Upstream E-Book

• Herausgeber: Dolman Scott Publishing
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 572

Beschreibung

Sir Eugen Millington Drake was the British Minister to Uruguay during
the Battle of the River Plate in 1939. The German pocket battleship
Graf Spee was damaged in the battle and had taken refuge in the neutral
port of Montevideo. Millington Drake led the very delicate diplomatic
negotiations to persuade the Uruguayan government first of all to get the
Graf Spee out of Montevideo harbour so that Commodore Harwood’s
small squadron could resume the battle and stop her scouring the South
Atlantic sinking ships carrying wartime supplies to Britain; and then,
when Harwood received news that a powerful force was racing to his
aid, to keep her in the harbour until it arrived. It was a complete change
of tactics by Britain and only someone of Millington Drake’s supreme
tact, and local knowledge, could have brought it off . The upshot was
that the Graf Spee’s captain scuttled her rather than let her with all her
modern technology fall into enemy hands, and the threat she posed to
Britain’s vital supply lines was removed.
Millington-Drake had a high flying career in Europe and South America
from 1912 to 1946 and a fascinating background. He was born and brought
up in the Paris of the Belle Epoque, where his family knew everyone,
and educated at Eton and Oxford where he was a leading rowing Blue.
Having entered the Foreign Office, in 1913 he was posted to St Petersburg
where he witnessed the beginning of the end of Imperial Russia in its
last glittering days before the outbreak of war, an intensely interesting
historic period which is covered in this book, along with his childhood in
1890 s Paris and his years at school and university in the Edwardian era.
He had started to write his memoirs but when he died in 1972 he had
not got beyond 1915, the year he was transferred to Buenos Aires for
the first of the four long postings in the River Plate area with which
his name will always be associated. He used to write ‘diary letters’ to
his family wherever he was and kept an actual diary from his Oxford
days until he went to Montevideo in 1934 as Minister and was too busy
to maintain it. He was going to draw heavily on these sources for his
memoirs but, as he couldn’t complete the job, after his death his PA did
it for him and this book, which would have been Volume I (probably of
several!), is the result.

Leseprobe

UPSTREAM

Forty Years on the Thames and the Plate

Memoirs of Sir Eugen Millington-Drake Vol. I 1889-1915

Edited and with an Introduction byJill Quaife

Published by Dolman Scott Ltd 2021

Copyright © Estate of E.L.M.V. Millington-Drake

Cover design by Jane Atherfold www.janeatherfold.co.uk

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the copyright owner. Nor can it be circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without similar condition including this condition being imposed on a subsequent purchaser.

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www.dolmanscott.com

Contents

Editor’s Note

Introduction

Chapter 1: Paris in the 1890s

Chapter 2: Our first experience of England

Chapter 3: Anna de Castellane and other Paris friends

Chapter 4: Daisy Decazes, my sister’s lifelong friend

Chapter 5: Opera and theatre in Paris in my youth

Chapter 6: My prep school, Park Hill, near Lyndhurst

Chapter 7: Eton in 1901 when I entered aged 12

Chapter 8: Hugh Macnaghten, my housemaster

Chapter 9: The faithful servants of the house

Chapter 10: Macnaghten’s teaching of the classics

Chapter 11: Sporting successes of the house

Chapter 12: Speeches 1907: My performance

Chapter 13: Home entertainments: My porters’ sketch

Chapter 14: Emotional farewell to Eton, 1908

Chapter 15: Going up to Oxford; Oxford rowing

Chapter 16: The 1911 Boat Race; We leave Paris

Chapter 17: Joining the Foreign Service; St. Petersburg

Chapter 18: 1914: The last glittering Russian season

Chapter 19: The run-up to war and its outbreak

Chapter 20: Leaving Russia for Argentina

Appendix: The Macnaghten Library at Eton

Illustrations

The River Thames at Eton. Windsor Castle on the skylineMillington-Drake dressed for the Fourth of June Procession of Boats, Eton 1903Millington-Drake (left) as Maître Patelin at Speeches at Eton 1908Macnaghten’s House Four with the House Four Cup they won in 1908. l. to r.: Millington-Drake (stroke); Stuyve Chanler (bow); Geoffrey Tower (2); cox (unknown); C.H. Greville (3)Hugh Macnaghten, Millington-Drake’s housemasterJessie Millington-Drake in 1910The Oxford crew which won the 1911 Boat Race, from The Daily Telegraph, 30th March 1911Millington-Drake with Violet de Trafford and Prince Felix Youssoupoff as characters in Troilus and Cressida at Mrs. Hwfa Williams’s Shakespeare Ball, 1912Sir George Buchanan and the staff of the British Embassy, St. Petersburg, 1913-14Avenida Rio Branco, Rio de Janeiro. Postcard sent by Millington-Drake, 6th January 1915 when he was en route to Buenos AiresThe Legation staff at Buenos Aires, 1915. Millington-Drake seated second left in front rowEugen Millington-Drake and the Hon. Effie Mackay after their wedding, January 1920

Editor’s Note

This is what would have been Volume I of the memoirs of Sir Eugen Millington-Drake, the British Minister at Montevideo during the Battle of the River Plate in 1939, if he had completed them. Sir Eugen had a fascinating career as a diplomat in Europe and South America from 1912 to 1946, a historic period, and his experiences provided the material for a thundering good memoir. In the last years of his life he was laying the groundwork for this first volume but he was too busy to finish the job so after his death I did it for him. I was able to do this because I had worked closely with him as his PA for thirteen years until he died and I knew what his intentions for his memoirs were.

Sir Eugen did write a considerable number of passages about his early life, got his sister to write a lot too, wrote articles for the newsletters of the Old Boys’ association of his house at Eton, of which he was the hon. secretary, with the express intention of using them in his memoirs when the time came, and was going to quote extensively from his diaries and from his letters home from Eton and elsewhere which his family had kept and to which thanks to them I had access. What I did was to pull all these strands together, and locating all the extracts, assembling them in chronological order and slotting in the material from the other sources that he meant to use and then checking every detail and re-typing the whole thing took me from 1972 to 1984, not full-time because I was doing two other jobs, but it was a long haul. It was also one of the most rewarding things I have ever done.

I did it as a record for the family, not, at the time, with a view to publication, though I couldn’t help hoping that one day the work might appear in print and when Sir Eugen’s son Teddy saw it he said we must do something about achieving that. I therefore sent the manuscript to Basil Blackwell for an opinion as he was one of Sir Eugen’s closest friends. He advised sending it to Hodder and Stoughton and Heinemann, so I did. They both let me down gently and their letters seemed to show that they had actually read some of it, unlike many publishers with unsolicited manuscripts. Heinemann even said the Russian chapters were historically valuable, being a first-hand account of the euphoria in St. Petersburg at the outbreak of war in 1914, the glittering social life of Russian society up to that time and the very serious reverses suffered by Russia in the early stages of the conflict.

Both firms indicated that if Sir Eugen had got down to his memoirs when he retired in 1946 he would have found a publisher then, but by the 1980s there was no market for personal reminiscences of this kind. Publishers were looking for sex and sensation, not stories of summer afternoons on the river at Eton before the First World War.

Now, thanks to the internet, self-publishing has come into its own and we have taken advantage of that to bring the memoir to a wider audience who we hope may enjoy this echo of a bygone age.

It was a labour of love and a tribute to a remarkable man.

Jill Quaife August 2021

Introduction

When the film The Battle of the River Plate was released in 1956 it was said by the film critics of the day that Anthony Bushell, the actor who took the part of Eugen Millington-Drake, the British Minister at Montevideo in 1939, played him as a copybook diplomat. Millington-Drake was never that, as he said himself, but he was the proverbial man in the right place at the time of the battle, for his skilful handling of the diplomatic negotiations brought about the outcome desired by Britain, namely the destruction of the German pocket battleship Graf Spee and the consequent removal of the threat she posed to British shipping in the South Atlantic at that early stage of the war.

Millington-Drake, whose name will always be associated with the River Plate, both the battle and the region, was able to achieve what he did because of his excellent relations with the Uruguayan government and the strong ties of friendship and support for Britain which by tremendous personal efforts he had himself built up in the country. His energy was phenomenal and from the moment he arrived in Uruguay in 1934 he had set out to gain goodwill for Britain by every means at his disposal, what he called ‘nursing the constituency’. He founded the Anglo-Uruguayan Cultural Institute in Montevideo for the teaching of English, and a string of associated institutes in the provinces, established numerous prizes and scholarships for Uruguayan students at British universities, organised exchange visits between the two countries not only for students but for many other groups, arranged lectures and concerts with English themes, lectured and broadcast on such themes himself, visited every corner of Uruguay, even the smallest towns, which no British diplomat had done before, persuaded visiting figures such as the Marquess of Willingdon and Field Marshal Lord Milne to present medals to long-serving employees of British companies and members of the Uruguayan armed forces, and contributed significantly to the development of Uruguayan sport, especially rowing and tennis in which he often participated himself in order to encourage others (and also because he enjoyed it). Above all he was always ready to listen to and help the individual as well as the organisation or official body, and he had the great gift of being exactly the same with everyone, from the President of the Republic to the local taxi drivers.

This personal involvement was not just diplomatic expediency but was prompted by genuine interest in the country and people, which the Uruguayans were quick to recognise and respond to. By the time of the Battle of the Plate Millington-Drake was a legend in Uruguay, loved not only for his espousal of everything Uruguayan and his great generosity and unremitting hard work but for his mild eccentricity and little foibles, one of which was to receive visitors and conduct meetings while doing his physical jerks on the lawn of the Legation residence. When he left Montevideo in 1941 ten thousand people lined the streets to see him off and the crowd broke ranks to drag his car bodily to the port (a spontaneous gesture of affection of the kind deplored by the Foreign Office).

If he was a legend in Uruguay in later life, Eugen Millington-Drake had the kind of background from which legends tend to spring. He was born and brought up in the Paris of the Belle Epoque, the son of parents who moved in fashionable circles, godson of Prince Eugen of Sweden (from whom he took the unusual spelling of his name), presented to Empress Eugénie when he was seven, blessed with good looks, and educated at Eton and Oxford, where he was one of the leading oarsmen of his generation.

Eugen’s father, Henry Drake, was the Paris representative of the family firm of Mincing Lane sugar brokers, J.V. Drake & Co. Ltd. Henry was President of the British Chamber of Commerce in Paris, an officer of the Légion d’Honneur, and respected by French and British alike. He was prosperous but not ostentatiously wealthy. The Drakes were a solidly English family with a proud name going back, it is thought, to John Drake, one of the brothers of Sir Francis Drake, and their firm was old-established in the City of London, where it is (or was) still trading, though under a slightly different name, Woodhouse, Drake, & Carey Ltd., having amalgamated with another firm. Strangely enough, the Woodhouses in that firm were the family of Admiral Sir Charles Woodhouse, one of the British commanders in the Battle of the Plate.

Henry Drake had married Ellen Millington, an American-born girl of English descent, whose parents had emigrated to the United States, and in 1901 Henry added her name to his by Deed Poll as she was the last of her family. Her parents had died when she was a child and though family friends took on her guardianship and brought her up as her parents would have wished she learnt early to fend for herself and exhibited great toughness and independence. She had qualified as a teacher in the US but did not practise as such and instead took herself to Paris where she worked as a journalist at a time when few young women did such a thing. Being a person of very strong not to say domineering character she was a most powerful influence in her son’s formative years and had set ideas for his future. She was also overweeningly ambitious. It was she who determined to get Eugen into Eton, where he came into contact with the other person who profoundly affected his development. This was his housemaster, Hugh Macnaghten, a famous Eton master who inspired in his pupils loyalty and devotion of no common order.

Millington-Drake was at Eton an exceptionally long time, from the early age of twelve, whereas most boys did not go there until they were thirteen or fourteen, until he was nineteen and a half, and because his family lived abroad he came to regard it as his home in England and was very happy there, in some ways perhaps happier than he was anywhere else in his life. Despite the apparent privileges of his background his childhood was not always an easy time for him. He tried to live up to his mother’s high ideals but there were inevitable clashes between them and occasions when her sharp tongue and forcefully-expressed opinions hurt. But at Eton, under Macnaghten’s sympathetic guidance, he was able to develop at his own pace.

It was at Eton that Millington-Drake first attracted attention, at Speeches in 1907, with an electrifying rendering in French of the monologue from The Marriage of Figaro, which was reported in the national press and resulted in his receiving several offers from theatrical managers, much to the alarm of his mother who had long since made up her mind that he would enter the Diplomatic Service and must have seen him as a future Ambassador to France. In fact the theatre was one of Millington-Drake’s lifelong interests and as a boy in Paris he had had lessons in diction with Pierre Laugier and other leading actors of the Comédie Française, as he tells in this memoir.

Many years later, travelling home for consultations from Montevideo via the west coast of America, he was taken to Hollywood to see a morning’s shooting on the set of the MGM film of David Copperfield, and at lunch, at which the director, cast, film crew, extras and visitors all ate together democratically at long tables, George Cukor looked down his table and seeing a striking-looking man somewhere near the bottom sent him a note saying he would like to do a screen test of him that afternoon. It had to be explained to Cukor that His Majesty’s Minister could not enter into such a thing, but for the Minister himself there was a tinge of the might-have-been about this incident.

The other sphere in which Millington-Drake made his mark at Eton was rowing, and he rose to be Captain of the Boats and went up to Oxford with a high reputation, but the university just then was full of some of the oarsmen of the century and what was worse was that most of them were at Magdalen, where he went himself. In his first term he was unwell and then out of form, and he had a long and dispiriting struggle to regain it and get into first the Magdalen eight, which he did in 1910, and then the Blue boat of the following year. However, he had the satisfaction of knowing that the 1910 Magdalen crew, which won the Grand Challenge Cup at Henley, was considered one of the finest ever seen, and the Oxford crew of 1911 won the Boat Race in what was then the record time.

After a year spent at the Universities of Berlin and Munich Millington-Drake eventually fulfilled his mother’s great wish by passing third into the Diplomatic Service in 1912. He had done the very searching entrance examination immediately after his university finals, something which at that time had never been attempted before, and perhaps it should not have been attempted then, for he was under immense pressure from his mother and the strain took its toll on his health, though he quickly recovered and in 1913 was posted to St. Petersburg as an attaché.

It was an intensely interesting moment, with Russia heading for revolution and Europe soon to be plunged into war, and in the British Embassy Millington-Drake was witnessing history in the making. In his off-duty hours there were the fantastic balls and receptions of Russian society in the last season before it was swept away for ever. Presentable young diplomats from the European embassies were welcomed by the St. Petersburg hostesses, and in Millington-Drake’s case he had the entrée into the very highest circles, not only because the British Embassy was what was known as en famille as the Empress was the granddaughter of Queen Victoria and the Emperor was also closely related to the British royal family, but also because of his friendship at Oxford with a young Russian he had known there as Count Felix Elston. When he got to St. Petersburg ‘Count Felix Elston’ turned out to be Prince Felix Youssoupoff, the heir of one of the oldest families in Russia and the intended husband of the niece of the Czar. He was also, of course, later to become much more widely known as the principal murderer of Rasputin, and Millington-Drake remained friends with him all his life.

Then the crisis broke, the parties stopped, and the work in the Embassy, which had been hard but interesting before, quadrupled in volume and importance. Millington-Drake was the resident attaché, liable to be called at any hour of the day or night to decipher urgent telegrams, and as such he had to have when necessary immediate access to the Ambassador, Sir George Buchanan. For this reason he had been given two rooms to live in in the great palace on the Neva which housed both the Chancery and the Ambassador’s residence. Here he became the first person in Russia to know that England was at war when on 5th August 1914 he was woken by the old Embassy porter at five o’clock in the morning and handed the historic telegram from Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, containing three words only – ‘WAR GERMANY ACT’ – which were a pre-arranged signal confirming Britain’s declaration of war on Germany.

A few months later Millington-Drake was deciphering another telegram of almost greater import for him personally, since it was the one transferring him to Buenos Aires for the first of his four long assignments in South America. He was loath to leave Russia at such a momentous time and not at all anxious to go to Buenos Aires, about which he knew next to nothing, not then foreseeing what an impact South America was to have on him, or he, later, on it. But with the facility which he had all his life for making the best of everything he soon began to feel that at Buenos Aires, where he would be the only career secretary (his transfer brought with it promotion to Third Secretary), working directly with the Minister, Sir Reginald Tower, in a very small but increasingly important legation, he would find greater scope for his own particular talents than at the larger more impersonal mission at St. Petersburg. This proved to be the case, for throughout the First World War he operated practically single-handedly the Legation’s ‘Black List’, which stopped Argentine businessmen from dealing with German or German-connected firms if they wanted to use Allied shipping to or from Europe and hampered Germany’s war effort accordingly. He had also realised on further reading that the River Plate region was a much more attractive area than he had imagined, and so it was in a perfectly happy and contented frame of mind that he set out on an epic wartime journey, one leg of it by sleigh on the edge of the Arctic Circle in northern Finland, and reached Buenos Aires in January 1915.

That is the period covered by this volume.

After the war Millington-Drake, at last back in Europe after five long years with no home leave, was appointed to the British delegation to the Paris Peace Conference and subsequently the Ambassadors’ Conference and on occasions interpreted for Lloyd George. There followed his marriage in 1920 to Effie Mackay, the youngest daughter of Lord Inchcape (later the first Earl of Inchcape, one of the developers of the P & O), who supported him staunchly in all (or most of!) his undertakings, and ten years of European posts in Paris, Brussels, Bucharest and Copenhagen. It was during this time that he started what was to become one of his major projects. This was the assembling of books for the future Macnaghten War Memorial Library at Eton, a collection of volumes about every aspect of the First World War, almost all of them signed, and most of them inscribed, by their authors. Fifty-three old boys of Macnaghten’s house had been killed in the war, more than from any other house at Eton, and most of them were contemporaries and friends of Millington-Drake, who would probably have been among them if he had not been refused leave to volunteer for the Army which he wished to do but was forbidden by Sir George Buchanan, his Ambassador at St. Petersburg, because the Foreign Office was afraid of losing half the junior members of its staff at a time when it was more necessary than ever that diplomats should be at their posts so that diplomacy did not collapse altogether.

Millington-Drake had long wanted to make his own tribute to these boys and in 1922 he hit upon the idea of presenting a library to Eton in memory of them, its subject to be the war in which they had given their lives, with the theory that no one reading about that war would ever advocate going to war again. To acquire the books and get every one signed by its author was a huge labour, and took Millington-Drake and his personal secretary, Evelyn Stuart, altogether sixteen years in the first instance and several more years later when he added a smaller but representative section of books on the Second World War and books about the First World War published after his original donation. The library was named after Hugh Macnaghten, who had himself died in tragic circumstances by drowning in the Thames in 1929, and officially opened in 1938, ironically enough when the next war was on the horizon. It is now a very valuable centre for research for historians of 1914-18 and a lasting memorial not only to Macnaghten and the heroic dead of his house but to Millington-Drake as well. [2015: After Sir Eugen’s death the Library was moved to the Millington-Drake Room, which was named in his honour, behind its original home, and then in 2005 it was relocated to the Provost’s Lodge in the most historic part of the old College buildings and reopened by General Sir Mike Jackson, then head of the British Army. Ed.]

In 1929 Millington-Drake returned to Buenos Aires as Counsellor and from there devoted himself in earnest to strengthening the cultural links between Britain and the River Plate countries, in one or other of which he was to serve continuously until 1946. Among countless other activities he founded, with his own money, and before the British Council existed, the Argentine Association of English Culture, which is a thriving institution today, established awards such as the Prince of Wales Scholarships at Oxford, and discovered Walter Owen’s translation of the epic Hispanic poem of gaucho life, Martín Fierro, which was published in Oxford by Basil Blackwell, one of his oldest friends, who later published other translations by this Scottish-born Argentine-domiciled poet and mystic.

All this was the same work which Millington-Drake carried out on an even greater scale when he was appointed to Uruguay as Minister five years later and continued when in 1941 he was seconded to the British Council to be its Chief Representative in the whole of Spanish-speaking South America with headquarters at Buenos Aires. This post was a specially-created one of particular importance during the war when Britain depended heavily on South American countries for food and other supplies and needed to influence public opinion in the region in her favour, something which Millington-Drake was ideally equipped to do. But the work also required money and when the Foreign Office was slow to provide this Millington-Drake was apt to raise it himself, which was not popular in Whitehall at the time, though in after years the Foreign Office acknowledged the great value of all he had done.

When Sir Eugen, as he now was, eventually retired from the Diplomatic Service in 1946 to be Chairman of the Reception Committee of the London Olympic Games in 1948, another post after his own heart, his life up to that point had already provided the material for a substantial autobiography, quite apart from a wealth of experiences still to come in his so-called retirement, and he was indeed always going to write his memoirs and call them Upstream: Forty Years on the Thames and the Plate. ‘Upstream’ was his own acknowledgment of the fact that he had sometimes, in fact often, gone against the current of official policy, in the Foreign Office and elsewhere. The forty years on the Thames and the Plate was from 1901 when he went to Eton at the age of twelve to 1946 when he retired as Chief Representative of the British Council in Spanish-speaking South America. Although there were the ten years of European posts within this timespan Sir Eugen maintained the closest possible links with both the Thames and the Plate during that period.

As time went on and the book wasn’t written the period to be covered increased to fifty, then sixty and finally seventy years* for even after his retirement Sir Eugen was still closely connected with both the Thames and the Plate, keeping in constant touch with developments at Eton and other rowing schools on the Thames in which he was interested (e.g. Radley and St. George’s College, Weybridge), and working as tirelessly as ever to promote and maintain good relations with the countries of the River Plate, both in a private capacity and in his role as a Vice-President of the Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Councils. He was a most generous benefactor of these Councils (later unified as a single entity), and notably he gave them the library of Hudson House, a centre for visiting South American students which he had set up in 1946 in London but closed when the Councils acquired their own London headquarters, at Canning House, 2 Belgrave Square, to avoid duplication of effort. The Hudson House collection formed the nucleus of the Councils’ own library which is now the largest one on Hispanic subjects open to the public in the United Kingdom. [2021: Very regrettably the library was closed to the public in 2011 and the more valuable parts of it were subsumed into the new King’s College Library in 2012 when Canning House itself closed. What Sir Eugen would have thought of these closures can be imagined. In 1940 he and Lady Effie had given the British government £50,000 – which today would be worth millions of pounds and was an incredible amount even then – towards the war effort, and the government had set some of it aside to be used for the promotion of Anglo-South American relations after the war because of Sir Eugen’s great interest in that field. £25,000 of it was in fact used for the purchase of the lease of Canning House in 1953. Ed.]

In the postwar years Sir Eugen made several world tours lecturing on everything from the Battle of the Plate to gems of English literature, donated the Prix Leclerc for an annual shooting competition between the NATO armies, and in 1964 published his book on the battle.* There were eight years of the most minute research into every detail of the battle and its aftermath before the book finally appeared and though several earlier dates had been set for publication they all passed because something new was always turning up to be investigated and slipped in under the nose of the publisher. The book has since come to be considered the definitive work on the subject, if there can ever be such a thing, but the result that gave Sir Eugen most pleasure was the friendship formed between British and German survivors of the action whom he had brought together during the long period of preparation, and this helped towards the Anglo-German reconciliation that he had always advocated.

Between 1964 and 1970 Sir Eugen made four extensive lecture tours of Uruguay and Argentina and, having in 1963 instituted the Canning Scholarships, which enabled students who might never otherwise have had the opportunity to do so to travel in that area, during the same period he made himself personally responsible for arranging every detail of the scholars’ visits. The way in which he did this shows exactly the way he had tackled his assignments in the past. It was an exercise in public relations, required exhaustive correspondence, and could only have been done by someone with his exceptional local knowledge, charm, perseverance, contacts at all levels, and stunning flair for getting other people to do things – attributes which he brought to everything he undertook.

At the same time Sir Eugen was carrying on what was for him his normal way of life even in retirement, writing articles and lecturing throughout Europe on a variety of subjects, scouring the serious newspapers for reviews of books suitable for inclusion in the Macnaghten Library, getting them signed by their authors, commuting to London from the family home in Rome, organising, with months of meticulous planning, an annual dinner for old friends and new acquaintances at his club, the Garrick, keeping the old boys of Macnaghten’s house at Eton in touch with each other by editing a regular newsletter overflowing with Eton reminiscences, seeing, when he had time, the latest plays in both London and Paris, writing letters all over the world, and helping other people.

Sir Eugen was never too busy to do anything he could for anyone who had sought his help or advice, but he was too busy to concentrate on his memoirs and he was still preparing the groundwork when he died in Paris, his birthplace, on 12th December 1972, the eve of the thirty-third anniversary of the Battle of the Plate. However, he did write down a number of descriptions of his early life, he composed many passages in the Macnaghten newsletters with the express intention of using them in his memoirs when the time came, and his family had copies of nearly all his letters to them and some of their replies over many years, as well as his personal diaries from his boyhood up to 1934 when he became Minister at Montevideo. (After that he had no time to keep a regular diary.) From these sources I have put together these memoirs. The Oxford and Russian chapters are based entirely on his diaries, with minimal editing where it seemed necessary for clarity.

The present volume deals with Sir Eugen’s childhood in Paris, his strict upbringing by his formidable mother, his schooling at Eton under the ægis of Hugh Macnaghten, his struggles and triumphs as an oarsman at Oxford, and his initiation into the Diplomatic Service in the kaleidoscopic brilliance of the last days of Imperial Russia. It ends with his first arrival on the banks of the River Plate in 1915, a natural breaking-off point as it was during the years before that time that there were laid the foundations of a long, honourable and unusual career.

Jill Quaife, December 1984

* The original sub-title has been restored in this volume.

*The Drama of Graf Spee and the Battle of the Plate. A Documentary Anthology, 1914-1964. Peter Davies, 1964

Chapter 1My birth in Paris in 1889; Scenes of old Paris; The Drake family; Our flat in the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne

I was born in Paris in 1889, which was exactly a hundred years after the French Revolution and two hundred years after the Bill of Rights which anticipated by a century the Droits de l’Homme. It was the year of an international exhibition in Paris, to which some foreign sovereigns refused to go officially because it was publicised as commemorating the Revolution. Within the exhibition grounds was built the Eiffel Tower, rising to a height of 984 feet, which was then the tallest building in the world and was named after the engineer who designed it. The only comparable feat of construction in Britain was the Forth Bridge, which was opened in 1890.

1889 was the year of the Mayerling tragedy, when the Crown Prince of Austria, the only son of the Emperor Franz Joseph, when ordered to break off his liaison with the young Baroness Vetsera, shot her and then himself at his hunting lodge at Mayerling near Vienna. This incident was among those that led directly, though slowly, and no one could have foreseen it at the time, to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.

1889 was also the year in which General Boulanger could have become dictator of France on the wave of public feeling seeking revenge against Germany for the humiliations of 1870, but he failed miserably to rise to the occasion. I often heard my father and uncle talking about what might have been.

My father, Henry Drake as he then was, was the Paris representative of the family firm of Mincing Lane sugar brokers, J.V. Drake & Co. He was the second of five brothers, of whom the eldest, John, and the youngest, Charles, worked in the London office of the firm. Alfred, who came next in age after my father, was their representative in Magdeburg which was the centre of the sugar-beet region in Germany, until 1905 when he retired and was succeeded by the second youngest brother, Edgar, who up till then had assisted my father in Paris. Edgar became British Vice-Consul at Magdeburg, and only just got away from there in time before the outbreak of war in 1914. After the Second World War Magdeburg became part of East Germany and therefore behind the Iron Curtain.

My father used to tell me how the enormous production of beetroot sugar in Europe all sprang from the endeavours of Napoleon to make France self-supporting at the time of the Napoleonic wars. Sugar was kept out of France by the British blockade and in his search for a substitute he hit upon the beetroot. Thus France was the pioneer of the industry in Europe. J.V. Drake & Co. were the government sugar brokers in the First World War and the firm was still flourishing in the City of London, though the name was changed to Woodhouse, Drake & Carey Ltd., when my first cousin, Colonel Francis Collingwood Drake, youngest son of my Uncle John, retired from it after many years and it amalgamated with Woodhouse, Carey & Brown, fellow produce merchants and Liverymen of the Grocers’ Company. I was to discover that by a happy coincidence the Woodhouses of this firm were the family of Admiral Sir Charles Woodhouse, the captain of HMS Ajax, Harwood’s flagship at the Battle of the River Plate in 1939, with whom later I was to have much to do.

The Drake family is generally thought to be descended from John Drake, one of the brothers of Sir Francis Drake, and this was established to the moral though not legal satisfaction of my grandfather who went into the family history very thoroughly and found that there was a single missing link in the chain of evidence, a church register which had been destroyed by fire, so that the whole thing could never be proved conclusively.

Though until my marriage I used only one of my Christian names, Eugen (and that only officially – I was known as Millers at Eton, Oxford and in the Foreign Office, and as Boy to my family!) I had three others, John, Henry, (Eugen), and Vanderstegen. John was a name much used in the Drake family, Henry was my father’s name and I was called Eugen, spelt in the Germanic way without the final ‘e’, after my godfather, Prince Eugen of Sweden. When my parents were a young married couple in Paris Prince Eugen and a friend of his, the son of the Swedish statesman Gunnar Wennerburg, were both studying art there and were frequent guests at the entertainments my parents used to give for their cosmopolitan friends, and so when I was born they not unnaturally turned to the prince to be my godfather. He remained in Paris for several years and as a child I saw him often and remember him well. After he left there I was to see him but once again and that was in November 1914 when as a young diplomat I was passing through Stockholm on my way from St. Petersburg to London, before taking up my appointment as Third Secretary at our Legation in Buenos Aires. The prince was a landscape artist of real merit (but not a good portrait painter – he had done a very bad portrait of my mother which had to be hidden except when he came to visit her) and on this occasion he showed me the pictures in the semi-subterranean private gallery which he had had built at his house. Later he gave these pictures to the city of Stockholm.

Vanderstegen, which is Belgian and can be traced back to Jan Baptiste Van der Stegen who was born near Bruges in 1345, is a family name, my paternal great-grandfather, John Drake of Leytonstone, having married Frances Vanderstegen, the daughter of William Henry Vanderstegen of Cane End near Reading in 1823. The son of this marriage, John Vanderstegen Drake, my grandfather, founded the firm for which my father and uncles worked in their turn.

My mother was born Ellen Granger Millington in America and was the only child of English parents who had emigrated and had a house right on the Hudson River near New York, so that she used literally to ‘paddle her own canoe’ in the summer and run an ice yacht in winter. Her parents died when she was young and she developed into a person of very strong character, full of energy, determination, drive and practicality. After her parents’ death she lived with a Mrs. Lee and her daughter Grace at 516 Fifth Avenue, and it must have been there, when still a young girl, that she met and fell in love with Dion Boucicault, the Irish-American actor and playwright. Old enough to be her father, with five children of his own, he wrote her a charming letter gently pointing this out and adding ‘And the time will come, years hence, when I am gone, and you are the happy mother of a beloved family, [when] you will look back on this moment and while you thank God that he preserved you with his strong hand when you were weak you will not “forget to remember” the “vagabond” [her name for him] who was delighted to seem cruel only to be kind…. The little bird, before it leaves the nest, whose horizon is bounded by the foliage of the tree in which it lives, knows as much of the world as you do – and is more fitted to battle with it.’ The letter, which she kept, is undated. Several others, of friendship only, which were dated, were written from London in the winter of 1875-76 when Boucicault was appearing at Drury Lane, and from places on the Continent where he went to try to get over the death of his son Willie early in 1876.

My mother qualified as a teacher in America but as far as we know she never worked as such and by1878 she was in Paris where instead she became a journalist, an unusual thing for a girl at that time. She lived in the Rue Galilée for some years, and married my father at the American church of Holy Trinity in the Avenue de l’Alma (now Avenue Georges V) in 1888.

In 1900 my parents decided to add my mother’s maiden name to that of Drake, partly because she was the last of her family but also to distinguish me from my four Drake cousins, the sons of my father’s eldest brother John. These four boys were all either at or going to Eton and although it had not then been decided to send me there my parents felt that it would save confusion in later life if my name was slightly different and accordingly they took the name Millington-Drake by Deed Poll.

At the time of my birth my parents occupied a flat at 43 Avenue Kléber, in the fashionable residential quarter near the Arc de Triomphe but somewhat sparsely furnished, for they started their married life in a modest way. Avenue Kléber was named after a general of the Revolutionary armies who also served with distinction under Napoleon in Egypt. My father’s brother Edgar who was unmarried had a smaller flat above ours. My only sister Jessie was born just a year after me, so that we were brought up very close together, and as babies we used to be taken in our prams to the nearby garden square today called Place des Etats-Unis.

In 1891 my parents had the vision to take the lease of a large flat on the fifth and topmost floor of a new apartment building in the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne (now Avenue Foch) which had just been put up by the American dentist Dr. Thomas W. Evans, who was a well-known figure in Paris at that time and had attended many of the crowned heads of Europe, including the Empress Eugénie who had taken refuge in his house when the Commune broke out after the débâcle of Sedan in 1870 and the Emperor himself had been captured by the Germans. Dr. Evans escorted the Empress to the French coast and managed to get her taken on board a yacht belonging to Sir John Burgoyne which was sailing for England and in this way she escaped to Ryde in the Isle of Wight and eventually went on to Hastings, where her son, the Prince Imperial, had landed.

It was Dr. Evans, with his great surgical skill, who made the fine silver tubes for the throat of the German Emperor Frederick III which facilitated his breathing after his tracheotomy. During his career Dr. Evans had amassed a great deal of money and as he had no children he used his fortune to found the world-famous odontological institute at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (his home town) which bears his name and which has trained generations of eminent dentists, including some that I have been fortunate enough to be treated by, among them the famous Harley Street partnership of Dr. Dyce and Dr. Dow who between them have looked after my family’s teeth for many years.

Dr. Evans and his wife lived in a commodious villa with a large garden behind a high wall in the angle between the Avenue Malakoff and the Rue de la Pompe. This villa was leased by the French government in 1900 for the entertainment of foreign royalty and other important visitors to the Paris Exhibition of that year and it had become known as the Palais des Souverains. In 1905 it was bought by the brothers Renault out of their newly-made motor car fortune and they covered the site with luxury apartment blocks.

But already in 1890, with the foresight to be expected of such a man, Dr. Evans himself, realising in which direction the Paris of the future would expand (westwards, as most major European cities do), had decided to build a block of flats on the adjoining corner of the Avenue du Bois and the Rue de la Pompe. There were then no such buildings in the second half of the avenue, only villas standing in their own grounds and beyond them fields where we used to feed the goats on our walks to the Bois.

Dr. and Mrs. Evans were friends of my parents, and when the new flats were ready and Dr. Evans was experiencing difficulty in letting them, probably because the rents were high by Parisian standards at that time, he suggested that my parents should take one. My mother was tempted because they were very well appointed and it would be a better address, but my father at first refused to consider such a move on grounds of expense. Dr. Evans then offered to let them have the top flat for a lower rent and my mother persuaded my father to agree to this. One day when we had been living there for three or four years my mother and I came in from a walk and were waiting downstairs for the lift when Dr. Evans himself came in. Having no children of his own he had always been inclined to make a fuss of my sister and me and on this occasion he put his hand on my head and remarked ‘Who knows that I may leave all I have to this fair-haired blue-eyed English boy?’ My mother, ever practical, exclaimed ‘Oh, Dr. Evans, don’t think of these things, but lower our rent’, and he did. He did not leave anything to the fair-haired blue-eyed English boy, but when he died his executors discovered that the boy’s father had for years been paying a much lower rent than any of the other tenants and this was immediately rectified.

The apartment was, for a flat, very large. It had seven bedrooms each with its own cabinet de toilette or dressing-room with wash-basin and running water, an innovation in those days, a spacious entrance hall and three very large reception rooms, one of which had a parquet floor and was intended for use as a ballroom. Another of the reception rooms was round, being in the tower which formed one corner of the building. The kitchen was vast and contained a stove big enough for a hotel. Above all there was a fully-fitted bathroom, which few French flats had in the early nineties. In this I was operated on for a minor nasal disorder by the great Dr. Péan, wearing his frock coat. He was already the inventor of several important surgical instruments, and later became one of the founders of modern gynaecological surgery.

A balcony ran all the way round the flat, and the whole building was very well designed and decorated. Downstairs the main entrance with its lofty hall and wide shallow staircase was done up in splendid style, with two reproduction Greek statues put there by Dr. Evans, but unfortunately Mrs. Evans, who was somewhat puritanical in character, considered them indecent and had them each draped with an American flag in the manner of a loin-cloth, in which guise they attracted the attention of the visitor far more than they would have done in their natural state.

The flat overlooked in one direction Dr. Evans’s own villa with its garden and stables and in the other the villa of the jeweller Boucheron and beyond it the broad Avenue du Bois with lawns on either side. On the skyline we could see Mont Valérian on which stood the fortress which was already famous in the war of 1870-71 and was to become more so when after the Second World War, during which some five thousand French Resistance workers had been shot there, General de Gaulle built a vault underneath it dedicated to the French armed forces and containing the mortal remains of sixteen men, one from each branch of those forces.

The Avenue du Bois de Boulogne began at the iron gateway to the Bois known as the Porte Dauphine and ran up to the Arc de Triomphe, to which it was indeed an impressive approach, so much so that the French government, when Czar Nicolas II paid a state visit to France in 1896, arranged that his train should come to the small station of Porte Dauphine, on the Ligne de Ceinture which circles Paris and links the main line termini, and that he should disembark there and enter the city in a carriage procession up the avenue. The Ceinture passes under the end of the avenue in a tunnel, and as a small railway-mad boy I used to watch the trains, some of which still had open carriages so that the passengers looked as if they were being borne along on a brewer’s dray, puffing by and then disappearing into the tunnel. The same method of entry into the capital was used when King Edward VII came to Paris in May 1903, a historic visit which cemented the Entente Cordiale, and on both these occasions we had a magnificent view of events from our balcony. Indeed on that balcony most of the typical sights of late nineteenth century Paris passed in front of us and my sister and I would spend hours watching the ever-changing scene.

First of all perhaps we would see a cart with two large baths and a boiler. Bathrooms were so rare in those days that there was a good trade to be done in carrying a bath into a house or flat and filling it with hot water from two large cauldrons, themselves filled from the boiler on the cart. I can remember one such being brought to us in the flat when the bathroom of which we were so proud was out of order.

Then might come an antique station cab, from the distant Gare de Lyon or Gare du Nord, with a decrepit-looking horse and an interior larger than that of ordinary cabs. In fact these cabs were more like the brougham in England, at once distinguished by the luggage rack on top. Luggage usually consisted of two or three large heavy trunks and it was the habit of unemployed men to jog along behind these slow-moving vehicles from the station all the way to the passenger’s destination to earn a franc or two for handling the luggage on arrival. Our building had a passenger lift but luggage and heavy household supplies such as coal were not allowed to be carried in it and had to be humped up the back stairs by the concierge, Monsieur Michel, a small man with the strength of ten. The men who had jogged all the way behind us from the station when we had returned from our summer holidays would volunteer to do this, but, half starved as they often looked, my father would never let them but always gave them their tip just the same.

When there was a fire on the northern side of the Avenue du Bois the fire engine would come thundering down the Avenue Malakoff, with its three horses, its high extendable ladder and its characteristic two-tone horn, the sapeurs-pompiers in their shining helmets clinging on perilously, like a squadron of cavalry charging the enemy, and behind it, again with three horses, the water cannon with its bright brass boiler. It was a thrilling sight. It is not generally known that the classic helmet of the French Army, which was only adopted by the poilu in 1914, was modelled on the helmet which had long been worn by the firemen of Paris.

Another excitement was to watch the progress of the war between the bill-stickers of the rival candidates during elections. The field of battle so to speak was the long wall enclosing Dr. Evans’s garden. During my childhood the opposing candidates were usually Alexandre Millerand, who was to become President of the Republic in 1920, whom we favoured, and the lesser-known C.H. Fortin. The height of our delight was reached when, after the Fortin bill-stickers had covered the wall with their posters, supporters of Millerand appeared from round the corner and stuck their own bills on top.

Sometimes we saw a runaway horse on the ride on the far side of the avenue, and occasionally a runaway carriage. Vehicles were of course nearly all horse-drawn, like the yellow buses we took up the Champs Elysées. On the flat these were drawn by three horses but a man waited at the bottom of the avenue with a spare horse and even when this had been put to it was distressing to see the four of them straining with a heavy load all the way up that long and deceptively gentle hill to the Arc de Triomphe. When in winter there was vers glas – frozen rain – on the wooden blocks with which the streets were surfaced the horses would often fall. These things worried my sister and me, as did the plight of the starving unemployed who followed the cabs home from the station, but there was little that we as children could do to alleviate matters.

There was however one mechanised green tram which could be used without giving rise to feelings of guilt about the horses, and this ran on rails down the Avenue Victor Hugo. We patronised it when visiting the dentist, Mr.Barrett. (Dr. Evans had by this time retired from practice.) Mr. Barrett was very deaf and had fought in the American Civil War, and his methods felt like it. They were rough indeed compared to modern techniques, but as a reward for submitting ourselves to them we would be taken afterwards to tea at Colombin’s or Rumpelmayer’s, the two classic Parisian tea shops.

My favourite author as a boy was Jules Verne, but my sister’s preference was for the stories in the Bibliothèque Rose series, among which was one called Les Malheurs de Sophie, about the misdeeds of a very naughty girl. She read and re-read this and took it everywhere with her, and one day had it with her on the green tram. We were sitting right at the end, where there was an aperture with what seemed to be another one below it. We dicussed whether it would be possible, and rather fun, to push the book in at the top aperture and see it come out of the bottom one. Eventually we pushed it in but alas it never reappeared, and for weeks afterwards my sister mourned poor Sophie, condemned to eternal peregrination in that green tram.

Interested as we were in trains and trams and horses the time inevitably came when we switched our allegiance, though only temporarily in my case for trains were my first love, to the motor car, and instead of counting the coaches of the trains that disappeared into the tunnel we counted the number of cars we saw in a day. We could claim to have had contact with the motor industry in its earliest days because the Comte de Dion, one half of the partnership which created the De Dion Bouton, was a friend of my father’s mother and used to come often to see my father and expound his theories about the development of transport in the future. He was a great enthusiast and one day stayed so long talking that the concierge rang up on the house telephone and said his fiacre was still waiting after nearly an hour and a half. The charge had been mounting up all that time, the comte having forgotten to pay the driver off. Furious, he jumped up and as he rushed out he said to my father ‘You will see, I shall soon have my own motor car’, and this he did, thanks to his collaboration with the engineer Bouton who was the brains of the organisation while de Dion put up the capital. It was the product of another famous engineer, Léon Bollée, however, which was considered the Rolls Royce of France at the time, and my father, when he bought our first car in about 1905-06, chose a Léon Bollée Limousine.

Later came a new passion in our lives, flying, the climax of this period being when Santos Dumont, the Brazilian aviator, flew from St. Cloud round the Eiffel Tower and back again in what can only be described as a motorised balloon, and received a prize for being the first man to as it were circumnavigate the tower. The amazing thing was not so much that he managed to get round the tower but that he did so so close in to the structure, necessitating a series of very tight turns. From our balcony we had literally a grandstand view of this exploit, which Santos Dumont had attempted several times before, always with near calamitous results such as when he, his basket and his deflated balloon out of which the hydrogen had escaped suddenly descended on the roof of the Trocadéro Hotel.

Santos Dumont was a tiny little man of unprepossessing appearance. It was said of him that he had never looked at a woman in his life, devoting himself to his flying machines, but this was quite untrue as he was deeply attached to the tall and beautiful Lurline Spreckels, the daughter of a prominent member of the American colony in Paris, who unfortunately did not reciprocate his feelings. My father had had business contact with Mr. Spreckels, and the family lived not far from us at the top of the Avenue Malakoff. Santos Dumont was naturally one of my heroes, and I pestered my father until he rang up Mr. Spreckels and asked if he could arrange through his daughter for me to meet him. The upshot was that one Sunday afternoon, dressed in our best clothes, my sister and I went with my father to tea with Mr. and Mrs. Spreckels, and there to my joy was Santos Dumont. He was not insensitive to my admiration and gave me a signed photograph of himself in his machine circling the Eiffel Tower. Years later when I was serving at Buenos Aires I got to know him well as he spent much of his time in that city.

In spite of our preoccupation with all forms of transport, however, when it came down to it we usually walked everywhere. As my sister, who wrote down some memories of our childhood, said ‘Looking back it is amazing that two children and their governess (Mlle. Talbot) could have covered such distances. For a time I went daily to the convent in the Rue de l’Assomption where my friend Eleanor Alexander, an American girl, was a pupil, and that must have been at least two miles, and we walked the same distance on Sundays to Sunday School in the Avenue de l’Alma. Sometimes we went out to the Pré-Catelan in the Bois which was nearer three miles there and back.’ This Eleanor Alexander married Teddy Roosevelt, the eldest son of old President Theodore Roosevelt, while another friend from those days, Belle Willard, married Teddy’s brother Kermit. My sister was a bridesmaid at Eleanor’s wedding, which was the wedding of the year in New York in 1910, and my mother and I accompanied her to America. It was my mother’s first visit to her native country since her own marriage, and of course for my sister and me it was the first time we had ever been there and we were greatly impressed by the size of everything, the hospitality and the whirl of social activity in which we found ourselves, even though my sister was ill at the beginning of our stay and I myself had to leave in the middle of it and return by an earlier steamer so as to be back at Oxford for rowing practice before the beginning of the term.

Our greatest treat in Paris was to be taken to the Jardin d’Acclimatation, a cross between zoo and pleasure garden in the Bois de Boulogne, which was reached from the gate next to the Café Chinois by a miniature railway. The open carriages ran on rails but were drawn by ponies. The chief attraction when we got to the garden was the stall selling gauffres or waffles. These were made by pouring what looked like cream into a double flat iron, pressing the two sides together and putting them in an oven. After a few minutes out came the gauffre, the buying of which was prohibited by my mother but connived at by Mlle. Talbot. Mlle. Talbot’s father had fought at Sedan in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, and we used to be taken to lunch with him and listen wide-eyed to his tales of that disastrous campaign.