Turkey

Lord Selsdon Excerpts

Thursday 13th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Selsdon]

My Lords, when I first joined your Lordships’ House in 1963, I was told that I ought to speak, but I pointed out to my superiors that I had no knowledge or experience. They said, “Don’t worry, my dear chap, go into the Library and you can borrow other people’s experience”. I remind noble Lords that, being on the Information Committee, I am proud to say that the Library is now taking initiatives and many who have spoken today may well have received a report from the Library. I commend it to you—it is also on the internet—although it makes a few mistakes, in that it says an awful lot about what has been said by the Prime Minister rather than by people who know better.

For the first time, I shall speak from my own experience. I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Hussein-Ece because I have certain knowledge and experience in some of those areas that I want to share with your Lordships. I may be able to draw no conclusions as everything that has been said that could promote Turkey has already been said. We are obviously great Turkophiles.

At a fairly early age I joined the Navy and we then had a problem in the Middle East. Before I knew it, I had become an officer—too soon. I was unqualified and was shipped out as a bit of baggage for the Suez business. I was made a junior officer on Cyprus patrols in a coastal minesweeper as part-navigating officer, having never been to sea. For two happy years, I was based in Famagusta and sailed around the north of Cyprus, particularly to Lotte’s bar in Kyrenia, which may possibly still be there. As the noble Baroness will know from her origins in Turkish Cyprus, such places are great. I found, too, that there was a bit of trouble. As a young man who suddenly has to lead a small team to try to put down a riot in Famagusta, you start to face seeing death for the first time. At that time, because I liked the sea and sailing, we used to go on trips to show the flag. We went into Beirut with the fleet for the first time after Suez. Being the most junior person, speaking French, I had to organise cheap deals in the nightclubs. I never had to do anything particularly important.

Occasionally, we would go on another trip. One day, they told us that we were going to Turkey. I have to say that I was not quite sure where Turkey was. I thought of Cyprus as just being full of Greek terrorists; I did not fully understand the involvement. I was asked to plot the course to Turkey and, on the way, to say where we were going, but I dropped the sextant. Unfortunately, I found that we were going somewhere into the mainland of Turkey.

Those trips gave me one great love—a love of the sea. St Paul was my hero, so I set out to see whether I could follow the three voyages of St Paul. I found that St Paul went more often than anywhere else to Turkey, but the Turks are not really sea-going people. They have a coastline of about 7,000 kilometres—the same as India. Greece has a coastline of 12,000 kilometres—the same as the United Kingdom. In order to be a sea people, you have to have the sea, and the Greek have more sea and therefore more ship owners, but the Turks have more land and more people. The Turkish people are, when they are pushed, pretty warlike and really great fighters. Most of their conquests were by land whereas, in many other cases, such as ours, they were by sea. As your Lordships will know, Marmaris was the base for Nelson before he fought the battle of Abukir Bay. As you go back in time, you find an historic relationship.

I then did something very stupid. I went out, borrowed a lot of money and bought a nice boat. For 14 years I sailed the coast of Turkey and Greece—like the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, I got to know it well. You even found co-operation with the Greeks. We were trying to save the loggerhead turtle off Caunos, one of the old ports. Who came into the breach but Melina Mercouri. I had always loved her from “Never on Sunday”. We found support for ecology. The thought was that the Turks were not very good on ecology but, gradually, the whole of that area opened up. I used to take children of friends—as many as I could—to make them learn to sail, but they also had to learn history. The first question was: where are the seven wonders of the world? One basis for that—which is, to some extent, where I started—was Bodrum, where the tomb of King Maussollos was.

We then found a sail-maker who was also a great sea journalist, Rod Heikell. Together, we wrote a book—he did all the writing and the research; well, I did some of it —called the Turquoise Coast of Turkey, which is still available. For every little port, he gave the history. Before I sit down, I will give your Lordships just one example: Knidos, which has two harbours, one Greek and one Roman, where the triremes would go out to attack people in the Gulf. Knidos also had two temples, one Greek and one Roman, and was the first place to have a statue of a naked lady—all naked statues before that were of men—which was Aphrodite. People would pay a large amount of money to be able to be placed close to that statue. All those things had great movement for me.

One day, I was chairman of the Committee for Middle East Trade. The Foreign Office rang me to say, “Although you’ve got the Arab world, we have now given you Turkey”. I said, “Turkey is not part of the Middle East; it is not part of Europe. Turkey is Turkey”.