Gill Bennett on the Foreign Office
Peace Makers: Shaping the Modern World: The Men and Women of the Foreign Office in WWII by Peter Ricketts published by Aurum Press
Books that focus on the “human stories” of World War II risk descending into sentimentality and a misleading evocation of Britain’s “spirit of the Blitz”: that is not the case in this refreshing book by Peter Ricketts, the former senior diplomat now active in the House of Lords and as a media commentator on foreign affairs. Not all the stories are new, but the focus on personal experience and domestic detail in Foreign Office life, whether in London or overseas, gives them a new (and often humorous) twist. Peace Makers is a vivid, and rather uplifting demonstration of how people of all kinds, whatever their gender, class or rank, can display not just courage and compassion but amazing creativity in the face of hardship and disaster. As the title of one chapter puts it, FO staff, from the most senior diplomats to those who cleaned the buildings and carried messages, became experts at “Adapting to Survive”.
The war brought about radical change in the Foreign Office, broadening the intake of staff from the traditional elite, and even permitting some women to enter the administrative grades on a temporary basis. Although it would be many years before women achieved full equality, it was, as Ricketts puts it, “the first breach in the dam”. One of the most fascinating chapters, “Persuasion and Propaganda”, tells the story of three notable women, Elizabeth Wiskemann, Freya Stark and Nancy Lambton, exceptional linguists and intrepid travellers involved in political intelligence work in Switzerland (Wiskemann) and the Middle East. Others feature the secretaries who played a critical part in keeping the wartime show on the road, whether in London or travelling. Ricketts was able to interview, in her 100th year, Heather Thomsett (née Auchterlonie), who joined the FO in 1943 as a secretary to Anthony Eden (“a real gentleman”) and travelled with him to the Yalta conference in February 1945; her friend and fellow secretary, Pat Sullivan, travelled on the plane that left first and crashed with no survivors.
The descriptions of life in the wartime FO in London are particularly interesting, enhanced by some wonderful photographs. Although male officers were not subject to conscription, they often volunteered as firefighters or in the special FO Home Guard Unit formed in 1940, where “hierarchy was put aside’. Rising diplomatic stars like “Bob” (later Sir Pierson) Dixon did their square-bashing in St James’s Park alongside junior clerks, while the FO Housekeeper became the Quarter Master Sergeant responsible for supplying the Home Guard with uniforms, weapons and meals before and after exercises. In reality, as Roger Makins (later Lord Sherfield) remarked to Joint Intelligence Committee chairman Victor (‘Bill’) Cavendish-Bentinck (later Duke of Portland), the only people who knew how to shoot were the security guards; diplomats did not know how to use bayonets or fire their rifles. From August 1941, enrolment in firefighting or Home Guard became compulsory, producing an irresistible mental image in a diary entry of 6 November 1941 by Permanent Under-Secretary Sir Alexander Cadogan: “9-10 crawled over the roof with Bill Bentinck and the professional fireman . . . worked after then went to bed in my room.”
While this domestic detail is fascinating, the chapters dealing with life in wartime embassies convey vividly the tedium, as well as drama and danger, of diplomatic life. The British Embassy in Tokyo was locked down for eight months after Pearl Harbour; in Madrid, Ambassador Sir Samuel Hoare intrigued with spies; in Moscow, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr went vodka-for-vodka with Stalin. But to me the standout hero is the British minister to the Vatican, the wonderfully-named Sir Francis D’Arcy Godolphin Osborne, who despite being interned from June 1940—with his cairn terrier Jeremy, “the first non-Catholic dog to reside in the Vatican City”—suspected of being a spy and forbidden to send coded telegrams, contrived to set up an escape network for Allied Prisoners of War and to play an important role in negotiating the armistice between Italy and the Allies after the Fascist regime collapsed in 1943 (Chapter 9).
Peace Makers is not just a collection of good stories, although there are lots of these. The final chapters give a brief account of the early postwar period, including the first meetings of the United Nations and the construction of the Western security architecture, leading up to the establishment of NATO in 1949. Today, as Ricketts says, that architecture appears to be “slipping into history leaving worrying uncertainty about what will replace it”. There are very few people left alive who have any direct experience of world war: for many younger people, even their grandparents are too young to remember World War II. It may be hard, as Ricketts says, for those who have had eighty years of (relative) peace to understand why the post-1945 generation were so desperate to put rules in place that would prevent general conflict ever happening. Reading this book will help.