Abstract
The diplomatic career of William James ‘Jack’ Garnett was relatively unusual in the number of his postings. Besides brief periods spent in the Parliamentary and Contraband Departments of the wartime Foreign Office, between 1902 and 1919, he served successively in Constantinople, Peking, Bucharest, St Petersburg, Tehran, Sofia, Athens, Tangier and Buenos Aires. He thus lived and worked in four of the world’s continents at a time when the tectonics of international affairs shifted significantly. He was at the Foreign Office when the strains of war placed unprecedented demands on it, and his career as a whole spanned a period in which it, as well as the Diplomatic and Consular Services, underwent reform on several occasions. Garnett’s nomination as an unpaid attaché in the Diplomatic Service was confirmed just as Britain signed an alliance with Japan, thus ending decades of relative diplomatic isolation. The period of his diplomatic career was one in which German military and naval power increased substantively and its ambitions erupted in August 1914. It was a period in which the old empires of Europe, including the Ottoman Empire, with its expansive Asiatic dominions, as well as the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires, dissolved. Then, too, nascent Chinese and Japanese imperialism took shape, and both those powers joined Russia in seeking greater influence in Central and East Asia.
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See, for example, B. J. C. McKercher, Esme Howard: a Diplomatic Biography (Cambridge, CUP, 1989);
K. Hamilton, Bertie of Thame: Edwardian Ambassador (Woodbridge, Suffolk, The Royal Historical Society/The Boydell Press, 1990);
D. Gillies, Radical Diplomat: the Life of Archibald Clark Kerr, Lord Inverchapel, 1882–1951 (London, Tauris, 1999);
G. J. Protheroe, Searching for Security in a New Europe: the Diplomatic Career of Sir George Russell Clerk (London, Routledge, 2006);
G. R. Berridge, Gerald Fitzmaurice (1865–1939) Chief Dragoman of the British Embassy in Turkey (Leiden/Boston, Martinus Nijhoff, 2007).
Sir Frederick Ponsonby considered Lady Feo, wife of Sir Francis Bertie, ambassador at Paris (1905–18), to be ‘quite impossible as Ambassadress’; Hamilton, Bertie of Thame, p. 10. So, too, the ‘unpresentable’ wife was a means of maintaining the integrity of the diplomatic elite, when amalgamation of the diplomatic and consular services was proposed. Z. Steiner, ‘Elitism and Foreign Policy: The Foreign Office Before the Great War’, in B. J. C. McKercher and C. J. Lowe (eds), Shadow and Substance in British Foreign Policy 1895–1939 (Edmonton, The University of Alberta Press, 1984), p. 34.
Sir William Wiseman to Eric Drummond, quoted in K. Burke, Britain, America and the Sinews of War 1914–1918 (London, Allen and Unwin, 1985), p. 185.
W. J. Glenny, ‘The Trade Commissioner and Commercial Diplomatic Services’, JPA, 2, 3 (1924), 282–7.
See, generally, D. C. M. Platt, Finance, Trade and Politics in British Foreign Policy, 1815–1914 (Oxford, Clarendon, 1968).
H. M. Grove to Garnett, 29 Nov. 1909, DDQ 9/21/2. In fact, Sir Arthur Nicolson, then ambassador at St Petersburg, had also blocked the idea; Nicolson to Grey, 15 Mar. 1909, FO 369/239/6195/11815. Some efforts had been made to improve commercial openings, though with mixed success: K. Neilson, Britain and the Last Tsar: British Policy and Russia, 1894–1917 (Oxford, Clarendon, 1995), pp. 105–6.
M. Hughes, Diplomacy before the Russian Revolution: Britain, Russia and the Old Diplomacy, 1894–1917 (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 2000), pp. 107–8.
David Kelly, on the other hand, who shared Garnett’s despair at the Treasury’s penny-pinching attitude regarding consular appointments, ‘found it utterly impossible to take an interest in anything I was doing’, when attached to the Consular Department of the Foreign Office in 1921. Sir D. Kelly, The Ruling Few or The Human Background to Diplomacy (London, Hollis and Carter, 1952), pp. 137, 139. Regarding dissatisfaction in the Levant Service before 1914,
see G. Berridge, British Diplomacy in Turkey, 1583 to the Present: A Study in the Evolution of the Resident Embassy (Leiden/Boston, Martinus Nijhoff, 2009), pp. 93–7.
The Swedes were frequently held responsible, as they were for transshipping to Germany. See, Marsden, ‘The Blockade’, in F. H. Hinsley (ed.), British Foreign Policy Under Sir Edward Grey (London, Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 497–9, 507–10. In the case of Argentina, the Italians were also blamed.
See M. C. Siney, ‘The Allied Blockade Committee and the Inter-Allied Trade Committees: the Machinery of Economic Warfare, 1917–1918’, in K. Bourne and D. C. Watt (eds), Studies in International History (London, Longmans, 1967), pp. 330–44.
R. A. Jones, The British Diplomatic Service, 1815–1914 (Gerrards Cross, Colin Smythe, 1983), pp. 196–7.
The argument has been made that the Foreign Office considered senior appointments carefully; T. G. Otte, ‘“Not Proficient in Table-Thumping”: Sir Ernest Satow at Peking, 1900–1906’, D&S, 13, 2(2002), 191.
See, for example, C. Gandy, ‘Fez and Frock-Coat: A Very English Consul in Ottoman Turkey’, AA, 15, 1 (1984), 68.
S. Jenkins and A. Sloman, With Respect Ambassador, An Inquiry into the Foreign Office (London, BBC, 1985), pp. 33–4.
See J. Fisher, ‘Keeping “the Old Flag Flying”: The British community in Morocco and the British Morocco Merchants Association, 1914–24’, HR, 83, 222 (2010), 719–46.
R. C. Newton, German Buenos Aires: 1900–1933: Social Change and Cultural Crisis (Austin/London, University of Texas Press, 1977), pp. 28–31.
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Fisher, J. (2012). Introduction. In: British Diplomacy and the Descent into Chaos. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230359819_1
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