This edition does not include illustrations.An authoritative and entertaining account by one of our most talented writers of the courageous and unusual women who have been the backbone of the British Empire and foreign service.‘English ambassadresses are usually on the dotty side and leaving their embassies drives them completely off their rockers’ – Nancy MitfordFrom the first exploratory expeditions into foreign lands, through the heyday of the British Empire and still today, the foreign service has been shaped and run behind the scenes by the wives of ambassadors and minor civil servants. Accompanying their spouses in the most extraordinary, tough, sometimes terrifying circumstances, they have struggled to bring their civilization with them. Their stories – from ambassadresses downwards – never before told, are a feast of eccentricity, genuine hardship and genuine heroism, and make for a hilarious, compelling and fascinating book.
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Katie Hickman. Daughters of Britannia: The Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives
KATIE HICKMAN. Daughters of Britannia
Dedication
Contents
A List of the Principal Women in the Book and the Primary Places Where They Served
Introduction
Prologue
1 Getting There
2 The Posting
3 Partners
4 Private Life
5 Embassy Life
6 Ambassadresses
7 Public Life
8 Social Life
9 Hardships
10 Children
11 Dangers
12 Rebel Wives
13 Contemporary Wives
Plates
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Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
About the Author
Author’s Note
Notes. Prologue
Introduction
Chapter One: Getting There
Chapter Two: The Posting
Chapter Three: Partners
Chapter Four: Private Life
Chapter Five: Embassy Life
Chapter Six: Ambassadresses
Chapter Seven: Public Life
Chapter Eight: Social Life
Chapter Nine: Hardships
Chapter Ten: Children
Chapter Eleven: Dangers
Chapter Twelve: Rebel Wives
Chapter Thirteen: Contemporary Wives
Also by the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
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The Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives
Title Page
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I discovered then that not one of the various intelligent people I had spoken with in England had been able to tell me anything about Persia at all, the truth being, I suppose, that different persons observe different things, and attribute to them a different degree of importance. Such a diversity of information I should not have resented; but here I was obliged to recognise that they had told me simply nothing. No one, for instance, had mentioned the beauty of the country, though they had dwelt at length, and with much exaggeration, on the discomforts of the way.
The land once roamed by the armies of Alexander and Darius had, to Vita’s romantic imagination, a kind of historical glamour that its contemporary inhabitants never quite equalled. It was ‘a savage, desolating country’, but one that filled her with extraordinary elation. ‘I had never seen anything that pleased me so well as these Persian uplands, with their enormous views, clear light, and rocky grandeur. This was, in detail, in actuality, the region labelled “Persia” on the maps.’ With the warm body of her dog pressed against her, and the pungent smell of sheepskin in her nostrils, Vita sat beside her chauffeur in the front seat of the motor car with her eyes fixed in rapt attention on the unfolding horizon. ‘This question of horizon,’ she wrote musingly later, ‘how important it is; how it alters the shape of the mind; how it expresses, essentially, one’s ultimate sense of a country! That is what can never be told in words: the exact size, proportion, contour; the new standard to which the mind must adjust itself.’13
