Unreasonable Behavior

by Don McCullin

  Although George H. W. Bush had been only too keen to foment a Kurdish uprising, his son was decidedly not. All hostilities had to be under allied control, and the Peshmerga were being instructed to keep their heads down and their powder dry. It was presumed that the reward for Kurdish passivity would come later, after Saddam had been dislodged.

  Then, suddenly, there was a hint of real action. The invasion in the south was already well under way, and the Americans were preparing to airlift what remained of the press motley in Kurdistan along with Chalabi and his seven hundred armed retainers closer to Baghdad. However, as we clambered into the huge Galaxy planes assembled for this purpose, I noticed that Chalabi’s men were being ordered to leave all their weapons behind. It was clear that any dream they might have had about making a triumphant warlike entry into Baghdad was over. This evidently was not part of the American military’s programme, and most likely never was.

  As it turned out, the press contingent was also not part of the programme. When the wheels of the Galaxy transports touched down, we may have been closer to Baghdad, but it looked remarkably similar to the middle of nowhere. Our destination proved to be one of Saddam’s old airbases, devastated by the USAF in the 1991 Gulf War and left in its original state of blasted dereliction ever since.

  There we arrived, and there we stayed in the few buildings that remained upright. Even when it was a functioning entity, going by the name of the Tallil Air Defense Base, it cannot have caused much disturbance to anyone in the vicinity. The nearest village was said to be a thirty-mile walk away. Our American army hosts implied that we would all be moved on again, perhaps to Baghdad, but that order never came.

  In essence, we were incarcerated in a wilderness with no entertainment aside from watching Chalabi striding around the cracked tarmac and making his urgent calls to what seemed to be increasingly deaf powers that be in Washington. We also had daily briefings which, like those in Vietnam, told us absolutely nothing other than what we already knew, which was that we were here while the action was elsewhere.

  One morning, while gazing forlornly out from the edge of the base, I spotted what looked like an interesting structure in the mid-distance shimmering in the haze. It was rather like a pyramid with its top cut off. So I asked one of the American soldiers, who I had befriended, if he knew what it was. He said, ‘That’s Ur, Sir.’

  I knew there were several sites which were alleged to represent what was left of the ancient Ur civilisation that flourished some 5,000 years ago. But even if this one wasn’t genuine, I thought it was well worth taking a closer look. So I asked if I could I just slip out of the camp, and take a few photographs. ‘Real sorry, Sir,’ said my friend, ‘Ur is out of bounds, Sir.’

  By now Charlie and I were coming to the realisation that the war itself was out of bounds, at least as far as genuinely independent journalists were concerned. The American military had efficiently devised a strategy that ensured that the only newsmen in a position to cover the war would be those ‘embedded’ with the advancing troops, and therefore essentially under its control. We could also, with hindsight, appreciate that the whole Chalabi enterprise was never a route into the action but a useful decoy away from it, though I’m not sure if Chalabi himself ever realised as much. In brief, we had been thoroughly outfoxed and outmanoeuvred all down the line.

  I knew that some American generals had managed to convince themselves that the war in Vietnam had been lost by the media. I just hadn’t appreciated the extent to which they had managed to stifle the media in subsequent hostilities. It was a painful lesson.

  With Baghdad falling to the invading American army and Charlie and me still out in the wilderness, there was nothing much we could do but try to find a way home. We managed this by way of Kuwait, which did provide some light relief. At least I learned there was a limit to Charlie’s generosity towards me. The hotel we checked into for one night in Kuwait could only offer its presidential suite. Charlie felt ABC News was equal to the cost. So we were shown around the suite, and highlighted reference was made to the magnificent bed, all silky and padded with an ornate gold leaf inlay surround. ‘I’ll have that,’ said Charlie, turning to our hotel guide, ‘and would you please send up a cot for my friend?’

  That aside, there were no high points. The whole enterprise was a disaster for me. I never got a good picture out of it. Not a single one. And I had tested the tolerance of my new family about as far as it could possibly go, and maybe beyond.

  I had predicted that I might be away for two or three weeks, but it was two months before I got back home again. Catherine was understanding in the circumstances, but it was not an episode I was ever allowed to forget. Any cross words between us in the ensuing years would almost invariably contain her reference back to the second Gulf War and ‘the time you abandoned me and Max’.

  45. NEW FRONTIERS

  My renewed vows of never going to war again were a lot more heartfelt this time. I was finished with it, but still to some degree captive to its memory. This probably explains why my first extended holiday with my son Claude, then just turned seventeen, was to Vietnam. He wanted to see the places where I had been, and so did I.

  Saigon was a disappointment to both of us, a clean city with scrupulously well-maintained boulevards and rows of swanky designer shops.It seemed as if all trace of the old Saigon had been erased—the good along with bad. The teeming, aromatic open-air markets, the exotic street life and the sense of existence being lived at an urgent pace were now all conspicuous by their absence. I had always recommended Graham Greene’s The Quiet American to people who wanted to savour the genuine flavour of Saigon. That would have to stop, I realised. The new Saigon was respectable enough, but deadly dull.

  Hue was more rewarding. ‘Look, Dad,’ Claude would say excitedly, ‘there are some bullet holes in the wall over here.’ There was also evidence of some sensitive reconstruction, which I welcomed because Hue had originally been a uniquely beautiful city. But when we crossed the Perfume River to retrace where I had been with the Marines on their assault of the Citadel back in 1968, I got thoroughly lost. I just could not figure out where those eleven fearful days of battle had taken place. I found this disturbing, but not as troubling as when I did actually manage to locate one of the key combat sites, which had been transformed into a vegetable garden. I was prepared to be a bit weepy, but I just felt flat.

  I think I must have used up all the raw emotion I could feel about Hue years earlier and there was nothing, not even a single tear, left in me. Claude told me that he enjoyed our time in Vietnam together, but I emerged with a strong feeling that you should never go back.

  I felt much better about another enterprise that disappeared without trace, at around the same time. There had been rumours in the press of a feature film being made about me, one of the projects of a motion picture outfit called the Natural Nylon Film Company. Had it been made, of course, that would have clamped the tin hat on my image for all eternity regardless of whatever else I might do. But production difficulties were reported, and the project mercifully collapsed.

  The great advantage of having my deck so thoroughly cleared of war was that I could get down to the business of proving that I had some competence as an all-round photographer. In a sense, I had already made a start in that direction. Aside from Open Skies, my landscape and still-life book, Christian Aid had produced two slim volumes featuring my Aids photography, entitled Cold Heaven and Life Interrupted. In 2005 Jonathan Cape had published Don McCullin in Africa, which displayed my anthropological studies in Ethiopia. I was resolved to seek more work in this vein; work that would make it impossible to categorise me as just a war photographer.

  There is some evidence to indicate that even my wife entertained doubts about my resolution in this matter. She would later write for Harper’s Bazaar:

  I married a war photographer. One who prefers to be recognised more for his landscapes and still lifes th
ese days, but an old war-horse nonetheless. This is the man who made papier maché models of Afghanistan for his five year old [Max] and spent long hours pushing toy soldiers around that battlefield with the same son. We still have a brilliant replica of a bombed-out building that he made out of a carton of Walkers crisps and ‘decorated’ with bullet holes . . . Other than that, he is a fairly balanced, normal, peaceable man.

  I hold my hands up to the charge of telling Max war-related bedtime stories, but I did stay true to my pacific intentions in the day job, with a little help from the National Portrait Gallery (NPG).

  The NPG would come up with two jobs for me, both essentially London-based, which made them doubly desirable. At that time, Catherine and I were maintaining yet another version of the two-home marriage. She kept her flat in Notting Hill Gate for ready access to her work at Harper’s Bazaar. We all spent the weekends together in Somerset, with Catherine and Max returning on Mondays to London where Max had a nanny and doting grandparent-assisted upbringing. I would go up to London as often as my work allowed on weekdays to assist the nanny and fine-tune Max’s military education. Sounds complicated, I know. But compared to trying to maintain a marriage with homes in New York and Somerset, it was almost a doddle. Still, it did give me an extra fondness for workdays in London.

  The first job the NPG came up with could hardly have been more central. The Gallery asked me to assist in compiling a photographic record of Trafalgar Square to be published as Trafalgar Square: Through the Camera. Most of the donkey work of research was done by my collaborator, Roger Hargreaves, the Gallery’s Education Officer for Photography, but I was able to dig out some studies from the long-departed days when tourists were actually encouraged to feed the pigeons, and get their pictures taken exhibiting huge pride in the deed. The most photogenic of the pigeon-friendly masses was the movie star Elizabeth Taylor. The project also provided an opportunity to celebrate Trafalgar Square’s relevance to the great political struggles of the day, ranging from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the decade-long, dogged protest against apartheid that took place outside South Africa House, one of the square’s flanking buildings.

  I also managed to locate an old 1962 picture of a demonstration by Colin Jordan’s National Socialist Party which was met with an impromptu counter-Fascist demo composed of regular stout-hearted, freedom-loving Trafalgar Square regulars. I remembered it well. In trying to get top value for my paper, then the Observer, I unwisely positioned myself alongside the National Socialist leaders to achieve good close-ups of the advancing anti-Fascists—and got myself comprehensively spat at by the Observer’s heroes of that day.

  The Gallery then set me up with an even more intriguing commission, asking me to do portraits of ten British religious leaders, at times and places of their choosing. I had considered myself a confirmed atheist from the age of fourteen when my father died, which was something I did not think any compassionate deity could possibly allow. Since then, of course, I had enjoyed many opportunities to observe atrocities committed in the name of God and religion, especially in the Middle East. This tended to confirm my boyhood judgment in theological matters.

  So I did not start out with active sympathy for my chosen subjects. On the other hand, I was not disposed to be aggressively hostile. I did the obvious ones, including the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, the Chief Rabbi and a former Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain; and a few less obvious, like a Sikh religious dignitary in west London and a woman priest in an impoverished South London parish.

  The stand-out character was the Anglican Archbishop, Rowan Williams, who had a fascinating face, or as much as could be seen of it through the thicket of eyebrows and whiskers, and a really sharp roving intellect. After our photo shoot in his London home at Lambeth Palace, he invited Catherine and me to dinner, which naturally edged him further up in my estimation as, until this point, practically all our high-toned dinner engagements had stemmed from Catherine’s vast personal network of upper-crust friends and travel business acquaintances. Dinner at Lambeth Palace was followed by an invitation into its library where our attention was drawn to a glass case containing a large dove-grey glove, with a few glittery bits on the back. This, the Archbishop informed us, was the very glove which Charles I had discarded on his way up to the scaffold.

  The Archbishop then quizzed me about the panelled room in the palace in which I had chosen to take his portrait. What was it that drew me to that particular room? I said that I really couldn’t think of anything specific, there was just something about its atmosphere. ‘Ah, atmosphere,’ said the Archbishop, evidently delighted, ‘I think you have it there.’ He went on to tell us that it was where Sir Thomas More was interrogated in 1534 after his refusal to sign Henry VIII’s Oath of Supremacy, an act of defiance that resulted in his execution a year later, and in his ultimate canonisation as a Catholic martyr in 1935, which, no doubt entirely coincidentally, was the year I was born.

  Thinking back, I reckon I could have done a bit better with the religious leaders. I was probably a bit too conscious of being an emissary of the National Portrait Gallery, an institution almost as dignified in its way as the Anglican Church, and therefore too much on my best behaviour. They all seemed like thoughtful and sympathetic people to me but I never did get around to discussing my own atheism, and the odd discrepancies that went with it. For example, why was it, when at risk on a battlefield, I could find myself calling on the God I didn’t believe in to do me a favour, and not let me die? And why was it that when Max asked me where people went after they died, I made the hypocritical reply—‘Heaven of course’?

  Catherine and I enjoyed the social whirl which resulted from my success: the exhibition-opening parties, the prizes, awards and honorary degrees. It was fun to breathe this rarefied air occasionally but, even if I had long grown out of my inferiority complex, I had never forgotten where I come from. Sometimes, when not on assignment, I would join the annual get-together of the ‘gang’, the group of the old Finsbury Park boys, who would meet up, incongruously enough, at the Conservative Club. I can’t honestly say that the passage of time had rendered them more peaceable in their attitudes. I never really expected that it would. But the general assumption that I shared their outlook did tend to get me down. This was particularly the case after Abu Hamza began to make a name for himself as the imam of the Finsbury Park Mosque.

  Catherine Fairweather by Terry O’Neill, 1991

  ‘You know, Donald,’ said an old boyhood mate, ‘if we’d had that mosque when we were around, we would have torched the place and that would have been it, end of story.’

  Around this time I also managed to deflect my regular publisher, Jonathan Cape, from its preoccupation with war books by persuading its staff to showcase other more peaceful aspects of my work. In England, published by Cape in 2007, presented my somewhat idiosyncratic version of English cultural life between 1958 and 2007. The geographical range was wide—Consett, Liverpool, Bradford, Sussex, Somerset, Wiltshire, Essex and London, especially Whitechapel, which, for me, conjured up the essence of William Hogarth. But the human range was perhaps wider—from Ascot race-goers, Glyndebourne opera buffs and Henley Regatta hoorays right across the social spectrum to a rich assortment of tramps, beggars and meths drinkers. My landscapes and still-lifes also got a good look-in.

  It was a very personal book, criticised by some for its failure to portray Middle England, an area I’ve never been very drawn to photographically. In any event, I’m not at all sure that Middle England would have welcomed my attention. But overall the book was very well received, and I was delighted when it went on to become one of my most popular efforts, even outselling many of my war books.

  I was less thrilled by Jonathan Cape’s proposal that I should go on mining the English lode by producing A Day in the Life of the Beatles. This was a fairly simple exercise which involved sorting through my photographs of the Fab
Four taken way back in 1968. However, I wasn’t particularly happy with the picture quality, although the collection did contain one item of retrospectively ghoulish interest—an image of John Lennon playing dead in a London street, with the other Beatles gathered around feigning concern.

  My long run of non-war books and assignments was interrupted towards the end of the decade, but not through any initiative of mine. The Imperial War Museum decided to mount a big retrospective exhibition devoted to my war years with the title ‘Shaped by War’. I was by now a bit blasé about exhibitions of my war work, having already supplied prints for exhibitions in Paris, Sydney, Canada, Italy, Spain, Holland, Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and probably a few more. But the Imperial War Museum was rather special, not only because it had tried to help me get to the Falklands war but also because its staff had assisted me when I was trying to find an explanation for why I had been prevented from going by the Ministry of Defence. We never came up with a precise answer, but they couldn’t have been more willing. So when the museum asked me to fashion a publication with the same title to accompany and promote the launch of the new exhibition, I said I would. It would have been churlish to refuse.

  I felt under a similar obligation when Charlie Glass asked me to provide the images for a book he was working on, though his request had the added attraction of allowing me to process photographs from our Phoney War period in the Gulf, which I had thought would never see the light of day. Charlie felt that our dismal experiences back in 2003 warranted writing up, and his The Northern Front: A Wartime Diary, with my pictures, was the result. And I was pleased to be associated with it. Phillip Knightley, author of The First Casualty, the standard history on war reporting, described it as being ‘in the finest tradition of radical reporting—anti-war, sympathetic, compassionate and enlightening’. John Simpson called it ‘Essential reading.’