Diplomatic Families and Children’s Mobile Lives

Experiences of British Diplomatic Service Children from 1945 to 1990

Sara Hiorns

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032120256
• eBook ISBN: 9781000468458
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze fisiche
• Subtopic: Geografia umana

This book is the first of its kind: a historical inquiry into the family life of British diplomats between 1945 and 1990. It examines the ways in which the British Diplomatic Service reacted to and were influenced by the radical social changes that took place in Britain during the latter half of the twentieth century. It asks to what extent diplomats, who strove to protect their enclosed and elite circles, were suitable to represent this changing nation.

Drawing on previously unseen primary sources and interview testimony, this book explores themes of societal change, end of empire, second wave feminism, new approaches to childcare, and developments in the civil service. It explores questions of belonging and identity, as well as enduring perceptions of this organisation that is (often mistakenly) understood to be quintessentially 'British'.

Offering new and fresh insights, this book will be of interest to students and scholars in history, historical geography, political studies, sociology, feminist studies and cultural studies.

1 1945–1958

Diplomatic Service society after the Second World War

DOI: 10.4324/9780429273568-1

Introduction

That the Diplomatic Service is a family affair has long been part of its rhetoric. Mori writes that ‘surrogate fatherhood was conferred’ on those eighteenth century envoys who established and equipped their own embassies and it was often the case that their staff were related by blood or via some other family connection.¹ Cromwell also observes that the family concept was never far from the forefront of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO)’s official self-image. ‘It was the enduring concept of the mission abroad as a family, and a particular type of family at that, which was to characterise the service till long after 1919.’² Marcus Cheke’s 1949 ‘Guidance … for a member of His Majesty’s Foreign Service on his first appointment to a post abroad’ explicitly underlined the patriarchal hierarchy of a British overseas mission: ‘The whole Embassy forms a sort of family … of which His Majesty’s Ambassador is pater familias …’³ The reality (of embassy life in particular), however, was very different. During the post-war period – defined in this chapter as the years between 1945 and 1958 – the Foreign Office administration maintained that ‘wives and children had never been their concern’.⁴ There was very little financial aid available for Diplomatic Service families and no systems of pastoral support existed at all. Thus, immediately after the Second World War, the Diplomatic Service did not provide a welcoming environment for the families of ordinary middle class meritocrats starting out on a career in government service.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the British Diplomatic Service’s far from flexible attitudes towards social distinctions in this era and it demonstrates that before, during and after the Second War World the Service retained fixed ideas about the preferred social pedigree of its members. As will be seen the Diplomatic Service family retained strong links and shared modes of behaviour with the aristocracy and upper class British families and its public image was closely associated with this group. The first section of this chapter examines families in this context and demonstrates the way in which families of lesser social standing could undergo ‘the process of acculturation’ identified by Cromwell, by adopting the values and attitudes of established diplomatic families. The second section turns to the optimistic social reforms of the post-war Attlee government and examines how the role of home and family became central to the British post-war reconstruction. It is a compelling aspect of this study that it was at this point that the experiences of Foreign Office children began to deviate significantly from those of their counterparts at ‘home’ in the UK: ‘home’ as a concept being something that children who led mobile lives found difficult to grasp and comprehend. The final section introduces the reader to the Diplomatic Service culture of family separation, still identified as late as 2004 as ‘one of the worst aspects of diplomatic life’.⁵ It analyses the reasons for this practice and examines the way that Diplomatic Service practice intersected with that of similar groups, for example colonial administrators and army and missionary children. It details the experiences of some of the children who experienced separation and looks at the systems of care provided by extended families and commercial agencies in an international environment.

Diplomatic Service families at the time of the Second World War

More than once during the early twentieth century attempts were made to recruit civil servants into the Foreign Office from more varied social backgrounds. The first, the Royal Commission on the Civil Service, pre-dated the First World War and many of its recommendations were never implemented because of it. The second attempt at change, Proposals for the reform of the Foreign Service Presented by the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs to Parliament by Command of his Majesty, published by HMSO in 1943, was testament to Eden’s dedication to the ideal of a more equitable post-war Foreign Service. Nonetheless, at the close of World War Two the Diplomatic Service was still dominated by aristocratic and socially distinguished families. Cannadine noted that ‘Between 1873 and 1945, eleven men held the post of Permanent Under Secretary: nine were peers, close relatives of peers, or bona fide landed gentry; only two came from the middle classes’.⁶ Diplomacy was an exclusive world, jealously guarded by its inhabitants. The urge to restrict this environment to socially acceptable candidates was illustrated shortly before the Second World War began, when a Departmental Committee was set up to discuss the amalgamation of the Diplomatic Service and Consular Service. The latter had always been known informally as ‘The Cinderella Service’ owing to its less splendid aspects and there were many meticulously observed differences: for example, diplomats were entitled to gold stitching on their official uniforms, where consuls had to make do with silver thread. Members of the Diplomatic Service vigorously opposed the suggested merger: in a private letter to the Permanent Under Secretary, Sir Alexander Cadogan, in January 1939, diplomat Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen made the sentiments of the Diplomatic Service towards the Consular Service and, by extension, the amalgamation of the two Services, clear:

Though we should be far from suggesting that personality, ‘address’, and savoir-faire are not of great importance in the Consular Service it is in the Diplomatic Service that these rather intangible qualities are most essential. A diplomatic officer must be prepared on all occasions to represent the most representative orders of his own countrymen. He must be able to deal as an equal with foreign colleagues, Cabinet Ministers, Prime Ministers and Heads of State; to hold his own with Sovereigns and other royalties and to fraternise with the governing class in no matter what country … there is a danger that the Service may suffer by the admission of candidates who lack the qualities which we have tried to describe.⁷

In this letter we also see that Knatchbull-Hugessen emphasised the importance of the diplomatic wife as ‘Chefesse’, observing that:

In many posts the part played by the wife is fully as important as that of the husband, and in all an immense influence for or against British prestige is exercised by the wife … We feel that in selecting officers for service abroad, whether in an amalgamated service or not, great attention should be paid to this consideration.

Lower class diplomats would presumably be married to lower class wives. Knatchbull-Hugessen was anxious to stress that the arguments given in his letter were unsuitable for inclusion in an official report; ‘difficult and delicate’ is the way that he put it. This was an early illustration of the ambiguity that surrounded the role of Diplomatic Service dependents, and wives in particular, during the twentieth century. According to the official Foreign Office administration, dependents were not important and yet the ‘intangible qualities’ that they possessed were of the utmost importance, and the lack of them precluded advancement within the service.

The 1943 report was dedicated to reforming these kinds of distinctions and the attitudes that upheld them within the Foreign Service. Its initial proposals criticised the Diplomatic Service, appearing to provide a direct response to the points made by Knatchbull-Hugessen: ‘the view has been expressed that it has been recruited from too small a circle, that it tends to represent the interests of certain sections of the nation, than those of the country as a whole …’⁸ However, a wartime recruitment freeze meant that ‘The new system of recruitment and training … will not … be felt for some years after its introduction’.⁹ For the moment, then, during the immediate post-war period, diplomats and their families continued to enjoy the ‘uniquely genteel tone’ that membership of the Diplomatic Service bestowed.¹⁰

Both the sender and recipient of the letter that discouraged amalgamation within the Foreign Office, Knatchbull-Hugessen and Cadogan, were firmly rooted in the British upper class. The former came from a long line of baronets, while the latter was son of the 5th Earl of Cadogan. Similarly, other Diplomatic Service families in this period were already well-known figures in British high society. Duff Cooper, first British ambassador to Paris after the German occupation, was married to the celebrated aristocratic beauty Diana Cooper (born Diana Manners, daughter of the Duke of Rutland), who was thought to have been the model for Lady Leone, the beautiful wife of the outgoing ambassador in Nancy Mitford’s novel Don’t Tell Alfred, based in the British Embassy in Paris. Edward Wood, Lord Halifax, ‘a quintessential grandee’, was another aristocratic figure who typified the glamorous image of the mid-twentieth century Foreign Office. Halifax was described as a ‘calm, rational man of immense personal prestige and gravitas …’¹¹ In a career that effectively traversed the divide between the institutions of empire and diplomacy, he was Viceroy of India between 1926 and 1931, served as Foreign Secretary from 1938 to 1940 and then took on the role of British Ambassador to the United States during World War Two. Grand as he was, Halifax enjoyed his large and visible family which ‘lent the [Viceregal] Court a relaxed atmosphere’. His choice of spouse was, according to his biographer, crucial to his success in these varied posts: ‘Lady Dorothy fulfilled a vital role in complementing her husband’s image of a sound family man who could be trusted to do the decent thing.’¹² The establishment position of figures like Halifax and Lord Curzon, a similarly patrician figure twenty-two years Halifax’s senior, who also held the offices of Viceroy and Foreign Secretary, no doubt contributed to the incorrect but widely held perception that imperial administration – especially that of India – and diplomacy were interchangeable. (Although there were many similarities: the Foreign Office shared a building with the India and Colonial Offices and many well-known diplomats of the l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. 1945–1958: Diplomatic Service society after the Second World War
• 2. 1958–1971
• 3. 1972–1985
• 4. 1985–1990
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Index