British Consuls in Russia

Abstract

The British consular services became the target for a good deal of public criticism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.¹ This was particularly true in the case of the ‘wretched and despised’ General Service, whose members staffed consular posts throughout Europe and America. When the Board of Trade set up a committee in 1898 to examine the ‘Dissemination of Commercial Information’, a number of the witnesses who submitted evidence were extremely harsh about the poor calibre of consular officials. One witness from the Sheffield Chamber of Commerce spoke for many of his colleagues when he observed that ‘it wants to be drilled in the Consuls that they must become trained experts and cover their ground’. Members of the Wakefield Chamber of Commerce were adamant that ‘Consuls should in all cases be commercial and practical businessmen, and well up in commercial education and knowledge’, while their counterparts in Birmingham agreed that ‘All Consuls should have some commercial experience’.² The prevailing view was that no amount of tinkering with regulations could improve the quality of commercial information unless there was a radical shake-up in the personnel who manned consular posts abroad.