George Patterson: Obituary

Daily Telegraph, 13 Jan 2013
One of three children of a strongly socialist coal miner, George Neilson Patterson was born at Redding, Falkirk, on August 19 1920 and brought up in nearby Laurieston as a member of the strict Plymouth Brethren. In his memoir, God’s Fool (1956), he recalled how, when seriously ill at the age of 17, he had felt confronted by a Dostoevskian choice between God and Marx. He decided to dedicate himself to God.

After leaving school aged 13, Patterson was apprenticed at a local company, Carron Engineering, where he worked on weapons production throughout the Second World War. At war’s end, when reading Sven Hedin’s book Trans-Himalaya, he felt that God was instructing him to go to Tibet. Penniless after donating all his savings to charity, he studied at the Missionary School of Medicine in London, after which, in 1946, he and Geoffrey Bull, a fellow member of the Brethren, travelled to Shanghai. They then went to the Sino-Tibetan border town of Tatsienlu , from where they trekked westwards for a month with their belongings on 24 mules, arriving at Poteu, in the Kham province of Tibet.

The province at the time was likened by Patterson to “the Wild West”. And it was there that he chanced upon Topgyay Pangdatshang, a Khamba chieftain and great merchant, born of Lhasa nobility, who ran his own tribal army and had done his utmost to wrench for Tibet a measure of independence from the Kuomintang Chinese Nationalist government.

Patterson mastered the local Khamba language and customs and was befriended by Topgyay, on whose behalf he carried out widespread medical work in exchange for his keep. At the time Topgyay was planning a second major revolt (following a failed attempt in 1934 to overthrow the feudal central Tibetan government in Lhasa). But in 1949 a new foe appeared—the communist Red Army, which massed on the Sino-Tibetan border and demanded co-operation. Determined to resist invasion, Topgyay asked Patterson to make a perilous winter journey to India to seek military aid, medical supplies and international protection. When the voice of God told him he should do what he could to help, Patterson knew he had no choice.

Though it was winter, he chose a route to Sadiyah, in northern Assam, which even Tibetans feared to cross. Leaving Geoffrey Bull behind, he and a trio of Tibetan soldiers made the three-month, 400-mile trek on horseback. “We had to deal with blizzards that came virtually every day,” Patterson recalled. “I slept with the horses some of the time. I even slept with a yak, just to get the body heat because it was biting cold. The Tibetans didn’t use tents, so it was easier to go with what they were used to. They used to find dung that previous travelling parties had used for fuel and set it alight using sparks from their guns.”

Eventually arriving in Calcutta in March 1950, Patterson went to the British High Commission to be met with blank stares and sniggers. He persisted, and finally met the First Secretary who, taking him seriously, introduced him to intelligence officials from Britain, America and India—but his requests for help were turned down.

He decided to return to Tibet, but a devastating earthquake, illness and the arrival of the monsoon kept him in India while the communist invasion began in October. Patterson settled near the border, travelling between the Indian hill stations of Darjeeling and Kalimpong. Soon he began sending regular reports to The Telegraph of terrible events taking place in Tibet, as related by the many refugees fleeing into India. Meanwhile, Geoffrey Bull was captured and imprisoned as a suspected spy. Held in solitary confinement, he underwent “re-education” and “thought reform” as his captors tried brainwashing him. His faith in God, however, kept him from breakdown, and three years later he was released to the British authorities in Hong Kong.

In 1951 Patterson was asked by the Dalai Lama’s family to plot his escape from Tibet. The Dalai Lama had been on the point of going, but yielded to entreaties that he should consult “the State Oracle” first. The State Oracle told him he had to return to Lhasa, and the escape was aborted. Four years later, however, Patterson helped the Dalai Lama’s elder brother, Thubten Norbu, escape to America.

Patterson then acted as a covert, unpaid messenger between the American administration and representatives of the Dalai Lama, whom the Americans were prepared to recognise as head of an “autonomous Tibet”. Patterson warned the American negotiators that the Tibetan language made no distinction between the concepts of “autonomy” and “independence”. Consequently, after the Dalai Lama actually fled in 1959, there was widespread disappointment among Tibetan exiles when it became clear that western promises of support meant little in practice.

In his reports for The Telegraph and other publications, Patterson described the “sullen, uncooperative, still rebellious populace and a ruthless Chinese occupation army determined to wipe out the Tibetan race by mass killings, transportation to forced labour camps, removal of thousands of children to China and confiscation of all wealth and property”. He was the first to tell the world about the wide-scale but abortive Lhasa uprising of 1959, and he chronicled the subsequent period of ruthless suppression by the Chinese which was met by reckless acts of defiance by individual Tibetans.

In reaction, on March 17 1959, the Indian government—nervous about relations with China—warned that it would be “constrained to interdict his [Patterson’s] residence” if he did not stop sending “misleading and exaggerated” reports. India’s Prime Minister Jawarhalal Nehru accused him of accepting “bazaar rumours” as fact. Later that day, however, Nehru was forced to announce that “fighting had broken out in Lhasa and the Indian consulate was damaged by shelling”. Later that year Patterson reported a build-up of Chinese troops along the Indian border, and India hardened its stance towards China.

In 1961 Patterson returned to Britain, where he had a BBC radio programme series, Asian Affairs in The British Press, and worked as a commentator and book reviewer. With David Astor, editor of the Observer, and others, he helped to establish, and became first director of, the International Committee for the Study of Group Rights, now called The Minority Rights Group International (MRG), an organisation working to secure the rights of ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities and indigenous peoples.

In 1953 Patterson had married a fellow medical missionary, Margaret (“Meg”) Ingram, to whom he had been introduced in Kalimpong. In 1964 they moved to Hong Kong, where she was appointed surgeon-in-charge at Tung Wah Hospital. For the next nine years Patterson used Hong Kong as a base for his travels throughout Asia, writing and broadcasting as he went.

In 1964, for example, Patterson, the British documentary film-maker Adrian Cowell and the cameraman Chris Menges became the first three Westerners to cross the border between Nepal and Tibet with the Khamba armed resistance, which at that time was active in the Himalayas ambushing Chinese military convoys. Claiming that they wanted to film scenes of Buddhist life, Patterson bluffed the team’s way into the remote Dzum valley, a restricted area in northern Nepal where a detachment of the guerrilla force was based. They then travelled over a 20,000ft pass into Tibet and captured dramatic footage of the guerrillas’ subsequent attack on a Chinese convoy.

The three evaded the CIA, which sought to relieve them of their footage, and Cowell’s subsequent documentary about the guerrillas, Raid Into Tibet, caused a sensation when it was shown on British television in 1966, providing Western audiences with the first glimpse of the continuing violent resistance to the Chinese occupation.

Meg Patterson, meanwhile, had discovered that electro-acupuncture analgesia (as applied for post-surgical pain control) could also significantly ameliorate the symptoms of opiate withdrawal. In 1973 the Pattersons returned to London so that she could pursue clinical and scientific investigation into the technique.

Together, based at her clinic in Harley Street, they developed Neuro Electric Therapy (NET) into an internationally recognised drug treatment programme, publishing numerous articles and books. During the 1970s and 1980s, Meg Patterson undertook much research in America and was credited with helping rock stars such as Eric Clapton and Pete Townshend come off drugs. The Pattersons argued that psychiatrists failed to resolve the drug problem because they could not address spiritual factors involved in addiction, while ecclesiastics failed because they could not tackle political and social factors. Alongside the physical treatment, therefore, they offered spiritual counselling.

In 1975 Meg asked George to help in the case of The Who’s drummer Keith Moon, who had become convinced that he was being taken over by demons, whom he called Mr and Mrs Singh. At first, Moon said, he had been able to call up these “familiars” of his own free will, and derived his powers from them. But gradually they had begun to take over his mind. “Keith recognised that he had sold his soul,” recalled Patterson.

Patterson told Moon that the demons could be defeated by a relationship with God and, for a time, Moon appeared to follow his advice. He invited Patterson to accompany the rock group on a tour of Europe in 1976. In Zurich for their first concert, Patterson saw Moon in his private dressing room with a fridge full of alcohol and a drawer full of drugs. “Your problem isn’t drugs or alcohol,” Patterson told him. “The only way this is going to work is if you go out on this stage with nothing, with the belief that I tell you about.”

Moon duly went on stage, performing without the aid of drugs or alcohol for what he claimed was the first time in 10 years. The drummer’s new-found “faith” carried him through the band’s European dates, but as soon as Patterson’s back was turned he returned to his old ways. Within two years he was dead.

Patterson was the author of 30 books covering the story of Tibet and his own involvement with its liberation struggle; the purposes of God; and the problem of drug addiction. He returned to Tibet again, visiting Lhasa for the first time in 1987, as an adviser to a proposed Hollywood film about himself which, however, to his slight disappointment, metamorphosed into Seven Years in Tibet—the story of Heinrich Harrer.

In 1999 Meg Patterson suffered a debilitating stroke a week after opening a drug addiction clinic in Tijuana, Mexico. In 2001 she and her husband returned to Scotland, where she died in 2002.

In recent years Patterson was pleased to see major reforms in China and efforts made throughout Tibet to restore and preserve the country’s ancient culture.

On hearing of George Patterson’s death, the Dalai Lama sent a personal message to his family, noting that Patterson was one of only a handful of Westerners to have known Tibetans intimately at first hand.

George Patterson is survived by two sons and a daughter.