Newton Bowles: Fifty Years (and more) with UNICEF

Indisputably, Newton Bowles holds the record for long service with UNICEF. Not only did he start his years with that agency in the summer of 1948 when he organized its first small mission in China, but he had earlier spent nearly three years (1945-48) in China with its predecessor, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA). He was also in those early days supervisor of Jim Grant, who became the agency's executive director. He himself rose to the position of (world wide) program director for UNICEF, which he held from 1965 to 1978, and then moved full-time to help organize the UN Conference on Primary Health Care in Alma Ata. And in 2000 he was still working for UNICEF as "a dollar-a-day man", doing an important policy study on the positive (as opposed to the victimized) role of women in combat zones. It is truly an amazing ­ and enduring ­ record of service.

He also happens to be a cousin of former Prime Minister Mike Pearson (to be precise, a first cousin once removed: Pearson's mother was a Bowles and the sister of Newton's grandfather). A further distinction is that he is a professional artist, having had shows of his landscapes and skyscapes in Montreal, Toronto and New York.

China figured largely in his life for many years. His father went to China as a Methodist missionary in 1906, and his mother who was a nurse followed in 1910. "They met in China. Of course, they had to go back to Toronto to have a proper Rosedale wedding! It was remarkable that in Szechwan, at the headwaters of the Yangtse river, there was quite a large, sophisticated missionary community ­ there was complete university there with medical, agricultural, dental [faculties] and quite a large group of Canadians. Most of them at that time had graduated from Victoria College, at the University of Toronto. And I have heard the Victoria College song sung in the gorges of the Yangtse river. So, when our family returned to Canada, I was destined to go to Victoria College. My uncle had been chancellor of Vic, so it was in the blood.

"As I approached my graduation ­ my course was triple honours: philosophy, English and history ­ I managed to avoid going into the Church. I had a summer internship in a four-church parish outside North Bay, and that was enough to convince me otherwise. So I set my course on an academic career, focusing on the history of ideas. I got a President's Fellowship at Johns Hopkins, and I was well into my doctorate when the pressure of the [1939-45] war intervened."

His friends were going into the army, and he tried to volunteer for the Canadian army but was rejected because of one bad eye. "So I found my way into the British war services in Washington ­ not on the intelligence side but I found I was involved in preparations for civilian post-war relief. And that is what led me to the UN post-war relief operation in China. I was recruited by UNRRA in April 1945, so that was the time of my joining the international secretariat. I thought of it as a temporary diversion from my academic career, and Hopkins was kind in holding my fellowship for me. I said: 'There is this opportunity to go back to my home country, China,' and they said, 'Go ahead; and please, while you're there, have a look at the formal Chinese gardens because this is of very great interest to us in connection with some of our academic courses'. Well, arriving in China in the middle of the civil war, there wasn't much propensity for seeing formal gardens!"

It was a massive operation. "UNRRA dumped 2,000 international staff into Shanghai in the course of a few months and, although I was a young fellow, I was one of the few people there who had any sort of preparation for this. So I was jumped up to management level in this whole show and I was made responsible for getting humanitarian relief across the battle lines. That was my political education! I found that war is ­ war. I had grown up rather naively as a good Christian boy saying all men are brothers. Anyhow, while negotiating with the Nationalist generals, we had a very interesting arrangement with the Communists. During the civil war, we had a delegation of five from the Communists right with us in Shanghai and, when the war was very hot, I got them into the UNRRA hotel with a 24-hour guard on them. We managed to do some symbolic work. The amounts we actually got across the lines were, of course, rather minimal; but we established the fact that we were not political."

The UNRRA operation in Shanghai and China was terminated in early 1948, and Newton Bowles returned to New York. "I was still wondering what to do with my life. I got enrolled at Union Theological Seminary for one semester, where I studied with Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr. While I was there, I was riding the bus on 42nd Street and this chap sat down next to me and said, 'Where have you been? We want you in UNICEF. We're beginning our work in China.' I said, 'Work in China, in this civil war?' He said, 'Yes, we've already put some ships on the Pacific. They're heading for China. What are you going to do?' So I said, 'How long is this going to last?' 'A year or two.' So I said 'I will speak to my friends down at Hopkins, to see if they are holding my fellowship.' They said, 'Yes, another year we can manage.'"

By the summer of 1948, therefore, Bowles was back in China and organizing a small mission with some ten internationals. "I said, 'You really have to be on both sides of the fighting, and you have to be ready. This Nationalist government is about to collapse. And that is indeed what happened. I became quite interested in what UNICEF was doing, and I found I had become committed to international work, through this series of accidents. I said bye-bye to Hopkins.

"Right from the beginning of UNICEF, I had the tremendous great fortune to be associated with some outstanding people of deep international and professional experience, mainly at first coming from the public health side. One of the founders of UNICEF was a Polish doctor who had been the head of the health secretariat at the League of Nations, Dr Ludwig Rajchman. With him came another outstanding figure in international public health, whom I had met with UNRRA in China. That was Dr Bereslav Borcic, a Yugoslav. These people had also been with the pioneer work of the Rockefeller Foundation in public health. So, sitting at the feet of such outstanding people, I had an apprenticeship. What impressed me with the UNICEF approach, even at the beginning which was fairly basic relief, was the understanding that what UNICEF could do with its own resources was very limited; the focus had to be on helping local institutions and people to do their own thing. This was the base for the long-term, continuing life of UNICEF."

At first his responsibility was for the initial work in Asia. "Then that broadened eventually to my responsibility for work throughout the world, where I was the program director for UNICEF from 1965 to 1978. It was a really wonderful job. UNICEF being fairly small, I was involved in everything ­ in questions of organization, administration, in supply operation, recruitment and in the evolution of our basic policies. The Governing Board was very supportive, especially on political issues where UNICEF was subject to criticism from the left and the right. On the whole, we had general guidelines from the Board, within which we set out our priorities and the allocation of our resources. We had a very good working relationship with the Board, but it was mainly political backstopping. Adelaide Sinclair, another Canadian, was one above me in the hierarchy. I was the workhorse who ran the programs."

Asked what were the big decisions made by UNICEF in its early days, Newton Bowles speaks of finding a distinctive role for the agency. "At the beginning the World Health Organization had assumed that UNICEF was a plum on the tree ready to be picked by the WHO. So a joint committee was established between WHO and UNICEF, on the initiative of WHO, on the assumption that this would be the mechanism for taking over from UNICEF. So we were somewhat imprisoned by our WHO colleagues at the beginning and we had to find a way to get out from under that. The way was to stress the unique role of UNICEF as the advocate for children ­ and children in every respect of growing up and development. So we announced we were going into education, and that we would be looking at the whole child. This was our escape clause from the World Health Organization."

He went on, in answer to the question about big decisions along the way: "It was an enormous intellectual exercise, based on a great deal of pragmatic experience at the field level, that led us to the conclusion that what UNICEF might best do would be to influence national policy in countries where we were. At that time there was the fad of national planning organizations, and we undertook to penetrate the planning organizations or the cabinet secretariat where the decisions about policy and the allocation of national resources were made. We did this both from New York and through national committees. The strength of programming and of UNICEF we tried to put at country level; the role of headquarters was to set general policy, to backstop and to look over the shoulders of our people in the field. Working through our people in the field was an enormous educational effort, because many of our people came from a rather naïve relief background. We built up our own little think-tank within UNICEF of technically qualified people to deal with these issues with a certain sophistication about economic and social policies.

"What came out of that was the concept of human development and this is the core of UN policy ­ and it came from UNICEF in the 1960s. I think that was UNICEF's major contribution. Richard Jolly, who now supervises the Human Development Report for the UNDP, was a deputy at UNICEF under Jim Grant. "

In 1978 the WHO asked UNICEF to be joint sponsor of what turned out to be the first major UN international conference on an important development theme. "This was the conference on primary health care at Alma Ata (in the Soviet Union, near the Sinkiang border). We thought it was so important that UNICEF put me full-time on that. It was the first UN watershed conference on a significant social issue, and it precipitated the series of conferences on population, social development and human rights. You might think that, because of the range of my responsibilities in UNICEF, I was what might be called an administrator, watching the money and people's behaviour. But in fact, by good fortune, I had to get into the real substance of our work. For example, I became a member of the WHO expert committee on maternal and child health. And in preparation for the Alma Ata conference I was invited to speak to regional gatherings of the World Health Organization on the important re-orientation of health services ­ and I was always introduced as 'Dr Bowles' because they couldn't believe that some lay person knew more than they on international public health. It turned out that I was one of the authors of the recommendations coming out of the Alma Ata conference. It was a wonderful privilege for me to gain that kind of insight into the social issues in developing countries."

Of UNICEF's part in fostering collaboration between UN agencies, Newton Bowles says: "An important feature of the way UNICEF worked was to draw in the resources of the UN system as a whole. We had regular formal consultations not only with the World Health Organization but also with UNESCO, FAO, ILO, the World Food Programme and eventually UNFPA ­ and we also brought the World Bank in. For me this was a unique experience of almost the whole UN system. Very few people have had this experience. We found that the way to bring them in was not to talk about co-operation in general but to focus on specific issues, and what resources they could contribute and we could not. On the whole this worked very well."

Newton Bowles has never retired, as others do at 65. "What happened was that, when Jim Grant took over ­ he had been one of my boys in China, and I knew him well ­ he kept me on and so I never left UNICEF. I am now a $1-a-year man. I have become very concerned with the impact of war on children; so I am working with the Emergency Office which is now headed by Nils Kastberg, a Swede, an outstanding man with vast experience. He is a prince of men, very intelligent, very sensitive. He negotiated the UN humanitarian entry into Kosovo. I like working with his team, because they are very hands-on, sophisticated and close to what is happening in the field."

He explains his move to this new area of work: "As I loosened my hold on UNICEF, and found I had more time at the United Nations, I looked around for some spot where I could turn my mind and energies to issues of war and peace as they affect children, and people generally. The first door through which I walked was to represent the Group of 78 (an Ottawa-based group of Canadians with internationalist concerns) on the NGO Disarmament Committee, and then in 1991 became the general representative of the Group of 78 at the UN. I had no specific briefing, so I thought the least I could do was to give its members an idea of what was going on. Then I initiated my annual round-up report, and it turned out to be the instrument to which I had to educate myself about the UN, because UNICEF was specifically focused. Year after year I have accumulated more background, and I have tried to cover all major issues at the UN, which is a rather ambitious thing to do since I am a one-man show, but I find it very interesting. Also it has enhanced my capacity to help UNICEF, since I am able to introduce my present colleagues there into the wider context of what they are doing."

In this context he went to them in 1998 and said, "We do have the treaty on landmines but much more important are small arms." He adds: "For some years I had been pressing the NGO Committee on Disarmament to involve itself in this prickly and complex issue. I was then invited by UNICEF to do their policy paper on small arms. It has now become the basis for the official UNICEF policy on small arms, where [the agency] has taken a stand on the importance of introducing some form of regulation of the trade in small arms. It will go out to our people in the field to support national and local efforts to bring arms under control. That will be variously interpreted by people on the spot, depending on local circumstances.

"Then I turned my mind to the actual and potential role of women in these war-torn societies. The women's organizations have quite legitimately been focusing on the victimization and the need to give them their proper place in political and social life. Which is certainly very important, but there is another kind of contribution that women are making, and this is the positive role ­ and I suggested to UNICEF that we should have a look at that neglected resource. I have (in October 1999) just completed a paper on that subject, which I think will lead to some practical action. As well, I have been invited to represent the United Nations Association in Canada at the UN, which has opened other doors for me."

When does he find time for painting? "My friends always ask me that, and I say it is not a matter of time, but of energy ­ and I seem to have plenty of that. During the winter I am working on big oils. I do most of my painting at night. I spend a good spell during the summer on Grand Manan Island (off the New Brunswick coast) and there I do water colours. These are sea and sky. There's a nice little gallery in Fredericton, Gallery 78, that has my summer water colours, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has one of my big oils." For some years while his wife became terminally ill, and died in 1996, he had not "the energy nor the motivation to deal with galleries. But my painting has been a very important part of my life: it's a balance for this involvement in international affairs."