Contributions From Former Employees of the Commonwealth

An Accidental Recruit

I originally got my job at the Commonwealth Secretariat (ComSec) completely by accident. Back in the olden days, just before leaving college, I took a trip on the underground to the West End to look around central London on my own for the first time. I got totally lost while looking for Green Park tube station to get back home and wandered in through the gates of Marlborough House (MH). In those days, the Secretariat used to organise a daily guided tour around the building – so they were used to people just walking in. 

Before I could open my mouth to say anything, I was grabbed by the arm by Kim Goh who said, “You’re late, you are running really late.”  She took me to the East Wing of MH, sat me down at a typewriter and gave me a typing test which started off with me typing my name at the top of the page. After the test, Kim looked at it and said that I had passed it – then suddenly she looked at my name and looked puzzled. “Who are you?” she enquired. I told her that I was lost and had entered MH to find someone to ask for directions to Green Park tube station. She asked why I had not mentioned this earlier. I told her that she had not given me a chance to say anything. It turned out that the candidate who was meant to take the typing test had not bothered to turn up and she had mistaken me for that person when I had walked into MH!

“Well, you have passed the typing test. Are you looking for a secretarial or clerical job?,” she asked. I said I was going to sit for my last exam at a secretarial college later that week and agreed to go through a job interview. I passed my interview with Jean Fryer, a really nice English lady with short blond hair who looked a bit like Margret Thatcher. 

I sat for my last exam later that week and started work at the ComSec the following week. I was later told that the organisation had been trialling an intake of school-leavers for secretarial posts. I might have been an experiment gone wrong because, as far as I know, I was the only secretarial school-leaver they ever took on!

So the result of wandering off the streets into MH whilst looking for directions to the nearest underground station led me to working at the ComSec for just under 36 years. I always used to say that I was probably the only person to start off as a teenager and leave as an old woman 🙂

Annie Carlton (née Matin)

(Management Training Services Division, General Technical Assistance Services Division and other divisions, Commonwealth Secretariat, 1981 – 2017)

13 June 2022

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Less of a Pain

The first Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) I attended was the one held in New Delhi in 1983, superbly organised by our Indian colleagues.

A zealous reporter discovered that whereas 1,000 rupees’ worth of aspirin had been sold during the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) Summit  earlier in the year, the small chemist’s shop in the press section of the Vigyan Bhavan had only sold 80 rupees’ worth during CHOGM. This, I argued, was proof that the Commonwealth was less of a pain than NAM.

A senior Government of India official was not convinced. “Have you taken into account”, he asked, “the relative lengths of the gatherings in question, and the relative availability of alcohol during the course of them?” 

I dismissed both considerations as tiresome impediments to a good story.

Sir Peter Marshall

(Deputy Secretary-General, Commonwealth Secretariat, 1983-88)

13 June 2022

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My Wonderful Ghana Election Monitoring Experience

My first election monitoring tour was in Ghana in 1992. The delegation was led by Jeremy Pope. I asked him if my colleague (a delightful Mauritian Minister) and I could go as far north from Accra as possible for the week-long posting. So, courtesy the highly efficient Ghana Air Force we did so, very close to the Burkina Faso border. 

Wonderful experience, not least the Saturday night beauty pageant at the Black Star Hotel in Bolgatanga. Apart from travelling widely in the beautiful savannah region, it was fascinating to see the mix of religions and tribes and how they dealt with the voting process.

Then, while waiting for quite a while in the hotel in Accra for a bus to the airport to return to London, Jeremy entertained us all by sitting at the hotel piano and playing many familiar tunes, including Waltzing Matilda. 

Great guy, and a great experience for me.

Chris Bowman

(Export Market Development Division and General Technical Assistance Division, Commonwealth Secretariat, 1981-2000) 

14 June 2022

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An Interesting Encounter with Jeremy Pope

Very interesting, Chris!

I bet you never expected to observe Ghanian beauties at that pageant…must have been a nice change from boring elections on your first ComSec mission in 1992. 

Your mention of the great Jeremy reminded me of how I once totally unexpectedly bumped into him in Sri Lanka when we, unbeknown to us, were on separate assignments there around 1990.

I was having a swim in the open-air pool of my Colombo hotel on a sunny Sunday morning. As I turned at the end of a lap and looked up, I spotted Jeremy standing on the edge of the pool, smiling benignly towards me! 

It turned out that he had checked in at the same hotel – Ramada Renaissance – the previous night.

The Pakistan cricket team led by Imran Khan happened to be staying at the same hotel; so, it was not long before he and I were talking about the game we both loved!

Asif Khan

(Information Division, Commonwealth Secretariat, 1978-97)

14 June 2022 

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You Can Keep Him!

The reminiscences of Asif Khan and Chris Bowman involving our late friend and colleague Jeremy Pope brought to mind a further anecdote related to me some time after I joined the Commonwealth Secretariat in July 1988. Jeremy was by then Director of the Legal Affairs Division, having been recruited as a more junior officer in the mid-1970s from his home country New Zealand.

There he had already made a name for himself not only professionally as a lawyer and as an editor of the New Zealand Law Journal, but also as a very active campaigner against the then apartheid South Africa. At home he had been particularly prominent in denouncing New Zealand sporting contacts with the apartheid regime and criticising the New Zealand government at the time, during the tenure of the then conservative (National Party) government of Prime Minister Robert Muldoon – a very pugnacious and combative politician if ever there was one!

Thus, it came to pass that at some time in the second half of the 1970s, a newly-appointed Commonwealth Secretary-General Shridath Ramphal visited New Zealand and paid a call on Prime Minister Muldoon. The SG quite naturally thought to mention the promising new recruit from New Zealand to the Commonwealth Secretariat, one Jeremy Pope. It is recounted that the Prime Minister paused as his eyes narrowed, and he said to the SG, “You can keep him!”

By the way, this is the same Prime Minister Muldoon who represented New Zealand at the 1982 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Melbourne Australia (where I was on duty as a junior Australian Foreign Service officer attached to the Kenyan Delegation). He was a regular drawcard for the news media and delighted in “teasing” the Australians and their political leaders both conservative and otherwise, and particularly the Australian Prime Minister and then CHOGM host Malcolm Fraser.

In one of the CHOGM press conferences, in response to a question to the effect that if Melbourne was such a miserable place how come there were so many New Zealanders living there, Prime Minister Muldoon retorted: “They raise the intelligence levels of both countries.” Prime Minister Fraser’s response is not known.

Maxwell Gaylard

(Political Affairs Division, 1988-1996)

19 June 2022

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Meeting Castro, the Man of the People

Chief Anyaoku, as Commonwealth Secretary-General (SG), was invited to visit Cuba and Missouri Sherman-Peters and I went with him. I was very excited and had my camera ready when Fidel Castro came into the meeting. He was accompanied by his Foreign Secretary and an interpreter.

Sadly, I jammed my camera! However, when we left the room there was a horde of journalists taking photos. And my camera began to work again! I took photos of the SG with Castro and then Missouri with Castro.

Then the SG said ‘Mary, pay attention’ as Castro had said I too should have a photo with him. Man of the people!

Mary Mackie

(Secretary-General’s Office and Office of Secretary-General, Commonwealth Secretariat, 1970-2000)

19 June 2022

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Promoting Food Production and Rural Development

I joined the Secretariat in July 1976, following a five-year stint with FAO in Sri Lanka. I was one of the first staff members of the newly formed Food Production and Rural Development Division (FPRD), which arose from the World Food Conference held in Rome in 1975. As Chief Projects Officer, I joined the Director of the Division, a venerable Ghanaian gentleman rejoicing in the name Mowbray Stephen O’Rourke Nicholas, and his Sri Lankan PA, Dhilma Nawagamuwa. Shobhna and several others joined FPRD later (see photos of the FPRD team taken on Mr Nicholas’s retirement in 1982).

One of the first assignments that FPRD undertook was the appraisal of a plan for rehabilitating a run-down coconut plantation on Turner’s Peninsula, a neglected area in the south of Sierra Leone.  This did not sit easily with the remit of FPRD, since the plantation contributed little to food production and not much to rural development.  However there was some pressure to respond positively to the Sierra Leone Government’s request, since the country’s Minister of Agriculture, whose constituency included Turner’s Peninsular, had played a significant role at the 1975 CHOGM in Jamaica in getting Heads of Government agreement to formation of this new Division.

Mowbray Nicholas was scheduled to travel to Freetown in late 1976, to try to find a diplomatically acceptable but affordable contribution to the Turner’s Peninsula affair, which FPRD could not undertake in full since our resources were very limited.  Mr Nicholas had a strong personal connection with Sierra Leone, having spent some of his childhood years in Freetown where his father had been a priest with the Holy Ghost Missionaries, an Irish organisation which had been active in Sierra Leone since 1864 (this connection no doubt explains the origin of Nicholas’s interesting given name, O’Rourke).  However at the last minute, for reasons that I no longer recall, Mr Nicholas had to withdraw from the trip and asked me to go in his place.

Arriving at Lungi airport (separated then as now from Freetown proper by the Sierra Leone River, which necessitates a three-hour road journey round the estuary, a one-hour ferry crossing or a hair-raising thirty-minute speedboat adventure), I was surprised to find a red carpet laid on the tarmac in my honour, and a delegation led by the Minister of Agriculture waiting to welcome me.  The reason for this reception soon became clear, when it was revealed that the telegram indicating that Mr Nicholas would not be coming to Freetown but would be replaced by this insignificant English functionary had not been received.  I remember well the quizzical expression on the Minister’s face as he came to greet me, with his head on one side, and said in true Livingstonian style, “Dr Nicholas I presume?”

Despite this unpromising start, the mission went well and I was able to convince the Ministry of Agriculture that they would get more value from an agricultural economist assigned to their Planning and Evaluation Unit (which CFTC was quick to pick up) than from a minor investment in an abandoned coconut plantation of dubious value or viability.

FPRD went on to take many effective initiatives in the following years – technology transfer workshops in East and West Africa as well as the South Pacific, training courses on irrigation and agricultural management in South Asia and the Caribbean, important work on fisheries and the Law of the Sea – of which I have good memories and I believe we can be justly proud.  It is a pity that contraction of the Commonwealth Secretariat’s activities (as with many other national and international organisations) has resulted in downgrading of the priority given to agriculture and natural resource development, and the resulting early demise of FPRD. These short-sighted trends have undoubtedly contributed to the frightening food crises that currently face the whole world.

Antony Ellman
Chief Projects Officer and Assistant Director, FPRD,1976-1984

17 July 2002

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Happy Reminiscences

I served under five former Commonwealth Secretaries-General and was honoured to have a photo with four of them and other colleagues, who remain good friends.

The Commonwealth Secretariat celebrated 50 years of its establishment in 2015.  Its 50^th anniversary was marked at the Annual General Meeting of the Commonwealth Association (CA) at Marlborough House. As the only members of the CA who had served under five former CSGs, Carmaline and I were invited to cut the celebratory cake.

Greta Fernandes, Executive Assistant, Economic Affairs Division, Social Transformation Programmes Division, and other divisions, 1974-2009

18 July 2022

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My time at the Secretariat

The year 1982, when Margaret Thatcher sent a task force of more than 100 ships to the Falkland Islands, is memorable to me as I was job hunting and my mother in law spotted a Commonwealth Secretariat advertisement for a messenger in the South London Press. immediately applied for this position and was pleased to be called for an interview with twelve other candidates. The interview by the 4-person panel, which included Peter Dunne, Pat Bancroft and Doris Harmsworth, went well as a few days later I received a phone call from Jean Fryer asking me to report to work the following day to help out.  Apparently, the Secretary-General’s chauffeur was on leave as his wife was expecting a baby.  As a result, Jimmy who used to drive the mini bus delivering mail and other things, was moved up to fill the position of SG’s chauffeur and I was asked to replace Jimmy. I enjoyed my new role which varied daily and included driving for the Assistant and Deputy Secretaries-General. I also delivered mail to Commonwealth High Commissions until I was eventually positioned as an internal messenger.

I had many amiable discussions with my colleagues about the Falklands war, though our views differed. My long tenure at the Secretariat remained enjoyable and interesting as it also exposed me to so many different cultures. I am still in contact with many of my friends from different parts of the Commonwealth.

Martin Smith, Driver and Messenger

1982-1997

December 2023

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My ComSec Memories

Although I had had dealings with ComSec prior to 1992, when I was deputy director at the old Commonwealth Institute (RIP) and when setting up the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (NGO ), my most vivid memory is focused on the year I was an adviser/consultant to Vishnu Persaud’s Economic Affairs Division. This was 1992, and for me it included a trip to Guyana, a trip to Yokohama, and a trip with Chief Anyaoku, Secretary-General (SG), to the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

At that time EAD was housed in a classic building by the Duke of York Steps. The rooms were large and Vishnu, a trusted adviser to Sonny Ramphal as well as Chief Emeka, had a considerable staff. But he had been asked to take on a challenging task, rather outside the normal run of the department’s economic work. This was to bring to life what came to be known in 1996 as the Iwokrama International Centre for Rain Forest Conservation and Development – a scheme to pioneer sustainable development of a million acres of tropical forest in Guyana. It had been approved at the Kuala Lumpur CHOGM of 1989, whose Langkawi Declaration marked a significant Commonwealth shift from commitment to development to commitment to environmentally sustainable development. A high-powered team led by M S Swaminathan, the Indian scientist, had prepared an outline plan.

Vishnu knew I had been to Guyana already, in connectionwith the Institute’s 1986 Caribbean Focus, and was familiar with the Commonwealth. Following Ramphal’s active involvement in the 1987 Brundtland report on environment and development, and the rising interest in ecological issues, he first asked me to write a series of papers for his department. But EAD was overseen by Peter Unwin, Deputy SG, who was pessimistic about the chance of getting Iwokrama funded from Commonwealth sources, and therefore rebooted it as an international centre. He was also looking for economies in Marlborough House, and told me it would take a while to “get the ducks in a row” even for a one- year appointment.

After some delay, therefore, I came to fill a hole in the staff complement created by Vince Cable’s departure, though my skills were not those of an economist. Entering this fine building, with a grand staircase, and Vishnu almost lost in his large office, my initial feeling was that I was walking through treacle. To someone who had been a journalist, managing stressful events at the Commonwealth Institute or launching a Commonwealth NGO, everything seemed to move painfully slowly. Where was the drive? Nothing much seemed to happen for days. The EAD staff were not only physically removed from colleagues in Marlborough House and round St James, but different divisions seemed to be living in separate worlds. Particularly irritating to a former journalist was a pettifogging concern with Secretariat house style for documents.

After a while I found my feet and Vishnu, Guyanese-born himself, was a firm supporter of what he saw as a pioneering scheme which could project his country’s now fashionable environmental credentials. But it had opposition both in Guyana, where Cheddi Jagan’s People’s Progressive Party was about to defeat President Desmond Hoyte’s People’s National Congress party in October 1992, and in the UK as well. In Guyana the PPP criticised it as a government gimmick, dumped down on the indigenous Macuxi and others who lived in the forest; in England, where I was once heckled explaining the project by George Monbiot at a meeting of the Commonwealth Forestry Association in Oxford, the concern was not only for the indigenous people but that development could become an excuse for a rip-off by timber interests.  

Navigating these different currents, at a time when there was no obvious finance for this programme, required ingenuity and luck. Among the early wins were persuading the Overseas Development Administration, forebear of DFID and FCDO, to fund a couple of experienced people to oversee the measurement and audit of the boundaries of the new forested estate. A second was to get the International Tropical Timber Organization, an intergovernmental body based in Japan, to provide some funding. I flew to meet the CEO in Yokohama, who by good fortune was a Malaysian, who said that he would be happy to support a funding application. But Guyana, in financial distress, had not paid its annual subscription. We persuaded the ODA to underwrite the cost of Guyanese membership, thereby facilitating a grant for the project.

We in the Secretariat could do little to help the Hoyte government to overcome suspicion inside Guyana, but backed its proposal to call it Iwokrama, after the indigenous name fora mountain range within the area that had been set aside. We also supported the involvement of local communities. But perhaps the most important fact in ensuring the commitment of Cheddi Jagan, when he at last returned to office in October that year, was that Iwokrama was a good news offer from the Commonwealth and Guyana at the Rio Earth Summit in June 1992.  

I was one of a small Secretariat group which went to Rio, led by Chief Anyaoku and also including Mary Mackie andVishnu Persaud. I had travelled to Brazil many times since the 1960s and was used to the world of NGOs, so my job was to organise a discussion about Iwokrama – a pioneering and attractive project in that era – in the huge extravaganza of the NGO Forum. This involved both the SG and the President of Guyana, who also were able to mention Iwokrama in their brief permitted speeches to the official conference of leaders.

Certain memories stick in my mind. Due to a foul-up by his airline the SG’s case arrived late in Rio, which caused a rushed purchase of another lightweight suit. I remember walking along the beachfront at Copacabana with Vishnu. To each huckster he would ask, “To me a special price?” But he never bought any of their goods. And then a high point was watching Fidel Castro speak to fellow presidents and prime ministers. Would he, who addressed crowds in Havana for hours at a time, be able to keep to the five minutes, all that any leader was allowed? Amazingly, having a well-crafted bash at destruction and exploitation by richer nations, Fidel sat down to rapturous applause. Inside five minutes…

I was always sad that the Iwokrama project was not badged as a Commonwealth innovation in conjunction with Guyana, although for some years its progress was reported to CHOGMs. It was a shame too that its progress has been stuttering. The concept was good and, given the huge Commonwealth expertise in tropical forestry in countries from Nigeria to India, from the UK to Malaysia, it should have been possible to create a powerful collaboration. But part of the problem was undoubtedly that Guyana was off the mental map of too many. I can still remember how, in a moment of enthusiasm, I had told the late Patsy Robertson that I would like to move there to help take Iwokrama forward. She, a powerful voice for the Caribbean, only remarked, “Why would you want to?”

Richard Bourne

February 2024