KATIE HICKMAN
Daughters of Britannia

The Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives

Dedication

For Beatrice Hollond,a diamond amongst friends

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

List of Principal Women

Introduction

Prologue

1. Getting There

2. The Posting

3. Partners

4. Private Life

5. Embassy Life

6. Ambassadresses

7. Public Life

8. Social Life

9. Hardships

10. Children

11. Dangers

12. Rebel Wives

13. Contemporary Wives

Plates

Keep Reading

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

List of Illustrations

About the Author

Author’s Note

Notes

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

A List of the Principal Women in the Book and the Primary Places Where They Served

Seventeenth Century | Date first went abroad
The Countess of Winchilsea (Constantinople) | 1661
Ann Fanshawe (Portugal, Spain) | 1662
The Countess of Carlisle (Moscow) | 1663
Katharine Trumbull (Paris) | 1685
Eighteenth Century
Countess of Stair (Paris) | 1715
Mary Wortley Montagu (Constantinople) | 1716
Mrs Vigor (St Petersburg) | 1730
Miss Tully (Tripoli) | 1783
Emma Hamilton (Naples) | 1786
Mary Elgin (Constantinople) | 1799
Nineteenth Century
Elizabeth Broughton (Algiers) | 1806
Elizabeth McNeill (Persia) | 1823
Harriet Granville (The Hague, Paris) | 1824
Anne Disbrowe (St Petersburg) | 1825
Mary Sheil (Persia) | 1849
Isabel Burton (Brazil, Damascus) | 1861
Mary Fraser (Peking & Japan) | 1874
Victoria Sackville (Washington) | 1881
Mary Waddington (Moscow) | 1883
Catherine Macartney (Kashgar) | 1898
Susan Townley (China, Washington) | 1898
Twentieth Century |
Ella Sykes (Kashgar) | 1915
Vita Sackville-West (Persia) | 1926
Marie-Noele Kelly (Brussels, Turkey) | 1929
Norah Errock (Iraq) | 1930
Iona Wright (Trebizond, Ethiopia, Persia) | 1939
Evelyn Jackson (Uruguay) | 1939
Pat Gore-Booth (Burma, Delhi) | 1940
Diana Cooper (Paris) | 1944
Diana Shipton (Kashgar) | 1946
Masha Williams (Iraq) | 1947
Peggy Trevelyan (Iraq, Moscow) | 1948
Maureen Tweedy (Persia, Korea) | 1950
Felicity Wakefield (Libya, the Lebanon) | 1951
Ann Hibbert (Mongolia, Paris) | 1952
Jennifer Hickman (New Zealand, Dublin, Chile) | 1959
Jane Ewart-Biggs (Algeria, Paris, Dublin) | 1961
Veronica Atkinson (Ecuador, Romania) | 1963
Rosa Carless (Persia, Hungary) | 1963
Angela Caccia (Bolivia) | 1963
Sheila Whitney (China) | 1966
Jennifer Duncan (Mozambique, Bolivia) | 1970
Catherine Young (Syria) | 1970
Annabel Hendry (Black) (Brussels) | 1991
Chris Gardiner (Kyiv) | 1994
Susie Tucker (Slovakia) | 1995

Introduction

‘English ambassadresses are usually on the dotty side, and leaving their embassies nearly drives them completely off their rockers.’ These words, from Nancy Mitford’s classic vignette of embassy life Don’t Tell Alfred, were like a mantra of my youth. As children, my brothers and I used to chant them to my mother, in those days a British ambassadress herself, in her vaguer moments. Not because she was dotty (well, only occasionally) but because we knew, beyond doubt, that all other ambassadresses were.

From an early age, we were used to the tales of former ambassadresses – mad, bad and dangerous to know, they came to form part of our family culture. In New Zealand, my father’s first posting as a young first secretary, there was the delightfully distraite Lady Cumming Bruce. She was far more interested in her painting than in her diplomatic social engagements, which often slipped her mind completely; according to legend, she could regularly be spotted crawling through the residence shrubberies, so as not to be spotted arriving late for her own parties. ‘Dear Mummy and Daddy,’ my mother wrote to my grandparents just a few months after her arrival in Wellington, ‘Lady Cumming Bruce is very vague and difficult to pin down – says she’ll do something and then doesn’t. When Helen* went onto their boat to greet them on arrival she suggested to Lady CB that she should perhaps put her hat on before meeting the press. Lady CB opened her hat box inside which instead of a hat, was a child’s chamber pot.’

During the twenty-eight years that my mother spent as a diplomat’s wife, she wrote letters home. Today, at my parents’ house in Wiltshire, in amongst the paper rubbings from the temples at Angkor Wat, the Persian prayer mats and the bowls of shells from the beaches of Connemara – the legacy of a lifetime’s wanderings – there is a carved wooden chest which contains several thousand of them. Once a week with almost religious regularity – sometimes more frequently – these letters were written at first to my grandparents and my aunt, but then later also to myself and my two brothers when we were sent home to boarding school in England. During the last ten years of her travelling life it was not unusual for her to write half a dozen letters a week, recording all the vicissitudes of diplomatic life.

In these days of instant communications, of faxes and e-mails and mobile telephones, it is hard to describe the extraordinarily intense pleasure of what used, in old fashioned parlance, to be called ‘a correspondence’. As a bitterly homesick ten-year-old at boarding school for the first time, I found in my mother’s letters an almost totemic significance. The main stairs of my school house wound down through the middle of the building around a central well; in the hall below was a wooden chest on which the post was always laid out. For some reason only the housemistress and the matron were permitted to use these stairs (the rest of us were confined to the more workaday stone stairs at the back of the house), so the trick was to crane over the banisters and try to spot your letters. From two storeys up it was impossible to read your name but, to a practised eye, the form of a certain handwriting, the shape of a certain envelope, its colour or its thickness, were all clues.

Occasionally my mother would use the official embassy writing paper – thick sheaves of a creamy sky-blue colour, lavishly embossed with the royal crest – but it wasn’t really her style. For most of my school days she used the same big pads of plain white airmail paper, slightly crinkly to the touch, bordered in red and blue, which she bought in industrial quantities from an English stationer’s. Often I would carry her letters around with me in my pocket, unopened, for a whole morning, until I could escape somewhere private in which to savour them. Their fatness, their pleasing weight, their peculiar texture against my fingertips had an almost magical power to soothe. These letters carried news of my family, of course, but perhaps more importantly they described another world, and another way of life. They described another part of myself, in fact, which was as strange to my English friends as the land of the Jabberwock or the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo.

I kept these letters, and many years later they were to be the inspiration for this book. Although I have quoted them here only occasionally, what they have given me is a strong sense not only of the value of the experiences they describe, but also of their fragility. One of my main aims in writing this book is to preserve them, and others like them, lest, like Lady Winchilsea’s, their stories should drift into oblivion.

The lives of the women described in this book represent a lacuna in history. While the experiences of their menfolk were recorded and preserved for posterity even as far back as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,* what these women saw or felt or did is unknown. Because, with a few rare exceptions, they were not involved in affairs of state, they were quite simply not considered important enough. Because they were women, their experience had no value, and even their presence often went unrecorded. To quote the well-worn feminist joke, the history of diplomacy is very much a ‘his-story’.

Of all the women whose experiences I have drawn upon in this book, Lady Winchilsea, who in 1661 made the long and perilous journey to Constantinople at her husband’s side, is the earliest. I am in no doubt that there were others before her, for the custom of sending resident ambassadors abroad, initiated by the Italians during the Renaissance, had begun to spread through the rest of Europe by the beginning of the sixteenth century,† but any records for them are almost impossible to find.

Even when we do have a fleeting glimpse of them (as in the case of the Countess of Winchilsea) their stories are tantalizingly elusive. Did Lady Winchilsea, like one of her more famous successors, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ever visit a harem or one of the imperial city’s glorious marble-domed hammams? Did she, like Mary Elgin nearly a century and a half later, go disguised in man’s clothing to watch her husband present his credentials to the Grand Seignior? What of the everyday practicalities of her life? What were the conditions she had to endure aboard ship? Did she have children whom she was forced to leave behind? Perhaps, like her contemporary Ann Fanshawe, she fell pregnant and gave birth thousands of miles from home. If so, did her child survive?

Although we will never know what Lady Winchilsea thought and felt when she arrived in Constantinople in 1661, remarkably, many accounts of the lives and experiences of diplomatic women have survived. Until well into the first half of this century many of them wrote letters home; these letters are often the sole record we have of them. A handful are already well-known names – Mary Wortley Montagu, Vita Sackville-West, Isabel Burton. The vast majority are not. Who was Mrs Vigor, gossiping from St Petersburg in the 1730s about the scandals and intrigues of the imperial court? Or Miss Tully, incarcerated for over a year in the consulate in plague- and famine-torn Tripoli on the eve of the French Revolution? We know almost no personal details about them (not even their Christian names). Nor do we know who their correspondents were, only that their letters were precious enough to someone, as my mother’s were to me, to have been safely kept. A great number of the sources I have used – collections of letters, private journals, or memoirs largely based on them – were never intended for public consumption at all: only a hundred or so copies were sometimes published through private subscription for family and friends. Why did they write these letters? No doubt they longed for news from home; but perhaps they also felt compelled to describe the circumstances of their lives abroad – so exhilarating, so strange, so inexplicable – to their family and friends. In Moscow in 1826 Anne Disbrowe enjoys the festivities which took place at the coronation of Tsar Nicholas I; in Peking, some fifty years later, at the heart of the Forbidden City itself, Mary Fraser takes tea with the legendary Chinese Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi; while at the turn of this century, during her seventeen long years in Chinese Turkistan, Catherine Macartney witnesses not one, but two full eclipses of the sun.

Others have more perilous tales to tell, of famines, plagues, tempests, earthquakes, wars, kidnappings, assassination attempts, and of the illnesses and deaths of their children. Even today – perhaps especially today – the world remains a hostile place for many diplomats. Their families, my own included, have often felt that the real substance of their lives is greatly, and at times almost wilfully, misunderstood. As one wife recently wrote in the BDSA (British Diplomatic Spouses Association) Magazine: ‘All Britons KNOW that diplomatic life is one long whirl of gaiety (they have seen the films and read the books)…’ Although this may be true for a few, most of the women represented here have very different stories to tell. ‘I shall never forget the utter despair into which the sight of my new home plunged me,’ wrote Jane Ewart-Biggs of her arrival as a young wife at her first posting in Algiers. From the outside their house – the central block of the old British hospital – seemed solid enough, but the interior was in a state of total disrepair, the paint flaking from the walls and doors hanging on single hinges. In the entrance hall a huge hole gaped through the ceiling ‘through which pipes and wires hung like intestines’. By the time her husband Christopher came home she was in tears. He, by contrast, was buoyed up by the fascinating day he had spent learning all about his new job. ‘It was then that I realised that the major problems arising from our nomadic life were going to affect me rather than him,’ Jane wrote, ‘and that the same circumstances creating political interest for him would make my life especially difficult.’¹

Whatever the external circumstances, for the most part these are personal stories told from within. Their sphere is essentially domestic. Whether they are writing from Persia or St Petersburg, these women (mostly wives, but some daughters and sisters, too) describe the concerns of any ordinary Englishwoman: children, dogs, gardens, houses, servants, clothes, food. Politics, except on the occasions when they came into direct conflict with their lives, are only incidentally discussed. What they engage with instead is daily life. For the contemporary reader the women’s subjectivity has a peculiar veritas which is frequently absent from their husbands’ more distanced and perhaps more scholarly approach. What they do, brilliantly, is to describe what life was really like. It is this, more than anything else, which is their particular genius.

Who, today, would want to read Colonel Sheil’s ponderous ethnographic dissertation on Persia in the mid-nineteenth century?* The memoir of his wife Mary, however, contained in the same volume, while politically almost entirely uninformative, has a freshness and drama which remains undimmed by time. Mary vividly describes her agonizing 1,000-mile journey with three small children and an invalid husband through the Caucasus Mountains from Tehran to Trebizond on the Black Sea (from whence they were able to sail to England). She recorded with simple stoicism how they waded up to their knees through the freezing snow, eating only dry crusts and sleeping in stables: ‘I learned on this journey that neither children nor invalids know how much fatigue and privation they can endure until they are under compulsion.’²

In writing Daughters of Britannia I have drawn on the experiences of more than 100 diplomatic women. Their lives span nearly 350 years of history, and encompass almost every imaginable geographical and cultural variation, from the glittering social whirl enjoyed by Countess Granville in Paris after the Napoleonic Wars, to the privations suffered at the turn of this century by that redoubtable Scotswoman, Catherine Macartney, who in her seventeen years in Kashgar, in Chinese Turkistan, saw only three other European women.

Many of these women lived unique lives. Some saw sights which no other English person, man or woman, had ever seen. And yet, despite their vast differences – in character and taste as much as circumstances – a bond of shared experience unites them; a diplomatic ‘culture’ which was both official and intensely personal. Even though they are separated by nearly 200 years, when the anguished Countess of Elgin writes about her longing for news from home, it could be my own mother writing.

Dearest Mother,

Do not expect this to be an agreeable letter. I am too much disappointed in never hearing from home; the 17th July is the last from you, almost six months!… I can’t imagine why you took it into your heads that we were going home; for I am sure I wrote constantly to tell you that we were at Constantinople, and why you would not believe me I know not. If you knew what I felt when the posts arrive and no letters for me, I am sure you would pity me. I shall write to nobody but you, for I feel I am too cross.³

In the Elgins’ day the journey from England to Constantinople was not only long and arduous, it was also hazardous. Messengers were frequently attacked and robbed, and every single precious letter either destroyed or lost. Amazingly, even in the late twentieth century the non-arrival of the bag has been the cause of as much disappointment and pain. Here is my mother to my brother on 23 May 1978: ‘Darling Matthew, Boo hoo! The bag has let us down, and there is gnashing of teeth here, and blood is boiling.’ And to myself, on the same day: ‘Darling Katie, The bloody bag has let us down yet again and we have no letters from any of you. We are so mad we could spit …’

What qualities were needed in a diplomat’s wife? In Mary Elgin’s day nobody would have thought it necessary to enumerate them. Of course, plenty was written on the qualities required in a man. In the sixteenth century, when the idea of sending a resident ambassador abroad was still fairly new, these were frequently listed in treaties and manuals. A man (in Sir Henry Wotton’s famously ambiguous phrase) ‘sent to lie abroad for the good of his country’ was required to have an almost impossibly long list of attributes. He should be not only tall, handsome, well-born and blessed with ‘a sweet voice’ and ‘a well-sounding name’,⁴ but also well read in literature, in civil and canon law and all branches of secular knowledge, in mathematics, music geometry and astronomy. He should be able to converse elegantly in the Latin tongue and be a good orator. He should also be of fine and upstanding morals: loyal, brave, temperate, prudent and honest.

An important ambassador’s entourage could include secretaries and ‘intelligencers’, a chaplain, musicians, liverymen, a surgeon, trumpeters, gentlemen of the horse, ‘gentlemen of quality who attended for their own pleasure’, young nephews ‘wanting that polish that comes from a foreign land’, even dancing and fencing masters. But never a wife.

The ideal diplomatic wife was more difficult to describe: ‘Just as the right sort can make all the difference to her husband’s position,’ wrote Marie-Noele Kelly rather forbiddingly in her memoirs, ‘so one who is inefficient, disagreeable, disloyal, or even merely stupid, can be a millstone around his neck.’⁵ Although there have been some magnificent millstones – Lady Townley’s infamous ‘indiscretions’ forced her husband to retire from the service – there is no doubt that all the staunchest qualities deemed necessary in men were required in their wives, too. Circumstances have often demanded of them unimaginable courage and reserves of fortitude.

This book is the story of how such women survived. It is the story of many lives lived valiantly far away from family and friends; and of the uniquely demanding diplomatic culture which sustained (and sometimes failed to sustain) these women as they struggled, often in very difficult conditions, to represent their country abroad. Although their role, in the eyes of ‘his-story’, lay very much behind the scenes, I believe that this is precisely why their testimony is so valuable: it was in coping with quite ordinary things, with the daily round of life, that their resilience and resourcefulness found its greatest expression.

My only regret is for the lives which, even after more than two years’ searching, have continued to elude me. So it is only in my imagination that I can describe for you what it must have been like for Lady Winchilsea as she sailed into Constantinople, that city of marvels, by her husband’s side that afternoon. Perhaps she, like the ambassador, was dressed in her court robes, still fusty and foul-smelling from their long confinement in a damp sea-trunk. Dolphins were still a common sight in the Bosphorus in those days, and I like to think of her watching them riding the bow-waves in front of the ship as it came into the harbour at last, the fabled city rising before them, its domes and minarets shining in the pink and gold light.

* Helen Pickard, the wife of the deputy high commissioner.

* Manuscript copies of these documents, often written in the form of relazione (‘A narrative of …’), were considered so valuable that they often commanded large sums, even in their own time.

† Previously, the role of an ambassador was usually to complete a short-term mission – to declare war or negotiate a treaty. England’s first permanent ambassador, John Shirwood, became resident in Rome in 1479. In 1505 John Stile was sent to Spain by Henry VII, where he became the first resident ambassador to a secular court. By the mid-seventeenth century the idea of permanent missions abroad was no longer a novelty in England, but neither was it a universal practice. During the Restoration (1660–68) the crown sent diplomatic missions to thirty countries, but permanent embassies to only five (France, Spain, Portugal, the United Provinces and the Hanse towns of Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck). Turkey and Russia were in a special category: ambassadors were sent there in the name of the monarch, but were in fact paid servants of the Turkey Company or British merchants settled in Moscow.

* Colonel Sheil was the British minister in Tehran on the eve of the Crimean War.

Prologue

It was the late afternoon when His Excellency the Earl of Winchilsea, Ambassador Extraordinary from King Charles II to the Grand Seignior Mehmed IV, Sultan of Sultans and God’s Shadow upon Earth, sailed into Constantinople.

To arrive in Constantinople by sea, even today, is to be presented with an extraordinary sight. In 1661 it was one of the wonders of the world. Built on seven hills, and surrounded on three sides by water, it was described by contemporary travellers as not only the biggest and richest, but also the most beautiful city on earth. The unequal heights of the seven hills, each one topped with the gilded dome and minarets of a mosque, made the city seem almost twice as large as it really was. On each hillside, raised one above the other in an apparent symmetry, were palaces, pavilions and mansions, each one set in its own gardens, surrounded by groves of cypress and pine. On the furthermost spit of land, and clearly visible from the sea, was the Seraglio,* the Sultan’s palace, its turrets and domes reflected in the waters of the Bosphorus.

Few buildings in history have had the sinister beauty of this fabled pleasure dome. No contemporary Christian king, and only a few since, had aspired to anything that equalled it. Built around six great courtyards, and covering as much land as a small town, this city within a city was the focus of all life in Constantinople. The Seraglio was not only the symbol of all power in the great Ottoman empire but also, to the dazzled imagination of foreign travellers, the seat of all pleasures too. For it was here, too, that the Grand Seignior’s harem was incarcerated – several hundred concubines, beautiful slave girls bought from as far away as Venice, Georgia and Circassia and kept, out of sight of other eyes, for the Sultan’s delight alone.

Here, every day, as many as 10,000 people were catered for – including the four corps of guards who protected the Seraglio, the black and white eunuchs, the palace slaves, its pages, treasurers, armourers, grooms, physicians, astrologers and imams, as well as the Sultan and his family. According to one estimate there were 1,000 cooks and scullions working in the palace kitchens which, in addition to staples such as meat and vegetables, produced jams, pickles, sweetmeats and sherbets in quantities ‘beyond possibility of measure’.¹

Opposite the Seraglio, and close enough to be easily visible from it, rose the graceful shores of Asia, a pleasing prospect of wilderness interspersed with villages and fruit trees. And on the narrow stretch of water in between them sailed the water traffic of the world.

It was three months since the ambassador’s entourage had set sail, and the journey had not been an easy one. On New Year’s Day, just after they had left Smyrna on the last leg of their voyage, a tempest had all but tossed them into oblivion. During the week of the storm their vessel had been cast upon rocks five times, leaving every man on board fearing for his life. It was an escape ‘so miraculous and wonderfull, considering the violence of the storm, the carere and weight of our ship, as ought to make the 8 day of January for ever to be recorded by us to admiration, and anniversary thankfulness for God’s providence and protection,’ wrote one witness.²

Now, the ambassador’s storm-battered, leaky little ship – its masts, yards and decks encrusted eerily with white salt from the continual spray of the sea, its flags and ensigns flying, its guns at the ready – sailed across the last stretch of the Sea of Marmara and into the Bosphorus at last. It must have seemed to those on board as if they had reached the very epicentre of the world.

In many ways, of course, they had. Whoever controlled Constantinople controlled not only the great gateway between Europe and Asia, but also one of the greatest water trade routes linking the northern and southern hemispheres. Looking north, the Black Sea gave access through the Volga to southern Russia, and through the Danube to the Balkans and eastern Europe. To the south, the Sea of Marmara led not only to the Aegean, but to the whole of the Mediterranean, North Africa and beyond. In amongst the fishing boats and the caiques, the galleons and perhaps even one of the Sultan’s magnificent gilded barges, sailed innumerable vessels from all four corners of the earth – merchant ships, slave galleys and vast timber rafts cut from the deep forests of southern Russia and floated down the Bosphorus for shipbuilding and fuel.

On the captain’s orders the men lined the rigging, their muskets at the ready. As the ship drew close to the Sultan’s palace, in a suffocating cloud of gunpowder, a salutation of sixty-one guns was fired. A little while later, when the ambassador finally disembarked, it was to a second deafening salute of fifty-one guns. His welcoming committee comprised not only his own servants, English merchants, and other travelling companions brought with them from Smyrna, but also many of the Grand Seignior’s officers who had come to honour him. Their procession was so splendid that multitudes of people flocked from all parts of the city to watch them, and made ‘the business of more wonder and expectation’. ‘As we marched all the streets were crowded with people and the windows with spectators, as being unusual in this countrey to see a Christian Ambassadour attended with so many Turkish officers,’ wrote the ambassador’s secretary. He was so proud of their ‘very grand equipage’ – believing that ‘none of his predecessours, nor yet the Emperour’s Ambassadours, can boast of a more honourable nor a more noble reception’ – that he recorded each element:

1. The Vaivod* of Gallata and his men

2. The Captain of the Janizaries with his Janizaries

3. The Chouse Bashaw with his Chouses†

4. The English Trumpeters

5. The English horsemen and Merchants

6. My Lord’s Janizaries

7. The Druggerman‡

8. My Lord himself with Pages and Footmen by his side

9. My Lord’s gentlemen

10. The officers and reformadoes of the ship.³

From the brief account of the voyage which has come down to us, we know that the Sultan presented the embassy with ten sheep, a hundred loaves of bread, twenty sugar loaves and twenty wax candles. We also know that the ambassador distributed money among the people, and was visited by the messengers of other foreign ambassadors to the Porte. We know that he was given audiences with both the Grand Vizier, and with the Grand Seignior himself.

But we can only speculate about the Countess of Winchilsea’s role in all this. The fact that we know she was there at all seems almost accidental. At the very tail end of the procession, in between ‘my Lord’s gentlemen’ and ‘the officers and reformadoes of the ship’, the ambassador’s secretary has inserted one simple phrase: ‘My Ladies Coach’. With these three small words, my Lady Winchilsea slips into history.

* The Topkapi Palace.

* Voyvoda, or Governor of Gallata.

† The chief guard and his guards.

‡ Dragomen, or interpreters.

1 Getting There

Sometime at the beginning of April 1915 a lonely Kirghiz herdsman wandering with his flocks in the bleak mountain hinterland between Russian and Chinese Turkistan would have beheld a bizarre sight: a purposeful-looking Englishwoman in a solar topi, a parasol clasped firmly in one hand, striding towards the very top of the 12,000-foot Terek Dawan pass.

Ella Sykes, sister of the newly appointed British consul to Kashgar, was dressed in a travelling costume which she had invented herself to cope with the rigours of the journey. Over a riding habit made of the stoutest English tweed was a leather coat. On her legs she wore a pair of thick woollen puttees, while her hands were protected by fur-lined gloves. On her head she wore a pith helmet swathed in a gauze veil, and beneath it, protecting her eyes from the terrible glare of the sun in that thin mountain air, a pair of blue glass goggles. If the herdsman had been able to see beneath this strange mixture of arctic and tropical attire, he would have seen that her cheeks and lips were swollen, her skin so badly sunburnt that it was peeling from her face in large painful patches. But her eyes, behind those incongruous goggles, sparkled with a very English combination of humour and good sense. ‘Such slight drawbacks’, she would later record, ‘matter little to the true traveller who has succumbed to the lure of the Open Road, and to the glamour of the Back of Beyond.’¹

The glamour described by Ella Sykes is not of the kind usually associated with diplomatic life. This mysterious existence invariably brings to mind a vague impression of luxury – of diamonds and champagne, of vast palaces illuminated by crystal chandeliers, of ambassador’s receptions of the Ferrero Rocher chocolates advertisement variety. While it is relatively easy to conjure with these fantastical images (for on the whole this is what they are) it is much more difficult to imagine the reality behind them. To contemplate Ella Sykes on her journey across the Terek Dawan pass* is to invite a number of questions. Who were these diplomatic women, and what were their lives really like? Where did they travel to, and under what circumstances? And, most important of all, how did they get there in the first place?

In 1915 an expedition to Kashgar, in Chinese Turkistan, was one of the most difficult journeys on earth. Following the outbreak of the First World War, the normal route for the first leg of the journey – across central Europe and down to the Caspian Sea – had become too dangerous, and so Ella and her brother Percy travelled to Petrograd (St Petersburg) on a vastly extended route via Norway, Sweden and Finland. From Petrograd they went south and east to Tashkent, the capital of Russian Turkistan, on a train which lumbered its way through a slowly burgeoning spring. At stations frothing with pink and white blossom, children offered them huge bunches of mauve iris, and the samovar ladies changed from their drab winter woollens into flowered cotton dresses and head-kerchiefs.

For all these picturesque scenes, even this early stage of the journey was not easy: the train had no restaurant car, and the beleaguered passengers found it almost impossible to find food. At each halt, of which luckily there were three or four a day, they would all leap off the train and rush to buy what they could at the buffets on the railway platforms, gulping down scalding bowls of cabbage soup or borsch in the few minutes that the train was stationary. The further east they travelled, the more meagre the food supplies became, until all they could procure was a kind of gritty Russian biscuit. Without the soup packets they had brought with them, Ella noted with some sang-froid, they would have half starved.

From Tashkent Percy and Ella took another train to Andijan, the end of the line, and from here they travelled on to Osh by victoria.† Here they found that Jafar Bai, the chuprassi (principal servant) from the Kashgar consulate, had come to meet them. Under his careful ministrations they embarked on the final stage of their journey, the 260-mile trek across the mountains.

At first they met a surprising number of people en route: merchants with caravans laden with bales of cotton; Kashgaris with strings of camels on their way to seek work in Osh or Andijan during the summer months: ‘Some walked barefoot, others in long leather riding boots or felt leggings, and all had leather caps edged with fur.’ The long padded coats they wore were often scarlet, ‘faded to delicious tints’, and they played mandolins or native drums as they went. On one occasion they met a party of Chinese, an official and a rich merchant, each with his retinue, also bound for Kashgar.

The ladies of the party travelled in four mat-covered palanquins, each drawn by two ponies, one leading and one behind [Ella wrote], and I pitied them having to descend these steep places in such swaying conveyances. They were attended by a crowd of servants in short black coats, tight trousers and black caps with hanging lappets lined with fur, the leaders being old men clad in brocades and wearing velvet shoes and quaint straw hats.

At night Ella and her brother stayed in rest-houses, which in Russia usually consisted of a couple of small rooms, with bedsteads, a table and some stools. Sometimes these rooms looked out onto a courtyard where their ponies were tied for the night, but often there was no shelter for either the animals or their drivers. Over the border in China these rooms became more rudimentary still, lit only by a hole in the roof. The walls were of crumbling mud, the ceilings unplastered, their beams the haunt of scorpions and tarantulas. Up in the mountains, of course, there were no lodgings of any kind. The Sykeses slept in akhois, the beehive-shaped felt tents of Kirghiz tribesmen, their interiors marvellously canopied and lined with embroidered cloths. In the remotest places of all they slept in their own tents.

According to Ella’s account, these nights spent in the mountains were attended by a curious mixture of the rugged and the grandiose. Wherever they stopped, Jafar Bai would instantly make camp, setting up not only their camp-beds, but also tables to write and eat at, and comfortable chairs to sit on. While he heated the water for their folding baths, another servant prepared the food. After the gritty Russian biscuits and packet soups, a typical breakfast – steaming coffee and eggs, fresh bread and butter with jam – must have seemed like a banquet. The Russian jam, delicious as it was, had its drawbacks. In a state of ever-accelerating fermentation, the pots had a habit of exploding like bombs, causing havoc inside Jafar Bai’s well-ordered tiffin basket.

The routine was one which the Sykeses were to adopt for all their travels in Turkistan: ‘The rule was to rise at 5 a.m., if not earlier,’ Ella wrote, describing a typical morning in camp,

and I would hastily dress and then emerge from my tent to lay my pith-hat, putties, gloves and stick beside the breakfast table spread in the open. Diving back into my tent I would put the last touches to the packing of holdall and dressing-case, Jafar Bai and his colleague Humayun being busy meanwhile in tying up my bedstead and bedding in felts. While the tents were being struck we ate our breakfast in the sharp morning air, adjusted our putties, applied face-cream to keep our skins from cracking in the intense dryness of the atmosphere, and then would watch our ponies, yaks or camels as the case might be, being loaded up.²

Most days they would walk for an hour or so before they took to their mounts. Ella usually rode sidesaddle, but on these long journeys she found it less tiring to alternate with ‘a native saddle’, onto which she had strapped a cushion. Her astride habit, she noted, did for either mode. They would march for five hours before taking lunch and a long rest in the middle of the day, wherever possible by water, or at least in the shade of a tree. Then, when the worst of the midday heat was over, they would ride for another three or four hours into camp (the baggage animals usually travelling ahead of them) ‘to revel in afternoon tea and warm baths’. This was Ella’s favourite time of the day, not least because she could brush out her hair, which she had only hastily pinned up in the morning, and which by now was usually so thick with dust that she could barely get her comb through it.

At high altitude – sometimes they were as high as 14,000 feet – she suffered from the extremes of temperature. During the day, beneath a merciless sun, in spite of her pith hat and sun-umbrella, she often felt as if she was being slowly roasted alive, while the nights were sometimes so cold that she was forced to wear every single garment she had with her, with a fur coat on top. ‘My feet were slipped into my big felt boots lined with lamb’s wool,* and a woollen cap on my head completed the costume in which I sat at our dinner table.’ Thus prepared, she felt perfectly ready, she wrote, ‘to meet whatever might befall’.

In Ella Sykes’s day a woman, diplomatic or not, was really not supposed to take with quite such aplomb to the challenges of ‘the back of beyond’. It was not just her physical but her mental frailty, too, which was the impediment. If women themselves were in any doubt about this, then useful handbooks such as Tropical Trials, published in 1883, were on hand to tell them so.

Many and varied are the difficulties which beset a woman when she first exchanges her European home and its surroundings for the vicissitudes of life in the tropics [warned its author, Major S. Leigh Hunt]. The sudden and complete upset of old-world life, and the disturbance of long existing association, produces, in many women, a state of mental chaos, that utterly incapacitates them for making due and proper preparations for the contemplated journey.³

Not only the preparations, but the departure itself, according to the major, were likely to reduce a woman to a state of near imbecility, coming as she did in moral fibre somewhere between ‘the dusky African’ and ‘the heathen Chinee’. When embarking on a sea voyage, farewells with well-wishers of a woman’s own sex were best done on shore, he advised, while ‘a cool-headed male relation or friend’ was the best person to accompany the swooning female on board.

In real life, of course, women were made of much sterner stuff, but nevertheless departures were often very painful. ‘The parting with my people was unexpectedly terrible,’ wrote Mary Fraser on the eve of her first diplomatic posting to China in 1874. ‘Till the moment came I had not realised what it was to mean, this going away for five years from everything that was my very own.’ Revived by a glass of champagne, thoughtfully provided by her husband Hugh, she soon pulled herself together, however, and ‘by the time the sun went down’, she would remember, ‘on a sea all crimson and gold, my thoughts were already flying forward to all the many strange and beautiful things I was so soon to see.’⁴

This poignant mixture of excitement and regret is probably superseded by only one other concern. Thirty years after Ella Sykes travelled to Chinese Turkistan, Diana Shipton was told by her husband Eric that he had been offered the post of consul-general in Kashgar. ‘Mentally,’ she wrote, ‘I began immediately to pack and to plan.’⁵

The notion of travelling light has always been an alien one to diplomatic wives. ‘We are like a company of strolling players,’ wrote Harriet Granville, only half jokingly, en route to Brussels in 1824. Over the centuries many others must have felt exactly the same. When Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whose husband Edward was appointed ambassador to Constantinople, arrived in Turkey in 1717, the Sultan lent their entourage thirty covered wagons and five coaches in which to carry their effects. Mary Waddington, who travelled to Russia in 1883, did so with a staff of thirty-four, including a valet and two maids, a master of ceremonies, two cooks, two garçons de cuisine, three coachmen and a detective. ‘Four enormous footmen’ completed the team, Mary recorded with gentle irony, ‘and one ordinary sized one for everyday use’.⁶ Even as recently as 1934, when Marie-Noele Kelly arrived by P & O in Cairo, she was accompanied by three European servants, three children, and fourteen tons of luggage.* The prize, however, must surely go to Lady Carlisle who, when her husband made his public entry into Moscow in 1663, accompanied him in her own carriage trimmed with crimson velvet, followed by no fewer than 200 sledges loaded with baggage.

When Elizabeth Blanckley’s family travelled to Algiers, where her father was to take up his post as consul, they chanced upon Nelson and his fleet in the middle of the Mediterranean. ‘Good God, it must be Mr Blanckley,’† Nelson is reputed to have exclaimed when he saw their little boat, all decked out ‘in gala appearance’ with flags of different nations. ‘How, my dear Sir, could you in such weather trust yourself in such a nutshell?… But I will not say one word more, until you tell me what I shall send Mrs Blanckley for her supper.’

My father assured him that she was amply provided for [recalled Elizabeth Blanckley in her memoirs] and enumerated all the live stock we had on board, and among other things, a pair of English coach-horses which, to our no trifling inconvenience, he had embarked, and stowed on board. Nelson laughed heartily at the enumeration of all my father’s retinue, exclaiming, ‘A perfect Noah’s ark, my dear sir! – A perfect Noah’s ark.’⁷

Even the most determinedly rugged travellers, such as Isabel and Richard Burton, whose highly idiosyncratic approach to diplomatic life broke almost every other rule, travelled with prodigious quantities of luggage. On Isabel’s first journey to Santos in Brazil, where Richard was appointed consul, she took fifty-nine trunks with her, and a pair of iron bedsteads. It is hard to imagine anyone further from Major Leigh Hunt’s fanciful picture of the swooning and feather-brained female abroad than Isabel Burton. This was the woman who, when she learnt that she was to be Richard Burton’s wife, sought out a celebrated fencer in London and demanded that he teach her. ‘“What for?” he asked, bewildered by the sight of Isabel, her crinoline tucked up, lunging and riposting with savage concentration. “So that I can defend Richard when he is attacked,” was the reply.’⁸ Carrying out the order issued by her husband when he was finally dismissed from his posting in Damascus – the famous telegram bade her simply ‘PAY, PACK AND FOLLOW’ – was really a life’s work in itself. Although Richard was little short of god-like in Isabel’s eyes, when it came to the practicalities of their lives, she knew very well who was in control. ‘Husbands,’ she wrote, ‘… though they never see the petit détail going on … like to keep up the pleasant illusion that it is all done by magic.’⁹

One wonders who was responsible for overseeing the household of Sir William and Lady Trumbull when they travelled to Paris in 1685. The vast body of correspondence describing Sir William’s embassy gives us almost no information about his wife other than that she had ‘agreeable conversation’ and once enjoyed ‘a little pot of baked meat’ sent to her by the wife of the Archbishop of York. We do know, however, the exact contents of her luggage. The Trumbull household consisted of forty people, including Lady Trumbull and her niece Deborah.

Besides a coach, a chaise, and 20 horses, there were 2 trunks full of plate, 9 boxes full of copper and pewter vessels, 50 boxes with pictures, mirrors, beds, tapestries, linen, cloth for liveries, and kitchen utensils, 7 or 8 dozen chairs and arm chairs, 20 boxes of tea, coffee, chocolate, wine, ale and other provisions; 4 large and 3 small cabinets, 6 trunks and 6 boxes with Sir William and Lady Trumbull’s apparel, and 40 boxes, trunks, bales, valises, portmanteaux, containing belongings of Sir William’s suite.¹⁰

Handbooks for travellers, particularly in the late nineteenth century when the empire was at its height, were often aimed at readers who were going abroad, as diplomats were, to live for some time. They enumerated at length not only what to take for a two- or three-year sojourn, but also exactly how to take it. Major Leigh Hunt, perhaps because of his military background (Madras army), was very particular on the subject.

First there were the different types of trunk available. These include a ‘State Cabin Trunk’, made from wood with an iron bottom, for hot, dry climates; a ‘Dress Basket’, made of wicker, for damp climates; and a ‘Ladies Wicker Overland Trunk’, for overland travel (it was shallow, and could easily be stowed beneath the seat in a railway carriage). Then, of course, there was the ubiquitous travelling bath. One’s china, he advised, ‘should be packed, by a regular packer, in barrels’. Sewing machines were to go in a special wooden case; saddles in a special tin-lined case; paint brushes, he warned, should have their own properly closed boxes ‘or the hairs will be nibbled by insects’. Even a lady’s kid gloves, well-aired and then wrapped in several folds of white tissue paper, should be stored in special stoppered glass bottles.

Useful items of personal apparel include ‘several full-sized silk gossamer veils to wear with your topee’ and ‘a most liberal supply of tulle, net, lace, ruffles, frillings, white and coloured collars and cuffs, artificial flowers and ribbons’. Furthermore ‘pretty little wool wraps to throw over the head, and an opera cloak, are requisites which should not be overlooked’. Among essential household items the major lists mosquito curtains, punkahs, umbrellas and goggles; when travelling by sea, a lounge chair; drawing materials, wool and silks for ‘fancy work’; a water filter, lamps, a knife-cleaning machine; and no fewer than half a dozen pairs of lace curtains. Other recommended sundries include:

a refrigerator

a mincing machine

a coffee mill

a few squares of linoleum

cement for mending china and glass

Keatings insect powder

one or two pretty washstand wall-protectors

a comb and brush tray

bats, net and balls for lawn tennis

one or two table games

a small chest of tools including a glue pot

a small box of garden seeds

a small garden syringe

chess and backgammon

a few packs of playing cards

a Tiffin basket

Tropical Trials was, thankfully, by no means the only handbook of its kind to which a woman planning a life abroad could turn. Flora Annie Steel’s celebrated book The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, first printed in 1888, was so popular in its day that it ran to ten editions. Although it was dedicated ‘To the English girls to whom fate may assign the task of being house-mothers in Our Eastern Empire’, its sound good sense and truly prodigious range of recondite advice – from how to deal with snake bite (‘if the snake is known to be deadly, amputate the finger or toe at the next joint …’) to how to cure ‘bumble foot’ in chickens – made it just as useful to diplomatic women living outside the empire.

Unlike the major, Annie Steel had no time at all for fripperies.* ‘As to clothing, a woman who wishes to live up to the climate must dress down to it,’ was her sensible advice. Frills, furbelows, ribbons and laces were quite unnecessary, she believed. None the less, the clothing which even she considered essential would have taken up an enormous amount of trunk space. ‘Never, even in the wilds, exist without one civilized evening and morning dress,’ she urged, and listed:

6 warm nightgowns

6 nightgowns (silk or thin wool) for hot weather

2 winter morning dresses

2 winter afternoon dresses

2 winter tennis dresses

evening dresses

6 summer tea gowns*

4 summer tennis gowns

2 summer afternoon gowns

1 riding habit, with light jacket

1 Ulster†

1 Handsome wrap

1 umbrella

2 sunshades

1 evening wrap

1 Mackintosh

2 prs walking shoes

2 prs walking boots

2 prs tennis shoes

evening shoes

4 prs of house shoes

2 prs strong house shoes¹¹

On the actual journey, however, circumstances were often rather more frugal than these preparations suggest. When Diana Shipton travelled to Kashgar it was so cold in the mountains that she and her husband put on every garment they possessed and did not take them off again for three weeks. On one of her journeys in Brazil Isabel Burton once went for three months without changing her clothes at all. Sometimes, though, such spartan conditions were imposed more by accident than by design. When Angela Caccia, her husband David and their newborn son were posted to Bolivia in 1963 they made the journey by sea, taking with them an enormous supply of consumer goods, from tomato ketchup to soap powder. This luggage came with them as far as Barcelona, where it was lost, leaving them to face the six-week ocean voyage with little more than the clothes they were wearing. For the baby they did have clothes, but no food; ‘David had 75 ties; I had 9 hats, and between us we had 240 stiff white paper envelopes.’

However, the journey itself was so entrancing that the Caccias soon forgot these inconveniences. Their route took them through the Panama Canal and then down the Pacific coast of South America to the Chilean port of Antofagasta, from where they took a train across the Atacama and up into the Andes. Angela was spellbound by the beauty of the desert, despite the fact that the air was so thin and dry that their lips cracked and their hands hissed if they rubbed them together as if they would ignite. The light was so intense, she recorded, that they wore dark glasses even inside their carriage with the curtains drawn.¹²

Very few diplomatic women were as experienced, or as naturally adept at travelling as Ella Sykes – or certainly not at first. The journey to a posting was often a woman’s first taste of travelling abroad, and it left an indelible impression on her – although not always the same sense of wonderment experienced by Angela Caccia. Reading back over my mother’s very first letters, written during the six-week sea voyage out to New Zealand in 1959, I find, to my surprise (for I have always known her as the most practised of travellers), a note of apprehension in her tone.

I suppose quite shortly we shall really be at sea [she writes from her cabin aboard the S.S. Athenic]. Atlantic rollers may begin, instead of the millpond the Channel has been up to now. We have been sailing in dense fog all day. It is a queer sensation to have thick mist swirling around with visibility about the length of the boat, the foghorn sounding every few minutes and bright sun shining down from above. We seem to be travelling at a snail’s pace.

It is also a surprise to be reminded that even then such a voyage was still considered a special undertaking. My parents arrived at the London docks to find themselves inundated with well-wishers.

We were taken straight to our cabin and found a large box of flowers from Auntie Olive, also from Betty and Riki, and telegrams from Hilary and Tony, J’s mother, Auntie Jo and Jack, Sylvia Gardener, and Richard Hickman. After the ship sailed at eight o’clock last night I found Mummy’s wonderful boxes of Harrod’s fudge and chocolates, and Hilary’s [my mother’s sister] stockings. Thank you so much both of you. It was all the nicer getting them then, after we had left the dock and were feeling a bit deflated. Thank you Mummy and Daddy also for the beautiful earrings, which J produced after dinner … I wonder if you realised how much I wanted something just like them?

There was no such send off for Isabel Burton when she took to the seas on her first posting in 1865. In her hotel room in Lisbon, where she stayed en route to Brazil, she was greeted by three-inch cockroaches. Although she could not know it then, it was only a taste of what was to come. ‘I suppose you think you look very pretty standing on that chair and howling at those innocent creatures,’ was Richard’s characteristically caustic response. Isabel reflected for a while, realized that he was right, and started bashing them instead with her shoe. In two hours, she recorded, she had a bag of ninety-seven.

For some women, the journey was the only enjoyable part of diplomatic life. The writer Vita Sackville-West loathed almost every aspect of it (the word ‘hostess’, she used to say, made her shiver), but her first impressions of Persia, recorded when she travelled there to join her husband, Harold Nicolson, in 1926, echoes the experience of many of these peripatetic wives. On crossing the border she wrote:

I discovered then that not one of the various intelligent people I had spoken with in England had been able to tell me anything about Persia at all, the truth being, I suppose, that different persons observe different things, and attribute to them a different degree of importance. Such a diversity of information I should not have resented; but here I was obliged to recognise that they had told me simply nothing. No one, for instance, had mentioned the beauty of the country, though they had dwelt at length, and with much exaggeration, on the discomforts of the way.

The land once roamed by the armies of Alexander and Darius had, to Vita’s romantic imagination, a kind of historical glamour that its contemporary inhabitants never quite equalled. It was ‘a savage, desolating country’, but one that filled her with extraordinary elation. ‘I had never seen anything that pleased me so well as these Persian uplands, with their enormous views, clear light, and rocky grandeur. This was, in detail, in actuality, the region labelled “Persia” on the maps.’ With the warm body of her dog pressed against her, and the pungent smell of sheepskin in her nostrils, Vita sat beside her chauffeur in the front seat of the motor car with her eyes fixed in rapt attention on the unfolding horizon. ‘This question of horizon,’ she wrote musingly later, ‘how important it is; how it alters the shape of the mind; how it expresses, essentially, one’s ultimate sense of a country! That is what can never be told in words: the exact size, proportion, contour; the new standard to which the mind must adjust itself.’¹³

On that journey, she believed, Persia had in some way entered her very soul. ‘Now I shall not tell you about Persia, and nothing of its space, colour and beauty, which you must take for granted – ’ she wrote to Virginia Woolf on her arrival in Tehran in March 1926, ‘but please do take it for granted, because it has become part of me, – grafted on to me, leaving me permanently enriched.’ But the exact quality of this enrichment even she found hard to put her finger on. ‘But all this, as you say, gives no idea at all. How is it that one can never communicate? Only imaginary things can be communicated, like ideas, or the world of a novel; but not real experience … I should like to see you faced with the task of communicating Persia.’¹⁴

Such difficulties, however, were as nothing compared to the difficulties and hardships often involved in the actual travelling itself. When Mary Fraser set off from Venice to make the journey to Peking in 1874 she was unprepared for the rigours of her first diplomatic journey, even though, having lived in Italy and America, she was relatively well travelled for a young woman. At first all was well, even though she could not help noticing the strange smell on board their boat: ‘the abominable, acrid, all-pervading smell of the opium cargo it was carrying’. By the time they reached Hong Kong, however, they had other worries: the worst typhoon in fifty years had all but destroyed the little island.

The P & O agent who came to meet their boat, ‘ashy pale and still trembling in every limb’, described how the storm had literally ripped apart the island in less than two hours. All shipping vessels had been wrecked, half the buildings ruined and not a single tree had been left standing in the Botanical Gardens. Worse than all this, though, was the fate of Hong Kong’s coolies and their families who had been living in sampans in the harbour – an estimated 10,000 had been drowned. By the time the Frasers arrived the water in the harbour was awash with the floating bodies of men, women and children. As she disembarked, Mary accidentally stepped on one of them and thereafter, ‘I could not be left alone for a moment without feeling faint and sick.’ In the tropical heat the corpses were already beginning to putrefy. Pestilence was all around and the atmosphere, she recalled with horror, ‘was that of a vast charnel house’.

The Frasers then travelled on to Shanghai without incident, and Mary recovered her composure enough to enjoy the rest of the journey, even the final stretch up the Pei-Ho river, although at first she surveyed the preparations with dismay. For the five-day river journey they had a fleet of five boats, each with five boatmen. Three of these carried their luggage; one was a kitchen and store room; while the fifth was fitted up snugly as a sleeping room and dining room. At night the boatmen pulled up the boards on the deck of their boat and, packed ‘like sardines in a tin’, they fitted the boards back tightly over themselves and slept peacefully. On the Frasers’ boat there was a little deck at the front with two chairs and ‘a tiny caboose sunk aft’, where a mattress could be laid on the floor at night. By day it was replaced by a table. ‘In the morning,’ Mary recalled, ‘poor Hugh used to hurry into his clothes, and go on shore for a walk, while I attempted to make my toilet, in all but darkness, with the help of one tin basin, muddy river water, and a hand glass.’

Although, unlike her husband, she was quite unused to these primitive travelling arrangements – ‘the Frasers’, she once commented, ‘are all Spartans’ – Mary was quick to learn a certain diplomatic stoicism. For most of the five days they spent on the Pei-Ho their servant, Chien-Tai, cooked ‘with marvellous success’ amidst her trousseau trunks in the kitchen boat and ‘not a course that we would have had on shore was omitted’; but on one terrible occasion, amidst torrential rain, the boats became separated and they had nothing to eat for a whole day. The two of them passed the day gloomily in the blacked-out caboose, lighted only by two meagre candles.¹⁵

On her journey to Constantinople in 1716 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, together with her husband and infant son, faced still greater hardships. On the mountain roads between Bohemia and Saxony she was so frightened by the sheer precipices that when she finally arrived in Dresden she could not compose herself to write at all. Their journey was all the more dangerous because they travelled at night, with only the moon to light their way.

In many places the road is so narrow that I could not discern an inch of space between the wheels and the precipice [she wrote to her sister Lady Mar]. Yet I was so good a wife not to wake Mr Wortley, who was fast asleep by my side, to make him share in my fears, since the danger was unavoidable, till I perceived, by the bright light of the moon, our postilions nodding on horseback while the horses were on a full gallop, and I thought it very convenient to call out to desire them to look where they were going.

As they travelled further south the danger of mountain precipices was replaced by another less dramatic but no less real peril: the weather. From Vienna Lady Mary wrote again to her sister on the eve of their journey through Hungary. It was January, and the entire country was so frozen by ‘excessive cold and deep snows’ that her courage almost failed her. ‘The ladies of my acquaintance have so much goodness for me, they cry whenever they see me since I have determined to undertake this journey; and, indeed, I am not very easy when I reflect on what I am going to suffer.’ Lady Mary’s usually sanguine tone begins to waver a little at this point; but when no less a person than Prince Eugene of Savoy, the Austrian general, advises her against the journey she begins to sound genuinely frightened.

Almost everybody I see frights me with some new difficulty. Prince Eugene has been so good as to say all the things he could to persuade me to stay till the Danube is thawed, that I may have the convenience of going by water, assuring me that the houses in Hungary are such as are no defence against the weather, and that I shall be obliged to travel three or four days between Buda and Essek without finding any house at all, through desert plains covered with snow, where the cold is so violent many have been killed by it. I own these terrors have made a very deep impression on my mind, because I believe he tells me things truly as they are, and nobody can be better informed of them.

She ends her letter, ‘Adieu, my dear sister. If I survive my journey, you shall hear from me again.’ And then, in an uncharacteristically maternal aside: ‘I can say with great truth, in the words of Moneses, I have long learnt to hold myself as nothing, but when I think of the fatigue my poor infant must suffer, I have all a mother’s fondness in my eyes, and all her tender passions in my heart.’

As it turned out, Lady Mary’s fears were not realized and the Wortley Montagus survived their journey. Although the snows were deep, they were favoured with unusually fine weather, and with their carriages fixed upon ‘traineaus’ (‘by far the most agreeable manner of travelling post’) they made swift progress. What they saw on the frozen Hungarian plains, however, shocked even their robust eighteenth-century sensibilities. Lady Mary recorded her impressions of the fields of Karlowitz, where Prince Eugene had won his last great victory over the Turks, in a letter to her friend, the poet Alexander Pope:

The marks of that glorious bloody day are yet recent, the field being strewed with the skulls and carcasses of unburied men, horses and camels. I could not look without horror on such numbers of mangled human bodies, and reflect on the injustice of war that makes murder not only necessary but meritorious. Nothing seems to me a plainer proof of the irrationality of mankind, whatever fine claims we pretend to reason, than the rage with which they contest for a small spot of ground, when such vast parts of fruitful earth lie quite uninhabited.¹⁶

But, as Lady Mary had found, the ‘tender passions’ provoked by the additional stress of travelling with small children were often difficult to bear. Catherine Macartney, yet another diplomatic wife to find herself posted to the wilds of Chinese Turkistan, describes the extraordinary precautions which she took to ensure the safety of her small son. Eric, her eldest child, was born in 1903 when the family was in Edinburgh on home leave, and was only five months old when they set off back to Kashgar. ‘It seemed a pretty risky thing to take so small a traveller on a journey like the one before us,’ Catherine wrote. Nonetheless, knowing what was ahead of them, she did all she could, almost from the day Eric was born, to prepare him for the journey. To harden him up she took him out in all weathers, and only ever gave him cold food (once they were in the Tien Shan Mountains she knew that it would be impossible to heat up bottles of milk). Eric apparently throve on it. Catherine described their travelling routine:

When we were in the mountains, his bottles for the day were prepared before starting the march, and carefully packed in a bag to be slung over a man’s back. As they needed no heating, he could be fed when the time came for his meals, and just wherever we happened to be. And the poor little chap had his meals in some funny places – cowsheds, in the shelter of a large rock, or anywhere where we could get out of the wind.

At night he slept in a large perambulator which they had carried along especially for the purpose. According to Catherine, ‘He stood the journey better than any of us.’

Five years later, in 1908, when the family went home on leave again, they were not so lucky. Eric was now five, his sister Sylvia two and a half. Flooding rivers had blocked the usual route through Osh, and instead the Macartneys decided to trek north over the Tien Shan, and then through the Russian province of Semiretchia, from whence they could reach the railway at Aris, just to the north of Tashkent. Catherine recorded it all in her diary. Despite her misgivings about travelling in the summer heats, she was overwhelmed by the beauty of the lakes and flower-filled meadows they passed through. The two children, who rode on pack ponies in front of two of the consulate servants, seemed to enjoy it too. It is not long, however, before a more anxious tone begins to colour her entries: ‘Thursday, July 23rd. We have beaten the record today and have done four stages, reaching Aulie-ata at about four o’clock this afternoon. Poor little Eric has been so ill all day with fever; but the travelling has not seemed to worry him much, for he has slept the most of the time in spite of the jolting. Our road has been across the grassy steppes and the dust was not so bad.’

The next day, to her relief, Eric was much better, and she was able to hope that it was just ‘a passing feverish attack’. Two days later it was clear that it was something much worse.

Sunday, July 26th. Today’s march has been done with the greatest difficulty, for the children have both been very unwell and can take no food whatever. They have not seemed themselves for some days, and today they have been downright ill. To make matters worse, I suddenly had an attack of fever come on, which decided us to stop at the end of our second stage at Beli-Voda. Eric and I had to go to bed, or rather to lie down on hard wooden sofas, and it was pitiable to see poor little Sylvia. She was so ill and miserable and yet wanted to run about the whole time, and seemed as though she could not rest. There was little peace for anyone, for we could only have the tiny inner room that was reserved for ladies, to ourselves. The whole afternoon travellers were arriving and having tea in the next room, talking and laughing and making a distracting noise. Happily we had the place to ourselves for the night. I am much better this evening, but the children seem to be getting steadily worse and we are becoming anxious about them.

The following day the two children were so ill that the Macartneys got up at dawn and made haste to the town of Chimkent, where they were told there was a doctor. The doctor advised them to stop travelling at once and, to Catherine’s relief, found rooms for them in an inn near his house.

It is delightfully cool and restful here, after the hot dusty roads [she wrote in a snatched moment] and a few days’ rest will, I hope, set us all up. The first thing we did was to give the children a warm bath, put them into clean clothes and get them to bed. They looked so utterly dirty and wretched when we arrived that I felt I must cry; and they were asleep as soon as they got between clean sheets … a sleep of exhaustion. Both of them have lost weight in the last few days.

It was the last entry she was to make for many weeks.

On 23 August Catherine finally resumed her journal.

Our two or three days here have lengthened into nearly a month, and a time of awful anxiety it has been. The children, instead of recovering in a few days, developed dysentery, and to add to our troubles Nurse took it too. For three weeks it was a fight for Eric’s life and several times we thought we would lose him. Sylvia, though bad enough, was not as desperately ill as Eric … My husband and I did all the nursing and during that time we neither of us had a single night’s rest, just snatching a few minutes sleep at odd times.

In spite of their rudimentary lodgings – two rooms so small that there was only space for the children’s and the nurse’s beds – they were comforted by the extraordinary kindness of the local people. The Russian doctor visited them sometimes as many as three or four times a day. And there were others, too, ‘who, simply hearing that we were strangers and in trouble, were most helpful in sending us goat’s milk, cake, fruit, and delicacies. It is when one is in such straits as we were that one discovers how many kind people there are in the world. But I never imagined that anyone could receive so much sympathy and practical help from perfect strangers as we did during that anxious month.’¹⁷

The Macartneys had been on the road for more than 800 miles before they finally arrived, exhausted, in Aris. From here they were able to pick up the Tashkent – Moscow train, and travelled onwards, first to Moscow, and then to Berlin via Warsaw. Although Eric suffered several relapses during that time, the family arrived safely in Edinburgh, three long and painful months after they had set out.

Like Mary Wortley Montagu with her traineaus, and Mary Fraser with her fleet of Chinese river boats, diplomatic women over the centuries have been obliged to take what transport they could find. Yet another Mary – Mary Waddington, who travelled to Russia to the Tsar’s coronation in 1883 – had several luxuriously appointed private railway carriages at her disposal, but a diplomatic wife was just as likely to find herself transporting her family by camel, yak, horse, palanquin, coolie’s chair, house-boat, cattle-truck, tukt,* sleigh or tarantass† as by more conventional methods.

Travelling to the most far-flung diplomatic posts has remained a logistical problem well into the present century. One diplomatic wife recalls her journey to Persia in 1930, with her husband and English nurse, her children Rachel, aged two, and Michael, aged nine months, and seventy pieces of luggage. The quickest route in those days was by train, through Russia, although it still took two weeks. There were no disposable nappies in those days, so the baby’s washed napkins had to be hung out on rails in the corridor to dry, and when it came to crossing the Caspian Sea both her husband and the nurse were so sick she had no one to help her at all. ‘I can still see my poor husband with Rachel on his lap, being sick, and she, infuriatingly cheerful, saying, “What’s Daddy doing that for?”’

In 1964 Ann Hibbert’s husband Reg was sent to Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia, to open the British embassy; she later flew out there on her own under very strange circumstances. It was at the height of the Cold War, and sometime in the middle of the night they came down to refuel on the Soviet – Mongolian border. Although Anne was allowed off the plane, the Russians went to some lengths to stop her from talking to the other passengers. ‘I was told that I was not to go with the others,’ she remembers. ‘I was separated from them, and taken into a room by myself and the stewardess, very kindly, said, “I have to lock you in. Would you like the key on the inside or the outside?” I said, “On the inside, if you don’t mind.” So I was locked up, while the plane was refuelled.’

Single women travelling on their own, even respectable married ones, have always been faced with special complications, as Sheila Whitney found when she went to China in 1966.

Ray said, ‘You need a rest, come out on the boat,’ which I did and it took me four and a half weeks – the slow boat to China. I didn’t particularly enjoy it because I was a woman on my own, and in 1966 if you were a woman on your own, and one man asks you to dance more than twice you were a scarlet woman. I went and sat on the Captain’s table and there was a young chap there, and he was engaged to somebody, so I said, ‘Oh well, we’re in the same boat. You’re being faithful to your fiancée, and I’m being faithful to my husband, perhaps we can, you know …’ I didn’t invite him to dance or anything. But, no, they all had to be in bed by half past ten. On the journey before they’d all been in trouble, apparently, and so they all had to be in bed by half past ten at night. All the ship’s officers. Anyway, that was that. I was sharing a cabin with a young eighteen-year-old girl, who was there with her parents, and I used to go out with her parents, because if I did anything else I was labelled. It was ghastly. I can’t tell you how ghastly it was. But it was very funny, too. So I didn’t have such a gay time as I thought I was going to have. You know, I was looking forward to it.

At the turn of the century a similar regard for propriety governed long sea voyages, although, if Lady Susan Townley is to be believed, the rules were slightly less strict then than they were in the 1960s.* On her journey to Peking from Rome in 1900 she noted the popularity of parlour games, especially musical chairs, during which a convenient lurch of the ship could always be blamed when a ‘not unwilling Fräulein’ fell into the lap of a smart officer. ‘These fortunate incidents, resulted in several engagements before the end of the journey,’ she noted wryly. ‘No wonder the game was popular.’¹⁸

A woman’s sex contributed to her difficulties on a voyage in many different ways. She was encumbered not only morally (especially if she was obliged to travel alone) by notions of ‘respectability’, but also physically, by the clothes she wore. Until the latter part of this century women’s fashions were a serious handicap on anything but the shortest and most straightforward of journeys. Even an exceptional traveller such as Ella Sykes, who relished the harshness of the road, must privately have cursed the inconvenience of her cumbersome long skirts.

Recalling her long diplomatic career, which began just after the war in 1948, Maureen Tweedy claims that she knew, even as a child, that she had been born into a man’s world. She was ‘only a girl’, and restricted, apart from her sex, by layers of underclothing. ‘Children today cannot imagine how my generation were restricted. Woollen combinations, a liberty bodice on which drawers, goffered and beribboned, were buttoned, a flannel petticoat with feather-stitched hem, and finally a white cambric one, flounced and also beribboned.’¹⁹

For grown women, matters became even worse. The extensive clothing list suggested by the highly practical Flora Annie Steel was as nothing compared to the extraordinary number of garments which went underneath:

6 calico combinations

6 silk or wool combinations

6 calico or clackingette slip bodices

6 trimmed muslin bodices

12 pairs tan stockings

12 pairs Lisle thread stockings

6 strong white petticoats

6 trimmed petticoats

2 warm petticoats

4 flannel petticoats

36 pocket handkerchiefs

4 pairs of stays

4 fine calico trimmed combinations for evening²⁰

Any woman following Flora Annie Steel’s advice to the letter would therefore have made her journey with a total of seventy-four different items of underwear (not including the pocket handkerchiefs).

Mary Sheil would have been similarly restricted in 1849, when she made the three-and-a-half-month journey to Persia via Poland and Russian Turkistan. The introduction of the crinoline was still seven years off, but there were stays, combinations and yards of cumbersome petticoats to hamper her. A typical day-time outfit of the period, even for travelling, would have included long lace-trimmed drawers, a tightly laced bone corset supporting the bust with gussets, and a bodice or camisole over the top. In addition to these a woman would have worn a total of five different petticoats: two muslin petticoats, a starched white petticoat with three stiffly starched flounces, followed by a petticoat wadded to the knees and stiffened on the upper part with whalebone, followed by a plain flannel petticoat. Over these went her travelling dress.

Mary Sheil was a highly intelligent and educated woman. During the four years she spent in semi-seclusion in the British mission in Tehran she learnt to speak Persian fluently, and became something of an authority on many aspects of Persian history. However, like so many other women contemplating their first long-distance diplomatic journey, she must have been totally unprepared for the kind of hardships she encountered. But the sheer physical discomfort of the journey, although considerable, was eclipsed by her growing sense of the vast cultural chasms which she would somehow have to cross. Physically, she may have had the protection of her husband and his Cossack escort; emotionally, I suspect, she was entirely alone.

Colonel Sheil and his newly pregnant wife were luckier than most contemporary travellers for, as diplomats, they were provided with a messenger, an officer of the Feldt Yäger,* who rode ahead of them and secured, to the exclusion of other travellers, a fresh supply of horses. Nevertheless, the journey was not only uncomfortable, but occasionally extremely dangerous. Until a few years previously, Mary noted with some trepidation, no traveller had been allowed to proceed through the Russian hinterlands without an armed escort.

At one point they travelled in their carriage – ‘an exceedingly light uncovered wagon, without springs, called a pavoska, drawn by three horses abreast’ – for five days and five nights at a stretch. They stopped only for meals in flea-bitten inns along the way; sometimes, after a long and exhausting day on the road, they would find that there was absolutely nothing for them to eat: ‘not even bread, or the hitherto unfailing samawar [sic]… so we went dinnerless and supperless to bed.’

As they penetrated still further into the Russian outback the countryside became increasingly desperate. There was nothing to be seen but desolation and clouds of midges. ‘It is marvellous,’ Mary remarked sombrely, ‘how little change has taken place in this country during fifty years.’ In Circassia she noted down the price of slaves who, even in 1849, were still openly on sale. A young man of fifteen could be bought for between £30 and £70, while a young woman of twenty or twenty-five cost £50-£100. The highest prices of all, however, were fetched by young nubile girls of between fourteen and eighteen, who went for as much as £150 (just under £9000 today).

For the most part, the strangeness of these lands was something which Mary had to endure before she could reach her destination. Unlike her successor, Vita Sackville-West, she found little in the Persian landscape to excite her imagination. ‘Sterile indeed was the prospect, and unhappily it proved to be an epitome of all the scenery in Persia, excepting on the coast of the Caspian,’ she wrote.

If Mary’s upbringing had ill-prepared her for the rigours of the journey, it had prepared her even less for the stark realities of life in Persia. At the border she veiled herself for the first time and, very much against their will, persuaded her two maids to follow her example.

At first the implications of this self-imposed purdah were lost amidst the excitement of their reception. The Persians welcomed them magnificently, as Mary recorded in her journal:

The Prince-Governor had most considerately sent a suite of tents for our accommodation; and on entering the principal one we found a beautiful and most ample collation of fruits and sweetmeats. His Royal Highness seemed resolved we should imagine ourselves still in Europe. The table (for there was one) was covered with a complete and very handsome European service in plate, glass and china, and to crown the whole, six bottles of champagne displayed their silvery heads, accompanied by a dozen other bottles of the wines of Spain and France.

More typical of her fate, however, was the ‘harem’ which had been prepared for her and her ladies – a small tent of gaily striped silk, with additional tents for her women servants, surrounded ominously by ‘a high wall of canvas’.

Colonel Sheil’s triumphal procession through Persia to Tehran is counterpointed in Mary’s journal by her growing realization that, as a woman, she would play no part at all in his public life. In Tabríz, in northern Persia, where thousands of people turned out into the streets to welcome them, ‘there was not a single woman, for in Persia a woman is nobody’. A tent was set up where the grandees of the town, who had come to meet them, alighted to smoke kalleeans and chibouks, to drink tea and coffee and to eat sweetmeats. Mary was obliged to remain in solitary seclusion while her husband received their visitors alone. Once the men had refreshed themselves, the entire procession was called to horse again, this time with a greater crowd than ever, including ‘more beggars, more lootees or mountebanks with their bears and monkeys, more dervishes vociferating for inam or bakshish …’

Excluded from these courtesies, and relegated ingloriously to the very tail of the procession along with the servants and the baggage, poor Mary found the show, the dust and the fatigue overwhelming. To make matters worse, at every village a korban, or sacrifice, was made in which a live cow or sheep was decapitated, and the blood directed across their path.* Although this ceremony was carried out in their honour, Mary was repelled and disgusted by it. Every last vestige of romance which Persia – the land of The Arabian Nights and Lalla Rookh – might once have held for her was swept away. In the towns she saw only dead horses and dogs, and a general air of decay; in the countryside only desolation and ‘a great increase of ennui’.

Mary Sheil completed her journey to Tehran in one of the strangest conveyances ever used by a diplomatic wife – a Persian litter known as a takhterewan, a kind of moving sofa ‘covered with bright scarlet cloth and supported by two mules’, while her two maids travelled in boxes, one on either side of a mule, ‘where, compressed into the minutest dimensions, they balanced each other and’ – no doubt echoing their mistress’s private thoughts – ‘sought consolation in mutual commiseration of their forlorn fate in this barbarian land.’²¹

* In recognition of her ground-breaking travels in Chinese Turkistan, Ella later became one of the first female Fellows of the Royal Geographical Society.

†A kind of small horse-drawn carriage.

* These special ‘double-lined native boots’ were a present to her from the orientalist and explorer Sir Aurel Stein.

* This was enough to furnish a very large villa. In those days only the houses of heads of mission were furnished by the government.

†Lord Nelson’s father was a close friend of Mr Blanckley’s.

* Although they were first published almost simultaneously, the difference in tone between these two handbooks is an interesting one. Annie Steel’s recipe for hysteria in her fellow sisters is wonderfully brisk: whisky and water, ‘and a little wholesome neglect’.

* A tea-gown was closely related to the modern dressing-gown, the difference being that a woman could perfectly respectably wear it in public.

† A stout waterproof cloak.

* A horse litter.

† A boat-shaped basket resting on long poles, drawn by three horses abreast.

* In the course of her long diplomatic career Lady Susan saw sex around every corner. Her brilliantly self-aggrandizing memoirs contain the heading, ‘How I once diplomatically fainted to avoid trouble with a German swashbuckler’.

* A government messenger, ‘nearly as powerful at the post-houses as the Czar himself’.

* In order that all misfortunes and evils should be drawn onto the sacrificial animal rather than onto the travellers.

2 The Posting

To Mary Sheil, nervous and exhausted from nearly four months’ travelling, the British residence in Tehran must have seemed like a haven from the horrors of the barbarous and teeming streets outside. ‘I passed through a pretty English garden, and then entered an excellent, and even stately-looking English, or rather Italian dwelling of considerable size,’ she wrote. But the house itself was not the only wonder in store for her. ‘I was still more surprised when an extremely well-dressed Persian entered the room and said to me, in an accent savouring most intensely of the “Cowgate”, “Wi’ ye tak ony breakfast?” This was Ali Mohammed Beg, the mission housekeeper, who had acquired a fair knowledge of English from a Scotch woman-servant.’

Despite this auspicious beginning, it was not long before Mary came to realize that the house, beautiful as it was, was not so much a haven as a prison. As she had so forlornly discovered on her journey, in Persia a woman was no one. The journal which she wrote to alleviate the loneliness and almost total isolation of her four years in Persia records all too clearly the monotony of her life: ‘To a man the existence is tiresome enough, but to a woman it is still more dreary.’ As was so often the case in these diplomatic partnerships, her husband was occupied with his job, with sports, visits, and ‘the gossip and scandal of the town, in which he must join whether he likes it or not’. The conditions under which a woman found herself obliged to live were very different: ‘She cannot move abroad without being thickly veiled; she cannot amuse herself by shopping in the bazaars, owing to the attention she could attract unless attired in Persian garments.’ But any European woman who managed to escape suffocation beneath the roobend,* would surely have been half-crippled by the tiny shoes, barely covering half the foot, with a small heel three inches high in the middle of the sole.

Unlike so many of her successors – and predecessors – in postings in which the seclusion of women was practised, Mary was as much a victim of her own prejudices as the local customs. In her view the acquaintance of only a very few of the Tehran ladies was considered desirable at all; none of them were Persians. The Russian mission, she complained, was too far away for her to be able to cultivate the friendship of ‘Princess D’ and her ‘aimiable daughter’, while the remaining female society was limited to just one or two other ladies, the wives of foreign officers in the Shah’s service. Tehran, she wrote rather plaintively, was ‘one of the most frightful places in the world’ and her life there resembled that of a nun. Although on several occasions she did go to visit the Shah’s mother in the palace harem, it does not seem to have occurred to her that such women might have been seen as equals rather than as exotic curiosities.

Later on, when Mary had learnt Persian and was in a better position to form an opinion, she conceded that the Persian women were both lively and intelligent. ‘They are restless and intriguing, and may be said to manage their husband’s and son’s affairs. Persian men are made to yield to their wishes by force of incessant talking and teazing,’ she noted, a frisson of disapproval in her voice. The Shah’s mother in particular – ‘very handsome, and did not look above 30 but must be 40’ – was very clever: not only was she in complete charge of the harem itself; it was also said that she played a large part in the affairs of government.

The Khanum (the Lady), as she was known, received Mary kindly. She said ‘a great many aimiable things to me and went through all the usual Persian compliments, hoping that my heart had not grown narrow and that my nose was fat.’ Mary was entertained lavishly, and the Khanum asked her many questions about Queen Victoria: how she dressed and how many sons she had. She even made her describe the ceremonial of a Drawing Room, and a visit to the theatre. And yet despite these overtures, ‘various circumstances render it undesirable to form an intimacy with the inmates of any Persian anderoon,’ Mary wrote primly. ‘If it were only on account of the language they are said to be in the habit of using in familiar intercourse among themselves, no European woman would find any enjoyment in their society.’

This memsahib-like prudery condemned Mary to a life of splendid isolation. At first she was amused by the way in which her escort seized any men who came too close to her and pushed their faces up against the wall until she had passed lest she should be ‘profaned’ by their glance. But once established at the mission Mary was allowed nowhere, not even for a drive, without an escort of fifteen or twenty armed horsemen. This was not so much for security, for Persia was a safe country, ‘but that dignity so required’.

Since she could take no part in her husband’s public life, almost her only pleasures were her pets, letters from home, which arrived just once a month, and her garden. At first she found the garden a melancholy place, full of lugubrious cypresses, in which ‘the deserted, neglected little tombs of some of the children of former ministers occupied a prominent place’, filling her with gloomy forebodings. But with the help of a Mr Burton, a first-rate English gardener who at that time was in the service of the Shah, she was soon astonishing everyone with the beauty of her celery and her cauliflowers, ‘for these useful edibles occupied my mind more than flowers.’¹ To be thrown back on her own resources in this way, albeit in the humble cultivation of a vegetable patch, was to prove an invaluable training for the real hardships that she was later to face.

In the mid-nineteenth century there was nothing, and no one, to tell Mary Sheil what living in Persia was going to be like. While various forms of military and diplomatic intelligence existed for the use of Colonel Sheil and his colleagues, the female, domestic sphere was never considered important enough to merit attention. As a woman, and as a European, Mary was doubly isolated.

Present-day Foreign Office wives (and now of course Foreign Office husbands as well) may consult a well-developed system of post reports to tell them exactly what to expect when they arrive in a new country, from schools for their children to whether or not Marmite can be bought in Azerbaijan (it can’t). But knowing the theory, of course, does not necessarily make the practice any easier.

Sometimes even the most basic physical conditions, such as the weather, can be the most daunting. Extremes of heat and cold (-45°C in the harshest Mongolian winters; +45°C in the hottest central Asian summers), of humidity or altitude, are only partly alleviated by modern central heating and air-conditioning. Although most diplomatic women are willing to adapt to a different geography, a different culture, even a different political system, they are often ill-equipped to meet the challenge. Learning the language, as Mary Sheil did in Persia, is vital, but sometimes even the most brilliant linguists find it unexpectedly tough. ‘Why do grammars only teach one such phrases as “Simply through the courage of the champion’s sword”,’ lamented Vita Sackville-West, ‘when what one wants to say is “Bring another lamp”?’² Jane Ewart-Biggs was able to learn quite fluent Flemish in Brussels, but even she was stumped when she had to introduce Baron Regnier de Wykerslooth de Rooyesteyn to the Comte de Crombrugghe de Picquendaele.

The very first impressions of a new posting are the most vivid. These fleeting insights can set the tone, all too brutally sometimes, for the next two or three years to come. Jane Ewart-Biggs arrived in Algeria with her two-month-old baby, Henrietta, in her arms, in 1961, at the height of the country’s savage war of independence against the French. The first thing she saw on her journey from the airport was a man leaning out of a stationary car. It was only when she was past the car that she realized that the man’s strange position, spreadeagled out of the window, could only have meant one thing: he was dead. ‘I had never seen anyone dead before,’ she commented faintly.³

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was both refreshed and exhilarated by her first impressions: ‘Hitherto all I see is so new to me it is like a fresh scene of an opera every day,’ she wrote enthusiastically on first arriving in Turkey.⁴ For others, such as Ella Sykes out in the wilds of Turkistan, part of the lure of the ‘Back of Beyond’ was simply the physical freedom from starchy drawing-room conventions.

There were other wives, however, for whom first impressions were not quite so liberating. When my mother finally arrived in Wellington, after six weeks on the high seas, she vividly expressed in her first letters home her own sense of dislocation at the strangeness of it all, tinged with a faint disappointment.

Dear Mummy and Daddy [she wrote a few days after her arrival in July], We arrived in Cooks Strait in lovely weather and docked at Wellington in bright sunshine and no wind. It was both exciting and sad. Firstly it was horrid having no family among the cheering crowds at the quayside, and secondly it was exciting to see this wonderful harbour. The Second Secretary and Chief Clerk were on the quayside, looking most English and conspicuous by the very fact that they didn’t look excited and weren’t waving to anyone … The town of Wellington has little to offer. It seems rather provincial, unfinished, and a cross between Montreal and some deep southern hick town. All the shopping streets have covered-in ways, with their signs flapping horizontally at you as you walk along, and it would never surprise me to see a posse come riding into town. One feels it should have saloon bars with swing doors.

When her husband was posted to Benghazi, in Libya, Felicity Wakefield was daunted not only by the conditions under which she was expected to live, but also by an acute sense of the life she was leaving behind.

I had just had two years living in our beautiful house in South Kensington. It was like a railway station because there were people in and out all the time, and we were having rather a good time living there. And the children were all there, and all one’s friends were readily available. Life was very easy and very pleasant, and then suddenly one’s taken out of that and put in a new place where you know nobody. And the physical things were very difficult. The lights were on sometimes, and often not on. The climate in some ways was idyllic, but then you got these terrible winds off the desert. The water in the tap tasted brackish. It was very salt. You could drink it, there wasn’t anything else to drink at that stage. Eventually we got organised, and used to fetch water in an enormous tank down from the mountains, but everything tasted revolting because it was cooked with salty water – including the coffee for breakfast. The Libyans were unfriendly; if you invited them, they wouldn’t come. In the end we learnt how they did things, and learned to love them. But my initial impressions were … I was horrified.

Many women, especially those with young families, found, like Felicity Wakefield, that their first impressions were dominated by purely practical considerations. In the harsher and more remote postings, shortages of light and water, and weird, if not downright dangerous electrical systems were commonplace. For Catherine Young, who arrived in Syria for the first time in 1983, it was the even more basic expedient of buying food for her family’s breakfast the next day.

I thought, oh my goodness, the children are going to school, I must go and get a few things. I went in to one of the shops and it looked like a grocer’s shop and there I got some sugar. As for tea? No, no tea. Coffee? No; no coffee. Jam? No jam. Butter? The same. I had to go into four different shops to get enough for breakfast. And I came back and I was absolutely desperate. I thought, I’m going to spend my life doing this – how am I going to manage?

The first few glimpses of a new and unknown country could evoke powerful feelings. Loneliness and homesickness were commonplace, but these were often mingled with other, darker emotions. Angela Caccia struggled to come to terms with the effects of the physical landscape itself. Bolivia was a beautiful country, but its beauty had a disturbing quality to it. Nature, she observed, ‘was prodigal here, contemptuous, aloof’. At midday the sun was so strong that even half an hour in it would burn the baby’s cheeks to blisters, and yet at night they ‘would huddle by the fire while frost fell outside’. Strangest of all, though, was the effect of altitude (La Paz is 11,000 feet above sea level) and the extraordinary mountain light. ‘The air was so clear, the light so pure, it seemed almost to have sparks in it, like fluorescence in sea water. On some days the blueness of the sky had a dazzling intensity; on others it was white, as though the colour had gone into a range of radiance beyond human sight.’ Despite this beauty, or perhaps because of it, during her first few weeks Angela felt miserable and isolated, surrounded by people ‘whose languages and ways of thought we saw no hope of understanding’. And at first she was afraid, too: ‘afraid … of these strange, different people, of the stories of violence, death, and brutality … I was afraid of the Indians, the men in the buses who smelt so strongly of dirty clothes, drink and excrement.’⁵

Her experience is echoed by that of Masha Williams, whose first impressions of Baghdad in 1947 were of a ‘violent, cruel world’. Although she was fascinated by it strangeness and its mystery, she was a little frightened too. ‘I was afraid of the Arabs,’ she confessed. ‘Socially we met them rarely, our time being taken up by the British, but it was a frightening world outside our British circle. In the streets – anonymous, faceless, shapeless women draped in black and the thin-lipped men who stared brazenly from under their head cloths at my bare arms and swollen figure.’⁶

It came as a shock to realize that these feelings were sometimes reciprocated. In Peking during the Cultural Revolution Sheila Whitney remembers the ‘anti-imperialist’ marches, specifically directed against foreigners, which took place every few months or so, during which the Red Guards would throw paint on cars in the British mission compound and smash their flower pots. ‘We used to watch it, fascinated, really. I felt sorry for the Chinese, because they all had to do what the Red Guards told them.’

Other less drastic forms of culture shock could work both ways as well. When Mary Sheil visited the Shah’s harem she was amused to find that not one of his ladies could be convinced that European women undressed at night before they went to sleep. ‘Was it true,’ she was asked, ‘we put on a long white dress to pass the night in?’ When Maureen Tweedy arrived in Seoul she, too, found the people friendly, but puzzled by Europeans and their ways. ‘We had to learn many things in our new post; to say Western and not European in deference to the Americans; to say Asian and not Asiatic; to remember that when a servant giggled on being reprimanded it was a sign of embarrassment and not of impertinence.’⁷ While blowing one’s nose in public was frowned upon, spitting was perfectly acceptable, and to be thought old was a compliment. On her arrival Maureen was met by a group of journalists, and their questions brought home to her how unknown and far away Britain was to Koreans. Why do English girls wear dark clothes? Why does the sun not shine in Britain? What do English boys say to English girls? What is a deb (this was in the late 1950s)? Why do the English not have a national costume like the Scots? How well did she know the Queen and how often did she go and see her? Was it true that the English are such bad cooks they can only live on fish and chips?

The style in which a diplomatic wife first arrived in a new posting varied enormously according both to the country and to her husband’s diplomatic status in it. When Maureen Tweedy’s husband was posted to Kuwait in 1950 it was still only a little-known sea port on the edge of the desert. There was no airport and no one to welcome them, so they landed, unheralded, on a strip of beaten sand ‘under the supercilious gaze of a couple of camels’.⁸ Arriving in Tripoli in the late eighteenth century, Miss Tully found that great crowds of people had gathered at the docks for a good view of the strange new arrivals. The Bey’s chief officers, ‘splendidly arrayed in the fashion of the east’ in flowing robes of satin, velvet and costly furs, had been sent to meet them. But the majority, she noted with revulsion, ‘were miserable beings whose only covering was a piece of dark brown homespun cotton’.⁹

In the grander embassies arrivals were very different occasions. Although there was no public entrance or procession for the Elgins when they arrived in Constantinople in 1779 (as there had been for the Winchilseas in 1661), their reception was still designed to reflect the richness and magnificence of the Ottoman court. No fewer than ninety attendants were sent to the British embassy, each one carrying a round tray covered with beautiful flowers and quantities of exotic fruit; ‘they placed the flowers and fruit on each side of our hall and made two rows from top to bottom,’ wrote the Countess of Elgin to her mother. ‘The Great Man [the Grand Vizier] then came into the room followed by eight trays with five pieces of fine Berlin china on each, filled with different sorts of preserves and painted handkerchiefs over each. Four trays for me and four for Elgin.’¹⁰

Similarly in 1664, when Ann Fanshawe and her husband, Richard, the new ambassador, first arrived in Spain, they were greeted with all the pomp and circumstance that the Spanish court could muster. Her view of Spain, perhaps not unnaturally, was profoundly influenced by her reception. The Fanshawes had sailed to Cadiz, where a barge, sumptuously covered with crimson damask and gold fringes, Persian carpets underfoot, was sent to meet them. As they disembarked from their own ship all the other vessels in the harbour saluted them with volleys of guns and cannons. At the dockside a great crowd of the town’s ‘quality’ was waiting to honour them, and the streets were thronged with common folk eager to watch them go by. The King’s representative, Don Juan de la Cueva, the Duke of Albuquerque and twice a Grandee of Spain, came to greet them personally. With a graceful flourish, Lady Fanshawe remembered with a little flutter, he deposited his plumed hat on the ground before her. ‘This, with my family and life, I lay at your Excellency’s feet,’ he said.

From Cadiz they travelled in state all the way to Madrid. In addition to the Spanish courtiers and their entourages who now accompanied them, the Fanshawes had their own extensive suite, including gentle-men-of-the-horse, three pages, a chief butler, a chief cook, two undercooks, two grooms, two footmen, a governess for their children, a housekeeper, a waiting gentlewoman, a servant to the young gentlewoman, a chambermaid and a washmaid, three postilions, three coachmen and three grooms.

As befitted his status as ambassador, Richard travelled in the principal gilded state coach, which was lined with crimson velvet and fringed with silver and gold. Ann followed behind in a second, green-velvet-lined coach. Many gentlemen, perhaps including the gallant Duke of Albuquerque, rode in front and Ann’s pages, dressed in matching green velvet liveries, rode behind her. Numerous coaches, litters, riding horses, and a string of covered wagons decorated with the Fanshawe coat of arms and carrying their trunks and clothes, brought up the rear. Along the way they were lavishly fêted, entertained with banquets, plays, comedies, music and juegos de toros (bullfights). In the King’s palace in Seville, where they stayed briefly, Ann was presented with a pet lion. ‘Yet I assure you,’ she claimed, not wholly convincingly, in the memoir written for her only surviving son, ‘… that your father and myself both wished ourselves in a retired country life in England, as more agreeable to both our inclinations.’

And yet, while she remained in Spain, everything about the country seemed marvellous; better, in fact, to her dazzled eyes, than anything she had ever encountered in England.

Our house was very richly furnished, both my husband’s quarter and mine, the worst bed and chamber of my apartment being furnished with damask, in which my chambermaid lay; and all the chambers through [out] the floor of them, covered with Persia carpets. The richness of the gilt and silver plates which we had in great abundance, as we had likewise all sorts of very fine household linen, was fit only for the entertainment of so great a prince as his majesty our master.*

In fact everything she saw or experienced in Spain, even the food, was fit only for kings.

There is not in the Christian world better wines than their midland wines are especially, besides sherry and canary. Their water tastes like milk; their corn white to a miracle; and their wheat makes the sweetest and best bread in the world. Bacon, beyond belief good; the Segovia veal much larger, whiter and fatter than ours. Mutton most excellent; capons much better than ours … The cream called nata is much sweeter and thicker than ever I saw in England. Their eggs much exceed ours and so all sorts of salads and roots and fruits. That I most admired is melons, peaches, bergamot pears and grapes, oranges, lemons, citrous, figs, pomegranates … And they have olives which are nowhere so good.¹¹

As the travelling dust gradually settled, and the last fanfares died away, the blurred kaleidoscope of first impressions gradually gave way to a more measured appreciation of the conditions in store. The house which Ann Fanshawe was to preside over for the next two and a half years, the Casa de las Siete Chimeneas (the House of the Seven Chimneys), with its rich damask hangings, Persian carpets, gilt and silver plate, was one of the grander British residences abroad, but others found that they could be just as happy in more modest surroundings.

In the 1950s Maureen Tweedy was posted to Meshed, near the Persian border with Russia, a place of pilgrimage for Sharia Muslims and the burial place of Harun-al-Rashid, Caliph of Baghdad, a name exotically linked with The Thousand and One Nights. For Maureen the consulate there, still redolent of the last days of the Raj, had a romance all of its own, and ‘the quietude of a purely English setting’. Despite its rudimentary Russian heating system and ‘our old friend from Indian days, the thunderbox’ as the only sanitation in their bathroom, she loved the house: it was a large, square, two-storeyed building with green shutters and wide deep verandas all round it, standing in a beautiful garden shaded by great walnut trees. ‘A sweep of lawn, flanked by herbaceous borders, led to the rose garden. Beyond were two tennis courts and beyond these again a formal lily pond, a swimming pool brooded over by an ancient mulberry tree, an enormous kitchen garden, and peach and apricot trees heavy with fruit.’ Their servants, ‘elderly Indian orderlies, grown old in the service of the British’, stood stiffly to attention as the Tweedys drove through the gates. In addition to the five indoor servants, and five gardeners, their household included an aged Pakistani syce, or groom. Although the consul no longer kept horses, the syce still made sure that all the saddlery was in perfect condition, and was fond of reminiscing about the days when the Russian consul general never went anywhere without his Cossack guards, nor the British without an escort of Indian cavalry.¹²

Similarly, when Diana Shipton, Maureen’s contemporary, arrived in Kashgar in 1946 she found the British consulate a rich repository of memories from other lives. There were photographs in the drawing room, ‘a store full of horns and heads from many shooting trips’, a game book, beautifully printed and bound, and another notebook in which to record sightings of birds and their migration. There was also a good collection of gramophone records, including everything from complete symphonies to old dance tunes. The greatest legacy was the library, which contained an eclectic collection of over 300 books, from improving tomes like The Life of Mohammed, Arithmetic in the Mongol Language and twelve volumes of the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, to the more wistful Hunting Insects in the South Seas.¹³

Other women found themselves considerably less well equipped. Catherine Macartney, the first woman to inhabit the Kashgar consulate, found no such luxury when she arrived there in 1898. The original building was little more than a ‘native dwelling’ built in traditional style around a courtyard. The walls were of sun-baked brick and mud, and there were no windows, only skylights covered not with glass (which had not yet reached that part of the world) but with oiled paper. ‘Our furniture was very primitive,’ Catherine wrote stoically, since most of it had been home-made by her husband, who had no very great experience of designing comfortable chairs. His first attempt ‘was so high that I had almost to climb up to the seat, and must sit with my feet on the rail, or with them dangling. The back was quite straight and reached far above my head, and the seat was not more than about six inches wide. There was no possible chance of having a rest in it …’¹⁴

In 1947, when Masha Williams first arrived in Baghdad during the ferocious summer heat, she found that none of her heavy luggage had arrived, although her fur coat had been sent from the cleaners at Harrods. In the house itself there were no curtains, and no furniture (the office, which provided them with an allowance, expected them to buy these things for themselves) and, worst of all, no refrigerator or fans.

The culture, customs or politics of a particular country could also impose their own particular living restrictions. Sheila Whitney speaks for all the diplomatic wives who experienced communist regimes.

It was quite tough. We weren’t allowed to move more than a twelve-mile radius from the centre of Peking. If you wanted to go any further you had to ask permission. And the Ming tombs were just about within that twelve-mile radius so you could go there. But when you did there was always a little man on a motorbike with a boiler suit watching you. You weren’t allowed to diversify off the main route to anywhere, so you didn’t see any of the little villages, and suddenly you got two or three miles outside Peking and this little chap would appear on his bike. And he would follow you to the Ming tombs and, wherever you were, you would see him in the bushes.

Peggy Trevelyan’s experience in the Soviet Union in the early 1960s was also typical. ‘One had to presume our house was bugged. So if ever my husband wanted to tell me about anything – not that he told me much because he thought it was better that I didn’t know – but if there was anything pertaining to individuals in the embassy that he thought I should know, we used to go for a walk in the botanical gardens.’

It was the dress restrictions that Norah Errock remembers from her lonely diplomatic childhood in Saudi Arabia in the early 1940s. When she and her mother went to visit the King’s harems in Riyadh she was expected to wear Arab clothes. ‘We had sort of bloomers first, then a long shift dress, then a sort of overdress with huge sleeves which you sort of pulled round and that acted as the veil if any male appeared – but in very beautiful colours. And if you went out you put on a black overdress – but then again the overdress was often beautifully embroidered.’ On one occasion Norah’s mother decided that it would be a good idea to show some films to the women.

They had never seen films before. The only films we had of course were propaganda films. I was given instructions on how to run the projector. They were allowing some of the younger princes in, and there was one who kept saying, ‘You should have your veil on when I’m in the room.’ He was probably about eight or so, but he might well have been thirteen and by then, of course, women are supposed to veil in front of them. So I can remember trying to work the machine, and at the same time keep the veil over my face.

The film they enjoyed most was when the previous person who had used the machine hadn’t wound back the reel as you are supposed to do. It was of parachutists and there was this wonderful sequence of the parachute going up – to them of course it was probably just as extraordinary as parachutists coming down from the sky.

Just occasionally a climate, a landscape, a people and a way of life all combined so harmoniously that, even from the very first, a country seemed like nothing short of an earthly paradise. ‘Whatever life brings or takes away … whatever comes, Japan will always be my second home,’ Mary Fraser was to write of her posting there in the 1890s. ‘I do not think I have really been so far from Japan that I did not sometimes see the cherry blossoms drifting on the wind, did not sometimes hear the scream of the wild goose through the winter sky and hear the long roll of the surf thundering up on the Atami beaches.’

Mary Fraser was an American brought up largely in Italy. Her parents were wealthy, liberal, cosmopolitan and artistic. Her sculptor father, Thomas Crawford, rented the Villa Negroni in Rome, once the home of Pope Sixtus V. In 1851 Mary was born there. Its stone walls (the masonry was taken from the ancient baths of Diocletian), its vast warren of long galleries and ‘dimly gorgeous rooms’ were the perfect setting from which to absorb the splendours of Rome. As a young girl Mary met the Brownings, the American poets Lowell and Longfellow and, best of all, Edward Lear, who drew pictures for her youngest sister, Daisy, then still just a little child, and wrote poems for her, including ‘Manyforkia Spoonfoolia’, inspired by the strange meats and unmanageable cutlery of his hotel dining room, and most of the recipes for Nonsense Cookery.

How Mary came to marry the spartan Scot Hugh Fraser we shall never know. They met and became engaged in Venice. Although they seem to have been rather ill-matched, she always wrote of him affectionately. ‘I always leave my real self in cold storage when I go to England,’ she once confessed, ‘and my dear Hugh had very little use at any time for the Mediterranean born side of my personality.’*

After her first posting to China Mary travelled to Vienna and South America. A photographic portrait of her shows a thin, thoughtful woman with a gentle face and pale blue eyes. Her hair is worn in the style of Queen Alexandra, piled up on the back of her head, a few curls swept carefully over her brow. It was this Mary, older and more wistful, who accompanied her husband, Hugh, when he was sent as minister to Tokyo in 1889.

From the beginning, Mary was bewitched by the beauty of Japan. With its gardens and its cherry blossom, Tokyo was one of the fairest cities she had ever seen: its streets and houses ‘seemed to have grown up by accident – and are of no importance as compared with the flowers.’ In her house, with its wisteria-sheltered verandas and its view, across a little moat, of the Emperor’s new palace, she felt at the very centre of things. Her own upstairs balcony was ‘so wide and cool that every breeze sweeps through it from end to end, and yet so sheltered that I can wander about and work or read in absolute privacy’. Japan seemed ‘absolutely fresh’; ‘All that one has read or heard fails to give any true impression of this vivid youngness,’ Mary wrote. Although she still missed her own country, she felt immediately at home.

Outwardly Mary’s life was still dominated by her diplomatic duties, particularly by the ceremonial of the imperial court; but she was becoming increasingly absorbed by the natural world around her. The plum blossom, ‘eldest brother of the hundred flowers’, came out when the snow was still on the ground, and she was entranced to find that a whole body of poetry and tradition had grown up around this early harbinger of spring. By the beginning of February the plum-gardens were in full bloom, and Mary visited them to admire what the Japanese called the ‘silver world’: ‘a world with snow on the paths and snow on the branches, while snowy petals, with the faintest touch of glow-worm green at the heart, go whirling along on the last gust of wind from the bay’.

In the autumn, it was the maple trees. ‘The autumn has come at last, and the maples are all on fire,’ she wrote in November that year. ‘Since one autumn, when I wandered through the New Jersey woods as a tiny child, I have never seen such a gorgeous explosion of colour, such a storm of scarlet and gold.’ The Japanese sub-divided their maples again and again, and one Japanese gardener told her that he knew of no less than 380 distinct varieties.

Those which please me most are, I think, the kind which grow about ten or twelve feet high, with leaves in five or seven long points, exquisitely cut, and growing like strong fingers on a young hand. They always seem to be pointing to something, and one involuntarily looks round and about to see what it is. They are deep red in colour all the year round, and are constantly grouped with vivid greens, making splendid masses in the shrubberies.

But Mary’s greatest rapture was saved for the cherry blossom. That first spring, the arrival of this fabled wonder coincided with a royal visit from the Duke and Duchess of Connaught. ‘I hope you will not think me wanting in loyalty.’ Mary wrote to her family, ‘if I say that they have been almost more of an excitement to me than the royal visitors.’ Mary had been ill, and the contemplation of the flowers in her garden, particularly the cherry blossom, meant more to her than if she had been up and busy: ‘The crown of the year has come at last … an outburst of bewildering beauty such as no words can convey to those who have not seen it for themselves.’

On the streets of Tokyo every avenue was planted with cherry trees in long, close-set rows; every garden boasted its carefully nurtured groves. ‘Over the river at Mukojima they dip to the water, and spread away inland like a rosy tidal wave; and the great park at Uyeno seems to have caught the sunset clouds of a hundred skies, and kept them captive along its wide forest ways.’ The double cherry blossoms were the most magnificent of all, surpassing ‘every other splendour of nature’. During the two weeks or so when the blossom was at its best, the Japanese flocked, day after day, to look at them. From her veranda Mary watched the tall grove of cherry trees in the garden, their branches waving softly against the sky, storing up ‘the recollection of their loveliness until the next year should bring it round again’.

However, ‘I would not want you to think that existence is one long series of cotillion figures out here,’ she wrote in a more sombre mood; ‘it can be very sad and very bitter.’ At times there was an almost mystical quality to her response to the natural world – her ‘cherry blossom metaphysics’, as she liked to call it, which in her dark moments brought great solace. On her frequent travels around Japan the merest glimpse of Mount Fuji – or Fuji-san, the name reverently given to the perfectly cone-shaped, snow-capped volcano – was usually enough to lift her spirits and banish her lingering sense of disappointment with life. ‘In Japan one cannot think of Fuji as a thing, a mere object in the landscape;’ she mused, ‘she becomes something personal, dominating, a factor in life. No day seems quite sad or aimless in which one has had a glimpse of her.’

This natural affinity with all things Japanese, which began with the natural world, opened Mary’s mind to many other, more perplexing aspects of Japanese life. Throughout her time there she was almost startlingly open to what must have seemed a deeply alien culture. She was strangely aware of the bluntness of her own, western faculties when it came to describing the exquisite delicacy of Japanese sensibilities. ‘English is a clumsy, square-toed vehicle of expression,’ she wrote in exasperation, ‘and stumbles along, crushing a thousand beauties of my Japanese thought-garden, which a more delicate language (or a more skilful writer!) might have preserved for you.’

Very soon Mary learned to love the Japanese people, as well as their country. Her natural peers were ‘the little hot house ladies’ of the imperial court, ‘with their pretty shy ways and their broken confidences about the terror of getting into European clothes.’* The life of the court was very formal: the clothes, etiquette and food were all strictly regulated. The speech used by the imperial family differed from that of ordinary people. There were special terms for the royal-feminine and the royal-masculine, and courtiers had to take care when speaking to one of the princes to use certain words meant only for royal ears. ‘Is this not a puzzling sum?’ Mary exclaimed. Even when the Frasers attended the Emperor and Empress at Enryo Kwan, their palace by the sea, this formality persisted. A simple walk around the palace gardens was conducted with rigid protocol. Members of the court followed the sovereigns, in the strictest order of precedence, in all their uniforms and finery, ‘like some huge dazzling snake, gliding in and out of all the narrow paths’.

Even the smallest details of imperial life, Mary observed, seemed to have a peculiarly Japanese grace. The chrysanthemum, symbol of the Japanese imperial house, appeared embossed in gold on royal invitations, on the panels of the court carriages, and even on the servants’ liveries. Thursdays were reception days at court and Mary was fascinated by the refreshments offered to the diplomatic corps on these occasions, which included maple leaf shapes made entirely of sugar: ‘Large and small, deep crimson, green and orange, with three leaves, or five or seven, they were piled on the delicate china in such an artistic fashion that I could not refrain from an exclamation of pleasure when they were offered to me,’ she wrote.

Mary was intrigued by the ladies of the court, but she felt greater sympathy for the ordinary people of Japan, particularly her own servants. ‘The very smart people here affect the most impassive countenance and a low voice in speaking,’ she noted, while only the lower classes could express their emotions and joie de vivre, although their habits did sometimes surprise her. She was supposed to enter her servants’ courtyard only at appointed times, but she could not resist observing them from behind the blinds of one of the upper windows. Once, in the terrible heat of summer, when even she could bear no more than ‘the thinnest of white garments’ against her skin, she arrived in her kitchen to find, to her quiet amusement, her cook’s grandmother ‘without a shred of raiment on her old brown body’.

Big Cook San, as her principal chef was known, was a particular favourite. Ever since the influenza epidemic which had swept the country earlier that winter he had suffered from bad lungs, and so when Mary and Hugh went on a visit to Horiuchi, a fashionable seaside summer resort, they took him with them, hoping that the change would do him good.

Big Cook San descended to the platform, jingling like a gypsy tinker with all the saucepans that he had hung round himself at the last moment. An omelette pan and a bain-marie, miraculously tied together, hung over his shoulder; a potato-steamer from his waist; in one hand he carried a large blue tea-pot, and in the other a sheaf of gorgeous irises, carefully tied up in matting, for fear there should be no flowers at Horiuchi!

Mary’s greatest affection, though, was reserved for Ogita, her samurai, guide and interpreter, her ‘right hand in a thousand matters of life’. When he died, of influenza, she recorded his death with real grief. ‘Do you wonder that I tell you so much about a mere servant?’ she wrote. ‘He has been so helpful and faithful, has carried out all my whims with such gentle patience, has piloted me through so many journeys, taught me so many quaint stories, that a part of my Japanese life has died with him.’

Ogita was a tall man of soldierly bearing, a master swordsman and a teacher of Japanese fencing. After his illness Mary was shocked to see death written on the face of this ‘valiant, humble, upright soul’. Ogita lived in a little house in the British legation compound with his wife and five children, and when Mary visited him there and saw him lying on a couple of worn mats on the floor, she thought he looked pitifully long and thin, and much too large for the tiny room. Although he was often too weak to speak, until the very last his two hands always went up to his brow when she entered, and there was always ‘a light of welcome’ shining for her in his eyes. Once or twice he said to her: ‘Okusama* is very kind; I would get well if I could; but I can never travel with her any more, and I am too tired to live.’

After his death, Mary went to visit Ogita one last time. Incense was burning in the house, and freshly gathered flowers had been placed near the coffin head.

He lay very straight and stiff, with a smile of peace on his thin face. His hands were crossed on his breast, and his long blue robes were drawn in straight folds, all held in place with little packets of tea, which filled the room with a dry fragrance; the coffin was lined with these, and his head rested on a pillow of the same. Beside him on a stand lay his most precious possession, his sword; and before the weeping wife left me kneeling there, she touched my shoulder, and pointed to the sword, bowing her head in reverence, and whispering, ‘Samurai, Okusama!’

Mary, a devout Catholic, had tried without success to convert Ogita to her faith. Although she was to remember this with regret after his death, she comforted herself with the thought that he had been ‘a samurai and a gentleman to the last; and I do not believe that any true gentleman was ever shut out of heaven yet.’¹⁵

When Elizabeth Blanckley arrived in Algiers in 1806, where her father was posted as British consul, it was through her servants, too, that the spirit of the country was most vividly revealed. Not everyone in the Blanckley household was as favourably impressed by their first sight of the country as Elizabeth. Her Maltese nurse was so disconsolate ‘at seeing herself surrounded by turbans’ (from the moment they disembarked, she never ceased weeping and exclaiming, ‘I must die, my heart is broke’; ‘il mio cuore sta negro, il mio cuore sta negro’) that the family took pity on her and dispatched her back home. Instead they found a new nurse, Maria; her husband, known as Antonio the Stupid because he could never do anything right; and a butler who could turn his hand to anything, but was particularly adept at making dolls’ wigs. Most exciting of all for Elizabeth and her sister, who were then still quite young, there was Angela, a seventeen-year-old slave, who was presented to them by the Dey (the local ruler) along with her three-month-old baby.

As Christians the Blanckleys were not allowed to own slaves, who were usually hired out to them as domestic servants (Maria and Antonio the Stupid were both slaves of Maltese extraction). Angela and her baby, however, were gifts, which was just as well because ‘the poor helpless unfortunate’ appeared to be unable to do anything at all either for herself or for her baby, let alone in any capacity as a domestic. The Blanckleys, who were good-natured and rather intrigued by her interesting circumstances, took them into their household and cared for them all the same. The baby, who was known as Angelina, became a great favourite.

It was their janissary, however, who became their most important link with the country. Janissaries were not really servants at all, but aristocrats,* an elite corps of soldiers created under the Ottoman system of devshirme (a levy of at least one son from each non-Muslim family in the empire). The most talented of these boys either became janissaries, or went into the Turkish civil service; throughout the Ottoman empire at least one of their number was always assigned to the household of a foreign diplomat to act as bodyguard. As far as Elizabeth was concerned, though, Sidi Hassan had much more exciting duties to perform. He would hide behind their drawing-room curtains, for example, and pretend to be a lion in his den while she and her sister took the role of lambs or travellers whom he would proceed to gobble up. But, best of all, Sidi Hassan was a storyteller.

Elizabeth listened to these stories, these ‘Algerian Nights’ as she called them, with a delight that even in later years, when she had long left Algiers, never faded from her memory. These fascinating tales of genii and princesses were so long that some of them took the evenings of an entire week to conclude. One, which she never forgot, was the story of a girl whose eyelashes were so long that she always swept the floor of her chamber with them. Elizabeth and her sister would sit and listen to Sidi Hassan in his room at the back of their house; he would smoke his pipe, the smell of which clung so strongly to their skin and dresses that such visits were finally banned by their mother.

Elizabeth Blanckley spent six years of her childhood in Algiers, from 1806 to 1812. Like Mary Fraser in Japan nearly a century later, from the moment their boat landed (the Noah’s ark so admired by Nelson) Elizabeth felt at home. They did not live in the town of Algiers itself, but in a country residence, a ‘garden’ just outside the city. The house was built on cliffs overlooking the sea. In the heat of summer it was delightfully cool, watered by fountains and shaded with vines which produced bunches of grapes at least three feet long.

Although the house was built in the Moorish manner, around an open courtyard, much of it was decorated in the English style. Elizabeth’s favourite room was her bedroom, which was more dear to her even than the grand Parisian boudoir which became hers in later life. This room had a domed ceiling and was surrounded by four smaller chiosks, or domed recesses. The first was the door; the second was taken up with books and toys, while the third accommodated her bed, ‘with its white muslin curtains, drapé by violet-coloured ribbons, and couvre-pied of scarlet and gold’. The fourth chiosk was a window, shaded by the branches of the vine, which overlooked the sea.

Away from the cliffs, the house was surrounded by groves of fruit trees – pomegranates, almonds, orange and lemon trees, as well as the bergamot, or sweet lemon – in which nightingales sang. The fig trees bore fruit of such perfection that it had hitherto been considered fit for the Dey alone, while the apricots were so abundant that two of their pigs died from a surfeit of them. (It was not only the pigs who became over-excited at the prospect of so much wonderful fruit: a local synonym for apricot was ‘kill-Christians’.) Their vegetables grew in prodigious quantities, too. In her potager Elizabeth’s mother grew cabbages, cauliflowers, broccoli, carrots, turnips, onions, leeks, peas, french beans, haricots blancs, artichokes, calabash, pumpkins, cucumbers, musk and watermelons, aubergines, tomatoes and several kinds of capsicums, okra, strawberries and potatoes.

The Blanckleys kept so many pets that their ‘Garden’ also became something of a Noah’s ark. Their animals included a spaniel, a tortoise, a hare, a silver fox, a lamb, a tame gazelle and a goat called Phyllis. Mr Blanckley tried to keep wild cats, but they did not survive captivity. Nor did their pet lamb, which was eaten by jackals; nor their father’s eagle, for whom an even worse fate was in store. One day, mistaking the bird for a guinea fowl, the cook killed it, plucked it, and hung it in their already well-filled Christmas larder. If Elizabeth and her sister had not missed it, no one was in any doubt that it would have been served up at table.

But even for Elizabeth there were intimations of something more disturbing beyond this vision of childhood utopia. For the convenience of Mr Blanckley in fulfilling his consular duties the family kept a second house in the town, and it was here that Elizabeth experienced the greatest thrill of all – greater even than Sidi Hassan’s ‘Algerian Nights’. As the sun began to set, exactly one hour before the muezzin began to call the faithful to prayer, she would make her way up onto the flat terrace at the very top of the house. Here, almost every evening, she would conduct a secret rendezvous with the secluded women of the neighbouring house.

I doubt not that the something of mystery connected with the rendezvous, and its realization through one of the Gothic pigeon holes in the upper chamber of our terrace, from which our fond Mahommedan neighbours had by degrees completely annihilated all intervening glass, increased the interest of the interview, and caused a battement de coeur, a something inexpressibly delightful, beyond, or at any rate, certainly very different from what I have experienced in all other liaisons of simple amitié.

Although she was only a little girl of nine or ten at the time, these forbidden meetings had an extraordinary, almost sexual frisson, which derived only in part from their clandestine nature. ‘I knew nothing of them,’ she wrote of her Algerine friends, ‘beyond the delight with which they ever sought and conversed with me, and the anxiety with which I ever ascended to the terrace and kiosk, and listened to their signals.’¹⁶

*A white linen veil fitting tightly round the head and hanging over the eyes with only a small open-worked hole to breathe through.

* King Charles II.

* Mary tells the story of one of Hugh’s earliest postings, before their marriage, in Guatemala. When his boss was sent on leave Hugh remained there as chargé d’affaires, with responsibilities in five republics in Central America. ‘His headquarters were in the new town of Guatemala; his staff, a native clerk; and his only means of transport, a mule. He used to tell me how he would journey from capital to capital through the forest, in uniform, cocked hat and all, this latter for the benefit of any stray bandits that might have been drawn there for shelter. They would not touch a foreign representative in a cocked hat and gold lace, though they might have cut his throat in mufti. England was a word to conjure with in those days.’ After a year and a half ‘a dreadful doubt began to enter Hugh’s mind. His mail grew scantier and scantier. His chief had not returned. Appeals for direction were unanswered and the FO turned a deaf ear to his suggestions of an exchange.’ Eventually he decided to take the matter into his own hands. He packed his bags and left. When he reported, rather shamefacedly, to the office, ‘authority was infinitely amused: “Good Lord, my dear boy!” it said. “We expected you home ages ago – we had no idea that you would last it out as long as that!”’

* Western institutions, and western clothes and customs, were officially encouraged in Japan at this time.

* Honorific by which Mary was addressed by her servants.

* The Dey was elected from their number.

3 Partners

Compared to the innocent childhood idyll described by Elizabeth Blanckley, her mother’s journal of life in Algiers makes altogether more sombre reading. Mrs Blanckley (we do not know her Christian name) was the devoted wife of Henry Stanyford Blanckley, whose family, of gentle rather than aristocratic birth, could trace its ancestry back to Sir Walter Ralegh. Before his appointment as British agent and consul-general at Algiers Henry Blanckley had been British consul in the Balearic Islands for nineteen years, an appointment he obtained after sixteen years’ service in the army during which he fought in ‘the American War’ (the American War of Independence, 1775–83). It therefore seems likely that Mrs Blanckley was much younger than her husband, but very few facts about her survive. From the diaries she wrote, however (later published by her daughter alongside her own memoirs), we know a good deal not only about the everyday details of her life, but also about the role she played as the British consul’s wife.

Many aspects of Mrs Blanckley’s life in Algiers were delightful. The consular corps was a small, close-knit community, but large enough to provide an ample supply of balls, dinners, banquets and masques. It did not lack for elegance either: the wife of the French consul had connections at the imperial court in Paris, from whence she would bring back details of all the latest fashions. The Europeans in Algeria were always very well dressed, ‘in accordance to the taste of the undisputed emporium of fashion’, even more so than in London, where they ‘sighed in vain for a copy of Le Journal des Modes’.

When not engaged in diplomatic entertainments, Mrs Blanckley spent a good deal of time visiting the Algerian women in their harems. Unlike Mary Sheil, whose Victorian sensibilities were shocked by the deliciously bawdy talk of the women’s quarters, Mrs Blanckley, a woman of a more liberal age, was struck by the beauty and courtesy of the Algerines. One of the first calls she and her daughters paid was on their dragoman’s (interpreter) new wife, whom they found sitting ‘in lonely grandeur’, laden with so many pearls and jewels that she could scarcely move beneath the weight of them. She wore so many rings in her ears, Mrs Blanckley recorded later in her journal, ‘that her ears were quite bent down, hanging in the elephant style’. At the wedding of the daughter of the Cadi, or chief judge, a few months later she was even more amazed by the opulence of the Algerian women: ‘My eyes were perfectly dazzled by the splendor of the jewels by which their salamas (caps) and persons were covered, whole bouquets of roses, jessamines, peacock feathers and butterflies were completely formed of diamonds,’ she wrote. The bride herself was so bedecked with jewels that ‘she was quite unable to bear the weight of her salama without the support of two of her attendants, who walked on either side of her and held her head.’

The greatest spectacle of all, however, came when she visited the Dey’s wife herself. As the wife of the British consul, Mrs Blanckley was an important visitor, and the Dey’s women took the greatest possible care over their preparations. They made iced sherbets of orange flower water, together with vast quantities of different foods – meat, poultry, pastries and sweetmeats – which she ate with beautiful rosewood spoons, their tips inlaid with amber and coral. Although she enjoyed this feast sitting cross-legged on the floor with the other women, Moorish fashion, every comfort had been thought of: the table on which the food was set was inlaid with silver and mother-of-pearl; her hands were washed with scented water poured from silver jugs; exquisitely embroidered napkins were brought for her to wipe her fingers on.

On her arrival at the palace harem, Mrs Blanckley had found that not only the women, but the whole room was heaped with jewels. There were jewels spread out over the tables and shelves; there were even jewels strewn across the floor – emeralds, sapphires and rubies which seemed to be growing up out of the cut-velvet carpets like so many fantastical flowers. Although Mrs Blanckley was perfectly sensible of the honour they were paying her – ‘I am the first and only Consul’s wife of any nation who has been so highly distinguished,’ she recorded with pride – she found this extravagance rather overwhelming: ‘My eyes were so dazzled with all the splendour I had beheld at the palace, that I felt quite glad when all these visits were concluded.’

There were other reasons why she might have been glad to conclude these visits. As the British consul’s wife, Mrs Blanckley was not only able to enjoy the greatest refinements and courtesies that the Algerians had to offer. She was also exposed to an altogether more sinister side of life. The Blanckleys’ position in Algeria was by no means as secure as it appeared. Although in theory they were protected by their diplomatic status, in practice they were entirely at the mercy of a series of petty despots, the Deys, who ruled Algiers under the nominal suzerainty of the Ottoman sultans.

Part of the Ottoman empire since the early sixteenth century, by the eighteenth Algiers had become a pirate state, preying mercilessly on shipping in the Mediterranean. Some aspects of Mrs Blanckley’s account of their life in Algiers make gruesome reading. Daily life for the ordinary citizen was bloody, brutal and, all too often, short. Both smallpox and the plague were frequent epidemics, although it was a crime punishable by death to even refer to the plague, let alone take precautions against it, until the Dey chose to make the pestilence official.* Slaves and criminals were kept in the bagnio, or prison, from whence they were taken by day to work in the stone quarries. At night they were forced to wear chains so heavy that even a strong man could barely support the weight of them. The most vicious punishments were handed out with impunity for the most arbitrary of crimes. ‘The poor Jew who was bastinadoed is not yet dead,’ Mrs Blanckley wrote soberly, ‘but has been obliged to submit to lose 3lbs of flesh from the part where the bastinadoes were inflicted.’ His crime had been to disturb the Dey with the noise of his hammer.

Reminders of the tyrannical powers of the Dey were ever present, even within the diplomatic community. The Danish consul was thrown into the bagnio like a common slave when the expected tribute from Denmark did not arrive on time, and, to the horror of his distraught wife, forced to wear chains which weighed a crushing 60 pounds. When Mr Blanckley led a deputation of diplomats to plead for their colleague, the Dey was so enraged that he ‘bounced up from his seat and fell down again, his legs still retaining their tailor position, whilst he pulled his beard … and literally foamed’. The same fate later befell both the Dutch and the Spanish consuls, with the threat (happily never carried out) that the latter’s wife and eight children would be taken to the market place and sold as slaves.

The Blanckleys themselves once came under a similar threat. ‘I am much fatigued, having passed the last several nights in packing up our valuables and clothes, which I am obliged to do with great secrecy, lest our slaves might give information, and we know not from one hour to the next what may be our destiny,’ Mrs Blanckley wrote anxiously. This time the Dey’s wrath had been aroused by the fact that some vessels sailing under the Algerian flag had been seized by the British in nearby Malta. Although a British gunship, La Volontaire, was sent in to protect them from possible repercussions, Mrs Blanckley, perhaps remembering the Dey’s previous rage, was still understandably agitated. ‘The Minister of the Marina has been very unguarded and violent in his expression against the person of the Consul,’ she wrote; ‘and we have but too great reason to dread being put into chains.’

Although it was her father who held the position of consul, Elizabeth Blanckley was never in any doubt about her mother’s crucial involvement in his work. While Mr Blanckley fulfilled the public role, behind the scenes Mrs Blanckley worked tirelessly to support him. To enable the family to meet all their expenses (a consul’s salary at that time was nominal) Mrs Blanckley regulated her domestic affairs with the greatest possible economy. ‘Rising early and retiring late’, she oversaw not only the immediate household, but also the vegetable garden, orchards, dairy, and even the large tracts of land on which they kept their own herds and flocks. According to Elizabeth, ‘From these resources our large family, and constant and numerous guests of all degrees, were in a great measure supported.’

It was against this background of domestic harmony that the Blanckleys’ most important work was carried out. While they survived the worst excesses of the Dey’s regime, some of their countrymen were not so fortunate. One of Mr Blanckley’s main duties in this ‘very nucleus of piracy’ was to claim any British national taken into slavery by the Algerians. He was able to do this under the terms of a treaty agreed with the Turkish Sultan in 1761, known as the Ottoman Capitulations, which also gave European consuls wide-reaching powers of jurisdiction over their countrymen in both civil and criminal cases, liberty of movement around the Dey’s dominions, freedom from restrictions in commerce and religion, and (in theory at least) inviolability of domicile.

After these captured Britons had been identified and set free, it was to Mrs Blanckley that the care of these unfortunates most frequently fell. Sometimes they were English sailors, or a handful of travellers on board a foreign passenger ship which had fallen into the hands of Algerian pirates. Sometimes they were the crew of an English merchant vessel captured on the high seas with its cargo of cotton, opium or oil. If the captain of one of these ships (who was often accompanied by his wife and family) was not properly insured his capture would spell certain ruin. At least he would have been allowed to keep a change of clothing; the rest of the crew on board such vessels were routinely stripped of everything they possessed, right down to their underclothes. Mrs Blanckley grew adept at making up not only extra beds, but also new shirts with which to clothe her destitute countrymen.

On one occasion fifteen Englishmen were shipwrecked on the Barbary Coast, at a place called Gigery. The Blanckleys first received knowledge of their capture when a small piece of bluish-white paper was delivered to their house, much creased and soiled, on which a few scarcely legible lines had been scratched with charcoal and water. It told a distressing but all too familiar tale. The ship belonging to these English mariners, laden with a cargo of pigs of lead and barrels of gunpowder, had been on its way to one of the Mediterranean ports, when a storm had driven it onto the rocks. The ‘inhospitable savages’ who inhabited this remote piece of coast had overpowered the exhausted men and diverted them of everything, including all their clothes. Freezing with cold and half-starved, the fifteen men watched helplessly from the shore as, in their haste take possession of the ship’s cargo, several of their captors tied pigs of lead to their waists, instantly sinking to their deaths as they attempted to swim back to shore. Another group later blew themselves up when they built a fire too close to one of the barrels of gunpowder. Perhaps anxious to be rid of these unlucky Christian devils, they were now demanding a large ransom.

It was only with difficulty that the outraged Mr Blanckley could be made ‘to comprehend the truth of the Dey’s reply, which was, that he had not the least command or influence with the men of Gigery … that they had ever continued a wild and completely savage people; and that had any Algerine subjects fallen into their hands, he, the Dey, would equally have been obliged to pay a ransom for their liberation.’ The compassionate Blanckleys paid the ransom from their own pocket, and a few days later the thirteen mariners – ‘two having sunk under their misery’ – arrived in Algiers.

The men had scarcely a rag upon them, but Mrs Blanckley was well prepared and already had beds and clothing waiting for them. She tended their wounds and fed them, although her greatest anxiety over the following weeks was that ‘they might be injured by taking too great a quantity of food, after their long state of almost starvation; and she used great caution in having nourishment distributed to them.’ ‘In this, and in every other instance,’ Elizabeth wrote, ‘did my excellent parents act a part worthy of the good Samaritan; their house, their purse, and even their wardrobe, being opened and freely bestowed according to the wants of their unfortunate fellow-creatures.’¹

In no other profession has a wife been so intimately involved with her husband’s work. While not everyone had the extraordinary task of sewing shirts for starving shipwreck survivors, it was a partnership which, in one form or another, had been taking shape from the very earliest days of diplomacy.

The Earl of Stair, ambassador to Paris in 1715, was noted for keeping ‘the most splendid house in Paris next to that of the King, and having with him his Countess and her daughter, both ladies of the greatest honour and politeness’. Here the ambassador would entertain the principal lords and ladies of France ‘with all possible elegance’, but after about ten o’clock at night his custom was to ‘pretend business, and leave the company to the care of his lady, withdraw to his Room, undress himself, and repair to the coffee-houses incognito; and, by a dexterous Method of Conversation, find out the secrets of the Day’.² In the 1730s Mrs Vigor, whose husband was consul-general in St Petersburg, liked to do her embroidery at the Countess of Biron’s, where the Tsar was a constant visitor. This was in no way for her own amusement, she claimed, but for the advantage these contacts might bring her husband ‘in the station he is in’.³

Marriage to a diplomat was a commitment not just to an individual but to an entire way of life. ‘CONSIDER SMALL MEANS AND FOREIGN LIFE,’ Lady Fane, herself the child of diplomats, telegraphed frantically to her own daughter when she announced her engagement to a young Foreign Service subaltern.⁴ The vagaries of diplomatic life, its insecurities and discomforts as well as its privileges, meant that husbands often demanded far more of their wives than most women might legitimately expect.

The twenty-one-year-old Catherine Borland might have thought twice if she had had someone like Lady Fane to advise her when in 1898 she became engaged to George Macartney, the first and perhaps most famous British consul to Kashgar. Assuming that her fiancé was still safely en poste, Catherine was in her kitchen in Edinburgh, innocently baking a cake one Saturday morning, when the maid announced that George had arrived. Although they had been engaged for nearly two years, to her astonishment he calmly announced that they must be married within the week, ‘for he had only got three months’ leave from Kashgar, and already five weeks of it had gone’. Just one week later they set off on their ‘great adventure’. ‘To me it was a great adventure indeed,’ Catherine later recalled, ‘for I was the most timid, unenterprising girl in the world. I had hardly been beyond the limits of my own sheltered home, and big family of brothers and sisters, had never had any desire whatever to see the world, and certainly had no qualifications for a pioneer’s life, beyond being able to make a cake.’

In the seventeen years that Catherine Macartney spent in Chinese Turkistan she had to master a far greater range of accomplishments. Fortunately, she seems to have been one of those women who was quite simply born to the pioneering life, and learnt to adapt both to a new husband and to a new life with extraordinary speed.

A journey of that sort is a pretty good test to one’s temper [she wrote of her first arduous six-week journey to Kashgar] for one’s nerves get strained, at times almost to breaking point. Everything seems to go wrong when one is utterly tired out, and sometimes very hungry. If two people can go through the test of such a journey without quarrelling seriously, they can get through under any circumstances. We just survived it, and it promised well for the long journey through life.⁵

There were others, however, who were not so lucky; others from whom, however devoted they may have been as wives, diplomatic life required sacrifices they found terribly hard to bear. ‘You cannot imagine how sorry I am at giving up our snug country Darby and Joan life for all the plagues and tinsel of diplomacy,’ wrote Anne Disbrowe in a letter from St Petersburg, where her husband was posted in the 1820s. The glitter of Alexander I’s court was a far cry from the braying donkeys and dust storms of Kashgar, but for Anne it was just as hard: ‘I once thought I was ambitious, but either I was mistaken in the conjecture or the quality is worn out, and perhaps having attained my wishes I want nothing more.’⁶ Having been told that they would only be gone a month or so, she had left her two little girls behind in England. In the event it was three years before she finally returned to England and was able to see her daughters again.

Whether or not they wanted to, diplomatic wives almost always led a far more active role than that of a mere camp-follower and housekeeper to their husbands. But as the example of Mrs Blanckley shows, their role often extended into many areas beyond the conventional social ones. Although it was not until 1946 that women were able to enter the Foreign Office in their own right,* in the past, when diplomats were often obliged to work with very little formal backup, they frequently used their wives as unofficial secretaries, and occasionally even as their deputies when they were occupied elsewhere. Many women, such as Mary Fraser in Japan and Isabel Burton in Brazil and later in Damascus, frequently acted as a private assistant, copying reports and even getting to grips with complicated systems of codes and ciphers. When Elizabeth McNeill married her husband John, the British agent in Persia in 1823, she took over the management of all his expenses. She was so discreet ‘that he could entirely trust her with all his diplomatic difficulties’, and was soon involved in making copies of all her husband’s letters. Their years in Persia were crucial ones as the country was an important buffer between an increasingly expansionist Russia and British India at that time. Although John McNeill was frequently away for months on end travelling the country, no one doubted that Mrs McNeill was more than capable of undertaking the more sedentary parts of his job. ‘I am more than delighted with the promptitude and ability manifested by Mrs McNeill,’ Colonel Macdonald, the envoy, wrote just a few years later in 1828; ‘we have no need of an Agent at the capital so long as she is there.’⁷

Even earlier, in the eighteenth century, diplomatic wives showed themselves to be equally as capable. In 1789 Torrington, the British minister in Brussels, described his wife in a letter to the Secretary of State as ‘the soul of my office’. When he came back to England he left her behind to supervise the work of his young (and of course male) chargé d’affaires. Although it was then unthinkable, for all her capabilities, that Mrs Torrington should herself have been appointed chargé, it was not unknown for women to be recommended for the less politically important post of consul. In 1752 Mr Titley, from Copenhagen, recommended the appointment, on the death of her husband, of ‘a very notable woman’, Mrs Elizabeth Fenwick, as consul in Denmark, so long as she should remain unmarried. In the event one of her sons was appointed instead, but some ten years later, in Tripoli, a Mrs White did indeed act as her husband’s unofficial successor (and was paid by the Treasury) for two years until an official, male replacement was appointed.⁸

In particularly remote or dangerous postings, an even closer involvement was often necessary. Felicity Wakefield was posted to Egypt during the Suez Crisis in 1956, when President Nasser nationalized the previously neutral canal zone. Although no one in the embassy, not even the ambassador himself, knew of the Israeli and Anglo-French plans to invade Egypt at that point, there was no doubt that the situation was serious – ‘We had a house out on the pyramids road and I remember convoys of Egyptian army vehicles going past.’ Given tank recognition charts by the secret service, she was asked to identify and count the tanks going past her house – ‘Which I did,’ she recalls with satisfaction. ‘I hid behind the curtain so that my servants didn’t know what I was doing and I drew the tanks and I counted them. I suppose they could have accused me of spying – which is just what I was doing.’

Spying was one of the very few things that Ann Fanshawe did not do for her husband, but no doubt she would have, had it been necessary – and relished it too. The marriage of Ann and Richard Fanshawe represented not only one of diplomacy’s greatest partnerships, but one of its greatest love stories. They were married in 1644, during the Civil War. Richard was thirty-five, and the Secretary of the Council of War to the Prince of Wales (the future Charles II), then a boy of fourteen. Ann herself was just nineteen. A portrait of her in later life by Sir Peter Lely shows an exquisite oval face with a long nose and soft chin. Her small mouth is slightly pursed; her dark eyes, beneath the fashionable ringlets of the day, have a faintly resigned look about them. Thick ropes of pearls are strung at her wrists and looped around her neck and shoulders over magnificent lace cuffs and collar. By not so much as a flicker of a sloe-shaped eyelid is it possible to guess at the extraordinary swashbuckling life which lay behind the exterior of this placid, conventionally fashionable matron.

Ann was the eldest daughter of Sir John Harrison of Hertfordshire. Although she was brought up with ‘all the advantages that time afforded’, learning to sew, to speak French, to sing and dance and play the lute, she was, by her own admission, ‘what we graver people call a hoyting girl’.* She learned her lessons well, ‘yet was I wild to that degree, that the hours of my beloved recreation took up too much of my time.’ Best of all she liked riding and running, ‘and all active pastimes … But to be just to myself, I never did mischief to myself or other people, nor one immodest action or would in my life, but skipping and activity was my delight.’

From a boisterous, skipping girl Ann grew up into a deeply sensual, ambitious and capable woman. From the day of her marriage at Wolver-cote church until Richard’s death in 1666, she was passionately in love with her husband. ‘I thought myself a Queen,’ she wrote, ‘and my husband so glorious a crown, that I more valued myself to be called by his name than born a princess; for I knew him very wise and very good, and his soul doted on me.’

It was only after the Restoration in 1660 that Dick Fanshawe became an officially credited diplomat, but for many years both during and after the Civil War, he acted as an envoy for the King in exile. He was very much a man of his times – highly educated, a great lover of both history and poetry, and something of a poet himself. As well as a writer of his own verses he was a translator of Horace, and of Camoëns’s The Lusiads from the Portuguese. In the memoir written for her son, also called Richard, so that he would know what manner of man his father had been, Ann describes him tenderly: ‘He was of the highest size of men, strong, and of the best proportion, his complexion sanguine, his skin exceeding fair, his hair dark brown and very curling, but not very long, his eyes grey and penetrating, his nose high, his countenance gracious and wise, his motion good, his speech clear and distinct.’ Both his ‘masters’, Charles I and Charles II, loved him greatly, ‘both for his great parts and honesty, and for his conversation, in which they took great delight’. Even after his death, Ann never stopped loving him. Throughout their life together he was her ‘North Star, that only had the power to fix me’.

Richard Fanshawe loved his wife as much as he was beloved by her. The first time they were parted after their marriage, when Richard went to Bristol on the King’s business, he was ‘extremely afflicted even to tears, though passion was against his nature’. From the very beginning he had complete trust in Ann, involving her unhesitatingly in many of his affairs. Not long after their marriage he entrusted her with his store of gold, saying to her, ‘I know that thou that keeps my heart so well will keep my fortune, which from this time I will ever put into thy hands as God shall bless me with increase.’

His trust was well-placed. During the dangerous and uncertain years of the Civil War Ann undertook a number of missions on her husband’s behalf. Alone, and almost continually pregnant (typically for those days, she bore Richard fourteen children), she travelled frequently on his business affairs: in November 1648 ‘my husband went to Paris on his master’s business, and sent for me from London. I carried him three hundred pounds of his money.’ In France she was received at the Palais Royal, and there her little daughter played with ‘the lady Henrietta’, younger sister to Charles II. This respite did not last long. Soon Richard ‘thought it convenient to send me into England again, there to try what sums I could raise, both for his subsistence abroad, and mine at home’.

But these missions were only a small taste of what was to come. After the Battle of Worcester in 1651, which finally ended the cause of Charles II in England, Richard was taken prisoner and for ten weeks kept in solitary confinement at Whitehall. ‘Cease weeping,’ Richard told her when they met, ‘no other thing upon earth can move me.’ But Ann had good reason to weep. The conditions in prison were so bad that Richard contracted scurvy, and the effects nearly killed him. In order just to catch a glimpse of him, she would go ‘when the clock struck four in the morning, with a dark lantern in my hand, all alone and on foot, from my lodging in Chancery Lane … to Whitehall … There I would go under his window and softly call him … Thus we talked together; and sometimes I was so wet with rain that it went in at my neck and out at my heels.’

Ann petitioned Cromwell in person to secure Richard’s release, and in November that year he was finally let out on bail, although it was not until 1658, seven years later, that he was able to escape to France again. To her consternation, Ann was refused a pass to travel out to join him. At Whitehall she was told that her husband had gained his liberty through trickery; ‘but for me and his children upon no conditions we should not stir’. Ann did not waste time arguing. She went to the pass office at Wallingford House, and obtained papers under her maiden name, Ann Harrison, for herself, ‘a man, a maid, and her three children’. She then shamelessly proceeded to forge the pass, changing the capital ‘H’ to two ‘f’s,* the two ‘r’s to an ‘n’ and the ‘i’ to an ‘s’, and the ‘s’ to an ‘h’, the ‘o’ to an ‘a’, and the ‘n’ to a ‘w’, ‘so completely that none could find the change’. She then hired a barge to take her family to Gravesend, and from thence a coach to Dover. Then, laughing merrily at the thought of their great escape, she and her family crossed the Channel, to Richard and freedom.

The Fanshawes’ greatest adventure of all, however, had taken place in 1650, ten years earlier, when Richard was sent on a vital diplomatic mission to Spain: he carried letters from the future Charles II to the king of Spain, Philip IV, petitioning urgent funds to help the royalist cause. Ann, as always, was by his side.

The Fanshawes set out from Galway, which was then in the throes of the plague. Not wishing to enter the town itself, they were led ‘all on the back side of town under the walls, over which people during the plague (which was not yet quite stopped) had flung out all their dung, dirt and rags, and we walked up to the middle of our legs in them’. By now covered in flea bites, they found the ship, a Dutch merchant vessel, which was to carry them as far as Málaga.

The boat was owned by ‘a most tempestuous master, a Dutchman (which is enough to say), but truly, I think the greatest beast I ever saw of his kind’. All was well until they came to the Straits of Gibraltar, where they suddenly saw a well-manned Turkish galley in full sail coming towards them. The Dutchman’s ship was so loaded with goods that his guns, all sixty of them, were useless. ‘We believed we should all be carried away as slaves,’ Ann wrote. But the ‘beast captain’ was not about to give up so easily. He called for brandy, of which he drank a good deal, called for his arms, called for his men, and cleared the decks of everyone else, ‘resolving to fight rather than to lose his ship that was worth £30,000’.

‘This was sad for us passengers,’ Ann went on, ‘but my husband bid us be sure to keep in the cabin, and no women appear, which would make the Turks think we were a man-of-war; but if they saw women they would take us for merchants and board us.’ Leaving Ann down below, Richard took up his gun, his bandoliers and his sword, and went up to the top decks, where he stood waiting with the rest of the ship’s company for the Turkish man-of-war to approach them. Ann, who despite being expressly forbidden to show herself, was merely waiting for her chance to join him, had not reckoned on the ploys of the ‘beast captain’. When she tried the door, she found she had been locked in:

I knocked and called to no purpose, until at length a cabin boy came and opened the door. I all in tears desired him to be so good as to give me his blue thrum-cap he wore, and his tarred coat, which he did, and I gave him half a crown; and putting them on, and flinging away my night’s clothes, I crept up softly and stood upon the deck by my husband’s side as free from sickness and fear as, I confess, from discretion; but it was the effect of that passion which I could never master.

The Turks were satisfied with a parley, and eventually turned and sailed away. ‘But when your father saw it convenient to retreat, looking upon me he blessed himself, and snatched me up in his arms, saying “Good God, that love can make this change!”, and though he seemingly chid me, he would laugh at it as often as he remembered that voyage.’

The most dangerous voyage of all, however, was undertaken very soon after this one on their return from Spain to France. In the Bay of Biscay their boat sailed into a storm which lasted for two days and two nights ‘in a most violent manner’. The winds were so strong that they ‘drew the vessel up from the water’, and so destroyed the boat that by the end it had neither sail nor mast left. The crew consisted of six men and a boy: ‘Whilst they had hopes of life they ran about swearing like devils, but when that failed them they ran into holes, and let the ship drive as it would,’ Ann wrote. The final blow to their chances of reaching land came when even the ship’s compass was lost, causing

such horrible lamentation as was as dismal to us as the storm past. Thus between hope and fear we past the night, they protesting to us that they knew not where they were. And truly we believed them; for with fear and drink I think they were bereft of sense. So soon as it was day, about six of the clock, the master cried out, ‘The land! The land!’ But we did not receive that news with the joy belonging to it, but sighing said, ‘God’s will be done’.

Eventually their ship ran aground and that night they all sat up

and made good cheer, for beds we had none, and we were so transported that we thought we had no need of any. But we had very good fires and Nantes white wine, and butter and milk, and walnuts and eggs, and some very bad cheese. And was this not enough, with the escape of shipwreck, to be thought better than a feast? I am sure until that hour I never knew such pleasure in eating, between which we a thousand times repeated what we had spoken when every word seemed our last.

Nothing was ever to equal the exquisite exhilaration of these two great adventures. After the Restoration the Fanshawes’ diplomatic career reverted to a distinguished but far more conventional round of appointments. Richard was officially accredited ambassador, first to the court of Portugal in 1662, and then three years later to Spain. In between the births, and deaths, of her prodigious family, Ann slipped effortlessly into the role of the ambassador’s lady, admiring Richard in all his finery as he presented his credentials, giving and receiving visits, and attending court functions; listing, with distinctly beady eye, all their silver, and plate, and fine brocades. But she would doubtless have given it all up, and endured a thousand more dangers, to be at Richard’s side.

When he died in 1666, while still serving as Charles II’s ambassador to Spain, Ann’s heart was broken. ‘O all powerful Lord God,’ she wrote in a frenzy of grief, ‘look down from heaven upon me the most distressed wretch upon earth. See me with my soul divided, my glory and my guide taken from me, and in him all my comfort in this life. See me staggering in my path. Have pity on me, O Lord, and speak peace to my disquieted soul now sinking under this great weight …’

Ann survived Richard by fourteen years, but the thought of him always made her eyes ‘gush out with tears’. In her heart, as well as in life, they had always been as one. ‘Glory to God we never had but one mind throughout our lives,’ she concludes her memoir, ‘our souls were wrapped up in each other, our aims and designs one, our loves one, and our resentments one. We so studied one the other that we knew each other’s mind by our looks; whatever was real happiness, God gave it to me in him.’⁹

Until well into the present century, the majority of diplomatic wives played a part which was very much an extension of the social role they would have fulfilled in England. Even Mrs Blanckley’s good works, sewing shirts for shipwrecked sailors, had perhaps more to do with her own upbringing and devout religious convictions than with any more formally imposed ethos. In the first half of the present century, however, two important changes occurred within the Foreign Office which were to affect the roles of diplomatic wives quite as much as those of their husbands.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century the Diplomatic Service had been expanding, and the introduction of salaries in 1919 meant that it attracted those who lacked the minimum £400 per annum in private income which had formerly been essential. It now also merged with the previously separate Foreign Office. After the Eden reforms of 1943, however, the service was expanded still further, and recruitment became both more meritocratic and more middle class. Mirroring the increasingly structured and hierarchical nature of their husbands’ jobs, the role of wives became subtly more codified.

This code was manifested not only in new diplomatic etiquette manuals, such as Marcus Cheke’s* specially written book of instructions (tactfully compiled in 1946 for the benefit of those wives who may not have been brought up to know a fish knife from a finger bowl), but also in a kind of received ‘in-house’ culture perpetuated by the wives themselves.

At the beginning of this post-war period wives of the ‘old school’ deplored the lack of social sophistication amongst the new breed of middle-class wives coming up through the ranks, and were not shy of saying so. Marie-Noele Kelly, who was to become one of the great British ambassadresses, blamed the communist bloc for the disruption of the old social certainties of pre-war Europe – the sort of ‘freemasonry’ which had once characterized the whole diplomatic corps. ‘This arose naturally,’ she wrote, ‘from members having the same background and training, from their use of a common language [French] and the universal code of courteous social formulae evolved by the French.’

Marie-Noele recalled how, as a young newly married wife in the 1930s, she was taken to one side by her own ambassadress, Lady Granville, and ‘in smiling fashion’ given some friendly words of advice. Although Lady Granville would no doubt have preferred her to have been English (Marie-Noele was of aristocratic, but Belgian stock), she recognized that she had been ‘properly’ brought up ‘and that there were things which need not be stressed’. The same could not be said for many of the younger wives coming into the service in her own days as an ambassadress, a high proportion of whom had ‘no conception that these mysteries even existed’.¹⁰

This was not just old-fashioned snobbery, although doubtless it played a part. For the more traditional diplomatic wives, of upper-class if not aristocratic upbringing themselves, this social know-how was an essential tool of the trade. Marcus Cheke’s handbook, which by today’s standards makes hilarious reading, was thoroughly approved of by the ‘old school’ because it showed the new recruits, both men and their wives, how to conduct ‘those social relationships which it is [their] duty to cultivate’.¹¹ It was the wives, however, who came in for Marie-Noele’s most withering disapproval:

They seemed to have little social sense and could not understand the idea of representation. Although, unlike an earlier generation, their husbands were given ample allowances for this very purpose, their ladies seemed to have exactly the same outlook as if the husbands were working in offices in London and their homes were in suburbia. If they spent their allowances, it was on the cosy job of entertaining each other, or members of the colony; if and when they were forced into wider society, they tended to huddle together in the corner until they could slip away.

The word ‘duty’, so unfashionable today, was all too familiar to diplomatic women of my mother’s generation. By the beginning of the 1960s the code of behaviour which had been gradually gathering force over the previous twenty years was finally given a formal mouthpiece with the foundation of the Foreign Service Wives’ Association.* One of the association’s first newsletters reprinted a speech given by Lady Kirkpatrick, wife of the Permanent Under-Secretary of State Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, in November 1960. The talk, entitled in a suitably no-nonsense way ‘Serving Abroad’, gave formal expression, perhaps for the first time, to the role of the ‘new wife’:

Our lives have to be dedicated. The work of the Foreign Service does not begin and end between office hours, its family life is often disrupted and it has to observe a degree of self-discipline and sacrifice unknown in most other callings … I have chosen the title Serving Abroad because service is the key note: and if we realise that the Service is more important than we are, we shall do our work abroad properly.

The submersion of women not only into the individual sphere of their husbands’ lives abroad, but into the wider embrace of the service itself, was complete.

The time and energy freely given by wives like Mrs Blanckley in Algiers had become a duty which was expected, even demanded, of all diplomatic women. According to Lady Kirkpatrick, the duty of the Foreign Office wife was, principally,

to make a comfortable centre where you can return hospitality and enable your husband to invite and talk to the people of the country in an informal way. To do this properly means work, and 90% of the work involved revolves on you. It would be fairer if all or most of the entertainment allowance were paid direct into your account. But we live in an unjust world, and there would be a collapse if everyone went on strike until they got justice.

In this rarefied world receptions and cocktail parties were ‘a cross which had to be borne’,¹²

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