Health & safety & death in the workplace : 2004 : BBC World Service Trust, Phnom Penh

 We were standing in a concert hall designed like a futuristic room on the ‘Discovery One’ spaceship in the film ‘2001’. Every feature was brilliant white. White plastic seats. White walls. White ceiling. When the house lights were switched on, it was a dazzling sight. In 1968, my father had accompanied me to watch that sci-fi movie at our local cinema because my school project concerned the American space race. Simultaneously, maybe an unknown architect somewhere had exited a theatre, sufficiently inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic vision to design their next project, this room, all-white.

The huge hall appeared little used and surprisingly intact, despite the sprawling two-story concrete headquarters of ‘Radio National Kampuchea’ [RNK] in which it was built exhibiting significant evidence of the raging civil war that had started with the overthrow of Cambodia leader Prince Norodom Sihanouk in March 1970. I wondered to myself whether this concert hall had served as a secret location for the Khmer Rouge leadership to enjoy a Friday night knees-up after a hard week’s work torturing and murdering fellow citizens. There might be ghosts here that would be best undisturbed.

“You will be training our staff here,” ordered Tan Yan, RNK director general, waving his hand around the cavernous hall. 

“Er …,” I replied, on the verge of telling him that this was no suitable venue to train a handful of his staff in radio production. But I managed to restrain myself from contradicting this Cambodia government appointee. I recalled that, only months prior, Chour Chetharith – deputy editor of an independent Phnom Penh radio station ‘Ta Prohm 90.5 FM’ critical of the country’s ruling party – had been shot dead by two gunmen on a motorbike on arrival at his workplace. Like anybody, I would like to live.

From his instruction to me, it was evident that our host likely had never made a radio programme, had scant idea how radio programmes were produced and had never needed to learn. His role, in charge of the government’s one national radio channel, was to ensure that its output caused no problems for his masters. We had just come from an initial meeting in his office, a cramped room awash with paper and lacking any twentieth century technology other than a telephone and an electric fan, but weirdly reminiscent of a North London taxi cab office. Then he had shepherded our delegation into a long narrow room, empty apart from two lines of chairs on opposing walls. Speeches were made in Khmer by government men sat opposite. My BBC colleague said something in English. We all stood up, uncomfortably close together in that small sweaty space, a photograph was taken and printed in the following day’s newspaper, trumpeting the first partnership between the Cambodia government and the BBC to produce radio programmes.

After the concert hall, our guided tour of the radio station took us to a large windowless office crammed with desks piled high with papers and occupied by scribbling staff. Our host explained that this was the nerve centre of his operation where everything had to be ‘checked’. Strangely, there were no signs of radio production equipment. The sign on the office door said ‘CENSORS’. This is where every script written by lowly radio employees was edited by important managers to ensure the words’ suitability for broadcast to the nation. Then it was recorded onto analogue tape in an unseen studio somewhere, to be returned here for checking that the announcer had not inserted any personal inflection or inference into their reading of the approved script. Every item within the station’s output was created this way. Not one minute of ‘live’ content had ever been transmitted. If aliens were to invade, this radio would inform Cambodians a week after their abduction to a distant galaxy.

We were then taken to a large darkened room in the bowels of the building, filled with standalone metal shelf units on which the station’s tape archives were stored. Thousands of items were evident, many in boxes, some not, much seemingly uncatalogued, some unspooling all over the floor. It was an unholy mess. No air conditioning. No organisation. But it was surprising it had survived at all the Khmer Rouge era. Right here, since the station’s launch in 1947 under the supervision of the Ministry of Propaganda, we were told there were priceless recordings of musicians, interviews and news reports spanning the country’s turbulent history … if you could ever find them amongst the chaos. I was awestruck.

Then it was down to work. The BBC had requested interviews with a dozen of RNK’s existing staff, from which we would choose a radio production team whom I would train to create (shock horror!) a live weekly phone-in programme, the first in the station’s history. We decamped to one of several unused rooms whose doors had been removed and that opened onto the compound, where we sat around a group of old desks pushed together in the middle. No air conditioning. Just a bare room and the three of us: the BBC’s radio manager in Cambodia, Chas Hamilton; BBC translator Keo Sothearith; and freelance me. We had a list of staff names and that was all. No CV’s. No idea who we were about to see.

One by one, our candidates arrived and what ensued was the most bizarre round of interviews I have ever encountered. Asked what their present job entailed, what skills they possessed and what they wanted to achieve in their career, most failed to answer anything at all. Some just stared at us as if we were mad. Several answered “I do what my boss tells me”. None appeared enthusiastic about their work or the potential of training with the BBC. Reluctance would be a gross understatement. I wondered to myself how they had secured their jobs in radio in the first place if their communication ‘skills’ were so poor. They seemed to consider our polite enquiries as interrogation, as if we might incarcerate them for any incorrect answer … or worse. Perhaps the government radio station staff were still being managed through ‘fear’, just as the Khmer Rouge had terrorised the population not so long ago.

By the time we reached our last interviewee, we had noticed that all our candidates had been dressed in black. We asked why. Our last man explained that one of their female colleagues at the station had recently been killed by falling masonry from the crumbling war-torn building, so the staff would be attending the funeral that afternoon. We looked at each other open-mouthed. We were sitting in a death trap. Oh dear! What were we doing there? Despite me having interviewed potential candidates for radio jobs in many countries, this selection proved the most difficult to assess because we had elicited almost no relevant information. We remained there a while afterwards to discuss our preferences, deciding to select the marginally least reticent six staff and hope for the best. I felt anxious about how I could train people who appeared so disinterested.

Our morning’s work done, we left the room and headed to the director’s office to thank him and say goodbye. It was empty. We walked out to the front gates of the compound and were astonished to find them locked from the outside. We walked back to the building and wandered around offices on the two floors, shouting ‘hello’. It was completely deserted. Like their former colonial masters, the staff must have left en masse at precisely midday and would not return for two hours. We had been locked in without anyone anticipating that their morning visitors might still be present.

All the three of us could do was walk through foliage around the inside of the high perimeter zinc fence and look for a gap to escape. Eventually we did find a small hole where the metal had suffered damage, we prised it open and, bending down, could just about crawl through. By then, we had been outdoors in the midday sun for a while and, once returned to the BBC office, we desperately needed refreshment. It was a bizarre end to a bizarre morning of meetings at the government radio station.

That afternoon, after reflecting upon our experience, I told my local line manager, Chas Hamilton, and the BBC Cambodia project manager, Giselle Portenier, that I considered the RNK premises a wholly unsuitable venue for me to train staff. Was there a room in the BBC building I could use instead? The local staff showed me a conference room with a boardroom table that seemed ideal. I almost fainted when I realised I had seen this exact space, with its large circular motif embedded in the marble floor, during a dream five years earlier. Not for the first time, ‘déjà vu’ sneaks up out of nowhere to surprise you in the strangest situations.

To me, it seemed self-evident that this room – in a secure, air-conditioned environment with access to a kitchen and toilet facilities – was the perfect solution to hold my training sessions two full days each week for the next few months. I was taken aback to be told that neither Hamilton (who had visited RNK with me) nor Portenier (who had not) agreed. Apparently, the BBC’s contract with the government insisted the training would take place on-site at RNK and that was considered the end of it. Before making that agreement, had anyone from the BBC actually visited the RNK building? This stalemate lasted more than a month. Maddeningly, in January the BBC in London had sent me to Cambodia to start work with the utmost urgency and yet, by March, I was still unable to commence training one of my two radio production teams.

In desperation, I felt forced to send this formal email on 30 March to Hamilton and Portenier:

“I feel I should flag that no specific resolution has yet been agreed to the health and safety issue of the RNK building.

After my visit to RNK on 2 March 2004, I immediately expressed my concern (verbally) to Charles and Giselle about the health and safety risk of undertaking training work at the RNK premises. In subsequent conversations with Charles, Giselle and Lori [McDougall], possible remedies were discussed that involved training RNK staff off-site.

Paragraph 10(5)(a) of the WST [BBC World Service Trust] Freelance Terms Of Trade requires the Freelance to “make an assessment of all risks to health and safety reasonably foreseeable by him/her that may affect the WST or any others arising out of or in any way connected with the performance of the Contract” and to “promptly make and give effect to arrangements to eliminate or adequately control such risks.” The Freelance is made responsible for health and safety issues.

The Freelance is obliged to “notify the WST accordingly,” which I have done (verbally), and I will reiterate (in writing) my assessment: The RNK building is in a terrible state of repair and looks as though it has not been maintained for at least a decade, maybe longer. Most exterior windows have no glass and many of the rooms no longer have doors. Only a few rooms seem to have air conditioning. We learnt that a member of staff has recently been killed by masonry falling from the building. There is little or no visible security, and the large front reception area within the building is completely empty. When we went to leave the premises at noon, we found all exit gates were padlocked, and the building devoid of any staff to assist. We eventually found an exit through a gap in a zinc fence to the rear of the building. We have yet to see any kind of refreshment facility, or inspect the toilet facilities.

I do not feel that this is a safe environment in which to spend several days a week training RNK staff. Such training could be arranged off-site without any loss of relevant radio facilities (since RNK has no live studio/production environment relevant to the training). As you are aware, I suggested that training could instead be conducted at the BBC office and/or ‘FM 102’ (or elsewhere).

I am sure that we can work together to resolve this issue and commence the training of RNK staff.”

Still enduring no local approval, I then had to write a similar email to the BBC office in London which resulted in further queries, more correspondence but, eventually, grudging acceptance that my work could be undertaken in the conference room only metres away from my office desk. The outcome was that training sessions which should have started in January did not commence until April, by which time the plan had been for me to return home. However, having just won such a frustratingly minor victory, I felt it would have been irresponsible to leave immediately, so I offered to extend my time in Cambodia a further few months. Nonetheless, the RNK phone-in programme had still not launched by the time I eventually left, sadly as a direct result of these delays attributable to the BBC. This was the first time I had been employed by the BBC, as well as my first work for an international charity, and my experience with ex-pat managers had proven far from productive.

By contrast, my training sessions in the BBC conference office with the RNK staff, about whom we had harboured such initial doubts, proved to be amazingly positive. They were wonderful people who taught me as much about Cambodia as I hopefully taught them about radio. I was so sad to leave them without having seen through their phone-in programme, which finally launched on-air in October.

I never returned to the RNK building. However, I did run into the station’s director at the press launch of some health project in Phnom Penh that the BBC insisted I attend. We stood together in silence in the garden of the venue, a small high circular table between us on which we placed our free drinks. Conversation was impossible. My knowledge of French proved irrelevant because the language had been effectively extinguished by Khmer Rouge assassinations of anyone vaguely academic in the 1970’s. This middle-aged government man smiled at me friendlily, though I found myself wondering what ‘successes’ he might have achieved in Year Zero to have sufficiently impressed the ruling party.

Once back in London, I wrote an email to UNESCO explaining that I had viewed RNK’s broadcast archives and believed they should be preserved, catalogued and stored in an improved environment because of their historical significance not only to Cambodia, but globally. No reply. I tried my best!

I had had a job to do … flying to Cambodia.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/11/health-safety-death-in-workplace-2004.html]

Remember the days of the old schoolyard : 1963-1969 : Cordwalles Junior School, Camberley

 “I don’t wanna go,” I was shouting as I struggled to hang on to the car door for dear life. I was being kidnapped and forced into a vehicle outside my home that was wanting to carry me away … to my first day at infant school. My mother was trying her gentlest to push inside the family car her five-year-old son who was usually well behaved and never angry or upset. Passers-by on their way to work in town were gazing. Passengers were pointedly staring out of a passing double-decker bus. What was wrong with that belligerent child? My mother was equally horrified to witness my first tantrum.

I enjoyed being at home. I had plenty of activities to occupy myself there. I never found myself at a loose end. My parents had a remarkably hands-off attitude to my upbringing, letting me put on records, listen to the radio, watch television or play in the back garden whenever I wanted. There was no regime to follow. I was perfectly content organising my own life and did not require a school to instruct me what I should do and when. During the past year, my mother had been sending me to Mrs Potten’s ‘Gay Tree’ nursery school on Grand Avenue in order to mix with other children because I was an only child. I had found most of my peers there to be noisy and bossy, whereas I was quiet and calm. To seek acceptance, I must have adopted their rather posh accents, committed to immortality when my father recorded me on his Uher reel-to-reel tape machine reciting the two ‘Winnie-the-Pooh’ books that I knew by heart.

My mother already harboured an aspiration for me to marry ‘above my station’. Whenever we walked into the town centre, on passing Bath Road, she would suggest I call on ‘Wooty’ who lived at the far end of that cul-de-sac in a large house backing onto the grounds of Sandhurst Royal Military Academy. I had met Alexandra Wooten at nursery school but had not developed a particularly close friendship with her, preferring the company of more down-to-earth Liam who lived only four doors away from our home … until his Irish parents moved away to Blackwater. Despite my mother’s persistence, I may have only visited Alexandra’s house once to ‘play’ because, unsurprisingly, I found we had no common interests.

My reluctance to attend primary school was due to anticipation that a new set of peers would be similar to Mrs Potten’s charges, the only children of my age I had so far encountered. I was mistaken! My fee-paying, town centre nursery school had been dominated by the offspring of Camberley’s middle class, whereas my state primary school was located on the peripheral council estate where I had been born, built to rehouse South Londoners whose homes had been destroyed by bombing during the War and subsequent slum clearance. Patronisingly, the council had named the estate’s streets ‘Kingston Road’, ‘Mitcham Road’, ‘Surbiton Road’, ‘Wimbledon Road’ and ‘Carshalton Road’, as if newcomers would feel more at home by eulogising their former hometowns some twenty miles away. Naturally, none of those roads led to the places after which they had been named.

I quickly discovered how wrong my expectations about school had been. My new classmates seemed perfectly normal. Unlike Mrs Potten, teachers did not require us to dress up in costumes and repeat archaic speeches for Biblical reenactments, or to watch violent ‘Punch & Judy’ puppet shows. Instead, we were given interesting creative activities to do and treated with respect and encouragement. Teachers addressed us by our first names. I loved school. I quickly retired my quasi-posh accent. I had already mastered the reading and writing skills with which some of my peers were struggling and was now teaching myself to type. One day at home, my mother had asked me to put away her electric iron and, without realising it was still plugged in, I picked it up by its plate and screamed, burning my right hand. She had to bandage my thumb and index finger for a while, so I continued to learn to type at home using my middle finger … the way I type to this day. I had wondered if my erased fingerprints would ever return, but they did eventually.

After two years, we all moved to the adjoining primary school where teaching was more structured. I attended my first morning assembly in the main hall but was baffled when the principal instructed us to recite something called the ‘Lord’s Prayer’. Everyone around me bowed their heads and recited a kind of mantra I had never heard. It felt unnervingly as if I had mistakenly been invited into some kind of cult in which all the teachers and children had already been indoctrinated … except me. I had no understanding of what was going on around me, more so because next we were told to sing strange songs from a thick book of incomprehensible ancient lyrics I had never heard played on the radio. It was impossible to sing when you had no idea what the tune should be.

Afterwards, having observed my bafflement, a teacher asked why I had not participated in the religious part of our school assembly. She seemed shocked that I had never heard of ‘hymns’ or ‘prayers’, asking whether my family was ‘Christian’. I had no idea what that word meant, so I returned home and asked my mother, who replied that we were not religious. She wrote a brief note to my teacher explaining that simple fact and, thereafter, I was excused from the section of daily assembly devoted to hymns and the like. Every day for the next four years, I would sit in a nearby small side-room alongside several children including classmate Jacqueline Dixon, a Hindu who initially asked me what was my religion. I had to tell her and the other non-Christians sequestered there that I did not seem to have one. I was an oddity.

Although my aunt Sheila worked as a ‘dinner lady’ at the school, I always returned home to take lunch. I would stand alone at the bus stop at the top end of Upper College Road, staring across at the modernist St Martin’s church on the opposite side of the roundabout, puzzled as to what might go on inside. I had heard classmates talk about attending something called ‘Sunday School’ there, next door to the home of classmate Annette van Hartaan Veldt. This church must have been where almost everyone else at school had been indoctrinated into their cult. It seemed to take an age until Aldershot & District Traction Company Limited’s number 1, 2 or 3C bus arrived to carry me one mile home for a halfpenny fare. (Once I had grown to be amongst the tallest in my class, the bus conductor insisted I pay the adult one penny fare despite me still being a child.) Arrived home, I would have just enough time to snack something and then catch the bus back for afternoon classes.

After school finished at four, if it was not raining, I could save the bus fare by walking home alone the length of Upper College Ride. This downhill route passed through a 400-yard stretch of Ministry of Defence woodland, a natural barrier intended to isolate the council estate from private housing around the town centre. It was always a lonely journey bereft of fellow pedestrians and scary on dark winter afternoons, me worrying an escapee from Broadmoor might jump out from behind a tree. The money saved I would blow in the sweet shop near my school on ‘Batman’ bubble gum packets, ‘Flying Saucers’, ‘Swizzels Love Hearts’, ‘Lemon Sherberts’ or a ‘Lucky Bag’. I was obsessed with the ‘Batman’ TV show and, as well as requesting my mother fabricate the superhero’s ‘utility belt’ for me to wear, I saved enough sweet wrappers to send for a ‘Batman’ poster that would grace my bedroom wall.

My favourite school activities were summer days when the teacher would take our class outside, thirty of us sat cross-legged in the shade of a huge tree behind the main building, writing essays in exercise books balanced on our laps. Those remain some of the happiest days of my life, before homework and exams impinged on my childhood, and before my parents sent me to a faraway school stuffed with posh boys and requiring a bottle-green uniform.

My least favourite school activity was ‘swimming’ in the newly constructed, unheated rectangular above-ground pool on the playing field. Alongside were two tiny windowless wooden huts in which girls and boys were shepherded separately to change into their costumes, and where I hated my mates spying me naked. I was so rake-thin that the bottom of my rib cage protruded, making me imagine I had some kind of physical deformity not evident in my schoolmates. My acute embarrassment destroyed any enjoyment and inhibited my capacity to learn to swim … which sadly I never overcame.

In my final year at Cordwalles, teacher Mr Hales encouraged us to open savings accounts with Trustee Savings Bank [TSB]. Once a week after class registration, he would ask if we had coins to deposit, record their value in our individual bank books and update our balances. It was a great way to make us understand the value of money, particularly as the monetary system was about to convert to ‘new pence’ from shillings. Would a school today actively encourage ten-year-olds to manage their first bank accounts in class?

I made some really good friends – including Paul Rowell, Michael Heinrich and Martin Bell – who would invite me to their houses on the estate after school. I was surrounded by peers of both sexes, of various religions and diverse races. I feel very lucky to have been educated in such a safe, sympathetic and uncompetitive environment, full of stimulation and encouragement that immensely shaped my attitudes and life thereafter. Unfortunately, it made my subsequent education and career make me feel all the more like a fish out of water, forced to navigate pathways amongst privileged, entitled people who seemed to have had very different childhoods that had fostered their cold, cutthroat, self-centred outlook on life.

I was sad to leave my primary school in 1969, after which I no longer saw the classmates with whom I had spent the previous six years. My parents failed to appreciate that their decision to continue my education at a distant school tore me away from roots I had forged on Old Dean Estate and isolated my social life by forcing me to travel daily to the other end of the county. At Cordwalles, I had felt like a normal boy living a normal life. I was never again made to feel that I fitted in so comfortably.

Postscript. The first time I went to church was in 1967 to accompany my mother to the final service of St George’s, built by the local Middleton family in the 1890’s on St George’s Road at Knoll Road, prior to its demolition to create a car park adjacent to Herman Solomon’s Garage. Despite never having known my mother attend any church, she was annoyed that our nearest one had been sold off as part of Camberley town centre’s modernisation. 

More than two decades later, having recalled that I had once opened a savings account at school, I walked into the TSB Camberley branch in London Road and asked if I could withdraw the balance. It took several weeks for the staff to locate my details and obligingly add years of interest to my balance before I could withdraw a small sum that I had almost forgotten I had.

Virtual Tour of Cordwalles Classrooms

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/12/remember-days-of-old-schoolyard-1963.html]