That scrapbook reminder of an assassination

The other day I came across a scrapbook that I started at the start of the sixties. It was proudly marked ‘File = 1’. Number 1. Clearly, I’d resolved to make this the first in a series of documents that would track my passage through life. But, alas, my character is one that views resolutions, like rules, as made to be broken. File 1 remains to this day the only one created.

First step in a lifelong commitment to documentation
which never reached the second step

At that time, my father was in an administrative position with the United Nations. More specifically, he was in finance. Those were the days when you could still get jobs without a degree. In the years when many today would be studying, my father was helping to fight a war instead, and he never did go to university. He learned accounting on the job, working his way from position to position until he gravitated into the UN, first with UNESCO in Paris and later with the FAO, the Food and Agriculture Organisation, in Rome.

That was where my brother and I were born and eventually started our schooling. Which explains why when I started my first, and ultimately only, scrapbook it was inside an exercise book from the English school in Rome, St George’s.

It was an extraordinary place. It was run by a character who’d been a housemaster at Harrow School, one of the great British ‘public’ schools – i.e. hugely privileged, exclusive private schools. He brought with him all the wonderful sense of entitlement and snobbishness such an institution breeds. It was touch and go whether my brother and I would be admitted, because my father was a Professional grade 3 in the UN and, as a general rule, the school took only children whose parents were at grade 5 or above.

Certainly, being in the school was a wonderful lesson in reward being entirely unrelated to merit. I fell out pretty badly with the authorities there. I assign my lack of ability in football to having missed all sport sessions at a critical time, because I was on detention every single Wednesday afternoon for two years. Indeed, the school briefly made me a fan of corporal punishment: this was the day when the head called me in to his study to tell me I had achieved a unique distinction.

“Out of a school of 500 pupils, you are the only one on detention this week.”

Imagine my pride.

But he hadn’t finished.

“I have no intention of keeping a teacher back to supervise you, so instead I’m going to cane you.”

What relief! My heart sang for joy. I took six strokes of his cane and – at last – could join my class on the playing fields.

As for my father, he too had fallen out with those in authority. His boss loathed him and denied him promotion for fifteen years, a fate he put up with exasperation but stoically, in order to guarantee us a minimum of stability. He then transferred to the United Nations Development Programme, where he was promoted three times in little more than the same number of years, so he ended his career at pretty much the level he would have reached had he been granted some reasonable promotions over his time in Rome.

Sadly, however, while he was able to get into the finance and accounting world without either a degree or an appropriate qualification, he was never able to get out of it. Organisations always need people who’ll keep an eye on the money, and it was known that Leonard Beeson was good at it. Wherever he went, he was cheated of his ambition to move into the running of aid programmes, and found himself spending most of his times with the account books. In the Congo, then called the Zaïre, he did get a programme or two to run, but his main task was still looking after the money.

Talking about the Congo brings me back to my scrapbook.

The Congo was the scene of a major emergency in 1960. The UN sent troops to quell a civil war and large numbers of civilians to put in place a full programme of support and aid. Volunteers were called for and Leonard Beeson was one of just three from the FAO headquarters in Rome. As a married man, he was only required to serve nine months (it was eighteen for those without a family). My mother took it badly, but he felt that it was a duty to step forward when the organisation that paid him needed help dealing with an emergency.

My father's friend
As it turned out, a dead man walking

He took plenty of photos and some of them I included in my scrapbook. One that has always stuck in my memory was of a young man in a security guard’s uniform. My father liked him and took pleasure chatting with him. But then he was sent as a guard on a plane taking the UN Secretary General of the time, the Swede Dag Hammarskjöld, to Northern Rhodesia (today’s Zambia). The plane never made it and an outstanding Secretary General was killed, along with everyone else on the plane, including my father’s friend.

That event was back in the news a few weeks ago, when it was finally confirmed that, as had long been suspected, the plane had been deliberately shot down by a Belgian pilot working as a mercenary.

Dag Hammarskjöld
Iconic Secretary General assassinated in 1961.
Along with my father's friend

It was odd to read that story and remember my father’s time in the Congo. It sent me back to my scrapbook and to that photo. I’m glad I still have it and that, even if I couldn’t make it last, I stuck to my resolution long enough to produce one scrapbook at least.

Allowing me to write this post, as a bit of a tribute to my father, the UN security guard who became his friend, and of course to Hammarsköld, probably the best Secretary General the UN has had.