Brussels One
My small part in the changing Congo
In 1961 I was still in my frustratingly menial clerical job in Unilever’s largest subsidiary, the United Africa Company (UAC), a holding company for dozens of subsidiaries and associates of its own. The whole thing had been formed gradually over many decades by absorbing historical trading houses in many of the countries (some still British colonies) of north, east and particularly West Africa, and in the area we now call The Gulf. Headquarters offices of what was then still called British West Africa were located in Lagos, Accra, Freetown and Bathurst with branches throughout Nigeria, Ghana, and Sierra Leone. On the other side of the massive continent, we were based in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and Kampala. At that time, there were operations in now seemingly unlikely places such as Baghdad and Basra, Doha and Dubai, all linked to former colonial influences.
Alongside the chief London Office, there were important European offices in Paris and Brussels, looking after the company’s business in the numerous former French territories in Africa and the Belgian Congo. Holland, Italy, Germany and Spain all had significant buying and shipping offices, and a large associate office in New York handled all our business shipped from United States sources. UAC was a huge export house, with other UK offices in Manchester and Liverpool, drawing products from potentially anywhere in the world and shipping them to African countries. Increasingly by this time, as the independence process continued to gather pace, manufacturing or assembling products in Africa was becoming more widespread.
At the centre of this gigantic commercial machine I was a small sluggish cog working in a long, narrow, open-plan office, lined on one side with banks of filing boxes ranged on long, dull rows of metal shelves. One afternoon in early January, Mr Hunt, our Office Manager, emerged from his glassed-in section at the far end and walked down the office. I was standing at the side, diligently rummaging in a filing box. As he drew level with me he called out, probably with little hope of much response: ‘Does anyone speak French?’ For once, I reacted spontaneously: ‘Yes, I do’. ‘Oh, do you? Well, come into my office.’ No one else made any move and that was that.
I didn’t really ‘speak French’ at all, but did have a grade B in ‘A’ level French and thought that, if asked, it should be good enough for the purpose. It was. There was no question of anyone testing my competence. Mr Hunt told me the background. As we were aware, the former Belgian Congo was being torn apart from within in the now well-documented birth throes of its independence. Our Brussels office was to transfer some of its administrative functions to London without delay to protect itself from potential anti-colonial reprisals. Members of the Brussels buying office were swiftly moved to London, generally unwillingly. To help transferring the shipping and invoicing work, the company wanted to send two French-speaking employees over to Brussels to learn the working systems and prepare to do that work back to London. The pilot scheme would focus on the company’s motor vehicle agency business in the Congo, mainly the sale and servicing of vehicles supplied by General Motors. Knowing what we know now of King Leopold II’s legacy, this was a sensible business decision at the time. In retrospect, as things became slightly more stable in the Congo and US aid poured in, the move turned out to have been largely unnecessary. Within two or three years all but two of the buyers eventually returned to Brussels, and plans to move further admin work to London were dropped.
They thought we could wrap the whole thing up in a fortnight. Mr Hunt (who soon became ‘Bill’ to us) would go to Brussels with me and an older colleague called Arthur George ‘Jimmy’ James. Bill would see us settled in, spend two or three days in meetings with more senior people and return to London, leaving us to complete the task. Bill knew no French whatsoever, I knew some but had never spoken any to a French speaker, and Jimmy was the one genuine French speaker among us. He was completely bi-lingual and an extreme Francophile. Everything about his appearance was French: the rimless glasses, the hairstyle, the shirts, the ties, the cut of his suits and the shoes. He had a left hand drive car, though mostly cycled to work. I never knew where all this had come from or how he’d become such a fluent French-speaker, but his entire identity was precisely calculated to convey Frenchness. He was a strange, rather isolated, character, probably a good ten years older than me. He’d worked for the company for years but very few who knew him really liked him much. He was one of those who try too hard to be instant friends with everyone. The result is that he seemed to be friends with hardly anyone. You couldn’t point to anything he’d done or said that had particularly put anyone’s back up. It was simply his rather persistent attempts to cultivate you. Most people prefer their personal relationships to evolve and develop at a natural pace, rather than behaving as though they already exist, fully formed. I was to have more than my fair share of old Jimmy during the several years that followed.
Next day I went to see Mr Frank Gilder, the head of our entire department, a respected name in the firm with a long and notable Africa career behind him. He was small, bent, humane and very wise. The wall behind his enormous desk supported an enormous map of the whole of north, east, west and central Africa. His main concern, apart from reminding me of the disastrous events taking place in the Congo, was to impress upon me just how big the Congo was, hence how unimaginably long and complicated the company’s supply routes were. He succeeded magnificently. I was incredibly impressed by all this. I was made to consider, for the first time, the implications of a country of over 905,000 square miles in area (the area of the entire UK is just over 94,000 square miles) and with such a consequent array of transport difficulties. Almost the entire country acts as the drainage basin of the Congo River, first known to Europeans in the late 15th century as the ‘Zaire’, a corruption of words that mean ‘river’ in many African dialects. This name was applied to both nation and river under the Democratic Republic of the Congo between 1971 and 1997, but in most people’s minds the river remained ‘the Congo’.
The country’s only direct access to the sea is the relatively narrow area where the Congo River empties itself into the Atlantic Ocean, about 6º south of the Equator. On the north bank of the great estuary is République du Congo, the former French colony. Angola, formerly a Portuguese possession, begins immediately to the south. The rest of this massive country is completely landlocked, surrounded by at least ten other countries. The journey from the coast port at Matadi to Stanleyville (now Kisangani) involved weeks of transport by road, rail and river at different stages, for example offloading from one to the other to get round the numerous sets of rapids on the lower reaches of the river. Including Livingstone (Inga) Falls, there are 32 cataracts between Matadi and Kinshasa (formerly Leopoldville) and Malebo (formerly called Stanley Pool, where the river expands into a huge lake), necessitating trans-shipment of goods to the railway system, originally completed in1898. From Kinshasa, navigation further inland by river can begin.
The most effective, though not particularly convenient, route from the coast to Elisabethville (Lubumbashi), capital of Katanga Province in the south of the Congo, had been to ship to Luanda in Angola and transport goods across Angola via the Benguela Railway system. For the far eastern side of the country around Lake Kivu goods would be shipped to Dar es Salaam and carried by East African Railways to Goma, completing their journey on the lake itself. Rwanda and Burundi, as former Belgian UN Mandate territories, were also included in the new arrangements, receiving their imports too via Dar es Salaam. For the first time since I’d joined UAC, that half hour with old Gilder had opened my mind to the enormity, not only of the continent of Africa, but also of the vast colonial project that assorted European powers had been conducting there.
Writers and the Congo
Above all, the Congo, river and country, is the territory of Henry Morton Stanley’s expeditionary career and of Joseph Conrad’s brilliant short novel Heart of Darkness, published in 1902. Stanley, a continuous self-inventor and self-publicist, first came to major public notice on the back of David Livingstone, who, from the early 1840s, had wandered Africa for over thirty years. The first white man to cross Africa from coast to coast, Livingstone searched unsuccessfully for the source of the Nile, found the Victoria Falls, looked for mineral deposits, spread the Christian word and denounced the slave trade. When he failed to return from his 1866 expedition, Stanley included the search for him among his own African projects, though his true motivation was always much more personal. Stanley was a journalist and, according to Adam Hochschild (King Leopold’s Ghost, 1998):
He was after more than fame as an explorer; his melodramatic flair made
him, as one historian has remarked, ‘the progenitor of all the subsequent
professional travel writers.’ His articles, books and speaking tours brought
him greater riches than any travel writer of his time, and probably of the
next century as well. With every step he took in Africa, Stanley planned
how to tell the story once he got home. In a twentieth century way, he was
always sculpting the details of his own celebrity.
His determination in terms of self-importance and potential personal glory was such that, as he set off for Africa, he even gave out false information as to his initial destination and the routes he planned to follow. This would put likely competitors off the scent and leave the field clear for him. In fact, he had been in Africa for a year before he eventually set off inland from the east coast in spring 1871 to search for Livingstone, whom no European had seen or heard of for five years. His trek, involving some 190 men, making it the largest exploration operation ever, led him to Livingstone in just over eight months. As the only source of information about this expedition, Stanley wrote it up in his dispatches as an experience of maximum difficulty, endurance and heroism. It has retained those legendary qualities ever since. They include confrontations with evil ‘Arab’ slave-traders, dangerous swamps, many miles of gruelling marching, deadly diseases and crocodiles. None of these is out of place in this terrain: it was their dramatic exaggeration that made his story one of the great ‘human interest’ scoops of its time.
Having met, and according to Stanley, established a warm relationship, the two men did some disappointing exploration together for a few months but Livingstone died soon after they finally parted. This guaranteed that there was no other authoritative voice to return home from Africa which might question the veracity of Stanley’s account, or draw the attention away from him. His brutal treatment of his own African bearers and guides is well known, as is his readiness to dispose summarily of any non-whites who might get in the way or pose a potential threat. One writer has implied that a slogan like ‘If it’s black, shoot it’ might not be inappropriate. Stanley did not attempt to conceal his attitude on this issue in his journals, and there is substantial further evidence of similar harsh treatment of Africans in his later career.
The location of the source of the Nile was one of the great, unanswered geographical questions of the day. It was among Livingstone’s objectives, Stanley was more than interested, and explorers Speke and Burton were in dispute over it. In 1874 Stanley set off from Zanzibar again to shed more light on the question. He circumnavigated Lake Victoria, confirming Speke’s estimate of its size and importance. He explored Lake Tanganyika and established that it had no connection with the Nile. Three years after starting out, he reached the Atlantic Ocean in August 1877, emerging at the mouth of the river Congo. Among other achievements, he had traced the entire course of the River Lualaba for 1,500 miles. As Michaela Wrong says (In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz, published 2000):
He had not only established that the Lualaba had no connection with the Nile,
which he had shown to spring from Lake Victoria, he had also opened up a
huge swathe of central Africa, until then known only to the ‘Arab’ merchants
(in actual fact Swahili-speaking, Moslem traders from Africa’s east coast) to
greedy Western eyes.
In the books Stanley wrote after each extraordinary trip he showed a near obsession with the dangers posed by perspiration and sodden underwear, which he blamed for malarial chills. But his eccentricities did not prevent him from accurately sizing up the potential of the land he had passed through. Its forests were full of precious woods and ivory-bearing elephants. Its fertile soils supported palm oil, gums, and most significantly, wild rubber, about to come into huge demand with the invention of the pneumatic tyre. Its inhabitants presented a ready market for European goods and, once the rapids were passed, the river offered a huge transport network stretching across central Africa.
‘Greedy Western eyes’: It hardly needs to be said that this massive wealth of natural resources and the potential market for imported European products explained precisely the presence in the Congo and in many other parts of Africa of the very company I worked for.
Stanley mistakenly imagined that Britain would want to develop the region. Instead, the Congo became the central concern – indeed, the central personal possession – of King Leopold II of Belgium. He snapped up one of the last, and largest, pieces of African territory not yet claimed by any other European colonising power. It provided him with exactly the colony he wanted (‘this magnificent African cake’), and Stanley was the very man to go and set it all up for him. Off he went again, this time establishing a chain of trading stations and developing road and rail transport in the king’s name. He confirmed the tremendous natural wealth waiting to be exploited, writing ‘We are like children ignorantly playing with diamonds.’
In order to quieten potential criticisms of what he was doing, Leopold gave the deliberate impression to other European governments that the project was less than rewarding. He also proposed that, while the Congo Free State should be under his personal control, its commercial possibilities should be open to all. In fact, the Congo became Leopold’s personal fiefdom, he absorbed its profits, and the African chiefs found out, too late, that they had handed over everything to him: land, trade monopoly and people. Stanley’s treatment of his African labourers, who were forced to clear jungle for trading stations and building the transport facilities, earned him the nickname 'Breaker of Rocks'. He said of Leopold that he had the ‘enormous voracity to swallow a million of square miles with a gullet that will not take in a herring.’ The Congo was not a free trade zone at all: it was simply a vast money-making machine for King Leopold II. Henry Morton Stanley had been his ruthless and willing collaborator.
The incomparable cruelty of Leopold’s regime in the Congo, disguised for public consumption at home as a purely benevolent venture, provided the source material for Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Since his boyhood, Conrad had nurtured a dream of one day going to Africa, attracted as much as anything by ‘the unsolved mystery of that continent.’ In 1890, aged thirty-two, the dream resurfaced. He applied for and was accepted for a job in the Congo, believing, like most Europeans, that Leopold’s African project was a noble and ‘civilising’ one. The ship he sailed on carried the first consignment of material for making the new railway there.
At the end of six months in the Congo, making the upriver trip of 1,000 miles as far as Stanley Falls and back, Conrad cancelled his work contract. This is how Hochschild describes the process of his disillusionment:
Several bitter disappointments punctured Conrad’s dreams. At the start he
hit it off badly with an official of the company he was working for, which
meant he would not gain command of a steamer after all. Then, after coming
downstream, he got sick again, with malaria and dysentery, and had to
convalesce at an American Baptist mission station on Stanley Pool . . . He
remained so weak that he had to be carried back to the coast and never fully
recovered his health. Finally, he was so horrified by the greed and brutality
among white men he saw in the Congo that his view of human nature was
permanently changed.
Eight years later, Conrad began work on the novel. For him, the ‘heart of darkness’ was not Africa itself, but the black interior regions of the human spirit and the awfulness of which it is capable. He was hit and permanently damaged, not by any stereotypical African ‘savagery’, but by the rotten double standards of Western values, which expressed themselves in the inhuman treatment of black men. In fact, the theme recurs in several of Conrad’s novels and short stories, exploring the appalling acts that humanity can both contemplate and perform, especially when left to itself, unconstrained by a society’s moral or legal standards. He develops this theme, for example, through the self-regulating ship’s company, where the captain lays down and enforces the rules for everyone else, and where another, equally rigid, set of conventions applies below decks among the crew. Or among a small number of expatriates on a distant island. Or at a coaling station in the South China Sea; or at another remote trading station far from any civilising influences. If pressed, we need look no further than 20th century history for large-scale illustrations of humanity gone bad in its treatment of its own species.
The iconic figure in the story is Mr Kurtz, the company’s superb agent, located at a distant trading station, the ‘Inner Station’, way up the great [Congo] river. He has amassed magnificent quantities of ivory for the company but there are also dark rumours that he has descended morally into unspeakable and undefined evil. Kurtz has been treating this piece of the African jungle just as King Leopold had done, as his personal possession, and plumbed, as Leopold’s lackeys had done, the very depths of human behaviour in doing so. We discover that there are dried, shrunken heads on the fence around his house. The ivory company has hired Marlow, the narrator, to bring both ivory and the physically ill Kurtz back to base. Kurtz dies on board the steamer on the journey back to the coast, muttering some of the most famous last words in English literature: ‘The horror! The horror!’ Kurtz himself was based on several models of contemporary agents and traders who had ‘gone native’, unbalanced by the demands of lust, greed and cruelty.
Conrad’s firsthand observations of the territory during his visit provided the material for his accurate descriptions of the awful, burgeoning colonial experience in Leopold’s playground. What comes through so often is the dull, pointless destructiveness of the white men, their exercise of absolute power for its own sake, the complete lack of understanding or vision, and the utter helplessness of the Africans, whose only recourse was to flee, otherwise forced to work in conditions of slavery clearing the jungle and building the roads and railways. Marlow, on a French steamer proceeding along the West African coast port by port, describes some of his earliest impressions of the approaching continent:
Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There
it is before you – smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid or savage, and
always mute with an air of whispering, Come and find out. This one was almost
featureless, as if still in the making, with an aspect of monotonous grimness. The
edge of a colossal jungle, so dark green as to be almost black, fringed with white
surf, ran straight, like a ruled line, far, far away along a blue sea whose glitter was
blurred by a creeping mist. The sun was fierce, the land seemed to glisten and drip
with steam.
To European eyes, it’s a completely ‘other’ world, lacking recognisable features or reference points, ‘as if still in the making’. When Africans come out to the steamer in their small boats, Marlow sees in them ‘a wild vitality, an intense energy of movement that was as natural and true as the surf along their coast. They wanted no excuse for being there.’ Of course they didn’t. It was their country, their land, and their life. If anyone needed such an excuse, it was the white man and his works. Later:
. . . we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn’t even
a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of
their wars going on thereabouts . . . the muzzles of the long six-inch guns stuck
out all over the low hull . . . In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water,
there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. . . . a tiny projectile
would give a feeble screech – and nothing happened. Nothing could happen.
There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery
in the sight; and it was not dissipated by someone on board assuring me earnestly
there was a camp of natives – he called them enemies! – hidden out of sight
somewhere.
It’s a classic illustration of power being used to absolutely no purpose. It’s pointless, and in this particular instance, not even destructive. ‘Nothing could happen’. More than thirty days later they reach ‘the mouth of the big river’, and tranship to a river steamer for the two hundred mile trip to Marlow’s company station. On his way up from the jetty:
I came upon a boiler wallowing in the grass, then found a path leading up
the hill. It turned aside for the boulders, and also for an undersized railway
truck lying there on its back with its wheels in the air. One was off. The thing
looked as dead as the carcass of some animal. I came upon more pieces of
decaying machinery, a stack of rusty rails . . . a horn tooted to the right, and
I saw the black people run. A heavy and dull detonation shook the ground,
a puff of smoke came out of the cliff, and that was all. No change appeared
on the face of the rock. They were building a railway. The cliff was not in
the way or anything; but this objectless blasting was all the work going on.
A slight clinking made me turn my head. Six black men advanced in a file,
toiling up the path. They walked erect and slow, balancing small baskets of
earth on their heads, and the clink kept time with their footsteps. Black rags
were wound round their loins . . . each had an iron collar on his neck, and all
were connected together with a chain whose bights swung between them,
rhythmically clinking . . . They were called criminals . . . They passed me
within six inches, without a glance, with that complete deathlike indifference
of unhappy savages. Behind this raw matter one of the reclaimed, the product
of the new forces at work, strolled despondently, carrying a rifle by its middle
. . . with a large, white rascally grin, and a glance at his charge, [he] seemed to
take me into partnership in his exalted trust. After all, I was also a part of the
great cause of these high and just proceedings.
All around him, Marlow sees this evidence of aimless waste of material resources and the subjugation of human beings as a new colony is born. Later he finds groups of ‘black shapes’ under the trees:
. . . in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment and despair . . . they were dying
slowly – it was clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they
were nothing earthly now – nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation,
lying confusedly in the greenish gloom . . . lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed
on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to
crawl away . . .
Finally, after an upriver journey of some two months, Marlow enters the area where he will find Kurtz. Again, the primordial ‘otherness’, the complete lack of reference points, swamps his perception:
Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the
world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An
empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest . . . There was no joy in
the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted,
into the gloom of over-shadowed distances . . . There were moments when
one’s past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment
to spare t yourself; but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream . . .
And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness
of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you
with a vengeful aspect.
Putting everything together - the nature and conduct of the enterprise and the embodiment of ‘The horror’ of it all in the character of Mr Kurtz - Heart of Darkness is a superlative indictment of the very worst excesses of the colonial process during the late 19th century, as a man like Stanley ‘shot his way down the Congo River’ while European powers raped the different parts of Africa. Hochschild concludes his discussion of the novel by asserting that the ‘moral landscape . . . and the shadowy figure at its centre are the creations not just of a novelist but of an open-eyed observer who caught the spirit of a time and place with piercing accuracy’.
Off to Brussels
Neither Stanley nor Conrad featured in my enlightening conversation with Frank Gilder, but only two weeks later a BEA Viscount flew Bill Hunt, Jimmy James and me to Brussels for a return fare of £14 each. I had never flown anywhere before. It was February, a few days before my 22nd birthday, and the walk across the Heathrow tarmac to the plane was seasonably wet and very windy. This made my first flight more than usually bumpy. The new arrivals building at Brussels Melsbroek was a glittering palace of glass and steel, probably only opened three years previously for the 1958 Brussels Exposition. Instead of the lumbering bus service between the Cromwell Road terminal and Heathrow, here was a dedicated train (‘le petit train’) running direct into the centre of Brussels. But on this occasion we were not to use it. As we reached this grand arrivals area the public address system announced our three names and invited us to address ourselves to a driver who was awaiting us. For half an hour or so we were real VIPs, collected by an official Unilever chauffeur in cap and smooth grey suit who ushered us into a long, black limousine and drove us direct to our hotel.
The company had installed us at the Hotel Albert Premier. Its grand 19th century frontage gave onto one side of the Place Rogier, just round the corner from the Gare du Nord. (The hotel was still there the last time I looked a few years ago but the former frontage has gone). The modern glass-walled Olivetti Building was one of the city’s latest office blocks commanding the north side of the Place. An electronic strip ran high across its front, broadcasting the latest news headlines and a string of advertisements, exhorting us to drink this, use that and ‘FUMEZ BASTOS’, all expressed in both French and Flemish. For me, this added to the romance and exoticism of the whole business of being in Brussels. The city functioned not only in the language of which I knew a little, but also in this strange linguistic register of which I knew absolutely nothing. With soft tyres on Belgian pavé, the traffic squealed round the square all day and much of the night. Round the great ring boulevard, itself refurbished with new tunnels, underpasses and flyovers for the 1958 Exposition, the trams clattered and clanged. Since then, the centre of gravity of Brussels has shifted with the expansion of the EU bureaucracy and Place Rogier is now a somewhat dingier pedestrianised zone.
I found it all immensely exciting: my first trip abroad, and on official business. There was novelty to confront and absorb at every turn: new sounds and noises, the languages, the smells of continental cigarettes everywhere and the daily life being lived on the pavements. The Albert Premier had an authentic 19th century atmosphere – gloomy, ornate, everything a bit larger and seemingly grander than convenient for today’s ordinary people. You could easily imagine Belgian expatriate businessmen staying here on leave from their Congo money-making during the old colonial years. The lift was a marvel of wrought iron, open on all sides, all its hoisting mechanisms on show, operated by one of the many silent flunkeys who would appear from nowhere all over the hotel whenever required. We had three adjacent and interconnecting suites on the third floor, right along the hotel front overlooking Place Rogier, each with a bedroom, bathroom and sitting room, every part of it capable of accommodating an entire family. These huge rooms were, in a dull, old-fashioned style, luxurious, with a massive bed, deep armchairs capable of swallowing an entire human being, a desk large enough for an average board meeting and tall, wide windows with heavy, fringed drapes With all this on top of our very special reception at the airport, I began to wonder whether I was really the person they thought I was, a mere L-grade clerical person being treated, it seemed, more like a member of senior management, or perhaps even royalty. But then we were travelling with Bill Hunt, a much more senior, though instinctively very modest, figure, and company protocol allowed junior personnel accompanying such people to enjoy the senior benefits.
Office people, smoking and drinking
The official car collected us from the hotel and took us to Unilever House at 46, rue Montoyer. It stood back to back with the Euratom building and next door to the European Coal, Iron and Steel Federation, the seed of the Common Market itself. By now the Six, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg were established in commercial partnership and Britain had begun one of its several vain attempts to negotiate entry. Our first engagement was a meeting of welcome with F. Michiels (Fred, though no one would have dared to call him that to his face) Head of Département Shipping, and several of his key subordinates. Michiels was a Flemish character (fluent in Flemish, French and English) whose knowledge and experience of his territory was just as formidable as Frank Gilder’s was of his. In size and facial appearance he rather resembled Nikita Kruschev, though with a little more hair. What remained of it was plastered in long streaks right across the bald top of his head from one side to the other. As the day wore on, the sticky stuff he used to keep it in place dried out, and the released hair would hang ludicrously down towards his collar.
Inside his head it was different. He was absolute master of everything he knew. His responsibilities covered the invoicing, import licences, financial and transport arrangements for every type of goods exported to the Congo, Rwanda and Burundi. At the announcement of a change in, for example, import regulations for Portuguese stockfish or buying commission shown on invoices for Rwanda, he saw immediately all the implications for everyone likely to be touched by it. He would sit down and, with only occasional reference to existing documents, dictate to his secretary a complex, multi-paged memo of precise, detailed and crystal-clear instructions on how affected aspects of the work now needed to be performed in the light of the changes. It was brilliant management: he knew everyone’s job inside out, could have done them all blindfold, and, above all, knew exactly who else needed to know. In this way, he literally re-wrote the ‘bible’ of the company’s commercial practice, over and over again. He was like an oracle. Individuals high and low, from parts of the organisation completely separate from his department, constantly came to him for information and advice in what was, after all, a rapidly changing situation. Of course, it made people lazy. Instead of keeping up with the latest developments in detail themselves, they would simply say: ‘I’ll ask Michiels. He’ll know’. And, like Frank Gilder, he always did.
After Fred Michiels, the three most important figures for us were the buttoned-up humourless N. Liesenborghs (not the kind of person whose first name, rumoured to be Norbert, was ever made public), in charge of invoicing; Mr. A. Michel (I forget his first name), transport department, a gentle Frenchman with plenty of humour; and Georges van Landschoote, avuncular in appearance though firm in practice, whose department across the corridor looked after import licences and letters of credit. Like Michiels, all three were complete masters of their work and so, despite their individual peculiarities, ultimately very well respected by their own subordinates. While Bill Hunt talked at higher, more abstract levels with various managers – and then went back to London – Jimmy and I sat for the fortnight with these three and some of their most experienced staff, gathering our information about what all the paperwork was about, what it was for, how it worked, and where it went.
Jimmy decided we should divide the departments between us. To my later relief, he chose to concentrate on invoicing and I on the licencing and letter of credit business. There was an awful lot of different kinds of paper, which may have reflected what we tend to see as a particular Continental taste for bureaucracy. Regardless of that, I had the tremendous impression that everyone I sat with and talked to really did know their job and did it extremely conscientiously. I felt that this kind of approach wasn’t so typical of many of the people I knew back in London Office, where there was much more of the old British amateur attitude, as well as some downright incompetence. Certainly, the London Office in general had some very passive section heads, many working out their time before retirement, in charge of some distinctive characters who believed that turning up at the office on time each morning was all they needed to do to earn their salaries.
I do know, for certain, that I’d never smoked as much in a fortnight as I did then. Virtually everyone in these offices smoked. Belgium was known for some of the cheapest cigarettes in Europe and, above all, for its superb range of excellent cigars, available at equally very smoker-friendly prices. I heard that French petrol tankers and other large container lorries, having offloaded their cargoes around Belgium, were then filled with Belgian tobacco products on the return trip, to be smuggled back to France for redistribution there. It was clear that, during our second, much longer stay in Brussels, Jimmy’s French father-in-law wanted to buy as many Belgian cigars as he could possibly carry while staying in the city. During that later period, I used to send small parcels of cigarettes and cigars back to my London address, using the Belgian Post Office’s échantillon (‘commercial sample’) facility, which meant that they escaped inspection by Customs on arrival.
Liesenborghs sat in his corner by the window at the top end of the big, open-plan office with a pipe whose bowl was the size of a medium coffee cup. He filled it with sweet-smelling tobacco, lit it and puffed out immense clouds of sweet-smelling smoke. It kept going out and he kept relighting it, clamping the stem between his massive teeth. By lunchtime, his enormous ashtray was piled high with spent matches and tobacco ash. Nearly all his spoken communication fought its way through these clenched teeth, the pipe firmly held, with the result that what he had to say was frequently not heard properly and needed repetition. Occasionally, he would actually remove the pipe from his mouth to scrape out the ash, improving both transmission and reception enormously. Members of his staff would imitate his speaking style to one another without his apparently being aware of it. If he was aware, he would have ignored it anyway.
When he wanted someone’s attention, he simply called out their name. Such exchanges almost always followed this pattern, whoever he was addressing: ‘Albrechts.’ ‘Oui, Monsieur Liesenborghs?’ ‘Quel est l’histoire de ces machins?’ ‘Quel machins, Monsieur Liesenborghs?’ And then the discussion would ensue, shouted across or down the office, back and forth for ages. While completely unprepared to get up and visit anyone else’s desk, he would sometimes summon the staff member to come up to his own, making it all much more efficient - and much quieter for everyone else. In French, machin is a slang term meaning ‘doings’, ‘what-do-you-call-it’, ‘whatsit’ or ‘thingy’, so calling out ‘What is the story on these thingies?’ was never going to get the enquiry off to a very clear beginning. But machin was one of his habitual words, used without realising it, and so had become part of the wind-up procedure used by others in conversations with him.
Mr Michel, the transport chief, was a gentle character who smoked cigarettes almost non-stop, made jokes and enjoyed laughing. Our contacts with him were more social than business because, having an entire transport department in London anyway, we didn’t need to study those aspects of the job. Unlike his colleague Liesenborghs, who ran his section with strictest of discipline, Michel got his work done through being humane and friendly with his staff. His deputy was a tiny man called De Hooghe, who smoked massive cigars and looked after the despatch procedures for relatively small consignments sent by airfreight. He drove an enormous American limo-type car with rear fins, with his head only just showing above the bottom edge of the windscreen. When you saw him out in it on the street, it appeared that a driverless car was approaching. The other most notable person in Michel’s section was one Jonquin, a rough, crude man who smoked roll-up cigarettes incessantly, one of them permanently hanging from his bottom lip. For some reason, he was constantly being called to by Liesenborghs from almost the other end of the long office. ‘Jonquin,’ Liesenborghs would shout. The response, given in a deep, throaty, gurgling, ugly voice, was always the single word ‘Quoi?’ and his subsequent replies were similarly limited to a single gruff word each time if he could possibly manage it.
One day during our first week Michel and van Landschoote took the three of us round to their local, Le Relais, in the nearby Place du Luxembourg, opposite the small Luxembourg Station. To the east of this small square is the Parc Leopold containing the Museums of Natural History and Natural Sciences. Today this is known as the European Quarter and contains the more recent European Parliament buildings.During our much longer stay later in the year, Le Relais became one of our main venues for beer and good, inexpensive meals like steak frites, a Bruxellois staple dish. On this first lunchtime occasion, Michel was keen to introduce us to one of the speciality beers for which Brussels is so famous. This was Gueuze, the yellowy-green lambic beer made by the mysterious process of infectious fermentation. At that time, it had not become as commercialised as it is today. It was strong in alcohol, partly because, like the champagne method, fermentation continued while the beer was in bottle. The litre bottle with champagne-style cork and wired cap was placed in a device that looked rather like a lathe with a corkscrew at one end. The bottle was firmly gripped and the cork gently extracted to prevent explosion and highly pressurised beer gushing all over the place. Gueuze flavours range from quite sweet to very bitter and sharp. The one we were having was on the sharp side, and some regulars put a knob of sugar in to make it more drinkable – perhaps even in the hope that more sugar would ferment, while they waited, into more alcohol. I found it tasted a bit more like cucumber than anything else I could relate to, and most unlike any beer I had ever experienced. Michel and his amused colleagues watched our faces as we took the first sip. Bill’s expression showed immediately that this wasn’t what he called beer. Jimmy and I made the best of it, saying we found it ‘intéressant’ and ‘différent’. In time, we persevered, and I made it one of my regular drinks. Michel warned us about its strength, suggesting that one large glass was enough for lunchtime when you had to go back to the office, but that you could be more cavalier with it during the evening. As we discovered, he was a great evening user of Le Relais with colleagues, friends and family, and, as generally happens in these circumstances, was on very good personal terms with le patron.
Georges van Landschoote didn’t like Gueuze, so he introduced us to Kreik, the sweeter cherry beer, another of the unusual Belgian beers that we’d never heard of before. In fact, as we found, once you began exploring the different types of Belgian beer, you’d embarked on a rewarding lifetime’s study. Van Landschoote was more moderate in both his drinking and smoking than Michel, though clearly enjoyed both. His everyday smoke in the office was a small cigar called Ritmeester Pikeur that came in a yellow tin. He offered me one, I liked it, and it became my standard cigar. He also had some rather special ones, very dark leaf that came wrapped in fine tissue paper. I was learning about import licencing with him, amid regulations that seemed to be changing every couple of days as the de-colonisation processes worked their insanely fast way forward. One of the first people in his office I sat with to study the nuts and bolts of the job was a woman in her early forties, attractive in an odd, blowsy way, whose most common utterance was ‘Trop de papier, non?’ to which all I could reply, with a sheepish smile, was ‘Oui – er, oui, beaucoup.’ It was in this office that I learned the fairly common practice of shaking hands with colleagues before leaving work at the end of the day.
As that pathetic exchange reveals clearly, apart from understanding how the admin procedures worked, which I think we got quite well taped in that fortnight, my major problem was using French. I found that I could follow what people were saying reasonably well. During a conversation, as long as they spoke reasonably slowly, I could grasp the point. But I couldn’t make any effective contribution. I still needed to translate what they were saying into English in my mind, prepare my reply, and translate that into French ready to speak it. By that time, the conversation had moved on considerably, leaving me with a sentence to utter that was, by now, completely irrelevant. I didn’t know how to interject and bring the talk back to the earlier stage and so was left with what I wanted to try and say unsaid. Buying cigarettes, ordering a drink or a simple meal in a restaurant was straightforward enough. I could do it, though the moment someone asked me a question about it, I would be on much less certain ground. Did I want the Pikeur cigars in the box of ten or the box of twenty? How large a Gueuze did I want? Should my steak be cooked à point or in some other way? Jimmy helped in these situations by teaching me several useful phrases that should cover any predictable queries. But for most of that fortnight of our first visit, I was practically tongue-tied, frustrated, listening carefully but unable to say much more in French to anyone except oui, non, merci, je comprends or au revoir. Jimmy did an excellent job in translating for me as the talk went along, and I gave him English sentences to speak on my behalf. Two weeks were simply not enough to develop any facility in the language. Later on, however, nearly four months definitely did the trick.
Brussels, daily life and some history
Bill completed his meetings and returned to London Office, at which precise moment, our official car was cancelled. We could go over to rue Montoyer on the tram, which we did, or walk, which we did a good deal during our later summer visit. Our route took us up the steep hill of Boulevard du Jardin Botanique. At the top, we crossed over and cut through an area of old, ordinary small streets with little shops selling cakes, chocolates, fish, meat and everything else. The Boulevard was modern Brussels showing off while this quarter was ‘real’ Brussels, a typical city interior of probably some 18th and largely 19th century buildings. Above the shops were apartments, and on the pavements the people who lived in them, walking dogs, doing shopping and chatting on street corners. This was more like real life, away from the new flashy office blocks. We skirted round the northern edge of Parc de Bruxelles, crossing first the great rue de la Loi (now the location of the EU Berlaymont Building), and then rue Belliard to reach the rue Montoyer. Getting our feet on the pavements made us feel a little more that we belonged there, rather than being driven protectively through it in our undeserved VIP cocoon.
In the evenings, exploring for moderately priced restaurants we found le Duc de Brabant on the corner by our hotel, where a fixed menu provided soup from a large tureen, chicken or steak with chips and salad and an ice cream for very little money. It was a friendly meeting place for customers who spoke Flemish first and French only when they had to, with a dozen tables and a pool table. Although Brussels was officially a bi-lingual city, with all street signs and most other public inscriptions given in both languages, the northern half tended to be more Flemish and the southern more French. Place de Brouckère had one of those typical city restaurants, plate glass windows with words on them giving onto a dark, slightly mysterious interior, with heavy curtains, big old furniture and shiny brass rails and knobs around the place. This is the traditional Low Countries style and you still find them in places such as Bruges, Antwerp and Amsterdam. They’re warm, comfortable, somehow very civilised and staffed by people who know what they’re doing, and do it unobtrusively. The outstanding example was the much more expensive Le Vieux Strasbourg on the main boulevard, not far from our hotel. During our summer stay, we used to go there at the end of every month when our expenses came through. On the second most costly menu, the starter was trout or half a lobster, pulled out of the very tank at the side of the room where you could see them hopelessly swimming around. The steak frites were marvellous, the desserts heart-stopping, the wines or beers superb, all neatly topped off with espresso coffee and a Ritmeester Pikeur. I think that meal cost us about thirty shillings a head, which seemed a very considerable amount to pay for a restaurant meal in 1961.
Comparing it with the great sprawl of London, I was always impressed by the compact nature of central Brussels. The pentagonal boulevard system encloses the whole of the old city – and a good deal more - within it. This ring was imposed precisely over the line of the original fortified city walls of the mid-14th century, themselves replaced by a continuous boulevard between 1810 and 1840. From our hotel in Place Rogier you could walk a straight line from northeast to southwest – from Gare du Nord to Gare du Midi - along the Boulevard Adolphe Max, via Place de Brouckère, and along Boulevards Anspach and Lemonier to the Place de la Constitution. Today the whole journey takes only three stops on the Metro. Adolphe Max was burgomaster of the city at the beginning of the First World War. Gaining international fame for his resistance to the German occupation, he remained a celebrated statesman until he died in 1939. The boulevard named for him was something like London’s Oxford Street in 1961, a succession of department stores, one or two cinemas and a few nightclubs. It’s now a much more glittering version of Regent Street (while Oxford Street has become even more like a market than it was always promising).
Beyond Brouckère and just before the Bourse at rue du Marché des Poulets (Chicken Market Street), you can peel off that route leftwards and reach the Grand’ Place, the spectacular late 17th century neo-Gothic reconstruction of most of the former genuinely medieval city square. The original craft guild buildings were knocked to bits by the French troops of Louis XIV in 1695, but then new ones were erected on the model of the old with the magnificent result available today. This glittering piece of old Europe is as good a place as any to represent the ‘centuries of occupation’, the label that the Encyclopaedia Britannia gives to the long history of Brussels. This is the very heart of the Old Town, with the commanding Town Hall filling most of the south side of the square. Opposite this stands the Maison du Roi, looking remarkably old, which was almost completely rebuilt during the last decades of the 19th century. It contains the Brussels history museum on three or four floors. Here I discovered only quite recently that the small River Senne, which I’d never been aware of in the sixties, was to be seen in several 18th century paintings. It once flowed through the inner city but had become so putrid with industrial effluent that it had to be put underground during the mid-19th century. The river is now a main sewer, following the straight course of those wide boulevards that link the north and south railway stations. The west side of the Place contains Le Roi d’Espagne, one of the most famous and most visited of central Brussels pubs, though those who know use the one next door which is similar but slightly less famous. Both provide a superb long view across the entire Place.
During the early Middle Ages, the duchy of Brabant, with Brussels as its principal town, was invaded by troops of the Count of Flanders, who occupied Brussels for a short time. This prompted the building of the fortified walls following its liberation. Brabant became part of the Duke of Burgundy’s possessions in 1430 and enjoyed a period of rich artistic and cultural development. The Town Hall and a number of Gothic churches, cathedrals and palaces were built, and the city acquired political status as the central administrative centre for the Duke’s possessions in the Low Countries. During the 16th century, the capital’s commercial role was developed as canals were built, eventually linking Brussels to Antwerp and the North Sea.
Protestant martyrs were burned at the stake in and around post-Reformation Brussels, but the city came under Calvinist control for over seven years during the Revolt of the Netherlands. In 1585 the southern provinces (including today’s Belgium) separated from the Northern provinces (today’s Netherlands) and came back to Roman Catholicism under the Spanish Hapsburgs. Many more fine churches were built in the city following the Counter-Reformation, in what is called the Italo-Flemish Baroque style. France invaded several times during the second half of the 17th century, but, by the century’s end, the Grand’ Place had been superbly rebuilt. There was yet another, fortunately brief, French occupation in the late 1740s. For the remainder of the century, Brussels was part of the Austrian Netherlands, developing considerably in both financial and industrial terms. The upper town enjoyed the close attention of the urban planners whose work included the Place Royale and the symmetrical Brussels Park with its surrounding neoclassical buildings.
It sounds complicated, and it was. Belgium as we know it had never yet existed and the territory we called the Low Countries was incessantly marched over or into, and grabbed by one power or another for several centuries, rather like Lebanon. Things were not to become any more straightforward towards the end of the 18th century, as the CD version of Encyclopaedia Britannica shows:
Following the Brabant Revolt (1788-90) against the government of Emperor
Joseph II of Austria, the French republican armies made their appearance, and
the Belgian principalities were annexed to France. During the Napoleonic era,
Brussels was reduced to the rank of chief town of the French département of
the Dyle, losing in addition all authority over its satellite villages.
One of the consequences of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo was the creation of
the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. This reunion of the southern and northern
provinces, which had been separated in the 16th century, lasted 15 years (1815-30).
During this period Brussels shared the status of capital with The Hague. Its
appearance changed appreciably, above all because of the demolition of the city
walls (1810-40) and their replacement by tree-lined boulevards, as well as the
digging of the Brussels-Charleroi Canal, which from 1832 onwards made waterborne
transport possible from as far as the province of Hainault to the port of Antwerp
via the capital.
Belgium obtained its independence in 1830 with Brussels as capital and centre of political and administrative affairs. From that time, the city grew rapidly in many other respects too. Economic and financial activity flourished; the city became the centre of new national road and rail transport networks; population increased and, with it, development of the city’s public transport and sewage systems, and suburban residential provision. By the time I saw Brussels for the first time in 1961, the European turbulence, including that of the two World Wars in the 20th century, had all subsided and the place felt, as it surely was: the very civilised capital of a fully formed country in its own right, similar, in those terms, to the one I had recently left.
There would still be subterranean disputes between French and Dutch speaking groups and inter-regional tensions erupting periodically, and remaining today a source of political sensitivity. By now probably three-quarters of the Brussels population speaks French, with many middle class people thoroughly competent in both French and Flemish, as they were in our office. Dutch speaking cultural activity tends to take place in the northern part of the city, while French-based events are concentrated more to the southeast. EU development has made a huge difference to the number of foreigners in Brussels over the past forty years or so. When I was there, they accounted for less than 7% of the city’s population but now total more like 30%. People have migrated there not only from other European countries but also from Morocco, Congo of course, Turkey and other parts of the Mediterranean. Like Britain and many other ‘old’ European countries, Belgium now has mosques, including a locality near Brussels with eighteen of them.
This was only a brief, though invigorating, introduction to Brussels. By April 1961 we were sent back to get on with the job in earnest for several months. Some impressions of that period are given in 'Brussels Two'.
Epilogue
Like Dartmoor and its surroundings a couple of years later, Brussels hit me at a particularly impressionable moment in my young adult life. Having just become 22 years old, I had discovered new people, more interesting work and new places to see. On top of that I had begun to absorb a different language and another culture. But we were only there for a fortnight on this first visit and it was not until April that we returned to Brussels for several months to try and do the job properly.
During that time I became moderately competent at conversing in French, even to the point of giving instructions to a Belgian barber about how I wanted my hair cut. I knew which Belgian beers I preferred, how much I loved steack frites (a dish for Belgians as spaghetti is to Italians), the destinations of the different tram routes in the city centre and loved the smell of continental cigarettes and cigars. In the subsequent three to four months I came to feel I belonged there, living and working for the first time in my life in a foreign city.