country house weekend”. I didn’t do that at all. Method Two was a set of interviews and group tests which were done at a civil service office in London, I forget exactly where. Nobody was the least bit interested in whether you had good table manners or not! Reporting Officer UNGA 16 and United Nations Department FCO, 1961 AW: So after you arrived, you did an induction course? It looks from your notes that you went straight off to the United Nations? DM: Yes. The induction course was rather a brief affair and I don’t remember much about it except that we had an extremely urbane retired Ambassador as chairman. He leavened the thing up because some of the new recruits were a bit on the serious side. He let them understand that trop de zèle was not actually a diplomatic requirement! It was probably apocryphal, but he described how when his father had joined the Foreign Service, as it still was in those days, he’d been quizzed by his father on his first day. He had said “We don’t have to arrive before ten o’clock at the earliest because the boxes aren’t in from Dover before then. Then we are expected to have a decent break for lunch and then mull things over. We come back and when the Secretary of State goes down to the House of Commons we get released quite early in the evening, and so it’s all very agreeable.” “I don’t know about that” said his father, “It seems to me that it cuts into the day a bit”. So with little anecdotes like that he leavened the proceedings. 4 We were introduced to lots of things that were not particularly new and were not technical but were meant to give us a bit of a grounding. I had to leave early because I had to go to New York to help out with our delegation to the UN. I think they normally took two people who were completely new entrants, to go off to New York to gain experience. I found it very informative and very instructive and also rather exciting because for someone who hadn’t seen very much of the world we were suddenly told we were going to have a cabin on the Queen Elizabeth, cross the Atlantic, go to America which was in those days regarded as an El Dorado to some extent. When I was a student there was the America Club and everyone was encouraged in the long vacation to get themselves to America, earn some money and cross the States. It was a different planet in some respects so it was very exciting for a young person to do all of that. I learned a lot at the United Nations. AW: You were a reporting officer for UNGA 16. Who did you report to? DM: The idea was that there were six committees and the main plenary session of the General Assembly that were all going on simultaneously. Countries had to staff all of these six committees and some of them were quite controversial. These two new reporting officers would sit as a British presence through these sessions, particularly the plenary which consisted of a long series of Heads of State or Prime Ministers or Foreign Secretaries of the Member States all coming in and delivering their set piece speeches for about two months. So someone had to be there in case they said something important. The regular members of the delegation and the members of the United Nations Department who had been sent out with us as a supplementary reinforcement were all quite busy on the actual technical questions. We couldn’t be there so we sat listening to what went on elsewhere. Of course this could have been incredibly boring but luckily there was a press service which was doing exactly the same thing. So if you missed a bit, or fell asleep, you could nip along to the press section and see what you’d missed. You then composed a telegram which you submitted to the officer who was supervising us. He was a delightful man. He was a nephew of Clement Attlee. He was a Desk Officer in the United Nations Department and he was responsible for us and made sure that what we wrote was sense and relevant. A lot of it was about the decolonisation programme and we, the British, were being attacked over Rhodesia, our support for South Africa, apartheid and all of that. General de Gaulle had recently declared, in the past two years, that all the French colonies in Africa were to be independent countries. This had caused a bit of a stir. We were going through our own 5 possessions rather more methodically but there was a certain amount of criticism and acrimony, particularly in relation to Rhodesia, which I mentioned. We used to have to listen to all of this and there were some quite exciting events.