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List of contents
Introduction: An Office of Class and Classification
Part I: Keepers of the Office
1. Residents
2. Pets, Pests and Other Miscreants
3. Riot and Debauchery
Part II: Keepers of the Papers
4. Arranging, Methodizing and Digesting
5. Quite de Jack in Office
6. Much Irregularity
7. The Hardest Working Man in Europe
8. Unhappy Spirit
9. Misnomer’s Heir
Part III: Carriers of the Papers
10. Persons of a Very Subordinate Class
11. A Change in the Class of Persons
12. New Ways for Old
13. Matters of Caprice and Fancy
14. The End of Superintendence
Part IV: Adjusting to the New
15. Servants of the New
16. Theft, Negligence and Security
17. Divisions of Labour
18. Pestilence, Redolence and Sustenance
Part V: Managing the Past
19. Supernumeraries, Supplementals and Pay
20. Archives, Arrears and Registers
21. Publishing the Record
22. After the Hertslets
23. Custody, Research (and Arrears)
Part VI: Delivering the Message
24. Rewarding Gentlemen
25. Here Today but Gone Tomorrow
26. Testing their Worth
27. Going Local, Paying Less
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Keith Hamilton was formerly an historian in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and has written extensively on British diplomacy.
Summary
Servants of Diplomacy offers a bottom-up history of the 19th-century Foreign Office and in doing so, provides a ground-breaking study of modern British diplomacy. Whilst current literature focuses on the higher echelons of the Office, Keith Hamilton sheds a new light on the administrative and social history of Whitehall which have, until now, been largely ignored.
Hamilton’s examination of the roles and actions of the Foreign Office’s domestic staff is exhaustive, with close attention paid to: the keepers of the office, keepers of the papers, the carriers of the papers and the efforts made to adapt to growing technological changes. Hamilton’s exhaustive analysis also focuses on the reforms of 1905-06 and the Queen’s Messengers during wartime.
Drawing extensively from Foreign Office and Treasury archives and private manuscript collections, this is essential reading for anyone with an interest of British diplomatic history.
Foreword
A new perspective on the domestic, library and messenger services of the 19th-century Foreign Office.
Additional text
Writing crisply and with immense authority, Keith Hamilton reveals much that we did not know about ‘downstairs’ at the Victorian Foreign Office and the extent of the aristocratic paternalism it enjoyed. It is an original, absorbing and, at times, entertaining book.
