Robert W. Ford

Robert Webster Ford CBE (27 March 1923 – 20 September 2013) was a British radio officer who worked in Tibet in the late 1940s.

[1][2] He was one of the few Westerners to be appointed by the Government of Tibet in the period of de facto independence between 1912 and the year 1950 when the Chinese army marched on Chamdo.

As he did not relish the idea of spending the rest of his life in a bank or office in Burton-on-Trent and wanted to travel and see the world, he enlisted as an apprentice in the Royal Air Force when he left school at 16.

In 1943, he was posted to India but soon became disillusioned, and jumped at the offer of a job as radio operator in Lhasa, Tibet, at the end of World War II.

[4] In 1945, he joined the British Mission in Lhasa as a radio officer, to replace Reg Fox who had to return to India for medical reasons.

In 1956 he was appointed at the British Diplomatic Service and served in the Foreign Office in London, Vietnam, Indonesia, United States, Morocco, Angola, Sweden, France and finally as Consul-General in Geneva.

However, the tour was brought to an abrupt end when Ford was put under house arrest in Dharamsala by the Indian authorities as the lectures coincided with Chinese Premier Li Peng's official visit to India.

[10] On 13 September 1994, together with foreigners who lived, visited and worked in Tibet prior to 1950, namely Joan Mary Jehu, Heinrich Harrer, Archibald Jack, Bruno Beger, Fosco Maraini, and Kazi Sonam Togpyal, Ford was invited for lunch by the 14th Dalai Lama, then on a visit to London, to exchange their reminiscences and endorse a statement that Tibet was a fully sovereign country before 1950.

[10] On his 90th birthday,[12] on 27 March 2013, the former radio operator was handed the last of his salary, a 100 Tam Srang note worth 65 pounds, by the Tibetan Government in Exile, at a ceremony in London.