The internal arrangements and organisation of the Office were in the hands of Lord Sanderson. Many of the clerks lived in terror of him. He was extremely kind to me, although he always told me I should never be a good clerk and would do better to stick to diplomacy. Even on the printed forms we used to fill up, enclosing communications, which we called P.L.’s, and which he used to sign himself, in person, every evening, a clerk standing beside him with a slip of blotting-paper, his minute eye for detail used constantly to discern a slight inaccuracy, either in the mode of address or the terminology. He would then take a scraper and scratch it out and amend it. The signing of all these forms must have used a great deal of his time, and I believe the custom has now been abolished.
In those days all dispatches were kept folded in the Office, an immensely inconvenient practice. All the other public offices kept them flat, but when it was suggested that the Foreign Office papers should be kept flat, there was a storm of opposition. They had been kept folded for a hundred years; the change was unthinkable. Someone suggested a compromise: that they should be half-folded and kept curved, but this was abandoned. Ultimately, I believe, they were allowed to be kept flat.
Later on, the whole work of the Foreign Office was reformed, and the clerks no longer have to spend half the day in doing manual clerical work. In my time it was most exhausting, except in the Commercial Department, which was a haven of gentlemanlike ease. Telegrams had often to be ciphered and deciphered by the clerk, but not often in the Commercial Department. But on one Saturday afternoon I remember having to send off two telegrams, one to Sweden and one to Constantinople, and I sent the Swedish telegram to Constantinople and the Turkish telegram to Sweden, and nothing could be done to remedy the mistake till Monday, as nobody noticed it till it was too late, and the clerks went away on Saturday afternoon. Sending off the bags was always a moment of fuss, anxiety, and strain. Someone nearly always out of excitement used to drop the sealing-wax on the hand of the clerk who was holding the bag, and sometimes the bag used to be sent to the wrong place. One day both Lord Sanderson and Sir Frank Bertie came into one of the departments to make sure the bag should go to the right place. The excess of cooks had a fatal result on the broth, and the bag, which was destined for some not remote spot, was sent to Guatemala by mistake, whence it could not be retrieved for several months.
After Christmas that year I stayed with the Cornishes at the Cloisters at Eton, and we acted a play called Sylvie and Bruno, adapted from Lewis Carroll’s book. The Cornish children and the Ritchies took part in it. I played the part of the Other Professor, and one act was taken up by his giving a lecture. The play was successful, and Donald Tovey wrote some music for it and accompanied the singers at the pianoforte.
In January I was appointed attache to the Embassy at Paris, and I began my career as a diplomat.
CHAPTER X
PARIS
I had rooms at the Embassy, a bedroom above the Chancery, and a little sitting-room on the same floor as the Chancery. The Ambassador was Sir Edmund Monson; the Councillor, Michael Herbert; the head of the Chancery, Reggie Lister. Both of these had rooms to themselves where they worked. The other secretaries worked in the Chancery.
In the morning, the bag used to arrive from the Foreign Office. It used to be fetched from Calais every night, and twice a week a King’s Messenger would bring it. The business of the day began by the bag being opened, and the contents were entered in a register and then sent to the Ambassador. The dispatches were then sent back to the Chancery in red boxes to be dealt with, and were finally folded up and put away in a cupboard. Later on in the day, a box used to come down from the Ambassador with draft dispatches, which were written out by us on typewriters, if we could, or with a pen.