Reader Bullard

Sir Reader William Bullard, KCB, KCMG (5 December 1885 – 24 May 1976) was a British diplomat.

Early life

Bullard was born in Walthamstow, Essex, the younger child and only son of Charles Bullard (1850–1912), a dock labourer, and his wife, Mary, "née" Westlake. After a short spell in Canada in 1886–7 (which was not a success), the family returned to various homes in and near London, and a few years later, Bullard's father obtained regular employment as a foreman on the British and Foreign Wharf, near Tower Bridge. At the age of eleven, Bullard won an Essex county scholarship worth £16 a year for two years, which took him to Bancroft's School in Woodford Green. He trained as a schoolmaster and spent one year as a pupil teacher, and at the age of eighteen, he briefly became an assistant master at a poor school in Walthamstow. All this time, he had been following an intensive course of self-education. He 'read everything', showed an early aptitude for languages, enjoyed excellent health, and so emerged successfully from the 'curious [educational] steeplechase' in which he had been engaged.

Bullard's future was determined after he had seen a crammer's prospectus which gave particulars of, among other careers, the Levant consular service, the examination for which required an English essay, arithmetic, good handwriting, and six languages, including compulsory Latin and French. He added Greek, German, Spanish, and Italian, and in 1906, successfully came third out of twenty-five candidates. There followed two years at Queens' College, Cambridge, studying Arabic, Turkish, and Persian under Edward Granville Browne.

Bullard's first posting was to Constantinople, first in the consulate-general and then in the embassy as a student interpreter (third dragoman), where he was in time to see the last few weeks of the rule of Abdul Hamid II. After two spells as acting consul in Trebizond and Erzurum, in the summer of 1914 he was asked to go to Basrah to take the place of the consul there, who was due to go on leave. This meant a complicated journey — a fortnight's ride to Diyarbakır, then by kelek (a raft of inflated goatskins) down the Tigris to Baghdad, and finally by steamer to Basrah. He expected to stay in Mesopotamia for six months, but was to be there for six years.

After the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War in October 1914 and an Indian expeditionary force was landed in Basrah, Bullard was naturally attached to it as political officer, helping to erect the rudiments of a civil administration. His chief was Sir Percy Cox, whom he accompanied on two missions to Tehran. After a brief period of leave in England in 1919 (he had survived the war without serious illness except malaria and without any leave), he returned to Iraq in May 1920 as military Governor of Baghdad, with the rank of major.

There followed two years back in London as a member of the new Middle East department of the Colonial Office, set up by the colonial secretary, Winston Churchill, who was 'trying to clear up the confusion in the Middle East'. Bullard's colleagues there included Herbert Young and T. E. Lawrence, but his responsibility was confined to Iraq. He attended the Conference of Lausanne in December 1922, where he was concerned with drawing the frontier between Turkey and the Mosul province of the new Iraqi state.

In June 1923, Bullard took up his post as consul in Jiddah, where the consulate was 'dilapidated though airy and picturesque' (there was no electricity, so no air-conditioning or refrigerator) and the haunt of a lot of noisy owls. Hejaz was at that time ruled by the Hussein, father of Feisal and Abdullah, now installed in Iraq and Transjordan, respectively. Hussein suffered from a keen sense of betrayal, as he saw it, at the hands of the allies, and had become a cantankerous old man who often sorely tried Bullard's exemplary patience. The main income of Hejaz was from pilgrims, and the main task of the consul was to prevent them from being cheated by guides or monarch and to look after the welfare of those, mainly from India, who were British subjects. It was from this time that he acquired the name by which he was always known, "Haji". By the time he left in July 1925, the man who was to turn Arabia into a unitary state, Ibn Saud, was battering on the gates of Jiddah, which he finally entered in December 1921, by which time Hussein was an exile in Cyprus.

Bullard's next two postings, Athens from 1923 to 1928 and Addis Ababa from 1928 to 1930, were comparatively uneventful, but after the resumption of diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, he asked for a posting there, curious to see at first hand the much vaunted 'new civilization'. In November 1930, he became consul-general in Moscow, transferring the following June to Leningrad. His four years in the Soviet Union saw the end of the first five-year plan and the beginning of the second. He left Leningrad just before the murder of Kirov, which provided Stalin with the excuse to stage-manage the series of great show trials. But Bullard had seen enough of the iron grip of the secret police and the adulation of Stalin to appreciate how wide the gulf was between the picture painted by unremitting Soviet propaganda and the reality. There was not a great deal of activity in the consulates but, as Bullard said, if there was little bread, there were plenty of circuses, and he enjoyed the theatre, opera, and ballet, as well as reading widely and perfecting his Russian.

Bullard was next offered the post of consul-general in Strasbourg, which he would have liked, but turned down in favour of a colleague from the Levant consular service whose health problems he felt gave him priority. Instead, two years in Morocco proved an equally pleasant contrast. That legacy of the old Ottoman empire, capitulations, was still alive there and involved Bullard in a good deal of legal business. Rather to his surprise, in 1936 he was transferred from the Levant consular service to the foreign service proper and was sent back to Jiddah as minister. He was appointed a KCMG at the same time.

Ibn Saud was a much more rewarding monarch to deal with than King Hussein. Pilgrims were still a major source of revenue (oil was not in commercial production until late in 1939) but they were now much better looked after. One agreeable duty which fell to Bullard was to escort Princess Alice and her husband, the Earl of Athlone, who had been invited by Ibn Saud to be his guests in a crossing of Arabia from Jiddah to Bahrain via Ta'if and Riyadh. The visit was a great success, Ibn Saud for the first time entertaining a European lady to a meal.

In December 1939, Bullard was appointed, now that the country was at war, to one of the key posts in the diplomatic service, Tehran, first as minister but from 1943 as ambassador. The sympathies of Reza Shah, the autocrat who had ruled Persia since 1921, were with the Axis Powers, and there were a great many Germans in the country posing as specialists or businessmen. Pressure to secure their removal increased after the German invasion of Russia in June 1941, and in August, British and Russian troops entered the country. The next month, Reza Shah, under the mistaken impression that Russian troops were approaching the capital, abdicated in favour of his son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and was taken in a British ship to South Africa, where he died.

Britain and Russia were now allies, and the Trans-Iranian Railway which Reza Shah had built became one of the main routes for the supply to Russia of arms and other essentials. But the interests of the allies were not always easily reconciled. Ensuring adequate food supplies for the local population became one of Bullard's constant headaches, the Russians holding the main grain-growing areas in the north and being reluctant to release supplies to areas where they were most needed.

Many important visitors passed through Tehran on their way to or from Russia, and at the end of 1943, it became the venue for the Tehran Conference of the "Big Three". Much organizational work fell on Bullard and his staff, and an inscription on a wall in the embassy drafted by Bullard commemorated the dinner there on 30 November, at which Churchill sat between Roosevelt and Stalin and, opposite them, Bullard sat between Marshal Voroshilov and Molotov. For his services during the Tehran conference, Bullard was appointed a KCB.

At the end of the war, though invited to accept another post, Bullard preferred to retire. His retirement was as busy as his diplomatic career. He was from 1951 to 1956, director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at Oxford; he wrote "Britain and the Middle East" (1951) for Hutchinson's University Library; he edited the third volume of the "Chatham House Middle Eastern Survey" (1958); and he chaired both the Libyan Currency Commission and the abortive attempt to adjudicate on the rival claims of Saudi Arabia, Muscat, and Abu Dhabi, to the Buraimi oasis. He also took some part in local government affairs and did much lecturing in Britain and America. In 1961, he published his autobiography, "The Camels must Go".

But it was for his personality that Bullard was chiefly remembered. He was a humble man. Short and stocky, with a craggy face and deep set eyes, he gave an immediate impression of rock-like solidity. A tireless worker, deeply conscious of his country's past and of the highest standards she had the right to demand from her servants, he was no less conscientious in his attention to detail, for example always arranging (and paying for) Christmas presents for the ever expanding embassy staff.

In spite of his multifarious duties in Tehran, Bullard found time to give two talks to the British Council, on Dr Johnson and Dickens, and another on a subject particularly dear to his heart, "Changes in the English language in my lifetime". His love of the literature of many languages was unconfined. He thought he must be slipping when it took him a whole morning to read a book of the "Aeneid" (in a Jiddah summer); at the other end of the spectrum, when in bed 'with a really bad cold — the first for years', he read, among much else, Dorothy L. Sayers's "Gaudy Night" for the sixth time. 'If I ever fall into the water', he wrote, 'and appear to be drowned, bring in a new book and see if the smell of printer's ink doesn't bring me round'.

Bullard was an honorary Fellow of Queens' College, Cambridge; Lincoln College, Oxford; and the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. He married, on 18 August 1921 at Bamburgh, Northumberland, Miriam "Biddy" Catherine Smith, daughter of Arthur Lionel Smith (1850–1924), Master of Balliol College, Oxford. She stayed with him briefly in Jiddah and Leningrad and for a longer time in Addis Ababa, but they realized that if their children were to be properly educated, a house of their own in Oxford was a necessity. The choice was vindicated. They had a daughter and four sons, two of whom followed him into the foreign service, Giles (1926-1992) and Julian (1928–2006). Bullard survived his wife by three years, dying in his son Giles's house in West Hendred, near Wantage, on 24 May 1976. Asked for a recipe for longevity, he suggested that 'while I do not make a fetish of exercise, I think that a brisk walk — say about every other Easter — does nobody any harm'.

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