Friday 7 May 2010
I should just like to set the record straight on one minor point. You say: “Our (Saigon) office, selected, I think, by an earlier bureau chief, Nick Turner, was in the most strategic position of any media group...” In fact, it was my selection, some years after Nick’s time.
I should like to take credit for making such an inspired strategic choice. I should like to say that I foresaw the day when this location would offer future colleagues a ringside view of the 1968 Tet offensive, and then of the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. I should like to claim that my choice of office was the result of brilliant long-term planning. I should like to, but I really can’t. This is what actually happened.
When I was posted to Saigon in October 1965, Reuters had an office that was very centrally situated on Tu Do Street, the former French colonial Rue Catinat, a magnet for fashion and gossip. It was an enviable location.
The problem was that Reuters had been given three months’ notice to quit. By the time I arrived, there were only six weeks left to find new premises. The previous Reuters bureau chief had resigned from the Company, so he had understandably left the choice of a new office to his successor. No easy task, given Reuters’ extremely modest budget for office rental costs. We were up against tough competition. This was the year of the big American build-up in South Vietnam, not just the military but also the media. US television networks and newspapers were paying top dollar for new offices all over the city centre.
It soon became clear that we had been priced out of the market. I was forced to look beyond the centre, at a rather large suburban circle around the Joint US Public Affairs Office, scene of the daily “five o’clock follies” military briefing, and try to find an office within running distance (in the absence of telephones). It also had to be as close as possible to the Post Office, where we still had to hand in news cables when the office telegraph line wasn’t functioning.
It was a peaceful haven in those days, unlike much of Saigon which was suffering frequent Viet Cong bomb attacks. There were no targets near Han Thuyen. No American or South Vietnamese military, no Western embassies or aid missions. The street was close to the presidential palace, but at that time the grandiose old building was just a deserted ruin, bombed out in a coup attempt a few years earlier. The only action in the district was cockfighting among the trees in the garden, which attracted crowds of local gamblers. Otherwise, all quiet.
In the following few years, however, Saigon’s centre of gravity moved very precisely out to Han Thuyen. The American Embassy led the way. Battered by constant bomb attacks on its old premises in the city centre, the US authorities built a brand new embassy building like a fortress, just along the road. Other embassies followed. The palace was rebuilt and President Nguyen Van Thieu moved in. At the end of the war, the US Embassy and the palace, two prime strategic targets, gave the world the iconic images of American defeat and Viet Cong victory. And 15 Han Thuyen gave Reuters correspondents a ringside place.
All well after my time, Jim, but I had, on reflection, certainly foreseen it all. At least, that’s what I’ll tell my grandchildren.
Photos: (top) Steve Somerville photographed by his son Greg Somerville at 15 Han Thuyen on a visit to Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, in 2008 when he researched ● Vietnam War haunts are now for dong millionaires, and the Reuters bureau c1966 with the new Reuters car parked outside.
Steve Somerville remembers a malevolent machine
Tuesday 13 April 2010
There was one anomaly in all this super-efficient technology: the Ipsophone, invented by a Swiss armaments company and installed in the Geneva office.
Steve Somerville, pictured, was prompted to recall some disturbing memories by a conversation he had with Lionel Walsh at the latter's recent 80th birthday party. Walsh was bureau chief in Geneva in the 1960s. Somerville was a junior correspondent. The Ipsophone was a menace, they recalled – an infernal machine that required eccentric behaviour and caused embarrassment for the user.
"When I first encountered it there in the early 1960s, I was impressed," Somerville remembers. "I thought it was a cutting edge system, a brilliant new Swiss invention. I began to have my doubts as it became increasingly erratic and disruptive. Later I discovered that it had actually been developed during the Second World War, so the technology was already about 20 years old, soon to be swept away by transistors and computer chips. That would explain a great deal. The Ipsophone evidently felt stressed and under threat.
“It had been a longstanding member of the Reuters Geneva family, but now it was approaching the end of its life. It was like one of those grumpy old relatives, sitting in a corner complaining about all the changes in the world, forever embarrassing the family by misbehaving at the worst possible moment.”
Physically, the Ipsophone consisted of two components, pictured: a chunky telephone handset, with a dial and an array of coloured buttons, and a big ugly metal box. The sealed box looked like a large safe. And all this for what was really only a telephone answering machine.
“It took up a lot of space in Reuters’ small attic office in Geneva’s Old Town. It was an electro-mechanical device, judging by the strange whirring and clicking noises that came from deep inside. It sounded as though it was full of cogwheels and pistons. In fact, I found out recently, it was packed with valves and magnetic wire reels. Even when it worked properly it was an odd system. When it went mad, as happened increasingly often, it was an evil spirit.
"I began to dream about the Ipsophone. I dreaded telephoning from the Old Town office, in case it cut in on a conversation, or recorded me unawares. I was only saved from the curse of the Ipsophone by a sudden, unexpected order from Reuters headquarters: a new posting, move immediately to West Africa. I was sorry to be leaving Geneva for many reasons, but I was happy to take up a new challenge. And to escape from the clutches of the malevolent machine."
● CLICK to read Steve Somerville's full account of his sometimes embarrassing encounters with the Ipsophone.
