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

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СКАЧАТЬ traditional diplomatic wives, of upper-class if not aristocratic upbringing themselves, this social know-how was an essential tool of the trade. Marcus Cheke’s handbook, which by today’s standards makes hilarious reading, was thoroughly approved of by the ‘old school’ because it showed the new recruits, both men and their wives, how to conduct ‘those social relationships which it is [their] duty to cultivate’.¹¹ It was the wives, however, who came in for Marie-Noele’s most withering disapproval:

      They seemed to have little social sense and could not understand the idea of representation. Although, unlike an earlier generation, their husbands were given ample allowances for this very purpose, their ladies seemed to have exactly the same outlook as if the husbands were working in offices in London and their homes were in suburbia. If they spent their allowances, it was on the cosy job of entertaining each other, or members of the colony; if and when they were forced into wider society, they tended to huddle together in the corner until they could slip away.

      The word ‘duty’, so unfashionable today, was all too familiar to diplomatic women of my mother’s generation. By the beginning of the 1960s the code of behaviour which had been gradually gathering force over the previous twenty years was finally given a formal mouthpiece with the foundation of the Foreign Service Wives’ Association.^* One of the association’s first newsletters reprinted a speech given by Lady Kirkpatrick, wife of the Permanent Under-Secretary of State Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, in November 1960. The talk, entitled in a suitably no-nonsense way ‘Serving Abroad’, gave formal expression, perhaps for the first time, to the role of the ‘new wife’:

      Our lives have to be dedicated. The work of the Foreign Service does not begin and end between office hours, its family life is often disrupted and it has to observe a degree of self-discipline and sacrifice unknown in most other callings … I have chosen the title Serving Abroad because service is the key note: and if we realise that the Service is more important than we are, we shall do our work abroad properly.

      The submersion of women not only into the individual sphere of their husbands’ lives abroad, but into the wider embrace of the service itself, was complete.

      The time and energy freely given by wives like Mrs Blanckley in Algiers had become a duty which was expected, even demanded, of all diplomatic women. According to Lady Kirkpatrick, the duty of the Foreign Office wife was, principally,

      to make a comfortable centre where you can return hospitality and enable your husband to invite and talk to the people of the country in an informal way. To do this properly means work, and 90% of the work involved revolves on you. It would be fairer if all or most of the entertainment allowance were paid direct into your account. But we live in an unjust world, and there would be a collapse if everyone went on strike until they got justice.

      In this rarefied world receptions and cocktail parties were ‘a cross which had to be borne’,¹²

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