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

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For Beatrice Hollond,
a diamond amongst friends

Seventeenth Century	Date first went abroad
The Countess of Winchilsea (Constantinople)	1661
Ann Fanshawe (Portugal, Spain)	1662
The Countess of Carlisle (Moscow)	1663
Katharine Trumbull (Paris)	1685
Eighteenth Century
Countess of Stair (Paris)	1715
Mary Wortley Montagu (Constantinople)	1716
Mrs Vigor (St Petersburg)	1730
Miss Tully (Tripoli)	1783
Emma Hamilton (Naples)	1786
Mary Elgin (Constantinople)	1799
Nineteenth Century
Elizabeth Broughton (Algiers)	1806
Elizabeth McNeill (Persia)	1823
Harriet Granville (The Hague, Paris)	1824
Anne Disbrowe (St Petersburg)	1825
Mary Sheil (Persia)	1849
Isabel Burton (Brazil, Damascus)	1861
Mary Fraser (Peking & Japan)	1874
Victoria Sackville (Washington)	1881
Mary Waddington (Moscow)	1883
Catherine Macartney (Kashgar)	1898
Susan Townley (China, Washington)	1898
Twentieth Century
Ella Sykes (Kashgar)	1915
Vita Sackville-West (Persia)	1926
Marie-Noele Kelly (Brussels, Turkey)	1929
Norah Errock (Iraq)	1930
Iona Wright (Trebizond, Ethiopia, Persia)	1939
Evelyn Jackson (Uruguay)	1939
Pat Gore-Booth (Burma, Delhi)	1940
Diana Cooper (Paris)	1944
Diana Shipton (Kashgar)	1946
Masha Williams (Iraq)	1947
Peggy Trevelyan (Iraq, Moscow)	1948
Maureen Tweedy (Persia, Korea)	1950
Felicity Wakefield (Libya, the Lebanon)	1951
Ann Hibbert (Mongolia, Paris)	1952
Jennifer Hickman (New Zealand, Dublin, Chile)	1959
Jane Ewart-Biggs (Algeria, Paris, Dublin)	1961
Veronica Atkinson (Ecuador, Romania)	1963
Rosa Carless (Persia, Hungary)	1963
Angela Caccia (Bolivia)	1963
Sheila Whitney (China)	1966
Jennifer Duncan (Mozambique, Bolivia)	1970
Catherine Young (Syria)	1970
Annabel Hendry (Black) (Brussels)	1991
Chris Gardiner (Kyiv)	1994
Susie Tucker (Slovakia)	1995

English ambassadresses are usually on the dotty side, and leaving their embassies nearly drives them completely off their rockers. These words, from Nancy Mitfords classic vignette of embassy life Dont Tell Alfred, were like a mantra of my youth. As children, my brothers and I used to chant them to my mother, in those days a British ambassadress herself, in her vaguer moments. Not because she was dotty (well, only occasionally) but because we knew, beyond doubt, that all other ambassadresses were.

From an early age, we were used to the tales of former ambassadresses mad, bad and dangerous to know, they came to form part of our family culture. In New Zealand, my fathers first posting as a young first secretary, there was the delightfully distraite Lady Cumming Bruce. She was far more interested in her painting than in her diplomatic social engagements, which often slipped her mind completely; according to legend, she could regularly be spotted crawling through the residence shrubberies, so as not to be spotted arriving late for her own parties. Dear Mummy and Daddy, my mother wrote to my grandparents just a few months after her arrival in Wellington, Lady Cumming Bruce is very vague and difficult to pin down says shell do something and then doesnt. When Helen went onto their boat to greet them on arrival she suggested to Lady CB that she should perhaps put her hat on before meeting the press. Lady CB opened her hat box inside which instead of a hat, was a childs chamber pot.

During the twenty-eight years that my mother spent as a diplomats wife, she wrote letters home. Today, at my parents house in Wiltshire, in amongst the paper rubbings from the temples at Angkor Wat, the Persian prayer mats and the bowls of shells from the beaches of Connemara the legacy of a lifetimes wanderings there is a carved wooden chest which contains several thousand of them. Once a week with almost religious regularity sometimes more frequently these letters were written at first to my grandparents and my aunt, but then later also to myself and my two brothers when we were sent home to boarding school in England. During the last ten years of her travelling life it was not unusual for her to write half a dozen letters a week, recording all the vicissitudes of diplomatic life.

In these days of instant communications, of faxes and e-mails and mobile telephones, it is hard to describe the extraordinarily intense pleasure of what used, in old fashioned parlance, to be called a correspondence. As a bitterly homesick ten-year-old at boarding school for the first time, I found in my mothers letters an almost totemic significance. The main stairs of my school house wound down through the middle of the building around a central well; in the hall below was a wooden chest on which the post was always laid out. For some reason only the housemistress and the matron were permitted to use these stairs (the rest of us were confined to the more workaday stone stairs at the back of the house), so the trick was to crane over the banisters and try to spot your letters. From two storeys up it was impossible to read your name but, to a practised eye, the form of a certain handwriting, the shape of a certain envelope, its colour or its thickness, were all clues.

Occasionally my mother would use the official embassy writing paper thick sheaves of a creamy sky-blue colour, lavishly embossed with the royal crest but it wasnt really her style. For most of my school days she used the same big pads of plain white airmail paper, slightly crinkly to the touch, bordered in red and blue, which she bought in industrial quantities from an English stationers. Often I would carry her letters around with me in my pocket, unopened, for a whole morning, until I could escape somewhere private in which to savour them. Their fatness, their pleasing weight, their peculiar texture against my fingertips had an almost magical power to soothe. These letters carried news of my family, of course, but perhaps more importantly they described another world, and another way of life. They described another part of myself, in fact, which was as strange to my English friends as the land of the Jabberwock or the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo.

I kept these letters, and many years later they were to be the inspiration for this book. Although I have quoted them here only occasionally, what they have given me is a strong sense not only of the value of the experiences they describe, but also of their fragility. One of my main aims in writing this book is to preserve them, and others like them, lest, like Lady Winchilseas, their stories should drift into oblivion.

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