Somewhat in contrast to the presentations we heard earlier today, I will present my memories and assessments of South Korea in the Eighties mostly in terms of how the country’s development fitted into the global trend of evolution in the latter part of the twentieth century. It was an era which saw countries in many…
I was not a sensible teenager. I wanted to become a musician, or perhaps a composer, despite my parents calling in heavy support from careers advisers briefed of the need to shift my sights towards law or accountancy. Such stories are commonplace amongst musicians and musicologists. Indeed, here, I take my title from one who…
In this short presentation, I will try to outline what it was like to cover South Korea’s October 1979 riots and the aftermath of the assassination of President Park Chung Hee in the same month. Also, for reasons that will become evident, I will talk about the problems and pitfalls sometimes experienced by foreign correspondents…
I was fortunate to have, between 1975 and 2008, three diplomatic postings to the British Embassy, Seoul, totalling 13 years. I was accompanied on all three by my wife Pam. What made this experience especially interesting was that each posting coincided with a different phase in South Korea’s remarkable economic, social and political development. The…
The 1970s would prove to be a fateful decade for gugak, traditional Korean music. Its greatest modern historian, Professor Lee Hye-ku, was at the height of his analytical powers; after decades of neglect through the colonial and post-war eras, its popularity was growing among South Korean music students and beginning to experience a long overdue…
From a very early age, probably from about six years, I had a fascination with East Asia, which meant, of course, China. However, in the Cold War era of the 1950s and 1960s it was very difficult to find any accurate information about contemporary China, and impossible as an American citizen to travel there. Nonetheless,…
When Personnel Department of the then Foreign Office asked me to call in early April 1957 I had no idea of where they intended my first posting to be. “Korea” they said, “the Embassy in Seoul, as our first language student.” My mind spun for a long moment. Could I cope? What kind of country…
After wartime experience at Bletchley Park, where he learned Japanese, Richard Rutt went up to Cambridge to read Modern Languages. He then took Holy Orders in the Church of England and offered himself as a missionary. In 1954, when he was 29, it was decided that he should go to Korea. He was assigned to…
I am honoured to be invited to talk to you about the Korean War and what it was like. I will tell you of my own experiences. I was there in the infantry for just under a year, 1951/2, following on after Colonel Hickey. Sir Max Hastings, the well-known historian and journalist, described the war…
After I have spoken you will get an exceptionally realistic account, from John Bowler, of what the Korean War was like at the sharp end. As an infantryman he saw at very close range the violence that only the infantry know, for it falls to them to take part in close combat. I was not…