Abstract
A foreign correspondent sits in his attic, sifting priceless treasures accumulated from the hotspots of the world
One of my tasks during lockdown was to clear some of my old junk out of the loft. Middle-aged men tend to hoard stuff from their youth, and my partner regards me as a particular offender. There’s my teenage record collection, for example, which I kept in the hope that early Iron Maiden vinyl one day would become valuable. And a diary from university, so badly written that it’s a miracle I ever considered a career in newspapers.
By far the biggest stash, though, is my “memorabilia box”, full of various souvenirs I’ve picked up during nearly 20 years as a foreign correspondent. Nearly every hack who’s ever been sent on a job abroad seems to have one - it’s usually a collection of foreign press cards, plus a few bits of dictator kitsch, like a poster of Kim Jong-un or some bit of decoration from one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces.
The most cherished items are the ones with a personal story behind them. In my own collection, for example, there’s a medical tube containing a 0.22 bullet, which was dug out of my backside after a row with a Mahdi army militiaman in Basra. It’s not quite as swashbuckling as it sounds: the bullet was a ricochet after he fired his pistol into the ground. But there’s an accompanying discharge note from a British Army surgeon, who, much to my delight, described the wound as a result of “enemy action”.
Then there’s a jewellery box with a gold-painted dummy inside, a present from Colonel Gaddafi’s daughter Aisha, when I interviewed her in Libya in 2010. Whatever your opinion of the Gaddafi family, they were thoughtful when it came to gifts: the day before, I’d mentioned to her translator that I had a six-week-old daughter. And yes, her charm offensive certainly seems to have skewed my judgment. In the interview, I wrote that Libya’s people seemed largely content, with no appetite for violent revolution. Just four months later, Libya’s Arab Spring uprising began.
Indeed, it seems my daughter had a better instinct for Libya’s changing political winds than I did: normally, she’d chomp readily on any dummy, but this one she always spat out. A shame really, given my hopes that a photo of her contentedly sucking on it might help wangle an interview with the with the Colonel himself.
On the espionage front, I have a handwritten note scribbled to me by a hotelier in Gambia, warning me that a senior aide to its resident dictator had just sat down for beers at the next table. “Be careful what you say,” it reads.
And on the showbiz front, I have an unusual autograph from Midge Ure, who once went on a press trip to Ethiopia with my colleague Nick Meo. When Nick mentioned to him on the flight home that I was an Ultravox fan, Ure grabbed an airline vomit bag and wrote on it: “To Colin, for next time you listen to one of my songs!” I doubt it’d fetch much money on eBay, but it does show that not all the 80s Live Aid rockers took themselves too seriously.
Beyond this, though, we start getting into niche territory. A mug, for example, from a visit to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. A T-shirt identifying me as an international adviser to the Iraqi police. Another T-shirt endorsing Mrs Elizabeth Remi Bakare for governor of Nigeria’s Lagos State (2007). And from Libya’s anti-Gaddafi revolution, some handwritten ordnance records from a captured Gaddafi tank division. I grabbed them, thinking they might be used in a Hague war crimes trial, only to discover that the only entry was from a practice drill in 1987.
And herein lies the problem - at least, from my partner’s point of view. Try as I might, I can’t bring myself to throw these more mundane items out. Yes, I know the Gaddafi tank records are just boring bits of paper. As, too, are my opposition leaflets from the Belarussian presidential election campaign in 2008. But unlike other attic junk, all these things are still historical documents, recording the fates, hopes and turning points of nations. It’s not like chucking out a box of old tax returns.
Instead, I hope that, one day, my memorabilia box might make a fascinating archive for my grandchildren. For who knows what might happen in years to come? For example, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former Iranian president, might return to power, and this time make good on his threats to wage war with Israel. In which case, my kids will have a DVD of his early speeches and a car sticker. Not surprisingly, this cuts little ice with my other half. I once gave her a guided tour of the box’s contents, journo-splaining my way through the socio-cultural significance of items such as my bottle of Burmese army rum. Judging by her face, though, it wasn’t just a case of “I think you had to be there”. It was more “Even if I had been there, I wouldn’t have been interested in this junk. Let alone carted it home”.
My only defence is that I’m clearly not alone in my hoarding habits. I put out a Facebook post to other journalists to see what memorabilia they had. There were so many replies that, sadly, there’s only room for a few highlights here.
First shout goes to a former Telegraph colleague, Rob Crilly. He has Osama bin Laden’s old ashtray from the compound where the al Qaida leader was killed in Pakistan. It’s a rough-hewn lump of wood with a metal smoking dish inlaid, gifted to Crilly when he interviewed the Pakistani contractor who was demolishing the compound.
Bin Laden’s pants and Pol Pot’s potty
Okay, as with most such souvenirs, the story around it is a bit unclear - for a start, Crilly says, bin Laden didn’t approve of smoking, so it may have been for his bodyguards instead. But while it might not satisfy an auction house, it’s enough for a good tale. Ditto, the pair of bin Laden underpants that Richard Lloyd Parry, then at The Independent, tells me he recovered from a washing line outside bin Laden’s hide-out in Jalalabad in 2001.
Other notable entries include Catherine Philp of The Times, who has a piece of Pol Pot’s toilet, and Lindsey Hilsum of Channel 4, who has a bullet that hit her hotel room ceiling in Tripoli in 2011. Reporters who covered Isis’s fall in the Middle East have also prospered, given the group’s fondness for bureaucracy. Freelancer Sofia Barbarani has an Isis driving licence, while The Times Middle East correspondent Richard Spencer even found an Isis parking ticket in Mosul.
Souvenirs of incarceration are particularly cherished. Johan Rydeng Spanner has the blindfold used during his week in one of Saddam Hussein’s jails. US journalist Jonathan Krohn has a string of prayer beads made from olive stones, given to him by a cellmate in a jail run by Kurdish intelligence officials in northern Iraq. I have an old twig that I used as a toothbrush from my time held hostage by Somali pirates.
Reassuringly, it turns out I am not the only person who likes the more offbeat stuff. Ruth Sherlock, the former Telegraph Middle East correspondent, has a “nice A-line floaty dress” in the colour of the Libyan rebel flag, which sometimes gets an outing at parties. Josie Ensor, who was her successor, has a mug with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on it, which lights up when you pour hot water in.
And no, I’m definitely not the only hoarder. Victoria Whitford, whom I knew as a diplomat in post-Saddam Iraq, told how she tried to bring a load of mortar fins home with her through Kuwait airport in 2005, only for them to be confiscated and blown up by the authorities, “along with a bag of my shoes”.
This was somewhat baffling, given that Victoria had never struck me as an avid munitions collector. Then, a few hours after her Facebook post, a confession arrived from former Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph reporter Toby Harnden, admitting that the mortar fins were actually his, and that Victoria had kindly agreed to try transporting them for him. “I never did get a mortar fin home but my loss was nothing compared to Victoria’s, which I still feel guilty about,” he admitted.
He added that he already has an extensive collection of shrapnel from bombs in Northern Ireland, a piece of wire fence from Guantanamo Bay, countless hotel keys from around the world, and “every piece of US political memorabilia imaginable”.
God only knows how big his souvenir box must be, then. But it’s given me an idea. What about a special “Media Section” in the British Museum, where we could dump the whole lot? We could clear out our attics, and in the process give the public an insight into modern journalism. Or, as you might put it, a History of the World in 100 Useless Objects…
