Sherard Cowper-Coles Interview

SIR SHERARD COWPER-COLES INTERVIEWED BY ALAN MACFARLANE 11TH SEPTEMBER 2024

AM
So, it's a great pleasure to have a chance to talk to Sherard Cowper-Coles. Sherard, I always ask first, when and where were you born?
SCC
Well, I was born, Alan, on the 8th of January 1955 at 27 Welbeck Street in W1, which is a clinic and I think may still be a clinic. My parents at the time lived in Cadogan Gardens. My father, who was at Harrow and at Caius here before the war, was I think then, he just left the bar, which he went to after the war, and started at Overscan. And I spent my first five years in Chelsea. We lived, my parents soon moved from their flat in Cadogan Gardens to Elm Park Gardens off the Kings Road. And I have very happy memories there as a boy. My parents are very good friends with someone called Freddie Gore, who's an RA and his father had been in the, I think the Camden School and I've still got a painting that he gave my parents as a wedding present. And his son was a friend. I remember Laurie Lee, who used to live there, 'Cider with Rosie'. I apparently used to follow him round. And Joyce Grenfell lived in the street. But it was all rather dark and dirty. The Clean Air Act hadn't come in. I remember pea- soupers. I remember seeing fire engines going along the Kings Road to the great fire at Smithfield in the late 1950s. But they were happy years. I remember playing on the bomb-site, In fact, I remember lots of bomb-sites, but one in particular, outside Chelsea Old Church on the embankment, where both my brothers were christened and I was later to be married the first time. My parents had been married in St. James's Piccadilly and I was christened there. My grandmother...
AM
It's an odd name Sherard was...
SCC
Yes, well it's a family name. My father was called Sherard as well and his father was also called Sherard. And he was an inventor, a friend of Conan Doyle's. And he invented something which he called Sherardising, which is an advanced form of rustproofing with zinc. And this is still used. And I was actually with the party secretary in the city of Guizhou outside Shanghai and I saw that he was a metallurgist and to sort of keep the conversation going, I said, “Mr. Party Secretary, I see that you read metallurgy at university and trained as a metallurgist. You might have heard of Sherardising because I want to proof the UK-China relationship against geopolitical corrosion”. And his face lit up rather as yours is doing. And he said, “I know Sherardising. I studied it at university”. But the interesting thing was my grandfather was one of 10 children. He married very late. He was forced by his sisters to marry his assistant. But his father had also been an inventor and had invented the turntable gun turret and designed a ship called HMS Captain, which went down off Cape Finisterre in a freak storm rather similar to the one which brought down that yacht, the Bayesian, the other day. And this ship, which was the most advanced ship in the Royal Navy, had been supported by Prince Albert and the Times, opposed by the constructor of the Navy because she had a low freeboard. And in order to cross the Atlantic to defend Canada against the Americans after the Civil War, she had masts as well as being powered by steam. And the idea was that the Americans, the Union, had these monitors who were inshore ships, what would be called today literal combat ships, and that America might try to take British North America, Canada, after the Civil War. So Britain needed a long-range warship and my great-grandfather designed it but unfortunately drowned on the ship. But we think we have just found the wreck off the coast of Spain and there are plans to go down. It's only 150 metres down. But when I was in the Embassy in Paris, I once remarked to a French naval officer that my grandfather had invented this ship. And I said in French, Alan, “À la marche, à la marche, avoir les vapeurs, by sail and steam”. And he burst out laughing and he said, he must have said in French, I don't remember, he said, “If one says that in French, it means you're bisexual, to sail under steam and sail”. Anyhow, that's the back history. My father then started to make a little bit of money in the city working for Cazenove and in 1960, we moved to Sevenoaks in Kent, near Sevenoaks, which was just half an hour on the train to Cannon Street. By then I'd had two younger brothers born and my father bought a large plot of land near the station and built a very comfortable modern house, although my mother hated it. But we had a large garden, we had dogs. And I went first to a small pre-preparatory school called Freston Lodge, run by a rather peculiar bachelor who'd been in the Indian army and was a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society but had no other obvious educational qualifications. But he was quite modern, we had a school bus and I remember him teaching us about nuclear war. And I was actually very happy there, although I realised very early on that I was completely hopeless at sport. I remember the embarrassment of my father's mother coming down from London for my first sports day and me coming last in every race and the proud grandparents. We used to, in those days, on my mother's side, my mother's father was very good looking but rather stupid and he'd grown up near Sidcup in Kent where his father had been a stockbroker but had been hammered, as the phrase was, before the First World War. And my grandfather worked, I think, in a pretty lowly role for the Imperial Tobacco Company but he loved the Navy and naval things and he trained on HMS President on the embankment. And when the First World War broke out he was enlisted or no, he enlisted in fact, I know he was the first volunteer in the Imperial Tobacco Company, it must have been in August 1914, he went to fight in the naval brigade in the defence of Antwerp sent by Churchill, these sailors fighting on land. And I remember him telling me about the absolute chaos because they were wearing white hats, the Germans had snipers and Uhlan cavalry and the naval brigade was pushed back. And his battalion retreated into Holland which was neutral and he spent the war interned in Holland at a camp near Groningen in the north which was called the English Camp because neutral powers were obliged to detain military units that strayed onto their territory in a war. He had an introduction to a wealthy Dutch family who'd, who had a very large tobacco company outside Rotterdam and he used to go and stay the weekends with them. And in the middle of the First World War, just after the Battle of Jutland, he was allowed back to London on parole to see his mother who was dying. And he told a wonderful story of being in Piccadilly in naval uniform but with his arm in a sling because he'd had a skating accident. And as he walked down Piccadilly, it was just after the Battle of Jutland, people came up to him and said, you brave sailor, thought he'd been in the Battle of Jutland and he didn't dare say he'd had a skating accident in Holland. He went back after the war and married my Dutch grandmother who was at Leiden University where she read classics and then law, and with her money after the First World War, in fact in the early 1920s, he bought a farm in East Devon which we still have, which he remembered going to, an area he remembered on holiday and he played at being a gentleman farmer using my grandmother's money. It must have been very difficult for her, you know, she was highly educated, she used to help me with my Greek and Latin later, she was stuck on this farm in Devon and no telephone, the roads weren't made up, she had to put up with a lot with this very good looking but rather stupid husband and this wealthy and well-connected family back in Holland. But they used to come over and indeed they still come over, we've still got a great network of connections in Holland and parts of Germany and Belgium. Anyhow, I grew up in Sevenoaks, I loved my pre-prep school, Preston Lodge, but in 1963 I moved to a much more traditional prep school, again as a day boy, called the New Beacon, founded by the Norman family in a beautiful set of buildings and amazing grounds, 'ex fume dare lucem' was the motto, had a proper chapel, proper dormitories and some serious masters who taught me Latin.
AM
Where was it?
SCC
On the outskirts of Sevenoaks on a special site on the hill. And the Norman family, they'd been at Marlborough, Siegfried Sassoon had soon been there, it was a grown up prep school. My contemporary was now Vice Admiral Sir Tim Lawrence, the husband of the Princess Royal, my predecessor as Permanent Secretary, Private Secretary to the Permanent Secretary in the Foreign Office, Michael Jay, was there, it was a serious prep school. But I don't think the headmaster, John Norman, particularly approved of me because I was hopeless at sport, but I did very well or pretty well academically. I loved some of the masters, particularly later on a rather eccentric English master who used to bring us every week, having produced it on a bander machine, a poem to read, and I still have at home the folder of those weekly poems. One week it would be a sonnet by Shakespeare, another week it would be a poem by Ted Hughes or Rupert Brooke or whatever it may be and he gave us a feeling for literature and for drama and for creativity and it was a wonderful, wonderful man, Paul Bench. I had two classics masters who were eccentric in their different ways, one a devout Christian, one had been an officer in the Indian Army, but they were very proud of me, taught me hard. My father had been at Harrow but he thought in the 1960s Harrow was rubbish, which it probably was. I remember going to see Dr James, the headmaster with him. So he put me down for Eton and put me down for a house at Eton run by a historian called Ray Parry who had come from Wales, come from a fairly humble background but had gone to Balliol, won a cricket blue and was a sort of rather prestigious Eton housemaster. His son, with whom I had lunch, or was given lunch the other day at White's, went on to be senior partner of Farrah's, the solicitors. Anyhow, Ray Parry, I remember having a drink with him or my father having a drink with him and I was introduced to him and I was down for his house and he was the first person I'd ever met with a Welsh accent and I found it incongruous. My father was so proud and took me to lunch at the cockpit in Eton High Street and then, I don't know whether it was because my father died, my father collapsed and died of a heart attack, aged 47, on the 18th of March 1968. But I think he'd already decided that it was probably wiser for me to go to Tonbridge. I remember him saying, I want you to sit the scholarship for Eton and the scholarship for Tonbridge. Tonbridge was much nearer. Anyhow, he died and my mother decided that I wouldn't go to Eton and I went to Tonbridge and I got a scholarship to Tonbridge. I had a wonderful housemaster there who was very musical, a mathematician, with a wonderful wife who was a sort of intellectual, had been at Oxford as he had been. We had a house poetry competition. We were very good at debating but so bad at sport and Tonbridge in those days was a great cricketing school that when we had the house photograph we had to borrow cups from another house. But it was a house full of poets and intellectuals and I didn't say but in 1966, just 18 months before he died, my father had left Cazanove to set up the investment management division of a merchant bank now long gone called Hill Samuel at 100 Wood Street in the city. But within 18 months he'd had his heart attack. But with the salary which I think was £6,000 a year he was earning at Hill Samuel, he bought for £25,000 a rather grand house on the outskirts of Sevenoaks called Fig Street Farm which had 15 acres, an oast house, a dining hall with a minstrels gallery, all rather bogus, stables, lovely gardens and we were incredibly happy there and my father was his Nirvana really. But then he dropped dead and my mother was left with little cash and this large house to look after. And my mother was a worrier and, if I'm honest, occasionally a bit of a bully. She bullied my father and she would bully me to mow the lawns or cut the hedges or creosote the sheds and I found school, particularly the civilised house I was in at Tonbridge which was the exception because Tonbridge was much more Sparta than Athens, although the Park Side was a mini Athens surrounded by Spartans. And I found school just a blessed relief and from September 1968, I left Tunbridge in July 1973, I can say along with the Foreign Office and HSBC it's been one of the three institutions in life where I really have been happy and have hardly had an unhappy day and I felt fulfilled and appreciated. When I started at Tonbridge the headmaster was Michael McCrum who came on to be Headmaster of Eton, Vice Chancellor, he was of course at Corpus here and he could have been a Permanent Secretary, ruthless timekeeper, classicist. He taught the top boys divinity in their first year and Greek because he wanted to get to know us. And I became a sort of favourite of his and he put me as the junior member on the chapel committee. He had an elaborate structure and I learnt aged 13 how a committee was run by someone who could have been Secretary of the Cabinet or he, you know, we had minutes and we had any other business and the agenda of the next meeting and it was all run in a most efficient way. And when he was appointed to Eton after two years people were heartbroken because he'd really modernised Tonbridge. He'd abolished fagging, he introduced an inter-house telephone system maintained by the signal section of the Corps. He made the Corps, the CCF, no longer compulsory, people were able to do community service. He abolished beating of boys by boys, all that sort of thing. Anyhow, he was appointed to Eton and I was asked to edit, I was then the literary editor of the school magazine, later the editor, but as literary editor I was asked to edit a special supplement paying tribute to Michael McCrum and his time at Tonbridge and I loved doing it. I remember one of the weaker Classics Masters, you know, I asked people for ideas and instead of Sic Transit Gloria Mundi he said Sic Transit Gloria McCree and that became a sort of classical pun. We had a rather pompous second chaplain at Tonbridge at the time who'd been at Emma here, only a short distance from where we're speaking, and he'd read the Theological Tripos at Cambridge and had done some Hebrew. And I remember him telling us when he arrived in 1970, he said, I'm going to teach you theology, not divinity, and he said, you realise the way the headmaster signs his name, M McC, the sort of short version of his signature, his initials, he said that is exactly the same as the Hebrew for Yahweh, the ineffable name of God. And I thought this was him being pompous and showing off, which of course it was, but years later when in the Foreign Office I learnt Hebrew, I learnt that it was true, Michael McCrum had signed himself the equivalent of God in Hebrew. Whether he knew he was doing it I have never been able to discover and I must ask his son. I didn't catch his widow in time, Christine. And then we had a very different headmaster at Tonbridge, Robert Ogilvie, who was a brilliant classical scholar, been head boy of rugby, a senior tutor of Balliol, a great Scot. His father had been the second Director General of the BBC, Sir Frederick Ogilvie, after Lord Reith. Both Sir Frederick and his mother had been heads of house at Oxford and he came from this extraordinary Oxford intellectual family. He loved walking, he rented from the clan Cameron, Cameron of Lochiel , a lovely house called Erracht near Fort William and used to go there by sleeper from King's Cross. He took me with a party of classicists, including a friend from Peterhouse, as sort of slave labour. There was at that time at Cambridge a professor of aerial archaeology called Professor J K St Joseph and he had these aerial photographs of Roman marching camps across Scotland. And Ogilvie, who was writing a book on Tacitus and Agricola and trying to date one of Agricola's campaigns against the Caledonians, needed labour to dig sections across these trenches which one could spot from the crop marks in the air. And I remember going, it was so exciting, my first visit to Scotland, staying with his brother in Edinburgh and then going up to near Perth, I think, near Creiff actually, to dig in a cornfield. It must have been the autumn, the corn had gone, but one could see the slightly greener crop marks where the Roman ditches had been around these marching camps which were every ten miles in a very Roman fashion. Ogilvie was a terrible name dropper and life really was one Balliol man after another. He had a wonderful booming voice and he was a brilliant scholar, but there was something very sad about him. He drank and he drank heavily. And later when I became Head Boy, I didn't, I'd never really come across an alcoholic before, a serious alcoholic, but I remember him smelling of alcohol in the morning, I remember him disappearing into his study before a meeting in the morning and hearing the chinking of glasses. And he got, was really destabilised in his first year at Tonbridge when a man called now Sir Anthony Seldon, who was the year above me, and went on to be Master of Wellington and Headmaster of Brighton College, and has written a number of books of contemporary history, organised a demonstration on the day of the annual inspection of the Corps. And these boys, as the General was marching up and down the lines of cadets in the quad, these boys opened the windows of the modern library overlooking the quad and poured out cigarette packets and this got in the Daily Mirror. I remember the story, '£625 a year, public school, disturbed by a riot', which had been modelled on 'If'', which had been written by David Sherwin, who'd been at Tonbridge and whose father taught me ancient history at Oxford. Anyway, Ogilvy really found this terribly upsetting. I think it made the drinking worse. And eventually he left Tonbridge to become Professor of Humanity at St Andrews University. He managed to bring out a wonderful book on Livy, either during or just after his time at Tonbridge. But after a few years at St Andrews, he shot himself, very sadly. And it was very poignant because by then I'd graduated from Oxford, I'd joined the Foreign Office and I was in the embassy in Cairo and I heard he'd died. And then through the post, the Egyptian post, arrived a letter from him addressed to me at Her Majesty's Embassy Cairo, just like that, and it reached me and in it he said Tonbridge did for me something very sad. He of course was very well connected at Oxford, having been Senior Tutor at Balliol. And there were five classicists in my year, he wouldn't allow any of us to apply for Balliol. I was allowed to apply for Worcester and I...
AM
To which I went, of course.
SCC
I've forgotten that, as did Stuart Gulliver, our former... Lovely, lovely college and Lord Franks, I think, was there. But... And that was fine. I'd got a very nice... My mother knew nothing about university, she hadn't been to university herself, but we had a tenant in our house who had been a research fellow at Nuffield, a Wyckamist, Bank of England economist, who advised me on colleges and he said Worcester would be lovely. He said to me, I wouldn't send your... I wouldn't send my worst enemy to Hertford. And suddenly I got a telegram, 'Open Scholarship Congratulations', signed Hertford. And Ogilvy had been talking to his friends and Hertford needed a classical scholar. And in those days one applied for groups of colleges and Hertford was in group one. So I was given a classical scholarship. I followed in the footsteps of a head boy of Harrow who had been the classical scholar the year before. They obviously felt they had to go to the Public schools to get a classical...
AM
We seem to be getting onto university now.
SCC
Yes, sorry.
AM
One question about your previous school. A much wider question. You mentioned that you'd been on the Chapel committee. Around the time you were about 15, if you were like me, you were confirmed into the Church of England. And it's often the time one is at one's most religious around the time 15 to 18. And you worked in a number of Islamic embassies and so on. So I wondered if you could say something about your religious life.
SCC
Absolutely. Yes, well I'm glad you brought that up Alan. I remember my father, you know, plenty of my forebears were priests in the Church of England. But I remember my father, we never went to church as children. And somebody coming round from the local church to collect money and my father, I was appallingly ashamed, said, oh we're atheists, we're not going to give money. Rather enjoying provoking this rather respectable sort of church warden who'd come round. But of course, you know, we had family weddings and funerals and things. And I loved going to chapel. I've always enjoyed, particularly Evensong, but I enjoyed at Tonbridge, which has a magnificent chapel, the sermons, the theatre of it. I didn't believe in the literal truth of it. But there was early on a master called George Gilbart Smith who was a very active evangelical Christian. And he inveigled me in my first year I think to join a Bible study class. And I went along for a bit but I soon dropped out of it. As you rightly say, I was confirmed at 15. We were given instruction in the Bible and I remember my brother, the same. And he was told by the chaplain to report to our local vicar during the holidays for some spiritual education. And our vicar said though ''The lawnmower's in the shed, would you mind cutting the grass?'' But I think actually, I mean I had a sort of brief period I suppose of thinking I really believed in the literal truth of it. As I did for a few weeks when I arrived at Oxford where my college was also very.., had a very evangelical chaplain. But it didn't last and in both cases I thought religion was a very useful metaphor, a way of guiding life. But I could not believe in the literal truth of the resurrection. Nor could I believe that this was the only way. And this approach was only confirmed by my experience when I learned Hebrew and was invited regularly to Friday night dinners with Jewish families. And you know what I saw of Islam in Egypt, in Saudi Arabia etc. So, but religion did play an important part in the life of the school. We had two very nice Chaplains. We had a theological discussion, sort of dining club run by the rather pompous second Chaplain, the Cambridge man, where we read papers on philosophy. There wasn't, I mean rather like the Church of England, that much religion in it. But I did enjoy the theatre of it. And I remember Father Crispian Hollis coming to preach. And he gave this most wonderful sermon. And Robert Ogilvie said to me afterwards in his deep voice, he said, 'Sherard, that is the sort of sermon'.
AM
He was a Catholic?
SCC
Yes, that could only have been delivered by a Catholic.
AM
He was a friend of mine.
SCC
Well, it was a wonderful sermon, Alan. And I remember some other wonderful sermons by people from the BBC. And also now, with shame I think of it, but in my first year, a friend of mine and I - there was on Monday mornings instead of chapel, a boy could address the school. And a friend of mine, Ziad Qasim, who's half Egyptian, and we did a talk to the whole school. It makes me so embarrassed to think about it, on C.S. Lewis's 'The Four Loves'. And we just paraphrased it. But incredibly sort of pretentious, and precocious rather than pretentious, I think.
AM
How would you describe yourself now? Agnostic?
SCC
No. I believe in religion. But I believe there are many ways to God. And I believe that it's the values that matter. And I have seen too much of the world to think that there's one exclusive way. I was very upset when I was ambassador in Israel and Jonathan Sacks, who was always on 'Thought for the Day' and everyone said a great holy man, would run up to me after I'd spoken at meetings of the Jewish community in North London, preaching sort of moderation. And he'd say, ''Sherard, I agree with every word you said, but I can't say so publicly''. And then he brought out a book called 'The Dignity of Difference', in which he said there were many paths to God. But his religious base at a yeshiva outside Gateshead objected, said there's only one way to God, the Jewish way. And to his great discredit, he withdrew the book and brought out a new edition, which fudged the issue. And I just saw so much of it in Saudi Arabia, where we had a wonderful visiting bishop for Cyprus and the Gulf, formerly the Diocese of Fulham and Gibraltar. And he would come out and by the end, Saudi was starting to change. I mustn't go too far forward, but as we're on religion, and I realized that this rather sort of middle stump Anglican bishop was able to have a perfectly good dialogue with some of the Muslim clerics. And it's something I rather admired the King for. I mean, I got to know our present King, well, I've come across him quite a lot in my career, but in Saudi Arabia, he took a great interest in Islam, and was very...
AM
Charles you mean?
SCC
Charles, and very respectful towards us.
AM
He did anthropology, of course.
SCC
Of course. And I got him to give an address, a speech at what the Americans called the ''Terror university' in Riyadh. And he said to me,' 'Sherard, what have you got me into?'' But it was an attempt to reach across and say that what really mattered was our common humanity and our common values. And the underlying principle, or what I think should be the underlying principle of every religion, which was, is, should be, do unto others as you would be done by, treat others as you'd wish to be treated yourself. And when I talked to Chinese friends, I see similar principles there. Of course, one must respect one's ancestors, respect the past, understand. But in the end, it is about whether one believes in an afterlife or reincarnation, that's up to you. And I personally find it very difficult to believe in the literal truth of the Resurrection and some of the stuff. I was at a family wedding last weekend and the presence of God, but these are metaphors.
AM
Good. Well, that sketches in some of it and we'll come back to them a bit later. So we've now got to.., I think Hertford was the college which someone said, ''when you say you're at Hertford, you should say, I was at Hertford O'', because the other person, if you say you're at Hertford, will always say “Oh” in a rather pitying way.
SCC
Yes. Well, I had a chip on my shoulder about it. I'd been taught.., there was a neighbour of ours in Sevenoaks who'd taken a third in mods and greats from Hertford and he insisted that the 'T' was silent. And I remember trying to end being teased by my friend saying ''The only distinguished thing that Sherard can think of about Hertford is the silent T''. And I remember saying to some girl that I'm at Hertford and she said, ''Oh, how wonderful to be at an American University''. But it was a rough college. It was part of the scheme to bring boys in those at that stage, although it was part of the Jesus plan. It was one of the first colleges to go co-educational. But when I arrived, it was predominant. It had a big effort to reach out to schools, particularly in the north of England that hadn't traditionally sent state schools, pupils to Oxford. As a result, we did very well in the Norwich table, particularly in biochemistry and engineering, physics. But it was not a working class college, but quite a rough college. I remember when I arrived, we had a rather refined principal, Geoffrey Warnock, a philosopher and Mary Warnock presided. And it was the college was good for geography. But the Dean, Roy Stuart, I remember on the college notice board, there was a notice. I can see it now typed with the red headed writing paper. And it was typed simply in capital letters, VOMIT. And under it, the Dean had written, I wished, or typed, “I wish to see less of this in College this term”. But as soon as the first girls arrived in 19... I went up in October '73. In October '74, the first girls arrived. And they were toff girls, you know, from the great English public schools. And the college immediately became more civilized. There was less sort of wild drinking. And I was very lucky I had a very nice classical mods tutor, Stephanie West, married to Martin West, who was a very... We did a Homer class with her and with the girls from Somerville who were much more studious than me. I enjoyed Oxford, but I don't have the sort of feeling of unalloyed pleasure towards it that I... Or almost unalloyed pleasure I have towards Tonbridge or the Foreign Office or HSBC. It was a time when I was first getting to sort of go out with girls. I had my mother... My brothers had been very horsey in the pony club and I'd met a few girls at school but I hadn't really sort of... And I remember I knew a girl in Somerville and going to see her and she sat there knitting while I tried to... And then another girl, my sort of first girlfriend, she was reading PPE and she was a sort of champagne socialist and she eventually became an investment banker. She was good fun, but it was all quite sort of stressful in a way.
AM
Were you involved in politics?
SCC
Yes. I started off in the Union and I enjoyed speaking and I joined when I went up the Conservative Association, the Labour Club and the Liberal Democrats. In fact, I joined lots of things. I went beagling with the Christchurch and Farley Hill Beagles. I joined the Architectural Society. I really... Lots of interesting things I did and interesting people I met. And the union, I mean, I have a friend now who's Marshal of the Diplomatic Corps who remembers, I think, better than I do my speeches. Benazir Bhutto was the same year as me. She was always just ahead of me in the polls, and then somebody called Andrew Bell in Univ. and I came third in the polls, I think, because I had a funny name.
AM
The polls for being President.
SCC
We were elected to various committees. And I was doing very well in the Union and then I had... With Classics at Oxford, it's four years and one has to do classical mods after five terms. And because I'd been well taught at Tonbridge, I was sort of winging it, not doing much work. And I was the Classical Scholar. And in classical mods, I got a pretty mediocre second. And I remember the college principal wrote to me. She was pretty... he was pretty furious. And I had to buckle down to work. And at the same time, I'd started going out with the Classical Scholar in St. Hilda's, who was very clever, hated politics, rather an intellectual. And she got me to work. So in the end, I got a first. But she didn't... Wasn't interested in politics. And I rather withdrew from politics. I did make one final speech in theUnion in which I said ''This place'', and I was rather proud of this expanding triplet, ''This place, the Union, is full of misfits and misogynists and men whose only merit is ambition''. And I thought then, as I think now, that the cliche politics is show business for ugly people. The sort of weirdos who spent their time hanging around the Union trying to get on couldn't possibly go on to be real politicians because they just weren't equipped to do it. They weren't real people. They were all needy and inadequate. And I was appalled in later life to discover that precisely those same people who'd been hanging around the Union went on to the House of Commons and with all the sort of neediness, but perhaps balanced and normal and rational people don't make good politicians. I don't know.
AM
So you knew Felix Markham?
SCC
Well there were two history dons when I went up. Felix Markham, who was an old Etonian bachelor who'd written on Napoleon, and Charles Armstrong of the Vickers-Armstrong family, who was a Harrovian and incredibly lazy. And I had a very good friend a year or two above me, Dr Nigel, later Dr Nigel Saul, who went on to get a first and became Professor of Medieval History at Royal Holloway. But he used to laugh at Markham and Armstrong because they were, they had a sort of reputation across the University. When I went up, the term before, the summer before, so the summer of 1973, Hertford had got two seconds and seven thirds in the history school and no firsts.
AM
I am glad it was after I was teaching.
SCC
At that time there was a disaster at a colliery at Markham in South Yorkshire and some wag cut out of the paper the headline 'Markham catastrophe, toll rises to nine', and put it up on the college notice board.
AM
Lovely. So, Sherard, we got to the end of your time at Hertford and Oxford. So what happened after that?
SCC
Well, I need to go back a little bit because I think as a schoolboy, Alan, a friend of my grandfather's in Devon, someone called Gordon Paterson, who'd fought at Gallipoli and had been a farmer in Scotland and retired to Devon, he said to me and said to my grandfather and my mother, Sherard should really go into the diplomatic service. And for me, that seemed an impossibly distant dream. But I knew deep down, I would love to do it if I possibly could. There was a rather annoying successor of Robert Ogilvie as headmaster of Tonbridge called Christopher Everett, who'd been in the diplomatic service, a Wickamist, a bit sort of superior and an Arabist. He'd been at Shemlan, the Arabic school that I was at, the spy school. But,... and he rather put me off. But I remember being in the College library at Hertford and reading a book on life in the diplomatic service and saying to myself, this is what I would really like to do if I could possibly get in. So I decided to take the Civil Service qualifying tests, and then, to my delight and surprise, I got through both rounds. The first round, which was the old, based on the War Office Selection Board, the country house procedure whereby one was interviewed by a psychologist, a senior civil servant, and a sort of serving diplomat and given various sort of psychometric tests and group exercises. And then a final selection board in the old Admiralty building, looking out across Horse Guards Parade. But I'd sort of reinsured because I thought the chances of my passing into the diplomatic service were small. And so I did two things. I wrote to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, saying, would they take me for a year to read..I don't know whether it would have been part one or part two of the law tripos to exempt me from the common professional examination to go to the bar. Trinity Hall wrote me a very snooty letter saying that they were not going to be used as a hotel, or an hotel by an Oxford graduate. But then this Don at Downing, John Hopkins, who was, I remember, gave me a glass of sherry. He wore a tweed coat rather like yours, Alan. Smoked a pipe. Absolute classic Don. He said, if you get a good degree, of course I'll take you. And I did get a good degree, but I got into the Foreign Office. I also thought that perhaps I should look at investment banking, merchant banking it was then called. And I went to various banks and was offered a job by S.G. Warburg, which was very Germanic, very Jewish, although it pretended not to be, very successful. It created the Eurobond market, and had this rather eccentric selection procedure. Siegmund Warburg had a girlfriend in Zurich who was a graphologist and one was required in applying for a job at Warburg's to submit the application in one's own handwriting. This handwriting was then sent off to this woman in Switzerland. And on that basis, amazingly, although I have the most appalling handwriting, I was offered a job at Warburg's. And had I gone to Warburg's, I would have been much richer than I am today, but probably would have had a slightly less interesting life. Anyhow, I passed into the Foreign Office and on the 22nd of August 1977, I walked up to the doors of the Foreign Office in King Charles Street and discovered that I'd come to the wrong entrance, that the training department was in what is now the Metropolitan Police Headquarters, the Curtis Green building on the Embankment. But I walked over there, and then had a very happy year as a trainee. And then in the course of that year, one does a language aptitude test and I was offered a choice of Chinese, Arabic and Japanese. And I chose Arabic mainly, but not entirely because the Camel Corps ruled the Foreign Office. I also thought...
AM
What do you mean when you say that?
SCC
Well, the Arabists were the sort of elite of the diplomatic service and the mythology around the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies, Shemlan, the Arab school in Lebanon above Beirut, which had been founded in Jerusalem after the war. Ava Eban, late Israeli Foreign Minister, had been its first director. It had a sort of mythology. And I also thought, having read classics and ancient history at Oxford, I sort of knew the Mediterranean. I didn't really know the Far East.
AM
You were telling me a story about someone who encouraged you to think about China at school.
SCC
Yes. Well, at school I was rather steered into doing Greek and Latin and ancient history for A-level. But there was a history master, well he was really a cricket master who did a bit of history on the side. He played cricket for this university, for Cambridge, called Mike Bushby. Very, very nice man. And he said to us in 1970, really you're wasting your time studying the civilisations of Greece and Rome. The civilisation that matters most in human development, in human history, is that of China. And China is going to matter enormously in your lifetimes. You need to know about China. So he organised, and he didn't have Chinese himself, but he organised a year's course in Chinese civilisation essentially. And I remember writing to the Chinese Embassy and being sent to the thoughts of Mao Zedong. I remember him teaching us about Sun Yat-sen, about the warlords, about the fall of the Qing, about the Japanese invasion. And the Cultural Revolution was then underway. The Greek master across the corridor from him said that Mike Bushby was a communist, which he manifestly wasn't. Quite the reverse. But it was such a wise decision and I fell in love with China. And curiously, my aunt's boyfriend was a railway engineer who had a partner called Kenneth Cantlie, who'd done a lot to build the railways in China. And Kenneth Cantlie's father, Sir James Cantlie, had been a professor of medicine, I think at University College Hospital, or wherever Sun Yat-sen was studying, and had become a sort of godfather to Sun Yat-sen. So before the First World War, Sun Yat-sen used to go and have lunch with Sir James and Lady Cantlie.
AM
He saved him, didn't he?
SCC
Exactly. You were ahead of me, Alan, as usual. Sun Yat-sen didn't turn up for Sunday lunch, so Sir James telephoned the Metropolitan Police and said, this chap is missing. And for some reason the police went round to the Qing embassy and found Sun Yat-sen in a sack, ready to be sent off to China. But that was a little footnote. But I remember Kenneth Cantlie and his son Hugh talking with sort of great affection about China, the way the Chinese railway network had been built in the 30s, etc.
AM
I was taught by a lady called Cantlie, whose father was Sir Keith Cantlie. He was in the Diplomatic Service, but in India, I think, rather. It must be all one family. So you did your training for a year or how long?
SCC
A year's training on a desk in London. And I had this rather eccentric boss called Trevor Mound, who'd been taught Chinese by the army, and he'd been in the parachute regiment. He later became British Consul General in Shanghai and rode around Shanghai in a London taxi wearing an Inverness cape. And he loved China. He got to know Jiang Zemin when he was Mayor of Shanghai very well. And years later, when Trevor was in the sort of twilight of his career as Commercial Counsellor in our embassy in Oslo, which he said was thoroughly depressing, he wrote to Jiang Zemin to congratulate him on him being appointed President of China. And he got a handwritten letter back from the British Embassy in Oslo from Jiang Zemin in Chinese. It's absolutely wonderful.
AM
So what I suggest is that we've now got to.., you've had your training, and you're going to go somewhere. And we'll take that into our future discussions. Is that okay with you?
SCC
That's great.