Daughters of Britannia: The Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives

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