Daughters of Britannia: The Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives

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.’