Author: Georgi Milkov, “24 Chasa”
John Cecil Cloke was born in London on December 2, 1924. He began working at the Foreign Office – the British Foreign Office – in 1948. His first appointment was as Third Secretary in Baghdad in 1949. In 1951, he was sent as Third Secretary, and then as Second Secretary to Saigon (today Ho Chi Minh City). Between 1954 and 1957, he held various administrative positions in the Foreign Office, where he was promoted to the rank of First Secretary and sent to New York as Commercial Consul (1957-1958). In 1962, he was First Secretary in Moscow, after which he returned to work at the Foreign Office, and in 1966, he was promoted to the rank of Counsellor and headed one of the departments of the diplomatic service in London. Between 1968 and 1972 was a Counsellor (in charge of commercial affairs) at the British Embassy in Tehran. He headed the Department of Trade and Exports at the Foreign Office between 1973 and 1976, after which he was appointed Ambassador to Bulgaria in 1976. He remained in Sofia until 1980. He then retired and devoted himself to research and writing historical books. He died in Richmond, Great Britain, on 9 July 2014.
Here are some of the memories of the British Ambassador in Sofia until 1980:
The Bulgarians loved opera and music. They sent choirs to the Welsh music festivals in the Eisteddfod and won all the awards – Ambassador John Cloke notes in his memoirs. – Molly and I had many friends in the opera. We met the mezzo-soprano Nelly Boshkova. Nelly and Molly became best friends. Molly taught Nelly English, and Nelly taught Molly Bulgarian. Their common language was French, which opera singers of that time usually spoke. We had many other friends from the opera world. It was easy to make friends, they were nice people and they didn’t mind being around the British ambassador.
There were a few people, usually older, who had been through the bad days of the purges in the 1940s and 1950s, who were still hesitant to come home. I must mention a dear friend who, at the time we were in Sofia, was now retired director of the Sofia Opera, the son of a Tsarist Minister Plenipotentiary in London before the war. He knew the Christies before they founded the Glyndebourne Opera Festival and would return there to produce opera performances. So he once invited us to dinner at their house, but asked us not to come in our cars but to walk, as it was very close. The man was worried about the British ambassador’s flag flying in front of his house… We negotiated a suitable cultural exchange agreement, which I helped to facilitate. We did many exhibitions of Shakespeare, Turner, etc., and we also did many concerts. For example, we had a wonderful concert with a Scottish orchestra that came the week after the East Germans had toured Sofia. At that time, my Bulgarian friend, the retired director of the opera, told me: “The most wonderful thing about the Scots is that they can perform fortissimo quietly, unlike the Germans!”
The great triumph was when the ballet “Rambert” came to Sofia. We invited the troupe to the residence and the ballet dancers could use the swimming pool in our beautiful garden together with the embassy staff. We got to know each other well and it was nice, and they had a really great success in Sofia.”
Cloke proudly describes the residence in which he spent his four-year term as ambassador in Sofia, and at several points he refers to it and the people who worked there.
“We had the finest house in the Balkans. It was built by the British government in 1912, along with two other houses in Bucharest and Belgrade. Just in time for the Balkan Wars. But in Bucharest and Belgrade these houses were used as embassies, and the residences were in unpleasant suburban villas. In Sofia, for some reason, just before the war, the office part expanded and we rented a block of more premises nearby. Since the Bulgarians ended up on the wrong side of the war, the residence was left in the care of the Swiss or someone else, so when the Russians arrived in 1945 with a British military mission attached, our people vacated the residence and requisitioned the small apartment block next door. After the peace treaty, we decided that it was convenient to have the apartments and continued to rent them, and the office part of the embassy moved there, while the ambassador’s residence remained in the house. We also had wonderful Bulgarian staff. One of the greatest butlers in the world! A man of my age and very nice, who had worked at the embassy even before the war. He was trained at first by a British butler. We also had the best chef in Sofia. We got along very well! I also had a very nice young driver for the official car. And my personal car was the first Range Rover seen in Bulgaria!
It caused great excitement and admiration, wherever we appeared, there were always a bunch of boys running after us.
When I left, the car was bought by our assistant administrative officer, whom we called Mr. Fixit – because we relied on him for everything – he was a Bulgarian lawyer with an English wife, who liked to tease the authorities a little. He thought that by owning this car he could annoy them even more.”
Apart from cultural ties, one of the most curious things happening between Bulgaria and Britain at that time was the arrival of British naval frigates in the Black Sea.
“I’m not sure which side initiated it, but it was in the “Helsinki spirit”. During the preparations for this, it was quite obvious that the Bulgarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs was working hard on the issue, and the Bulgarian Ministry of Defense was doing everything possible to thwart it.
In the end, “foreign affairs” won out.
Two of our frigates were in the Black Sea waiting to enter the port in Varna, where I had gone to meet them. The leadership of the Bulgarian Navy made them wait for about eight hours before they were allowed to enter the port. The visit went quite well, there were no unpleasant incidents or anything like that. There was also a football game where it was very clear which team was whose, because ours had a few black players. During lunch I asked the admiral when they were going to return the visit and he turned completely purple. My defense attaché whispered to me, “He doesn’t have a ship he can send,” Cloke says.
The former British ambassador points out that throughout his stay in Bulgaria he was aware that the so-called Soviet bloc was no longer very united and things were falling apart. What were his arguments? Here is how he described the situation:
“Bulgaria was probably the most peaceful country in Eastern Europe. There were no Soviet troops there, there was a constant flow of foreign tourists. Greeks came by bus to hear the wonderful music in the Orthodox cathedral at Christmas and Easter, and Turks began to cross over on their way to Germany. West Germans came to the Bulgarian Black Sea resorts because it was the only place where they could meet their East German friends, families and colleagues. Bulgaria was a good place for cheap school trips and trade union meetings, for skiing in winter and beach holidays in summer, and the prices of accommodation were quite reasonable. I felt at ease. There were no policemen at our door, but they were discreetly watching us from the apartment opposite. My security officers recognized them.
One of our observers even went into the embassy to get a visa for the Bulgarian ambassador’s driver in London. But overall, there was a good and relaxed atmosphere. We were able to enjoy our stay and made quite a few friends, not only in opera circles but also in the artistic and academic worlds. Some of our friends, knowing our interest in Islamic art, had warned us that the Bulgarians had been under what they called the Turkish yoke for 500 years, so that we should not talk too much about our Islamic interests. But early in our stay, a British historian turned up to give a lecture. We all gathered after the lecture in the office of the head of the Bulgarian Institute of History. Molly asked the Bulgarian historian what he was interested in, and to everyone’s surprise, he said, “Oh, I’m interested in the Islamic period in Bulgaria”! We became great friends. About two and a half years later, he was nominated as Bulgarian ambassador to Athens. Since we often went to Athens for the weekends, and during one such visit, I called the Bulgarian embassy and, speaking my best Bulgarian, asked to be put through to the ambassador. And they put me through to him directly. He rushed to see us, greeted us with open arms, and treated me like a Bulgarian colleague, telling me about the shortcomings of his staff.
Shortly before we left Bulgaria, the first signs appeared that the communist economic system was beginning to collapse. There were some signs in Hungary as well. At that time, the Bulgarians introduced some new economic methods that were quite stressful. Because they included the abolition of state control and five-year production plans. They said that what matters is no longer what you do, but how much profit you make. I talked to the Minister of Heavy Industry, who said that things hadn’t changed much because all the factory managers kept coming to him and saying that if the ministry wasn’t telling them what to do anymore, at least it should advise them. They had no experience and were not prepared for these changes.
But I think everything went wrong when the communist regime finally gave way, which was a few years later. I’ve always maintained that if there had been free elections in all of Eastern Europe when we were there, Bulgaria would have been the only place where the communist majority would have returned.
Because the Bulgarians had never had it so good before. Bulgaria had always been a rural country, it had never been really industrialized. And the Bulgarians had never been part of Central Europe in the way that, for example, the Hungarians, the Poles, the Czechs, or even the Romanians were.
Bulgarians didn’t have much of a middle class.
Something like that started to appear at the end of the 19th century, with one or two industrialists who made fabrics and materials for the Ottoman army, tobacco manufacturers, officers and one or two high-ranking civil servants. And that’s all… If you go to Bucharest, it’s full of middle-class villas from a bygone era. There were none in Sofia. And so it was true that Bulgarians had never felt so good before. Every family had a car, a telephone, a television, a refrigerator. Bulgarians had a comfortable life and were prosperous. At the same time, we spent two weeks in Romania and were struck by how poor that country was compared to Bulgaria.
I’m afraid that things actually got messed up when, when the Berlin Wall fell and when all the communist regimes in all of Europe collapsed, the communists in Bulgaria changed their name and came back to power. But this was no longer the old regime, and power went to the younger ones, those with whom I could easily talk and who understood how the West worked. Mladenov, who had been foreign minister, became president, and Lukanov, who had been deputy prime minister for economic affairs, became prime minister.
But something went terribly wrong.
There were demonstrations and Mladenov lost his mind, saying, “It’s best if the tanks come,” and that was it. That whole cohort was destroyed, and then we had a series of different governments running the country until the former tsar returned as prime minister for a while.” He notes that Saxe-Coburg-Gotha is actually a nice royal family. I met some members of the family in London. John Cloke claims that during his mandate in Bulgaria he did not register any organized protest movement against the communist regime. According to him, there were individual timid attempts to criticize the system, but nothing that could be defined as dissidence.
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