‘The Little Foreign Office of Transport House’, British Foreign Policy and Socialist Internationalism

This is according to Protocol. More briefly ‘Dear Anthony meet me at Geneva. Yrs. Cleopatra’Very few of the figures who held responsibility for the making and direction of British foreign policy in the 1930s did so with much benefit to their subsequent historical reputations. Three of the four men who occupied the post of Foreign Secretary after the General Election of 1931 appeared in the cast list of the ‘Guilty Men’, vilified by the triumvirate of left-wing journalists who wrote under the pseudonym of ‘Cato’ in the dramatic summer of 1940. That vilification has been only partially redeemed by the efforts of later revisionist biographers. Certainly, Sir John Simon, Sir Samuel Hoare and Lord Halifax all left the Foreign Office with their political reputations lower in the public mind than at the time of taking office. The exception to this experience was, of course, the case of Anthony Eden who, at the time of his resignation in February 1938 after more than six years as a member of the National Government, stood, in Churchill's famous words, as the ‘one strong young figure standing up against long, dismal, drawling tides of drift and surrender’. The making of his reputation had begun in the early 1930s when Eden occupied only subordinate office within the administration. Yet an examination of the making of British foreign policy in the years 1931–5 will show that popular perceptions of Eden's position and of an apparently serious rift between him and his departmental superior were somewhat misleading.

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THE LESSONS OF ABADAN AND SUEZ FOR BRITISH FOREIGN POLICYMAKERS IN THE 1960s

The Historical Journal ◽

10.1017/s0018246x06005310 ◽

2006 ◽

Vol 49 (2) ◽

pp. 525-547 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

PETER J. BECK

Keyword(s):

Foreign Policy ◽

Pilot Project ◽

Radical Change ◽

Historical Narrative ◽

Change Of Direction ◽

British Foreign Policy ◽

Foreign Office ◽

The 1960S

Responding positively to the 1957 ‘funding experience’ initiative encouraging Whitehall departments to use history more systematically in their everyday work, the Foreign Office commissioned a pilot project centred upon the 1951 Anglo-Iranian Abadan crisis. The resulting study, completed by Rohan Butler in 1962, included a lengthy section drawing lessons from the historical narrative. During the early 1960s Butler's Abadan history, attracting interest and comment from both ministers and officials, fed into ongoing reviews of British foreign policy and methods stimulated by the 1956 Suez debacle and Britain's initial failure to join the Common Market (1963). Confronting policymakers with the contemporary realities affecting Britain's role in the world, the history prompted serious thinking about the case for a radical change of direction in both foreign policy and methods. Generally speaking, the Foreign Office has made little use of history in the actual policymaking process. From this perspective, this episode, centred upon Butler's Abadan history, offers a useful case study illuminating any appraisal of history's potential as a policy input, most notably concerning the role of historical analogies in the formulation, conduct, and presentation of British foreign policy.

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INTRODUCTION: APPEASEMENT AND ALL SOULS COLLEGE

Camden Fifth Series ◽

10.1017/s096011630400003x ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 24 ◽

pp. 1-19

Keyword(s):

Foreign Policy ◽

Close Association ◽

Nazi Germany ◽

Clearing House ◽

British Foreign Policy ◽

The Social ◽

Foreign Office ◽

The Times

Appeasement and All Souls College, like Neville Chamberlain and Munich, The Times and Geoffrey Dawson, or the Astors and the ‘Cliveden Set’ appear synonymously in any discussion of British foreign policy in the 1930s. They have been firmly associated since 1961 when A.L. Rowse, the historian, poet, and Shakespearean scholar published All Souls and Appeasement. Rowse denigrated appeasement as the foreign policy of ‘a class in decadence’ that reduced Britain to a second-rate power. Rowse asserted that All Souls was an important clearing-house for politicians, academics, intellectuals, and other establishment figures who supported appeasement as the only policy which could attain a settlement with Nazi Germany. The same claims also surrounded the social gatherings hosted by Waldorf and Nancy Astor at Cliveden, their country home in Berkshire, and the close association between The Times and the Foreign Office.

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The Foreign Office, Commerce and British Foreign Policy in the Twentieth Century

10.1057/978-1-137-46581-8 ◽

2016 ◽

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Foreign Policy ◽

British Foreign Policy ◽

Foreign Office

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A Venture in ‘The Caverns of Intrigue’: The Conspiracy Against Lord Curzon and his Foreign Policy, 1922–3

Historical Research ◽

10.1111/1468-2281.00046 ◽

1997 ◽

Vol 70 (173) ◽

pp. 312-336

Author(s):

K. M. Wilson

Keyword(s):

Foreign Policy ◽

Prime Minister ◽

Major Theme ◽

Nineteen Twenties ◽

British Foreign Policy ◽

Intelligence Agencies ◽

Foreign Office ◽

The Relationship

Abstract This article investigates the opposition, both within and without the British cabinet, to Curzon's handling of relations with France and Germany in the early nineteen‐twenties, opposition which came to a head in the form of a conspiracy to remove him as Foreign Secretary in October 1923. The chief conspirators are identified as the editor of the Morning Post, a senior Foreign Office official—and Lord Derby. The relationship to this conspiracy of the French premier and of several British cabinet ministers, including the prime minister, Baldwin, is a major theme. How Curzon survived, with the help of French documents intercepted by the British intelligence agencies, is part of the conclusion. The article adds to what is known of the making of British foreign policy at this time, and is largely based upon material in the papers of H.A. Gwynne and in the archive of the Morning Post newspaper which has not been utilized by anyone else.

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Agent of Empire? The National Bank of Turkey and British Foreign Policy

The Historical Journal ◽

10.1017/s0018246x00023736 ◽

1975 ◽

Vol 18 (2) ◽

pp. 367-389 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Marian Kent

Keyword(s):

Foreign Policy ◽

Ottoman Empire ◽

British Government ◽

Third Place ◽

The Third ◽

British Foreign Policy ◽

Foreign Office ◽

National Bank ◽

The Subject

‘The National Bank of Turkey was founded in 1909 with British Government encouragement and support to further British economic enterprise in the Ottoman Empire’ so we are told in all die standard and respectable works on the subject. This is correct in form but incorrect in substance, for one cannot accept the implications it carries with it, in some cases explicitly stated. These are that, in the first place, the Foreign Office was instrumental in actually starting the Bank, in the second place, that the Bank succeeded very far in its objects, and in the third place, that it ever received much Foreign Office support in what it sought to do.

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