Servants of Diplomacy

A Domestic History of the Victorian Foreign Office

Keith Hamilton

• Éditeur: Bloomsbury Academic
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350159174
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Storia
• Sous-sujet: Storia mondiale

Servants of Diplomacy offers a bottom-up history of the 19th-century Foreign Office and in doing so, provides a ground-breaking study of modern British diplomacy. Whilst current literature focuses on the higher echelons of the Office, Keith Hamilton sheds a new light on the administrative and social history of Whitehall which have, until now, been largely ignored. Hamilton's examination of the roles and actions of the Foreign Office's domestic staff is exhaustive, with close attention paid to: the keepers of the office, keepers of the papers, the carriers of the papers and the efforts made to adapt to growing technological changes. Hamilton's exhaustive analysis also focuses on the reforms of 1905-06 and the Queen's Messengers during wartime.
Drawing extensively from Foreign Office and Treasury archives and private manuscript collections, this is essential reading for anyone with an interest of British diplomatic history.

1

Keepers of the Office

Accommodation and domestic staff, 1782–1868

[T]he buildings now occupied by the Foreign Office and the Colonial Office . . . are inadequate to the present extent of public business, in parts unsafe, and generally in such a state of dilapidation as to render it inexpedient to expend any large sum in their substantial repair.

Report from the Select Committee on the Public Offices (Downing Street), 29 July 1839¹

[T]he office-keepers are absolutely worn out . . . from the straggling state of the office they cannot perform their labour, from the immense length from one end of the office to the other.

Thomas Bidwell Jr., chief clerk, 11 July 1839²

The early Victorian Foreign Office occupied a less than stately edifice. Following its relocation in December 1793 to Lord Sheffield’s former home on the south side of Downing Street, other neighbouring properties were leased and later purchased from Sir Samuel Fludyer, a wealthy merchant. Then in 1825 the government bought, initially with the object of providing an official residence for the foreign secretary, an adjoining mansion from a shipowner and marine insurance broker, Sir Robert ‘Floating Bob’ Preston.³ It, along with houses accommodating the Colonial Office, formed part of a small square closing off the western end of Downing Street.⁴ Soon after this addition, the architect Sir John Soane was engaged to oversee necessary structural changes and the construction of a new ground-floor façade, including the replacement of external gas lamps originally fitted in 1817. The building contained some fine rooms: one overlooking St James’s Park in which formal dinners and receptions were hosted and a first-floor salon which until 1856 was used regularly for Cabinet meetings. But there was no disguising the fact that the Office was made up of what had once been six private residences, thrown together and crammed between Downing and Fludyer Streets in a ‘nest of squalid slums’.⁵ Party walls were knocked through and gloomy chambers were linked by labyrinthine passageways and winding staircases. As one veteran diplomat recalled, it was ‘a thorough picture of disorder, penury and meanness’.⁶ It was also a building subject to subsidence and decay. The houses, the oldest of which dated from the late seventeenth century, had been built on piles sunk into marshy ground alongside what a government surveyor termed an ‘ancient sewer’. As a result, properties at the eastern extremity of Downing and Fludyer Streets, a dirty public house, the Rose and Crown and a row of third-rate lodging houses used chiefly by Irish and Scottish MPs, were so near collapse that in 1839 they were demolished and the Office’s exposed brickwork shored up with unsightly timber supports.⁷ The weight of reference books and ever-accumulating volumes of bound despatches and memoranda only added to the problem. Moreover, the Office’s commitment to the circulation of selections of its own and other government correspondence in the form of parliamentary papers and what from 1827 became known as the Confidential Print, plus the desire of foreign secretaries to weed out more easily from any subsequent publication such material as might be considered ‘prejudicial to the public service’, required the in-house employment of a firm of printers, Thomas Harrison and his sons. The vibrations of their presses, installed until the early 1840s in one of the upper storeys, placed a further strain upon the frail fabric of the rickety establishment.⁸

Residents

The sad state of the building was a great inconvenience for those employed there. Surprisingly, Thomas Bidwell Jr., a chief clerk whose management of the Office’s accounts left much to be desired, told a parliamentary select committee in July 1839 that he did not reckon it an impediment to business.⁹ Walls cracked, while floors sank, doors jammed and ceilings bowed. Wooden presses cluttered corridors, and rooms intended for clerical endeavour served as thoroughfares along which officekeepers scurried, conveying correspondence, attending to the needs of visiting diplomats and Cabinet ministers, and answering the bells of distant senior staff.¹⁰ Nevertheless, for the undersecretaries and most of the clerks, Downing Street was solely a place of work where they rarely gathered before late mo rning or midday. For others, it was a home or temporary residence. These included two foreign secretaries, George Canning and his successor, Lord Dudley. The former had no central London home of his own and, having found Preston’s house inadequate for his needs, in July 1825 he appropriated for himself and his family eight large rooms, along with basements and attics, in what had been the Foreign Office’s principal building. Their previous occupants, including the chief clerk, the librarian and the printer, were then forced to take refuge in two less than commodious properties which the Office rented on Fludyer Street. By contrast, Dudley was in no need of an official residence and only in January 1828 did he lodge briefly in the Office. But to the dismay of his officials, he then put his park-side apartments at the disposal of his friend, the war and colonial secretary, William Huskisson.¹¹

The same rooms thereafter reverted to clerical use, for as another foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, noted in May 1836, there would otherwise have been ‘insufficient space for the transaction of public business’.¹² Palmerston was, however, of the opinion that the Office should have reception rooms capable of taking nearly fifty guests for dinner parties, and his successors were reluctant to relinquish their right to residence since it implied that there should be space available for the entertainment of the wider diplomatic community.¹³ Meanwhile, the resident clerks, younger men of the establishment who were responsible for opening mail received outside office hours, were accorded bedrooms and a sitting room on the second floor. Other more or less permanent residents, mostly the Office’s domestic staff, were allocated what must have been very cramped quarters extending from the attics to the basement. According to records for the years 1830–1, Mary Urquhart, the housekeeper, shared a room with her servant on the second floor along with three additional attic rooms; Conrath Stahl, the first of the by then three officekeepers, and his servant had a sitting room and bedrooms; and John Venfield, the second officekeeper, had an attic ‘sleeping room’. James Talbot, the office porter (sometimes designated office messenger), his assistant and their families and servants had five ‘apartments’ in the basement and six attics; Andrew Gracewood, the doorkeeper (or door porter), his wife and six children had five attics and a kitchen; and James Kingsbury, who since 1817 had been employed as lamplighter and coal porter, his two children and a ‘female assistant’ had two attics and one room in the basement.¹⁴

Domestic staff were usually provided with accommodation when their continuous presence in the Office was considered essential. It was also offered in part payment for their services, and in this respect they were treated in much the same way as servants in any private establishment. The housekeeper or ‘necessary woman’, one of the senior figures in the domestic hierarchy, was thus responsible for the general upkeep of the building and for the servants she herself employed. In a return, probably completed at some point during the 1790s, Ann Cheese, who was housekeeper from 1783 to 1805, listed amongst her services the provision of board and wages for one manservant and three maidservants, as well as the buying of cleaning materials and paper for the Office and the hire of extra assistance (outgoings totalling about £50); and in return she received an annual salary of £100. She was paid separately ‘for pumping water to the printing room and eight water closets & cleaning the cistens [sic]’ (£15 4s.), and further supplemented her income from the sale of ‘old pens and bits of tallow candles’ (£19 10s.) and sums received from the ‘Secretarys [sic] and the rest of the gentlemen in the office’ (£13 17s. 6d.).¹⁵ The position was an attractive one for a single woman and was on at least two occasions filled by women with personal connections to the foreign secretary. Mary Dassonville, who was housekeeper from 1806 to 1814, was a former maidservant of the courtesan and royal mistress, Elizabeth Armistead. Indeed, she was one of the two witnesses to Armistead’s marriage to Charles James Fox in September 1795.¹⁶ It would, therefore, seem no coincidence that it was during Fox’s final brief term as foreign secretary in 1806 that at his direction Dassonville paid Ann Mallet, Cheese’s immediate successor, £350 for relinquishing her appointment.¹⁷ Thirty years later, on Mary Urquhart’s death, Ann Watson, the widow of Palmerston’s gardener on his Broadlands estate in Hampshire, was chosen to fill her place.¹⁸

As in the country’s diplomatic service, so in the Office’s domestic service, the extended family and its ties counted for much. There were servant dynasties in the making. Gracewood, who was doorkeeper from 1815 to 1851 and whose six children were raised in the Office, had previously served for twelve years as valet and butler to the family of Charles William Stewart, a diplomat and younger half-brother of the foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh.¹⁹ Henry Valentine Cocking and James Samways, both of whom were appointed officekeepers during the 1830s, seem likewise to have owed their positions to they or their friends having been in Palmerston’s domestic service.²⁰ In some instances more than one member of a family were thus employed and their duties shared amongst relatives and personal friends. Thomas Talbot was office porter from 1802 to 1825, and his younger brother, James, who was in the Office’s employ from 1795 to 1843, was, prior to succeeding Thomas, understood to be his deputy. Neither was paid a salary, and only the senior of the two could be regarded as directly answerable to the foreign secretary or his subordinates. But they had rooms in the Office and derived their income from the profits made on the hire of coaches for official use and from perquisites, such as those earned from the sale of certain copies of the London Gazette, the government’s official newspaper. They were also aided by Edward Spyer, the son of a deceased deputy porter. He, and at some point, his wife, lodged with the Talbots, and he received between £1 and 30s. a week for his services. When Thomas Talbot retired in October 1825 Talbot’s total emoluments were stated as amounting to £300 per annum, on the basis of which he was awarded an annual pension of £150. Thereafter, Spyer continued to work with James Talbot, and a younger man who had been brought up as a member of the Talbot family provided additional assistance.²¹

In later years, as James Talbot’s health declined, much of the Office’s regular porterage work fell to Spyer and William Greenall, a new recruit to the family enterprise. Gracewood too felt himself in need of extra help. A considerable increase in business and changes in the arrangement of rooms meant that by March 1832 he found his duties ‘multiplying and waring [sic]’. His situation required his constant attendance at the door and, he complained to Palmerston, he was ‘deprived of any comfortable meal with his Family by Day, and of rest by Night; being frequently under the necessity of rising from his bed to attend to the Door’. Backhouse, the permanent undersecretary, was sympathetic to Gracewood’s plight, but reluctant to contemplate hiring a night porter at £25–30 per annum, not least because he felt it undesirable to have yet another person sleeping in the Office. Finally, it was agreed that in return for an additional £14 12s. a year, Kingsbury would share Gracewood’s night duties and stand in for him during his dinner hour. Kingsbury, who, besides being responsible for lighting the Office’s candles, gaslights and oil lamps, had to haul during cold weather each working day by yoke and scuttles approximately half a ton of coal upstairs to fuel some eighty-three fire places, was doubtless pleased at this increase in earnings. His annual salary had previously been £80, and Palmerston thought that with the extra pay he must now ‘have a good Thing of it’.²² He would, however, also be on ca...