Daughters of Britannia: The Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives

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.’