Lucky Dip, by Richard Thomas (Austin Macauley, 2021, 291pp, £11.99) Reviewed by Hugh Arbuthnott

The title of this memoir is well-chosen. Richard was a diplomat, a dip, and although the Diplomatic Service did its best to work out career plans for its staff, circumstances and other peoples’ careers often got in the way. You put your hand into the Lucky Dip and had to accept what came out. Sometimes you were lucky, sometimes you weren’t. Richard was one of the lucky dips according to his book, happy with all the jobs he drew out of the bran tub.

 He was born in February 1938. Like many other parents who could afford it or who had the right connections, Richard’s sent him and his elder sister to Canada in 1940 to escape the bombing in England. They returned in 1944 when a long connection with West Kent and East Sussex began. His parents ran a National Association of Boys Clubs’ school in Cranbrook which trained boys in the arts and later on ran the theatre and Ellen Terry’s house at Smallhythe. Among other places in Kent and East Sussex, the family later lived in Winchelsea.

One might say that Richard’s luck started when he went to private schools and then to Merton College, Oxford. It was also his luck to be in the last cohort of young men called up for National Service in the Army where he seems not to have been overworked and was an extra in the film Tunes of Glory.  

Richard’s account of his adult experiences jump about in time which make it difficult sometimes to follow what happened when, but overall it is in chronological order. His diplomatic career started in the CRO, the Commonwealth Relations Office, later merged with the FO to become the FCO now the FCDO; the reader has to swallow alphabet soup throughout the book. It is worth the effort because his entertaining account of his life as a dip well illustrates the many jobs that dips do but also the fun and the adventures they have and the famous people they meet. Richard rightly praises his wife who, like so many dips’ wives, worked unpaid with him in his job and therefore for the British Government.

 

Richard’s jobs were in London in the CRO, then the FCO and in British Embassies and High Commissions abroad. He was in Paris as a member of the British delegation to NATO before its Council moved to Brussels to join SHAPE. He was in the High Commission in Ghana, Accra, where he married his  wife, Catherine, an Australian. When in the High Commission in India administering an aid programme, he also helped to set up schools in Bhutan. In the Embassy in Prague he formed links with opponents of the communist regime who later became the government.  When Ambassador to Iceland, he was involved with NATO again but there was a severe domestic upset when the residence butler murdered his (the butler’s) boyfriend in the residence basement and went to prison. In Sofia, also as Ambassador, his Embassy was giving practical support to Bulgaria as it became a liberal democracy after the collapse of communism. Catherine helped the many orphans left in dreadful conditions by the communist government. Richard also once had the tricky task of entertaining Robert Maxwell who had business interests in Bulgaria. His final job was as High Commissioner in a string of island mini-states in the Eastern Caribbean where he had to manage a large staff covering development and the battle against drugs gangs.

 If you wonder what diplomats do, Richard’s book will tell you at least what one of them did. But it is also full of personal details and experiences which make it lively, interesting and amusing.