Never Learn to Type, autobiography of Margaret Joan Anstee. Published by John Wiley and Sons, 2004.
ISBN 0470854316
It was an important meeting in the UN, ‘Someone needs to take notes’, they decided. ‘Margaret, can you…?’
“Sorry. I never learned to type.’ which also meant that she could not use shorthand either.
Which meant, crucially, that she remained an essential part of the decision-making team.
Margaret Anstee grew up in a tiny village in Essex; no bathroom, and an outside toilet. Village school.
But her educational promise was spotted, and nurtured. She was to go to Cambridge taking French and Spanish.
How could she learn sufficient Spanish in the 1930s, in rural Essex?
In that tiny village were a Gibralterian couple, refugees from Franco.
This was one of many fortuitous meetings.
Another was her Spanish tutor at Cambridge, he had personally known many of the writers of the Generation of ’27, Lorca was just one, Cernuda was a visiting lecturer.
What to do with her First, in the late 1940s? Teaching at Belfast, Queens University. But then she applied to the Foreign Office, and got in, one of the very few women at that time. The interview had some very bizarre aspects, candidates were asked to ‘govern an imaginary island, beset with problems’ and other similar things.
An earlier department head insisted on using a quill pen. Why not.
A later boss turned out to be… Donald Maclean, Soviet agent. He asked her to act up and cover his post one Saturday, as ‘something had come up.’
And so off he went.
To be a woman in the FO you had to be single. The sort of answer she chose was to marry another FO employee. She was determined to carry on her academic work. In the Philippines. The marriage didn’t work, so to earn money to return home she started work with the local United Nations programme. And found she loved it.
Her first solo assignments were in Latin America, first Columbia, then Uruguay and Argentina. and Bolivia. She was later in the middle of Pinochet’s coup.
She’d been through coups before, but Pinochet’s was different. The difference was the barbarity. USA had worked furiously to undermine Allende, pouring money, arms and training to Pinochet’s supporters. The ferocity and destabilising barbarity came from there.
She worked on projects with Haile Selassie, and in Morocco, UAE. She was also part of British Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s first ever Think Tank in 1967/8, a kind of secondment from the UN.
The career ladder was a very difficult climb. She travelled relentlessly. She was on the point of retiring, having climbed to Under-Secretary, and endlessly passed-over or positions on the upper tiers. Why stay on? – and she had a house built for herself on the shores of Lake Titicaca, her first real permanent home – when she was offered a post of great standing.
She became a Dame under the English Honours System, and a Director-General, based in Vienna.
*
She worked under nearly all the United Nations General-Secretaries. Dag Hammarskjöld and U Thant barely register. We come into direct contact with Kurt Waldheim, Javier Perez de Cuellar, Kofi Annan. She had rocky relationships with them, mostly on account of being passed over.
She had worked long and hard with the remains of with her team behind the scenes, using all the diplomacy she could muster to protect people under Pinochet. Her role was questioned in the press and in public, Was she doing nothing? How could she respond, when everything she was doing, and it was a lot, was in secret? Kurt Waldheim should have been more savvy.
This was part of the problem between the official’s world and the project workers.
On another occasion she was one of a small team producing an essential procedural overhaul report. The working groups thought it very beneficial, but the officials did not, it meant changes to the system no matter if they were for the better. It became watered-down and piecemeal, the accumulating problems not faced, nor dealt with.
Her private life became swallowed up in her work. Opportunities for personal romance, security she willingly sacrificed. The work was a huge reward in itself.
This all sounds like hard, continuous graft. It was hard work, but done with that obsessive love that only the committed know.
And she had her fun along the way.
There are many photos in the book: we see her in the more energetic phases of the Bolivian ‘Devil Dance’, or rolling in the dirt to ‘take possession’ of the land to build her house, on the Bolivian shore of Lake Titicaca. Juxtapose those with the photos of her standing next but one to Mikhail Gorbachev at the finale of 1987’s World Congress of Women, in Moscow.
Margaret Joan Anstee, 1926 to 2016
See also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Anstee
