MR AMBASSADOR: The Memoirs of Sir Carl Berendsen
Ed. Hugh Templeton
VUP, $40, pbk
How the world has changed. Time was in New Zealand when senior public servants were treated with respect (as mandarins) by politicians, their staff and the news media. Now, anything goes.
These are the edited memoirs of a mandarin, Sir Carl Berendsen, who laboured as a general public servant, but mainly as a prominent diplomat, during the first five decades of the 20th century.
They have been edited by Hugh Templeton, a man in his time a diplomat, member of Parliament and cabinet minister, who has since reinvented himself as an author. It is hard to imagine anyone alive more qualified to write about Berendsen.
Like the famous instruction by Oliver Cromwell to his portrait painter, this book is a "warts and all" picture.
Berendsen was often an overbearing bully, but he was a very clever man as well as a very strong one who carved out a distinctive place for his tiny, distant country on the world stage. He has aptly been described as having "founded New Zealand foreign policy".
In retirement, his fate was the traditional one of a mandarin: yesterday cock of the heap, today a feather duster.
Berendsen was born into dire poverty in Australia, and his family shifted to Southland, in New Zealand, where he was raised in equally dire poverty, with the added disadvantage that it was a good deal colder. It is a tribute to the meritocracy early New Zealand was that from this background he rose to the highest levels of influence.
After an undistinguished record of service in World War 1, he was expecting to be appointed to head the Labour Department in the 1920s when he was tapped on the shoulder to run the new foreign relations section of the Prime Minister's Department.
His memoirs are a fascinating insight into the top echelons of decision-making during the 1920s, '30s, '40s and '50s, and the men who made the decisions.
He admired Gordon Coates and Peter Fraser, without really liking them, and liked M. J. Savage, without really admiring him. But Berendsen was not a man who tolerated fools gladly and he encountered plenty of those.
No-one can claim to understand New Zealand history who has not had access to these memoirs of the man who helped New Zealand prepare for World War 2, led it into the Anzac and Anzus pacts, helped form the United Nations, and for nine years in Washington and New York led the country's presence on the world stage.
The book has several faults. It has what might have been useful thumbnail sketches (181) of many of the dramatis personae, but sadly some are so brief as to be meaningless. It has some sharp-looking political cartoons, but does not explain their context.
But it also has some bonuses. It contains the essence of 13 notable, policy-setting speeches by Berendsen. and includes vignettes from two diplomats who worked with him and knew him well - Tom Larkin and Ann Trotter.
- Oliver Riddell is a Wellington writer.
