Ford at the time of his capture by the Red Army in Lhasa in 1950. He subsequently spent long periods in solitary confinement
British radio operator arrested during China’s invasion of Tibet who was subjected to intense communist re-education in prison
Robert Ford was one of the tiny handful of westerners in Tibet who had the misfortune to be caught up in the violent Chinese invasion in 1950. He was imprisoned for half a decade, becoming a pawn in a ferocious tussle for power on the roof of the world.
He had been working in Tibet as a radio operator, and the Chinese invaders accused him of being a spy and a murderer. He endured years of isolation and underwent a ruthless communist re-education programme in his remote cell. Then, out of the blue, he was released into Hong Kong. He later rebuilt his life, working for the Foreign Office, and he wrote an account of his harrowing story, Captured in Tibet.
Even without these terrible experiences, Ford would have had rich material for his memoirs. He was thought to be the first Briton to be employed as a Tibetan government official and was one of the very few Europeans to penetrate Lhasa, the Tibetan capital.
There he rubbed shoulders with such figures as Heinrich Harrer, the Austrian mountaineer who chronicled his adventures in the bestselling book Seven Years in Tibet. Ford was among the first to hear the news that a Chinese invasion of Tibet had begun and he witnessed its violence. Later, he was a tireless campaigner for the Tibetan cause and beloved by Tibetans in exile.
Robert Webster Ford was born in Rolleston-on-Dove, Staffordshire, in 1923, the son of a brewery engine driver. He won a scholarship to Alleyne’s Grammar School in Uttoxeter but left, aged 16, to attend RAF Cranwell to train as a radio technician. Eventually he was sent to Hyderabad, on the baking Deccan Plateau, and a post training Indian army officers. He was soon frustrated with the monotony of the work, so when the opportunity arose to replace the wireless operator, Reginald Fox, at the British Mission in Lhasa he seized it and stayed on in the Himalayas, working as a wireless operator at the British residency in the tiny mountain state of Sikkim, which acted as a listening post for Tibet and Bhutan.
After Indian independence in 1947, he volunteered to train Tibetans to use radio equipment donated to them by President Roosevelt. During the war two US officers had been sent to obtain the Tibetan government’s permission to survey an alternative supply route between India and China after Burma fell to the Japanese. Three radio transmitters were sent as a gesture of goodwill but no Tibetan knew how to use them.
Ford was delighted to return to Lhasa and soon became the first Briton to be employed as a Tibetan government official with the rank of Letsempa; he was was known affectionately as “Phodo Kusho” (Ford Esquire).
Ford built and opened Radio Lhasa, recalling later “for the first time Tibet was able to broadcast to the outside world.” In 1949, accompanied by a train of mules, yaks, porters and muleteers, Ford set off over the mountains to Chamdo, a town in Kham, eastern Tibet, near the border with China, from where he would establish a radio link with Lhasa. “When I arrived the whole population turned out to stare at my blue eyes, long nose and especially the ginger beard I had grown on the way.” From this lonely outpost he established daily contact with Lhasa. He also contacted amateur radio hams around the world for whom communication with Tibet was the rarest possible signal confirmation. To his utter astonishment he heard from one in his home town of Burton-on-Trent who thenceforth kept him in direct weekly contact with his parents. Not that Ford was lonely. He greatly enjoyed the traditional government summer parties at which there was much feasting, dancing and drinking. “The drink was ‘chang’, a rather flat yeasty beer. It was served by two girls magnificently dressed and bejewelled, specially chosen for their beauty and powers of persuasion. When all else failed, they resorted to force, sometimes sticking pins into senior officials who drank too slowly. This was regarded as great fun.”
He also survived a colossal earthquake in which “mountains had become valleys and vice versa”. The Tibetans regarded it as foreshadowing terrible events. On January 1, 1950, Ford picked up an ominous message about plans to invade Tibet and rid it of US and British influence. Aware of the dangers, Ford agreed to renew his contract. “It would have been cowardly to run away,” he said later. “I thought the Tibetans needed help and were worth helping; I felt responsible for the four Tibeto-Indian trainee radio operators who had accompanied me; I had a well-paid interesting job; I stayed because I preferred a life of adventure and because I liked Tibet.” Meanwhile the last remaining British missionary just over the border in Sikang — Geoffrey Bull —– gave his medical equipment to Ford, who the Tibetans often called upon to practise his Boy Scouts’ first aid.
One day, Geda Lama — a “Living Buddha” — arrived in Chamdo as an official agent of the Chinese communist government with instructions to go to Lhasa to negotiate with the Tibetan government. “He watched me closely when I tuned in the radio, and when he thought I was not looking at him his eyes darted round the room. I gave him tea and cake, but did not try to make polite conversation. Everyone knew what he was and why he had come, but they treated him with all the respect and reverence due to a lama.” However, the lama fell ill and died a few days later, probably poisoned by local Khambas who loathed the Chinese. As the invasion threat mounted and the Chinese crossed the border near Chamdo in October, the newly appointed Tibetan governor of Kham proved incompetent and, deciding to save lives, soon capitulated and fled. Ford, fearing for the worst, prepared to evacuate but could not fathom why the Tibetan government had not informed the world. “It was still trying to avert a war that had already broken out.”
While the rest of the world was distracted by the outbreak of the Korean War, Ford witnessed firsthand the growing crisis that would lead to the eventual flight of the Dalai Lama: “The Tibetan Army was not designed for retreat. When troops went to the front line they took their families with them with household goods and personal belongings piled up on yaks and mules. There were tents, pots and pans, carpets, butter-churns, bundles of clothes, and babies in bundles on their mothers’ backs.”
His own escape route was cut off by the Red Army, and having crossed a dangerous, slippery, steep 15,000ft pass at night he was captured in a monastery where he had been sheltering with Tibetan officials. “My heart missed a couple of beats as I saw a column of perhaps 200 Chinese troops riding steadily up the valley. They halted a few hundred yards from the monastery, deployed and threw a cordon round the buildings. We were surrounded.”
Ford was accused of murdering the high lama with poisoned tea and of being a British secret agent and spreading anti-communist propaganda. He was imprisoned in southwest China where he underwent interrogation and long periods of solitary confinement. “I cannot described the fear I felt . . . Every morning when I woke I wondered if this was the day I would be shot.” He was forced into a programme of communist re-education. Simple confession and mere parroting of political statements were not enough and he was forced into “grovelling lies”, such as admitting that he was a British spy. Ford later recalled that fear of torture, contraction of the disease beri-beri and endless brain-washing gradually wore down his resistance until he came to see (if not accept) the Chinese view of their relationship with Tibet. “The diabolical cleverness of thought reform is that the victim is made to want to believe,” he said. He was, however, never physically tortured.
In prison in Chungking his morale was boosted when he discovered that Geoffrey Bull was in a neighbouring cell after hearing him singing Onward Christian Soldiers. He also learnt to read and write in Chinese. In 1954 he was tried and sentenced to ten years in prison and allowed to write to his distraught parents. However, the following year he was unexpectedly handed several Hong Kong dollars and released across the border. Walking over the bridge to freedom he feared he would be felled by a bullet in the back. He was met by a British policeman who told him that Everest had been climbed.
When he returned from Tibet in 1956 he worked as a freelance journalist, published his memoir and married Monica Tebbett, an old school friend. In 1957 he joined the Diplomatic Service, serving in the Foreign Office in London before being posted to Vietnam. He served in Indonesia, the US, Morocco, Angola, France and Sweden. His final posting was as Consul-General in Geneva.
As a career diplomat he had to remain silent on Tibet but in retirement he was active in the Tibetan cause and was a vice-president of the Tibet Society and a trustee of the Richardson Foundation for the tertiary education of Tibetans (Hugh Richardson was the last head of the British mission in Lhasa). In 1992 he undertook a lecture tour in India, at the request of the Dalai Lama. This was brought to an abrupt end when Ford and his wife were detained under house arrest in Dharamsala by the Indian authorities. Once again the shadow of China had crossed his path. His lecture tour had coincided with the official visit to India of the Chinese Premier, Li Peng.
Ford was instrumental in arranging a meeting between the Queen Mother and the Dalai Lama at Clarence House in 1996. A man of quiet but fierce integrity, he was presented with the Light of Truth Award by the Dalai Lama for his contribution to the Tibetan cause soon after celebrations for his 90th birthday. He was also given £65, the salary for his radio work which his capture by the Chinese meant he had never received.
High in Tibet there still stands a monument erected to the dead Geda Lama stating that he was “murdered by the British spy, R. W. Ford”.
Ford’s wife, Monica, died in 2012. He is survived by his two sons.
Robert Ford, CBE, diplomat, was born on March 27, 1923. He died on September 20, 2013, aged 90
Model for one of the world’s most commercially successful artists — and a key participant in the prosecution of war crimes in the Far East
Leonora Schmidt-Salomonson’was the model for several of the distinctive and once near-ubiquitous female portraits by the bestselling Russian-born artist Vladimir Tretchikoff. The 1998 documentary film about the painter and his life, Red Jacket, was named after his best-known depiction of her.
For more than half a century Tretchikoff’s luridly realistic productions were derided by art critics while enjoying almost unparalleled popular success. Reproductions of his best-known works sold in their tens of thousands and hung — perhaps still hang — in homes throughout the world. His commercial appeal seems undiminished since his death in 2006. When auctioned at Bonhams in 2012, the original Red Jacket painting sold for £337,250. This was a record for Tretchikoff’s work (until the even more famous green-faced Chinese Girl, thought now to be based on a different model, sold for £1 million this year).
Red Jacket had previously hung for many years over the dining room table in Tretchikoff’s home in South Africa, selected as a gift by the artist’s wife, Natalie, after he confessed to having had an affair with the sitter. It was Tretchikoff who nicknamed Leonora “Lenka”. She liked the name, and used it for the rest of her life. Yet she deserves to be remembered as more than just the model for an artist whose merits are at best a matter for debate.
As a young woman, of mixed race, in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) Leonora Frederique Henriette Salomonson was the only female qualified accountant in Java. She was married to a pilot with the Royal Dutch Air Force who was evacuated from Java with his squadron during the pandemonium preceding the Japanese conquest. Lenka kept her home in Batavia (Jakarta) and survived the war. It seemed scarcely possible that her husband would ever return. In fact, against all odds, he did survive wartime captivity in the Philippines. On his way home after his release, however, he met a young woman and fell in love with her . He and Lenka divorced.
After her husband’s escape from Java, Lenka had been placed under house arrest by the Japanese. Unable to carry on her job with a Dutch company, she found herself in straitened circumstances, when Tretchikoff turned up on her doorstep. He had been involved in British anti-Japanese propaganda work at the outbreak of hostilities. The Japanese responded by removing him from Singapore to Batavia, where he was placed under parole, with limited freedom of movement. Tretchikoff, lodging with Lenka, found her an obliging model, and they became romantically involved. Some of his most popular canvases were painted in her home. A Japanese officer gave the painter unlimited access to art supplies in exchange for a degree of collaboration.
After the war Tretchikoff learnt that his wife, who had been evacuated from Singapore shortly before its fall, had survived and was living in South Africa. Lenka encouraged him to rejoin her and his infant daughter. Artist and family were duly reunited in Cape Town.
By then, perhaps to her own surprise, Lenka had become a key figure in the British effort to identify and track down Japanese war criminals. Her initial qualifications for the role were linguistic, as she later explained. “I had a good command of Dutch, English, German, Malayan, Indonesian and French as well as the smattering of colloquial Russian I had picked up from Tretchi.”
Her involvement had come about through Tretchikoff. He had offered his own services to British war crimes investigators, to whom he turned out to be of little real use. At the same time, however, he introduced Lenka to Patrick Spooner, a dashing young major in the British Indian Army, soon to be promoted lieutenant-colonel.
The 24-year-old officer with a Gurkha regiment had had an eventful war. Captured in Italy, he led a party of fellow prisoners to freedom. He subsequently rescued three British generals from behind enemy lines, before eventually being parachuted into Japanese-occupied Java to organise escape routes for downed Allied airmen. At the end of hostilities, he was involved in arranging the release of prisoners of war and civilian internees — and in laying the groundwork for war crimes investigations. He found Lenka irresistible.
It was thus that she became, without doubt, an enormously important figure in the investigations leading to one of the largest and most significant series of war crimes trials ever to have taken place. Without her, it is fair to say that the British war crimes trials in the Far East might have descended into chaos.
She brought systematic organisational skills and intellectual rigour to the task of screening and apprehending thousands of Japanese war crimes suspects. She managed a processing system that had to sift through 708,000 surrendered enemy personnel in South-East Asia. At one point more than 9,000 Japanese war crimes suspects were held in British custody. Ultimately, more than 900 Japanese would be tried by the British, with others transferred for prosecution to Dutch, French and Australian military courts.
From December 1945, Lenka took charge of the clerical side of this huge investigation. She introduced impeccable card index and filing systems (now preserved at the National Archives in Kew), and rapidly showed her worth. She was soon given the rank of staff sergeant in the British Indian Army.
By the autumn of 1946 she was head of the central war crimes registry at the British war crimes headquarters in Singapore, promoted to staff captain and then to acting major. She was at the centre of a very able network of some 660 British military personnel on the strength of the various British war crimes teams, between them spanning the whole of South-East Asia and reaching as far north as Shanghai and Hong Kong and into Japan itself.
The central war crimes registry’s task was to collate the information gathered by the investigation teams. This involved identifying war criminals, discovering their past movements and current whereabouts, cataloguing the documents and witness details needed to bring cases to trial, and preserving chains of custody for those records (and their translations into English). Japanese witnesses for the prosecution had to be held safely in custody, too (in some cases for up to two years, before the last trials were wound up).
The workload was unremitting, but Lenka and her personality did much to brighten the lives of her colleagues. As Spooner wrote home in the summer of 1946, “You’ve no idea how exhausting it is to read about the ghastly things that happened, day in, day out, sometimes until the early hours. Also one has to try and remember hundreds of names of suspects, victims and witnesses, though in that respect I am very fortunate to have Lenka close at hand. She has the most amazing memory for names and facts. I don’t know what I’d do without her. I could show you statements that would give Dracula nightmares!” He described her as “indomitable”; and so she would remain.
It is appropriate that one of Tretchikoff’s full-length semi-nude paintings of Lenka should later have had pride of place in the boardroom of perhaps the most elegant hotel in Singapore, the Goodwood Park. In the immediate postwar years, the hotel was the headquarters of the vast British war crimes executive for South-East Asia.
When work on war crimes ran down, because so many competent personnel had been demobbed to resume their civilian careers, an international agreement was reached to end new prosecutions. At their farewell party at the officers’ mess at the Goodwood Park , Lenka and Spooner were seen off by an impressive guest list that included two brigadiers, two colonels, seven lieutenant-colonels, 20 majors, one wing commander, two squadron leaders and ten captains. The pair left the Far East for London in the autumn of 1947; Lenka had obtained a visa with glowing references from senior officers in Singapore.
Her plan was to study commercial art. The lieutenant-colonel’s plan was to marry her. His mother had other ideas. With winter fast approaching, and wartime rationing still in place, she found Lenka a perishingly cold and damp basement flat in Notting Hill Gate. The relationship did not thrive. Lenka left for the Netherlands, thinking that this might offer a way home, or better prospects in the meantime.
She did travel back to Indonesia, only to find it locked in a murderous struggle to end colonial rule. The nationalists were deeply hostile to the Dutch planters and to mixed-blood Eurasians who had worked with the authorities. The violence of the time was toxic. For Lenka, this could no longer be home.
Eventually, she found employment with a Dutch chemical concern in Amsterdam, CN Schmidt. She and the owner’s son, Theo, were attracted to each other but his family forbade them to marry, perhaps as much because of their religious differences (Catholic and Calvinist) as their racial backgrounds. Lenka was to abandon her own religious faith and found succour in spiritualism as she grew older.
Theo and Lenka went on to found their own business in 1954, specialising in the import and export of pharmaceuticals and of plants and other substances used in their manufacture, especially from East Asia. They settled in Hilversum, bought adjacent apartments in a modern block of flats and soon opened them up into a single home. It was not until Theo was near death, however, in August 1982, that they finally married in a civil ceremony.
As the company accountant, Lenka helped to build up an enterprise worth 300 million guilders (about £100 million). On her retirement, she met a rogue on a cruise and they became close. He talked her into letting him take charge of her financial affairs.
Lenka died penniless., though loved and protected by relatives and friends. Most of the art that had graced her home was lost. She and her husband had no children.
Lenka Schmidt-Salomonson, artist’s model and war crimes investigator, was born on April 20, 1914. She died on August 1, 2013, aged 99
