Government Service
In 1951 he was posted as naval liaison officer to the Chinese Nationalist Government. The post was a sensitive one, with the Korean War in progress and the Communist Chinese threatening the offshore islands. The nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek lived close by and Davidson was invited to the family home to play mah-jong. On his return to England, Davidson was promoted and became commanding officer of the minesweeper HMS Welfare, on minesweeping and fishery protection duties. But he found the peacetime Navy less attractive than wartime service and decided to seek an alternative career.
He married his wife Daphne While in 1955.
After being called to the Bar, he joined the Commonwealth Relations Office in 1960. His first assignment was as first secretary in the newly independent Trinidad. In 1969, though, he was posted to Phnom Penh, where he formed a good relationship with the head of state, Prince Sihanouk.
In 1970 Sihanouk was deposed in a military coup. The British and American embassies were the only ones to keep families on in Cambodia, and the Davidsons were kept awake at night by the mortar fire of the Khmer Rouge closing in on the city. All those who worked for them later fell victim to the horrors of "Year Zero". Davidson was an acknowledged authority on the region and his book, Indo-China: Signposts in the Storm (1979) was well received.
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Famous quotes containing the words government and/or service:
“Visit the Navy-Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts,—a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A man’s real faith is never contained in his creed, nor is his creed an article of his faith. The last is never adopted. This it is that permits him to smile ever, and to live even as bravely as he does. And yet he clings anxiously to his creed, as to a straw, thinking that that does him good service because his sheet anchor does not drag.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)