by John Cloake
John Cloake is a former British Ambassador to Bulgaria (1976-1980). When a few months ago we invited him to contribute to the 100 Years UK in BG blog, John came back to us saying that he holds “many good memories of Bulgaria” and that he has always thought that the British Ambassador’s Residence in Sofia was “the best house in the Balkans”.
The centenary of the diplomatic relations between the UK and Bulgaria was marked during John Cloake’s mission in Bulgaria. Unsurprisingly, John noted that the #100UKBG celebrations seemed very appropriate to him.
Along with Sofia, John’s diplomatic career includes missions in Baghdad, Saigon, New York, Moscow and Tehran, among others.
“In 35 years you have done what the Christian Church failed to do in 2000 years, you’ve stopped the people from eating meat!”
© Richmond University
After three years in Trade I was told I could have my own post and go off to Sofia, Bulgaria. I knew nothing about Bulgaria except that it was at the southern bottom right hand side of the map of Europe and our friends knew even less, one of them told her husband that “John had been appointed to Belgravia!”
[Soon after arriving], I found Bulgarians had a great sense of humour. They also had a great love of music and in a country of nine million people they had nine professional opera companies, one in each regional capital, which tells you something!
Going back to the sense of humour, they would even tell stories against themselves, against the regime or against the Russians.
Even Todor Zhivkov, the President, whom I personally heard telling this one. They tended to be quite often short of food, because they exported a lot. He said that the Patriarch came to see him one day at the Central Committee to give him a present. He had said to the Patriarch: “But this is the Central Committee of the Communist Party’ and the Patriarch had said: “Yes, I know, but in 35 years you have done what the Christian Church failed to do in 2000 years, you’ve stopped the people from eating meat!”.
Similarly the great Party newspaper which was called “The Workers’ Thing” (it’s the best translation I can think of!). Every week it had a little humorous column and quite typical was the tale of a manager of a state business talking to his deputy who said he was “having terrible trouble getting my son into university, can you help?” And the boss says: “Have you tried everything? You’re fired! I thought you had connections.”
It was the sort of place where ties mattered.
[In Bulgaria] any family could have a plot in the country outside the town, in addition to their house in the town, and they could build another house on it if they wanted to and a lot of them did, gradually. You weren’t allowed to employ people but you could use a friend to help and the cost of “a friend” went up and up.
On a Sunday evening if you went out of Sofia, cars would come streaming back into town all laden with vegetables, eggs, whatever all on the back seat and as Andrei Lukanov, the Deputy Prime Minister in charge of Foreign Economic Relations, said to me: “It’s our green economy, it never gets into the records but we couldn’t live without it.”
Comlement with John Cloake’s story on what it was to be a British Ambassador to Bulgaria in the late 1970s.
This article is part of an extensive interview of John Cloake for British Diplomatic Service Oral History Project (BDOHP), a project run by Churchill College, Cambridge. The copyright to the article belongs to BDOHP. It has been published with BDOHP permission and John Cloake’s knowledge.