Foreign Office

by Anthony Seldon

The book takes us inside the Foreign Secretary's London home, 1 Carlton Gardens, and his country retreats, Dorneywood and Chevening. We hear tales of the life of ambassadors abroad, where the glittering parties and glamorous living quarters of an ambassador to Paris contrast with the accommodation that might be on offer to an ambassador and his entourage in Berlin or Moscow, and we look at the fascinating clandestine methods by which the Foreign Office communicated with its far-flung empire and embassies abroad.
The story of the building is also the story of the struggle between two great architects - George Gilbert Scott, the architect of the Foreign Office itself, and Matthew Digby Wyatt, the architect of the India Office section of the building. Their contrasting styles still define the building today, and are revealed in Kim Sayer's contemporary photographs of the lavish and ornate rooms of the Locarno Suite; the magnificent Grand Staircase with its extraordinary murals; the Foreign Secretary's Room and the beautiful India Office buildings. Along with a wealth of material from the Foreign Office archives, much previously unseen, they combine to make this book both a celebration of the building and its work today and a testament to a time when the Foreign Office was the nerve centre of the world's greatest power.

240 pages, Hardcover

First published November 6, 2000

About the author

Sir Anthony Francis Seldon, FRSA, FRHistS, FKC, is a British educator and contemporary historian. He was the 13th Master (headmaster) of Wellington College, one of Britain's co-educational independent boarding schools. In 2009, he set up The Wellington Academy, the first state school to carry the name of its founding independent school. He was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham from 2015 to 2020. Seldon was knighted in the 2014 Birthday Honours for services to education and modern political history.

Reviews

[Helen Lloyd · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting mix of history, architecture and politics, focused around the buildings and office of the Foreign Office and its people and outposts. It's not Anthony Seldon's fault, and I think it mostly came from me, but I sensed a touch of regret at the loss of the Great British Empire - none of the language used implies this, the book is purely factual, but it's hard to read about this subject and not sense that subtext. Even factually, "Captain X claimed Hong Kong in 1841 and in 1843 it became a British Possession." (I'm paraphrasing as don't have the book to hand but that was the gist) followed by how difficult it was for Patten to hand it back, just has overtones.

I also had a sense, again mostly coming from my hangups, of what a male bastion the Foreign Office is. I knew that of course, but in this book all the women are wives, secretaries or war time telegraph operators, and pictures of women are labelled "Female.. .....). The pictures of men aren't labelled "Male........". There's even reference to the decision to alter employment of a "female secretary".

This is the nature of the subject of course and I don't blame Seldon, although I think he missed a trick but maybe he wasn't setting out to make any statements but just to record the story of a fascinating part of UK history and government and he's done that very well. (There's even a slightly disconnected science bit at the end about communication to keep me happy).