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Hotel Kasserhof
Nurnburg
Germany
Late Nov 70
(written in pencil)
Dear mum and Dad
I hope you can read this but Tony and I are in Germany for the car service and all we have between us is three pencils to write with. We are being relocated to Bulgaria and had an exploratory trip to Sofia last week to meet the I.C.L. staff there. Sofia is quite different from Prague, New and clean with a few Roman remains but not as much history as Prague. We had difficulty getting a hotel room and spent the first night in a suite in a grand socialist 1920’s hotel the Hotel Balkan. We almost got lost in our room, it was about twenty foot long, with a double bed hidden at one end. We also had a lounge with TV, an entrance hall and bathroom. It was very expensive so we moved to the cheaper Hotel Rila for the next three nights. We met all the I.C.L. staff and two of the three customers and also arranged a flat. It is in a lovely situation right next to a huge park. It has 3 rooms and a kitchen and bathroom- plenty of guest space. The only drawback is that most Bulgarian flats it did not have a bath, only a shower room with a drain in the middle of the floor. It is terribly expensive- £80 a month. I am glad I.C.L. are paying not us. I.C.L. seem very disorganised in Bulgaria and all the customers are dissatisfied so it will be quite a challenge to work there, especially for Tony who is the support manager.
We plan to drive to Sofia before Christmas as we are worried that the weather will be bad in January. At the moment there is no snow in Germany or Czechoslovakia but we noticed some on the mountain tops as we were flying from Prague to Sofia. We hope to be flying home from Sofia on the 22nd December and returning 1st January. However Tony has a lot of work to do in Putney. I am hoping to visit the Pert team in Reading as they are using Pert a great deal in Bulgaria.
When we got back to Prague our salary rises had come through and we were quite pleased as we will get another rise for going to Bulgaria. I got £240 a year rise and Tony got £280.
Your two letters were waiting for us when we arrived home. I was interested to hear Wendy. M is pregnant. I hope it is not triplets this time. Our family are a fertile lot.
As we need to be in London to work after Christmas I think we should come to stay with you for Christmas. I need to visit my bank in Birmingham to discuss money transfers to Bulgaria. Could you book me an eye test at the co-op optician on the Monday after Christmas?
Here are some suggestions of things I would like for Christmas
Mini under slip
Hairbrush and comb
English dictionary
Anorak for skiing
Talc powder
Books to learn Bulgarian and English-Bulgarian dictionary
Tights and pants.
Tony is more difficult
Long woolly socks
Secretary for Bulgaria. (joke)
Tell Nanny not to worry about the poncho she is knitting for me- navy blue is fine.
I am trying to think of things to buy for the family. I cannot find any shops in Prague for those little wooden trains for Nicky; they appear to have sold out. Also we do not have much free time at present because we have to complete all the bureaucracy in Prague in the next ten days in order to leave by the 10th December. We are leaving plenty of time for the drive so we can take it easy and allow for the weather conditions. By the way our new flat is on the phone Sofia 724797 so you can phone us in an emergency.
We are using the British Embassy as our postal address
c\o I.C.L.
British Embassy
Sofia
The telephone service in Sofia is awful, worst than Prague. It took over an hour to get a call. Also the post can take ten days or more, six days is the shortest. Anyway you probably should not write any more letters to Prague a we will be gone before they get here.
We are planning a farewell party on Friday which means a lot of hard work. We shall be sad to leave CSSR but we hope our friends will visit us in Sofia.
Bulgaria seems to be cheaper than CSSR and there are more western goods like Nescafe and plastic goods to be bought. The food is fabulous lovely fresh salads and sheep’s milk cheese and some Arabic dishes. The folk art is lovely, lots of pottery and carved wood and hand woven cloth.
The music is a mixture of East and West and they sing and dance at the slightest opportunity. The local wine is fantastically cheap we will bring home some champagne for Christmas dinner.
Yesterday we bought some skis and tomorrow we hope to buy some sticks and bindings. There is a mountain with ski facilities only a twenty minute drive from Sofia. The Greek sea is only five hours drive away and Istanbul nine hours.
I had better close now as I am running out of paper. See you all at Christmas
Love to all the family
Gillian and Tony
Over the Christmas period almost all of our ICL colleagues working in Communist Eastern Europe were expected to return to the UK. One of the main reasons was to attend a briefing in London by MI5 Intelligence Service agents (& MI6 agents but in the early 1970’s the Government had not yet acknowledged their existence, not rectified until the 1990’s). We all duly assembled in a large auditorium in one of the ICL Bridge House buildings in Putney. The briefing, as I recall, lasted most of a morning. We were taken through the many Communist ‘spook’ tricks we might encounter in attempts to compromise or bribe us into passing on national or industrial secrets, or delivering parcels or information to agents in the UK.
We had missed the winter 1969 event having only just arrived in Prague and deciding to spend Christmas there. The talk was a little late after already spending 12 months behind the Iron Curtain.
We had certainly been the subjects of a prolonged effort by a Czech agent to befriend us. He would turn up near our office and make every effort to gain our trust and get us in a position that we were indebted to him in some way. It started with gifts (politely refused) and offers to take us to important Ice Hockey matches (he didn’t seem to know that the British were nowhere near as fanatical about the game as the Czechs). He moved on to trying (unsuccessfully) to buy hard currency from us at three times the normal exchange rate (strictly illegal and could have resulted in arrest and a strong lever on us). Buying one of our cars from us was another ploy, again at a very advantageous exchange rate. Finally he tried to get us to deliver a message and parcel to a ‘relative’ of his in London, living somewhere near Clapham Common, just the spot for an incriminating long range telephoto shot recording the handover!.
Besides describing all these situations and how to avoid them, the MI5 speaker seemed to really enjoy recounting ‘honey-trap’ scenarios and how to avoid them. Phone taping and surveillance were also covered (something we had not encountered, but that was to change soon enough in Bulgaria).
Tony has been involved on the fringes of another potential barter deal involving Spofa (the Czech Pharmaceutical industry) who were hoping to export excess production in exchange for computer equipment. The City of London Barter House executive mentioned in the comments on the 7th September letter comments returned to Prague to help..
Spofa could easily over produce a sufficient quantity of a penicillin derivative, Ampecillin . The Barter House ‘gent’ took up the challenge & found a potential buyer in Taiwan, but without revealing where the pharmaceuticals were coming from. He knew that at the height of the cold war and with great animosity towards the mainland Communist Chinese authorities, the Taiwanese would not consider trading with any Communist Block country.
So a friendly intermediary country in the West had to be found to whom the Spofa products could be shipped, and who would then issue a ‘Certificate of Origin’ to enable trans-shipment on to Taiwan. The deal rumbled on over many months and eventually an Italian Company agreed to act as a shipping intermediary. More time passed and all went well until the Italian Authorities issuing the certificate of origin asked to see proof of patent ownership from the Czechs. Back again to Prague, by now approaching 12 months of effort, only to find that Spofa did not have patent ownership which was actually owned by Beechams (a British Company!).
The deal fell through, but was eventually resurrected we heard with mostly excess Veterinary pharmaceutical products for which patents were held.
I cannot remember exactly what had gone wrong in ICL Bulgaria but the previous country manager and support manager had succeeded in upsetting all the customers. I think basically the machines were sold with promises of software we had not written yet. A new country manager Terry C. was recruited and Tony was given the job of Technical Support Manager for Bulgaria & Romania. So for the next eighteen months Gill worked for her husband. Not always a recipe for a successful marriage but we muddled through. We would soon find the best thing about Bulgaria was the road to Greece.
The journey through Yugoslavia was quite a revelation. We had got used to the sophistication and culture of Prague. At one point we got lost in the foothills of the Mountains in a village with roads made of packed earth. The locals were travelling around in beat up old carts drawn by tired old horses and chickens pecked at the roadside. People dressed in traditional costume came out of their houses to watch us pass. I can only conclude they were not used to seeing cars go by, at least not new ones registered in Holland.
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