Aficionados of Victorian crime literature may recall one of Sherlock Holmes's cases, originally published in 1893, that revolved around a secret government document missing from the Foreign Office. The suspicions of the Scotland Yard's finest fell on the commissionaire, a former Guardsman who had fallen asleep in his little booth at the entrance to the Foreign Office, and then on his wife, “a bad lot” who worked as a charwoman in the building to supplement the family's precarious finances, before Holmes revealed the real thief of the secret Anglo-Italian naval treaty (Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Naval Treaty,” Strand Magazine, October-November [1893]: <page range>, at 422). Whatever may have inspired Arthur Conan Doyle to write this story, it was no mere flight of a novelist's fancy. As Keith Hamilton shows in his excellent Servants of Diplomacy: A Domestic History of the Victorian Foreign Office, the nineteenth-century Foreign Office was no stranger to cases of larceny, and its inner workings were interspersed with episodes of “indolence, insolence and intoxication” (11), especially, one might add, the latter.
Various historians, including Hamilton himself, have charted the development of the Foreign Office from a motley crew of clerks to the later nineteenth- and twentieth-century hub of foreign-policy making. In Servants of Diplomacy, Hamilton offers an altogether different take on that story. It is a domestic history of the department, a social history from the bottom upt. Other historians may occasionally have troubled themselves with the decorative and representative aspects of the diplomatic profession and its activities. Hamilton's concern is with the non-diplomatic or non-political staff, mostly below stairs, who kept the wheels of official foreign policy turning and who pushed the Ferrero Rocher sweets around at official receptions.
Until its move into Gilbert Scott's neo-Venetian palazzo in 1861, the Foreign Office was housed in dilapidated, jerry-built Georgian buildings at the end of the Downing cul-de-sac, with malodorous kitchens, malfunctioning lifts, sagging walls, problematic sewers, and disease-ridden basement rooms. Discipline was often lax—one office keeper was arraigned before Lord Palmerston in 1832 for having “behaved saucily” toward one of the great man's private secretaries (22).The attitude toward security was no better. There were fires, and the building was often left unlocked. Nor did things necessarily improve following the move to the new building. Lifts malfunctioned—office messengers fell to their deaths—and the building was plagued by unsavory odors of uncertain provenance. There had been cases of theft and embezzlement in the old department; there were similar instances in the new; and not always was the culprit brought to justice. Indeed, one begins to see what may have given Willoughby Maycock, superintending clerk of the Foreign Office's Treaty Department from 1903 to 1913, the idea for his compendium Celebrated Crimes and Criminals (1890). There seemed to be plenty of both in his own ministry.
Servants of Diplomacy is told in elegant and lively prose, with an unfailingly felicitous turn of phrase, and always crisp and precise. Hamilton has an eye for the telling detail that often amuses and always illuminates. But he also has a serious analytical purpose behind his book, though Hamilton wears his learning lightly. His principal focus is on the unsung heroes of the Foreign Office, the librarians, who archived and indexed the department's voluminous correspondence and made it available when needed, and the Greyhounds, the official messengers who braved wind, weather, and wars to deliver dispatches to and from the Foreign Office in the days before the advent of the telegraph wire. The story of generations of Hertslets, from Lewis Hertzlett, a Swiss-born king's messenger who committed suicide in 1802, to the great Sir Edward Hertslet and his sons, who made the Foreign Office library their family's fiefdom until the end of the century, is a fascinating one. It is more than that, however, for through it Hamilton offers a vital, in-depth insight into the operations of the Foreign Office as a policy-relevant and knowledge-producing and knowledge-consuming department. In many ways, the library was the “pivot” of foreign policy, as Lord Granville observed in the 1870s and Sir Eyre Crowe reminded his superiors in 1905 (219). No less interesting, and vital to the functioning of the Foreign Office, were the women who worked there long before the profession admitted females. The careers of formidable Mary Langcake, the head housekeeper in charge of a small army of maids, cooks, and chars, and the equally redoubtable Sophia Fulcher, who ran the typists, offer an excellent glimpse into the social history of a section of women in the Victorian metropolis.
This is a book of great erudition, and one that entertains. That is a rare enough combination. Few would attempt it; fewer still could hope to accomplish it. Hamilton has done so. In writing Servants of Diplomacy, he has done a great service to others working in the burgeoning field of diplomatic and international history. He has taken it in a new direction, using innovative ideas, but without losing sight of the wider context. This is no pointillist piece of récherché writing, genuflecting before the latest etiolated fad, but one that speaks to bigger concerns and one that is grounded in meticulous archival research. There is no other work of this kind. In the otherwise overlabored phrase, this book really does break new ground. It will quickly become known as the go-to work on the subject. Scholars working in cognate areas of nineteenth-century social history will find much stimulating material and analysis in this book. It will be of interest also to anyone interested in nineteenth- and twentieth-century international history.
Servants of Diplomacy is to be highly recommended. The same, alas, cannot be said of the exorbitant price that the publishers think they can demand for it. Insolence, it seems, is not confined to the dregs of Victorian society.
