Daughters of Britannia: The Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives - Katie Hickman

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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’.8 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’.9

      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.’10

      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.

      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.11

      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.12

      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.13

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