The weeping Persian
Richard West
The late Herbert Morrison, who had been briefly Foreign Secretary at the end of the Attlee government, was to write of certain 'unwelcome surprises' during his reign in office: 'One was when Mossadeq, the head of the Persian government, whose fascination bordered on the mental, suddenly had the idea of nationalising our oil wells at Abadan without any negotiation and without any discussion about compensation'. Although the Labour government in Britain had itself nationalised much of the country's industry, Morrison thought that Persia (or modern Iran) deserved the dispatch of at least a gun boat. However, he wrote in his memoirs published in 1960, the cabinet feared that 'an effective attacking force would take a lot of time and might therefore be a failure. In the end we had to abandon any military project'.
That Persian crisis came to a head about 1950 with the accession to power of Muhammed Mussadiq, as scholars preferred to spell his name. He was rich and aristocratic — although this had not saved him, from getting the bastinado for some indiscretion in youth; he was pious, loquacious and xenophobic, although this quality had eluded the British Minister in Teheran, who described him in 1920 as: 'honest, intelligent, capable and very friendly to us'. Between 1950 and 1953, Mussadiq was not only unfriendly to Britain but one of the most hated and caricatured of bogeymen in the British press.
During his years as Prime Minister, Little man Mossy Sat on his bed, Weeping and wailing And holding his head. He saw what he wanted And grabbed what he saw, But now that he's got it, He wants it no more. (P.M. Langdale-Snot I ran out of oil He ran out of oil He ran Iran out of oil He ran Tehran frantic, I ran he ran Tehran ran Wasn't that romantic? (D.S. Gorcl0r1) The radio comics like Jimmy Edwards never failed with Mussadiq jokes: 'See that wide-boy over there? He's got so much oil on his hair, if he was Persian they'd nationalise him'.
In August 1953, the long joke came to an end when the Shah fled abroad and a few days later overthrew Mussadiq in a bloody revolution. An eye-witness claimed at the time that as Mussadiq heard the noise of tanks and machine-gun fire nearing his home 'he pulled a sheet over his head and snuggled down giggling and saying "look what I've done": That story may be apocryphal, according =to Peter Avery, who recorded it in his book Modern Iran. The former darling of the mob was arrested and sentenced to hang, and scores of foreign journalists arrived to recount the end of a famous enemy. One representative of a popular sheet, who had too often predicted the execution, received one day the following message from London: EITHER MUSSAMQ HANGS TOMORROW OR YOU DO. In due course the hack was fired and Mussadiq died in the bed on which he had passed so many years of weeping. values which are ultimately much more important.
All this, if! may say so, has been beautifully illustrated in microcosm by the extremely unpleasant row which in recent weeks has been rending the little world of baroque music-making, and which has spilled over into these columns both through my own efforts to report on what was going on, and though the responses in the letters column of Mr John Morton, the General Secretary of the Musicians Union.
Mr Morton, like most General Secretaries of trade unions, is collectivist man par excellence. In his attempts to dragoon Mr Christopher Hogwood into his union, and to bar some of the more distinguished European and American baroque performers from playing in this country, he is not concerned with the finer niceties of musical standards, let alone the feelings of those involved. He is simply interested in what he imagines to be the interests of his 'group', and if that means riding roughshod over a few human decencies or musical standards, so be it. In collectivist terms, he and his colleagues have got a job to do and they are getting on with it. The rest, as his official Mr Smith said to Mr Keyte on 14 September (even though Mr Morton won't believe it), is 'all fresh air and flowers'.
In human terms, however, the story looks very different. Mr Morton and his colleagues weigh in, initially for reasons which were singularly petty and personal, on an area of music of which they have not the slightest knowledge, They create untold unpleasantness and havoc for large numbers of people who have nothing directly to do with their dispute whatever (vide last week's letter from Mr John Letts of the Folio Society). They refuse to answer even the most politely phrased and reasonable
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