Fourteen years ago in Riyadh, in June 2004, BBC reporter Frank Gardner was shot eleven times. The cameraman with him, Simon Cumbers, was killed but Frank survived.
I read about the attack in Ever The Diplomat, a memoir by Sherard Cowper-Coles, I have often heard Frank on Radio 4 and once I saw him in a wheelchair outside the Ministry of Defence but of the man I knew nothing. He tells his story in a memoir first published in 2006, Blood & Sand.
He had a comfortable childhood in London: doing gym with Prince Andrew, taking piano lessons from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s mother and winning an Exhibition to Marlborough. His “A” Levels weren’t brilliant, a C and two Ds, but I’m in no position to criticise (an A and 2Ds). However, a chance encounter in 1977 on a bus with an old friend of his mother, Wilfred Thesiger, sparked an enthusiasm for the Middle East that lit a fire that still burns.
He was sixteen in 1977 and soon able to nurture that spark. He went backpacking in Morocco in 1980 and later that year started a four year course, Arabic and Islamic Studies, at Exeter spending one year in Cairo. After that, like most of us, he had to find a job. He was interviewed by MI6, considered a Short Service Commission in the Parachute Regiment but in the end took a more prosaic route. Working for a Saudi bank in London provided a stepping stone to a job with Flemings in 1990. Flemings was the sort of place you could spend your whole working life and Frank fitted in getting on well with colleagues and clients. He started making a bit of money and ran their Bahrain office. This led to a Directorship back in London where he admits to being both uninterested in his job and bad at it – two things that don’t necessarily go together in the City.
After five years at Flemings the man who hired Frank politely sacked him, John Drysdale. I don’t think I have ever been to Garsington without meeting John who has been a director of the opera company since its inception. I never knew that he worked at Flemings for thirty years – something to talk about next time we meet over a glass of champagne but I digress.
Getting married and changing career aged thirty-four could be daunting. Frank had to work hard to get an insecure junior position at the BBC, largely because he speaks Arabic, albeit in a Cairo patois. It led to the sort of life that his meeting with Wilfred Thesiger had conjured up. At a time when his contemporaries were being stabbed in the back in their mundane jobs it also, tragically, led to him being shot in the back in Riyadh in June 2004.
Frank Gardner weaves the threads of his personal story into the larger tapestry of the troubled history of the Middle East and brings both vividly to life in Blood & Sand. (The title of this post is the title of the penultimate chapter.)