Daughters of Britannia: The Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives

(#ulink_66e4d817-d895-52dc-a03e-24cae242243f) would surely have been half-crippled by the tiny shoes, barely covering half the foot, with a small heel three inches high in the middle of the sole.

Unlike so many of her successors – and predecessors – in postings in which the seclusion of women was practised, Mary was as much a victim of her own prejudices as the local customs. In her view the acquaintance of only a very few of the Tehran ladies was considered desirable at all; none of them were Persians. The Russian mission, she complained, was too far away for her to be able to cultivate the friendship of ‘Princess D’ and her ‘aimiable daughter’, while the remaining female society was limited to just one or two other ladies, the wives of foreign officers in the Shah’s service. Tehran, she wrote rather plaintively, was ‘one of the most frightful places in the world’ and her life there resembled that of a nun. Although on several occasions she did go to visit the Shah’s mother in the palace harem, it does not seem to have occurred to her that such women might have been seen as equals rather than as exotic curiosities.

Later on, when Mary had learnt Persian and was in a better position to form an opinion, she conceded that the Persian women were both lively and intelligent. ‘They are restless and intriguing, and may be said to manage their husband’s and son’s affairs. Persian men are made to yield to their wishes by force of incessant talking and teazing,’ she noted, a frisson of disapproval in her voice. The Shah’s mother in particular – ‘very handsome, and did not look above 30 but must be 40’ – was very clever: not only was she in complete charge of the harem itself; it was also said that she played a large part in the affairs of government.

The Khanum (the Lady), as she was known, received Mary kindly. She said ‘a great many aimiable things to me and went through all the usual Persian compliments, hoping that my heart had not grown narrow and that my nose was fat.’ Mary was entertained lavishly, and the Khanum asked her many questions about Queen Victoria: how she dressed and how many sons she had. She even made her describe the ceremonial of a Drawing Room, and a visit to the theatre. And yet despite these overtures, ‘various circumstances render it undesirable to form an intimacy with the inmates of any Persian anderoon,’ Mary wrote primly. ‘If it were only on account of the language they are said to be in the habit of using in familiar intercourse among themselves, no European woman would find any enjoyment in their society.’

This memsahib-like prudery condemned Mary to a life of splendid isolation. At first she was amused by the way in which her escort seized any men who came too close to her and pushed their faces up against the wall until she had passed lest she should be ‘profaned’ by their glance. But once established at the mission Mary was allowed nowhere, not even for a drive, without an escort of fifteen or twenty armed horsemen. This was not so much for security, for Persia was a safe country, ‘but that dignity so required’.

Since she could take no part in her husband’s public life, almost her only pleasures were her pets, letters from home, which arrived just once a month, and her garden. At first she found the garden a melancholy place, full of lugubrious cypresses, in which ‘the deserted, neglected little tombs of some of the children of former ministers occupied a prominent place’, filling her with gloomy forebodings. But with the help of a Mr Burton, a first-rate English gardener who at that time was in the service of the Shah, she was soon astonishing everyone with the beauty of her celery and her cauliflowers, ‘for these useful edibles occupied my mind more than flowers.’

(#litres_trial_promo) To be thrown back on her own resources in this way, albeit in the humble cultivation of a vegetable patch, was to prove an invaluable training for the real hardships that she was later to face.

In the mid-nineteenth century there was nothing, and no one, to tell Mary Sheil what living in Persia was going to be like. While various forms of military and diplomatic intelligence existed for the use of Colonel Sheil and his colleagues, the female, domestic sphere was never considered important enough to merit attention. As a woman, and as a European, Mary was doubly isolated.

Present-day Foreign Office wives (and now of course Foreign Office husbands as well) may consult a well-developed system of post reports to tell them exactly what to expect when they arrive in a new country, from schools for their children to whether or not Marmite can be bought in Azerbaijan (it can’t). But knowing the theory, of course, does not necessarily make the practice any easier.

Sometimes even the most basic physical conditions, such as the weather, can be the most daunting. Extremes of heat and cold (-45°C in the harshest Mongolian winters; +45°C in the hottest central Asian summers), of humidity or altitude, are only partly alleviated by modern central heating and air-conditioning. Although most diplomatic women are willing to adapt to a different geography, a different culture, even a different political system, they are often ill-equipped to meet the challenge. Learning the language, as Mary Sheil did in Persia, is vital, but sometimes even the most brilliant linguists find it unexpectedly tough. ‘Why do grammars only teach one such phrases as “Simply through the courage of the champion’s sword”,’ lamented Vita Sackville-West, ‘when what one wants to say is “Bring another lamp”?’

(#litres_trial_promo) Jane Ewart-Biggs was able to learn quite fluent Flemish in Brussels, but even she was stumped when she had to introduce Baron Regnier de Wykerslooth de Rooyesteyn to the Comte de Crombrugghe de Picquendaele.

The very first impressions of a new posting are the most vivid. These fleeting insights can set the tone, all too brutally sometimes, for the next two or three years to come. Jane Ewart-Biggs arrived in Algeria with her two-month-old baby, Henrietta, in her arms, in 1961, at the height of the country’s savage war of independence against the French. The first thing she saw on her journey from the airport was a man leaning out of a stationary car. It was only when she was past the car that she realized that the man’s strange position, spreadeagled out of the window, could only have meant one thing: he was dead. ‘I had never seen anyone dead before,’ she commented faintly.

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Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was both refreshed and exhilarated by her first impressions: ‘Hitherto all I see is so new to me it is like a fresh scene of an opera every day,’ she wrote enthusiastically on first arriving in Turkey.

(#litres_trial_promo) For others, such as Ella Sykes out in the wilds of Turkistan, part of the lure of the ‘Back of Beyond’ was simply the physical freedom from starchy drawing-room conventions.

There were other wives, however, for whom first impressions were not quite so liberating. When my mother finally arrived in Wellington, after six weeks on the high seas, she vividly expressed in her first letters home her own sense of dislocation at the strangeness of it all, tinged with a faint disappointment.

Dear Mummy and Daddy [she wrote a few days after her arrival in July], We arrived in Cooks Strait in lovely weather and docked at Wellington in bright sunshine and no wind. It was both exciting and sad. Firstly it was horrid having no family among the cheering crowds at the quayside, and secondly it was exciting to see this wonderful harbour. The Second Secretary and Chief Clerk were on the quayside, looking most English and conspicuous by the very fact that they didn’t look excited and weren’t waving to anyone … The town of Wellington has little to offer. It seems rather provincial, unfinished, and a cross between Montreal and some deep southern hick town. All the shopping streets have covered-in ways, with their signs flapping horizontally at you as you walk along, and it would never surprise me to see a posse come riding into town. One feels it should have saloon bars with swing doors.

When her husband was posted to Benghazi, in Libya, Felicity Wakefield was daunted not only by the conditions under which she was expected to live, but also by an acute sense of the life she was leaving behind.

I had just had two years living in our beautiful house in South Kensington. It was like a railway station because there were people in and out all the time, and we were having rather a good time living there. And the children were all there, and all one’s friends were readily available. Life was very easy and very pleasant, and then suddenly one’s taken out of that and put in a new place where you know nobody. And the physical things were very difficult. The lights were on sometimes, and often not on. The climate in some ways was idyllic, but then you got these terrible winds off the desert. The water in the tap tasted brackish. It was very salt. You could drink it, there wasn’t anything else to drink at that stage. Eventually we got organised, and used to fetch water in an enormous tank down from the mountains, but everything tasted revolting because it was cooked with salty water – including the coffee for breakfast. The Libyans were unfriendly; if you invited them, they wouldn’t come. In the end we learnt how they did things, and learned to love them. But my initial impressions were … I was horrified.

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.’

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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.’

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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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

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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.’

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 …’

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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.