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MAGAZINE: JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2025 - THE LAST RUN OF THE ORIENT EXPR3ESS TRAIN by Don Mowatt

   Don Mowatt joined the staff of CBC in Vancouver in 1964 as a Radio
   Variety Producer and retired in 1997 as a Producer, Radio Features.
   During that 33-year span, Don won innumerable awards in recognition
   of the programmes he brought to air including 2 George F. Peabody
   medals, ACTRA, Armstrong, Gabriel, B'Nai Brith and the New York
   Audio Arts award for his feature documentaries and radio plays. He
   was chairman of the Radio Jury for the Prix Futura, Berlin, Germany in
   1993 and in 1995 was the Canadian Media representative at the
   International Chopin Competition in Warsaw. From 1964 to 1997, he
   produced over five hundred full-length documentary features and plays,
   and interviewed dozens of major figures in the Humanities including:
   George Woodcock, John Irving, Ray Bradbury, Jean Vanier, The Aga
   Khan, Sir Malcolm Arnold, Sir John Gielgud, Dame Peggy Ashcroft,
   Ruggiero Ricci, Janos Starker, Aaron Copland, R. Murray Schafer, Jean
Coulthard, PK Page, Bill Reid and Earle Birney. He was also the principal western contributing producer to the Ideas series from 1982 to 1997. Following retirement from CBC in 1997, Don joined the UBC Faculty of Theatre, Film and Creative Writing, where he remained for nine years. He was Co-artistic director of Western Gold Theatre in Vancouver for eight years, has been a lecturer and media consultant for The Aga Khan Trust for Culture for many years and has continued to write, perform and lecture on a wide variety of subjects. In 2007, Don wrote the libretto for Lloyd Burritt’s opera “The Dream Healer” on the subject of Carl Jung. It premiered at the Chan Centre with an international cast and the UBC opera company directed by Nancy Hermiston. In 2012, he and Carolyn Finlay toured Britain from Devonshire to the Aboyne Festival in the Scottish Highlands as Mark Twain and Olivia Clemens. He, Carolyn and the late Cam Cathcart performed together for two decades at Barclay and Roedde House Museums and the Silk Purse Gallery in an original play by Don with music: “A Charles Dickens Christmas“.

Don has previously shared memories of both his career and his travels for this website.  We are delighted that he is now sharing another memory that combines both career and travel, taking us back to 1977 and "The Last Run of the Orient Express", a journey Don shared with Dagmar Kaffanke-Nunn and Jurgen Hesse.   A special thank you goes to Dagmar who search her collection to provide photos for this article.

The Last Run of the Orient Express Train by Don Mowatt

In May 1977, three of us…a freelance writer and broadcaster, a photographer and I took the last run of the Orient Express train from Paris to Instanbul to collect audio and visual recordings for the CBC and related publications in Canada.

Dagmar on the platform in front of The Orient Express Train

Before taking a taxi to the station, we stopped off at the Paris apartment of Orient Express aficionado and art publisher Paul Bianchini and his wife Pati Hll, the American avant-garde artist and writer.  While Jurgen interviewed Paul about the history of the train and Paul’s own personal adventures, in the bedroom, out of earshot of his wife Pati, Dagmar and I shared our own stories about public broadcasting with our hostess who had been a model, a co-editor with George Plimpton of an expatriate literary magazine and a novelist.  Born in New England into a wealthy family, she reminded us of the character Tracey Lord played by Katherine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story and in the later remake, Grace Kelly in High Society.  She was blonde, slim, aristocratic and brilliant, begging us to send her, on our return to Vancouver, tapes of our literary features made about Hemmingway, Vonnegut, Bradbury and TS. Eliot among others.  Occasionally we’d hear guffaws followed by moments of total silence in the bedroom where the two old pros were trading stories of indiscretion and fantasy.  When they emerged, Paul carried gifts for the three of us…souvenirs from the heyday of the Orient Express: china ashtrays, linen napkins and cutlery, all impressively marked with “Simplon Orient Express” or “Wagons-Lits: Paris-Istanbul”.  As a sideline he ran a shop in Paris selling memorabilia of the train he loved as much or more than his fascinating wife.  After farewells and promises to tell them all about our trip ahead, we parted company at 11 p.m. headed for the Gare de l’Est and the Simplon Orient Express, king of trains, train of kings.

It was inaugurated in 1882 when the first train left Gare de l’Est headed for Lausanne, Milan, Venice, Trieste, Zagreb, Belgrade, Sofia, and Istanbul.  Kings, presidents, actors, spies, smugglers, authors, and personalities all travelled on this train for nearly one hundred years.  It was the first real attempt to unite a fractured continent.  FIRST CLASS accommodations were a dream – linen and silver, and liveried waiters in the dining car serving 8-course meals, lounge cars with leather and velvet armchairs, mahogany tables, crystal chandeliers, and bedrooms small but sumptuous with porters offering room service at all hours.  It was also the train of immigrant workers, from the beginning.  Like the Titanic, the various class sections were connected but not open to one another.  In the early years, the Third Class section had not even a toilet or sink and passengers there hadto run for it when the train pulled into the next station, maybe four or five hours away, or more…”Schnelle Marie” or “Montezuma’s Revenge” was a living reality and a plumbing nightmare.  Those stops too were often necessary to get some bread, cheese paté and red wine- no dining cars in Third Class…and no beds.  In a brochure at the station we read that the menu on the inaugural train in 1882 consisted of oysters, soup with Italian pasta, turbot with green sauce, chicken a la chausseur, filet of beef with chateau potatoes, chaud-froid of game animals, lettuce, chocolate pudding and a buffet of desserts.  That was on the first train, we were on the last.  When the train crossed borders, the train stopped to let on teams of intimidating border guards suspecting everyone of smuggling, illegal entry or insufficient passport and visa accreditation.  In First Class, they accepted tips and smiled and went on their way as though they were window shopping.

That was how the Orient Express was up until 1939.  Then, for practical reasons, the train stopped connecting countries at war with one another.  And the luxury disappeared, never to return.  When I took the last train in May 1977, First Class and Third Class were not that far apart in terms of style, only in cost…and Second Class had disappeared entirely.

The train left Paris at one minute past midnight on schedule and the next morning at 7 a.m. we were running through the Swiss Alps – past the Matterhorn.  The train was fast, clean, efficient and the passengers all looked pleased and excited.  We recorded the sounds of the train, through tunnels and open spaces, conductors speaking in several languages, the sounds of tea trolleys, compartment doors sliding open and shut, and of course we interviewed everyone who spoke English.


Don Mowarr enjoys a few quiet moments on board The Orient Express

In First Class, the sections were open to one another now; we found three American spinsters, newly retired teachers from Colorado celebrating their liberation from the classroom and dressed up today as Agatha Christie sleuths: Hercules Poirot, Miss Marple, and the Chief of Scotland Yard.  They were hilarious in their enthusiasm and naivete – never been married or engaged before, any of them, but by God they were going to get men on this trip, maybe even just one man…among them.  We tried to get their opinions at each border crossing and it worked until Italy when their interest in us and our microphones completely gave way to two swank looking men in their 20s dressed in silk suits, who boarded in Venice and took the compartment next to them.  Were they gay, smugglers, business executives: “Who cares?” they said, “They’re men”, and were gone in a flash leaving us with astonished looks and blank tape.  But that is another story and I must begin again.

We are to travel from Paris through the Swiss Alps to Italy, Slovenia, Serbia, Macedonia, Bulgaria and finally to Turkey and Istanbul where the Vikings had arrived before us, exactly eight hundred and seventeen years, four months and…25 minutes earlier, in long boats by river.

On our first night we share a couchette with an attractive young French woman.  She is on the top bunk opposite me.  The lights have been turned out shortly after our midnight departure, but there is still light enough to see by.  I change under the sheet and single blanket, as do my colleagues below, but the Parisienne opposite has no scruples…or worries…about undressing for the night, sitting upright at the top of our cabin.  Attitude spawns attitude, I suppose.  She strips to the waist and sits waiting for inspiration, then slides out of her jeans and socks and reflects in her briefs…in this case quite alluringly brief.  I remember Paul Bianchini and his tales with the microphone duly reported by Jurgen in the taxi ride to the station. I shall have to write to him about opening night in the Orient Express balcony section.  The lovely traveller looks across to me for the first time, sighs, smiles and turns around and is ready to sleep above the sheet and blanket in barely yours panties and a back that shines in the night like the face of a watch.

In the morning we awake refreshed and inspired by the Swiss Alps and the thought of our next stop, Milan.  The Venus de Milo of the previous night has disappeared somewhere but her luggage is still here as we unpack a bottle of wine, Perrier, a baguette and a tin of liver paté.  Our Yugoslav conductor knocks, asks how we are and brings us fresh coffee.  We learn from him who our fellow passengers are and what we should expect in the journey ahead.  He is most affable but asks more than he tells.

After Milan, he becomes agitated.  A Croatian gentleman in the compartment next to ours has lost his schizophrenic son somewhere between the beginning of the last stop in Milan and now.  The son had gone to the washroom down the hall as they approached the grand station and hadn’t returned.  Together the conductor and the father had searched the whole train for him without success, and now we were speeding towards Venice.  The son was seventeen and not carrying his medication.

The Parisian lady is seated by the window in our compartment reading a magazine – Paris Match.  The air is cool through a partially opened window and Dagmar is bundled in a blue sleeping bag reading Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, which she puts down now and then to make an observation in her journal. 

Dagmar. caught in her sleeping bag.

As we approach Venice, our conductor Nikolai comes to tell us the good news that our neighbour’s son was found in the Milan station, and is being driven to Venice to meet his father.

The further east and south the train travels, the more behind schedule we are.  In Zagreb we are already three and a half hours late.  And the clientele and the smell of the train washrooms and corridors become increasingly intolerable.  The world of Agatha Christie is long gone.  Animals appear and extra police.  The Parisienne has left and now we have two smoking Serbians as travelling companions.  After Zagreb, we are no longer in a couchette for four but a compartment for six with no sleeping accommodations but an increasing amount of blue smoke.  The two Serbians leave as we pull into Belgrade, and a young couple speaking Italian replace them in our compartment.  They have three large pieces of luggage, and the woman a long cast on her leg running from foot to waist.  When we arrive at the Bulgarian border late at night, border guards enter the train, check our passports and spot-check the luggage.  They focus on our two Italian companions and Jurgen records the process on a new recording device with the twin microphones placed as earphones in each ear so that it appears he is listening on his Walkman, not recording in stereo!  The girl begins to cry as the police open one suitcase full of jeans…contraband in Bulgaria.  A second policeman runs a wand over her cast and the wand beeps repeatedly…metal inside…probably a pistol and ammunition.  Both Italians are arrested on the spot.  We are alone in our compartment again and Dagmar writes furiously in her journal.

Don Mowatt at left, Jurgen Hesse in the middle, and their tour guide in Sofia, Bulgaria from the radio station there.   

There is one problem.  We had gotten visas for passage through the two Iron Curtain countries Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, but the Turkish Army had delayed approving our entry as a recording team into Turkey.  We were allowed in as tourists with our regular passports, but, as we found out finally at the British Embassy in Sofia, we had been refused entry as recording journalists.  We were advised to leave our equipment in Bulgaria and pick it up on our return five days later.  But in any ravel story as everyone knows, the destination is crucial to the shape and meaning of the tale.  We had so far collected the most colourful sound portraits of Paris, Venice, Zagreb and Sofia and not getting to do the same with fabled and romantic and mysterious Istanbul would be a major disaster.  So we took our equipment and hid it among sweaters and shirts in our luggage and journeyed on to Istanbul.

At the station there, we spot our three Agatha Christie school teachers from Colorado but they are running for a taxi and a night out with three Bulgarian businessmen.  They call out to us that we should meet again at the station tomorrow to conclude the interviews.  We never saw them again.

We were met at our hotel by the musician son of a Vancouver actor.  Gerry had married a Turkish wife and, with his infant son in a stroller, guided us to Istanbul’s secret alleyways, shops, and restaurants.  The 2-year old was all the visa we required.  Once inside Istanbul, we felt free to record everywhere – almost everywhere: the bazaars, the markets, restaurants, streets, the sounds of the muezzins calling from the minarets, cars, donkey carts, sellers of flutes, carpets and all manner of Turkish delights.  Salesmen called out to us, trying several languages to pin point ours and our gullibility.  They were usually quite accurate.  Outside the bazaar I tried to take a photograph of several gypsy children in brilliantly coloured costumes but two mothers jumped into the frame at the last minute demanding to be paid before I snapped the picture.  As I gave them the money requested, they vanished while I was adjusting my lens.

On the night before we were to return westward, we finally realized why our recording visas has been denied by the Turkish Army.  It was April 30th and we were staying at the Gezi Hotel in Taksim Square.  Tanks were rolling in, soldiers flooded the streets, taking up positions at every corner and on rooftops.  All that because we brought in our recorders, we wondered.  We asked the hotel manager what was happening and he told us: “Tomorrow is May Day – the day of the young people in their fight with their oppressors.”  The university students were planning a major confrontation with the military dictatorship and it was to begin here in Taksim Square tomorrow.  “Go to Topkapi Palace tomorrow morning or take a boat ride on the Bosphorus, but don’t come back until late at night, maybe not until May 2nd”.  “But our train leaves tomorrow at 3 p.m. and we have work to do.”  “Don’t be here after 9 o’clock tomorrow morning.  Take my advice,” he warned. 

At eight o’clock the next morning at breakfast I could see out of the dining room window a devout Muslim on his prayer rug on a roof terrace, bowing to the floor and towards Mecca.  And in the same frame, if I had only taken my camera downstairs for breakfast, I could see an army sharp-shooter on the next roof, watching through his rifle scope.  The bridges from this area to the rest of Istanbul were all being sealed off.  There was no way to get to the train, so near and yet so far away, just across a narrow stretch of water.  The taxis had all disappeared; there was no public transportation.  We begged the manager to find us a car…half an hour later, he came back with a big grin, the last taxi in the area has just pulled in to the Istanbul Hilton.  “I told him to wait for you, but you better start running now.  Can you manage your luggage?  It will cost you!” he shouted after us.  We made it.  For $100 American at the Istanbul Hilton, ten blocks away from our hotel on Taksim Square, the taxi driver had a solution for our barricaded route that would take us completely around Istanbul and get us to the train station on time for 3 p.m. departure or close to it, he said.  As it was, we had eighteen minutes to spare in a drive that must have covered most of European Turkey.

Dagmar mocked us for our fear of the tanks and the protest, but that day 20 were killed in Taksim Square, 200 injured, and our hotel had been riddled with bullets.

As it later turned out, we three, because we had left and entered surreptitiously and without visas, were listed as missing in the conflict and this had been reported on CBC national radio.

I arrived back in Vancouver several days later…on the same day as a letter from my grandmother in Montreal sent to my wife deploring my presumed demise in Istanbul and hoping that someday, by a miracle, I might show up alive.  The letter I opened had borne my name on the envelope, but, so used to being the recipient of her news, I misread the “Mrs.” for “Mr.” and, astonished, read of my own disappearance just minutes prior to my wife’s arrival home with our children.

Good timing in train travel and in show business is based on practice and preparedness.  “Timing is everything” the saying tells us, but it is far from everything when things go wrong.  Then improvisation is king.

I think I will just hide my luggage and go to the supermarket, leaving the letter for my wife to read and I will return as Inspector Poirot with preparation for a meal of Turbot in green sauce, chicken a la chausseur, chaud-froid of some animals and a buffet of desserts with champagne to celebrate my solution to the riddle of my own unexpected passing in the May Day riots in Istanbul, 1977.