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- [00:01]
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- [01:30]
Lord Peter Ricketts
Politicians and generals today talk a lot about the need for exit plans to be established if conflict erupts between nations. In the middle of the horrors of the Second World War, Britain's diplomats were doing exactly that, working hard to think what peace would look like after the fighting. Lord Peter Ricketts, the former head of Britain's diplomatic service and the author of Shaping the Modern World, the men and women of the Foreign Office in the Second World War spoke to David Musgrove for this episode of the History Extra podcast. He explains the key role played by Britain's diplomats and Foreign Office staff, both men and women, in shaping the outcome and the aftermath of the war.
- [02:13]
David Musgrove
So we are talking about the Foreign Office and the Diplomatic Service in the Second World War. So that's not an area that gets talked about as much as other aspects of the war in comparison to the military operations. At least just introduce us to the story. How important were the people of the Foreign Office and the Diplomatic Service to to the story of the Second World War? And maybe just pull out a couple of key characters who might come up in this conversation as we go forwards?
- [02:38]
Lord Peter Ricketts
Well, I myself am a 40 year diplomat now retired And I've always felt that the Foreign Office is the kind of Cinderella of the British story of the Second World War. I mean, we all have books about Churchill, about the military commanders, the battles, the spies. But the diplomats were also central to the war effort and in particular to thinking about the future peace, even in the middle of a world. And so I wrote the book to put the people of the Foreign Office a little bit back in the story. And there are some fascinating stories in the book. One of the dominating characters is a guy called Sir Alec Cadogan, who was the head civil servant in the Foreign Office throughout the war, called the Permanent Under Secretary. He started in that job in 1938 with Lord Halifax as his Foreign Secretary and Chamberlain as the Prime Minister, and he finished it in 1946 with Bevin as the Foreign Secretary and Clement Attlee as the Prime Minister. He lived through the entire period and he sat at the sort of fulcrum between the foreign policy, the Foreign ministry and number 10. And he was constantly in both those worlds. He was very close to Churchill. He went to all the summits with Churchill. He was constantly attending the Cabinet, sitting up till 2am writing the telegrams or the instructions to the ambassadors. So he's a very central character. As well. As well as him, I wanted to also bring out the women of the Foreign Office because the Foreign Office is thought of, and rightly, as a very elitist male organization. At that time, women weren't allowed to join the diplomatic service. The senior reaches, they were in the lower ranks. But the women had fascinating contributions to the war effort as well in London, where they replaced many of the men called up for service, and also abroad in jobs where it hadn't been thought women could possibly operate in the Arab world, in Persia, in dangerous surroundings of neutral Switzerland. So I'm both bringing out the policymakers, but also the women and the other junior staff who played such a vital role.
- [04:40]
David Musgrove
Yeah. And we will come back to some of those women as we go along, I hope. Just picking up on Cadogan there and your experience. Perhaps we ought to just be clear for listeners. So you basically have the same job as Cadogan. You were the Permanent Under Secretary for the Foreign Office and head of the Diplomatic Service. What does that actually mean? What does that job entail? And does the fact that you held the same job as one of your historical subjects give you any particular insights into the sort of challenges that he might have been facing?
- [05:06]
Lord Peter Ricketts
I did the same job and I had the same office. And so I felt very much in a Succession from Alec Cadogan. And indeed I had on the wall of my office the final draft of the Atlantic Charter, which is what Churchill and Roosevelt agreed in Placentio Bay in Canada in 1941. And it was the draft which Cadogan had written on the ship and Churchill had corrected in his characteristic writing. And that sat on my wall as Permanent Secretary. So I did feel an affinity with Sir. He lived at a time where every single piece of paper headed for the Foreign Secretary went through his office. And then Also whenever number 10 wanted advice, if the Foreign Secretary wasn't there, they'd call over Alec Cadogan. He sat in Cabinet, so he was even more central than I. By the time I got there, the Permanent Secretary ran the organization, gave the leadership, obviously was a close advisor of the Foreign Secretary. But I didn't try and cover absolutely everything that was going to the Foreign Secretary. So Cadogan worked impossible hours. If something happened in the middle of the night, he'd be called back to the office. I have tried to avoid that, but it was recognizably the same job where you're the leader of an organization dispersed around the world with embassies around the world as well as the operation in London. And very much the link between the official machine and ministers.
- [06:24]
David Musgrove
Yeah. And sometimes challenges, I guess, in terms of having to deal with politicians who don't necessarily have the same agenda as what's going on for the rest of government.
- [06:32]
Lord Peter Ricketts
Absolutely. And also someone who has to occasionally be able to say no to ministers or rather, are you sure Ministers, that that's a good idea. Perhaps you'd like to think about doing something else. And Cadogan was a past master at that. I mean, he was very disciplined, very rather buttoned up civil servant, extremely efficient. Whenever there were disagreements in the Foreign Office, he would be the one who'd arbitrate with a neat little handwritten note at the end of all the papers. But then after he'd retired and just before his death, they published his diaries, which are sparkling and caustic and full of wit and humor of a kind that I don't think he showed in the office. And his contemporaries were very surpr to suddenly read a different Cadogan day by day with his commentary on events. So he had, you know, there was a volcano inside this rather quiet, buttoned up, efficient civil servant.
- [07:20]
David Musgrove
Yeah. And did you, when you were researching the book, did you sort of find yourself reflecting on what you would have done had you been working at the same time as Cadogan? What would you have done in terms of The Munich Agreement, for instance.
- [07:30]
Lord Peter Ricketts
Cadogan was the person who took the key bit of paper over to Chamberlain when he was standing up in the House of Commons in September 1938 with the invitation from Hitler to go to Munich for the final round of negotiations there. I often felt, good heavens, he's inherited a whole pile of papers from the foreign office at 11 o' clock at night on what are we going to do about the next stage of the war in Europe? And he's taken them home and he's digested them and he's written a one page note to ministers saying, out of all this, what I think you should do is X, Y and Z. Nine times out of ten they took his advice. I thought it was pretty extraordinary. One thing he lacked was the capacity to delegate. He wasn't at all good at passing things down the line and saying, you do that and then I'll sign it off. So there was an awful lot of centralization of the effort and I did feel that I would have been a bit more inclined to push the work back down to the lower levels of the Foreign Office to say, you work on that and now I can send it over, rather than me sitting up till 2am doing it.
- [08:28]
David Musgrove
Yeah, okay. So the Munich Agreement, that was one thing. And then there was another fascinating episode that you talk about in your book a little later on about the idea that there might have been a union between the UK and France. And again, you got a bit more skin in the game here because you were also the British Ambassador to France for a little while, so you've done lots of interesting jobs. Tell us about that moment when there was a conversation about having a formal union between the two nations.
- [08:50]
Lord Peter Ricketts
Well, it was an extraordinary moment. Churchill, when he came into office on 10 May 1940, was immediately plunged into the German occupation of first of all Belgium and Luxembourg and then spreading into France. And by June, the Panzer divisions were rolling across France. They were around Paris. The French government decamped first to Tours and then to Bordeaux. With the British Embassy scrambling after them. They were getting increasingly defeatist. But the Prime Minister, Paul Reyno, was still up for standing up against the Germans. And in London, de Gaulle had arrived. First day, second day. In London, ideas were put to him as a last ditch throw. Why don't we have a union between the two countries? We'll worry about the details, like who'd be the monarch and what the currency would be like, but let's make a declaration of union as a way of keeping France in the war and De Gaulle and his counterparts put this to Churchill. Churchill took it to the Cabinet in half an hour. They said, okay, you know, if that's our last chance of keeping France in the war, let's go for it. De Gaulle got back on a plane carrying this back to Reynaud in Bordeaux. By the time he arrived, Reynaud had resigned, Petain had taken over, and France was looking for an armistice with the Germans. The opportunity was missed. It never happened. But the document is quite remarkable. In about a page and a half, it suggests a fusion between these two countries, which have been, you know, friends, but also sometimes enemies over the last thousand years.
- [10:21]
David Musgrove
Okay, so let's talk about the diplomats a bit, because you've got some great stories in the book and you've got a really nice quote, actually, at the start of the book. You say Cicero observed that laws fall silent in times of war. And then you go on to note that diplomacy does not disappear in wartime. A very nice phrase. So tell us a bit about that. What were the diplomats doing? What were happening to the embassies around the world as war started to spread and conflict started to really hot up?
- [10:49]
Lord Peter Ricketts
Of course, diplomacy and military operations are two sides of the same. But when war breaks out, diplomacy changes, of course. And what many of the embassies were doing, particularly in Europe, was desperately trying, as the German armies rolled forward, to help the Brits to get out of the countries coming under occupation and then get themselves out. So evacuation was one of the things that they had to do, and that caused all kinds of problems. I talked about the embassy in Paris, and following the French government, they British Embassy people, the ambassador and others finally left from the beach in our right in the southwest of France to escape the Germans arriving. The ambassador in Belgium didn't have the same luck. He stayed to the very last moment trying to help the British people in Belgium out. He left it too late. And when he set off to Le Havre to get back to the uk, he was cut off by the advancing German armies. And so he took refuge in a little beach resort on the coast of France for Mahon. Plage stayed there for a few days. Germans occupied the village, and he thought it's actually pretty undignified for the British ambassador to be caught hiding under a Junip in the sand dunes. So he surrendered and he was interned, and he spent about eight or nine months in pretty much sole confinement, then eventually linked up with one or two others and swapped eventually for Germans caught up in the uk, Our embassy in Japan.
- [12:11]
David Musgrove
Yes, tell us about this the Tokyo Story. Is brilliant.
- [12:15]
Lord Peter Ricketts
The Tokyo story is quite extraordinary because obviously Pearl harbor came out of the Blue in December 1941. Suddenly America was at war with Japan. And also Churchill decided that Britain would be at war. And at that moment Japan became a hostile. The British Embassy and the community there were thousands of miles away from the uk and the Japanese essentially said, all the Brits must assemble on the British Embassy compound and we're going to intern you, we're going to shut the gates, cut you off, no contact with the outside world. Luckily, we have rather a large diplomatic compound in Tokyo, quite comfortable, but from a staff and families of about 35, it swelled to 80 with five or six children as the British community all piled in and they were cut off for eight months. And it's fascinating that they had a daily newsletter that they put round the community and copies of that have survived. They're in the Bodleian Library and it tells the story of a British community doing what they could to keep up their spirits, to keep stiff upper lip under very adverse circumstances. I mean, they had. All their radios were confiscated. They didn't know what was going on. All they had was Japanese propaganda. They got their food into the compound, but that was it. So they organized tennis ladders and musical evenings and a panto at Christmas. And some of the embassy wives whose spoke other languages did language courses and they did keep fit classes. Our whole community rallied round. People found unexpected talents and it lasted eight months until they were finally swapped as well. There was a rather darker side as well, because the information officer was taken away by the Japanese. I understand that information and intelligence are the same word in Japanese. So they decided he was the intelligence officer. They tortured him, they kept him in solitary confinement, that they treated him horribly. Eventually he was also added to the British community who were swapped and came back to uk. And extraordinarily enough, after the war, his name was Vear Redmond, he went back to Japan and settled in Japan. He had no hard feelings against the people of Japan, only the awful people who had tortured him during the war. So it's a remarkable story of resilience and British spirit under pretty adverse circumstances.
- [14:24]
David Musgrove
Yeah. That fact that he went back did rather stop me in my tracks as I was reading the vocal book. That's a very quite extraordinary.
- [14:30]
Lord Peter Ricketts
He loved Japan so much that even that treatment. He and his wife went back, settled there and became, you know, of the society.
- [14:37]
David Musgrove
Yeah. And all their communications equipment was confiscated and they could sort of slip bits of paper through the gates to the Argentinians. Is that Right. If they wanted to try and communicate.
- [14:47]
Lord Peter Ricketts
The Argentinians were so called protecting power, so they were the diplomatic power looking after us. So, yes, you could pass messages to them, but then they passed them back to the capital and probably the Japanese read what was going. But after all the radios were confiscated, one of the young diplomats was a skilled sort of amateur radio fanatic and had enough parts to actually build a shortwave radio. So there was one secret shortwave radio which gave them occasional bits of news about how the war was going, but otherwise, yeah, they were very cut off. And all their communications with the Foreign Office about the swap with the Japanese had to go through the Japanese. And so at the end of this process, there was a diplomatic dance where they were all taken to Lorenzo Marquez in Mozambique. And the Japanese arrived from London, the Brits arrived from Tokyo. They were on the dock at the same time. One got off the boat, one got on the boat as the communities were swapped. So nobody could cheat. And only when all sides were satisfied that their people were back under their control were they allowed to leave.
- [15:46]
David Musgrove
Remarkable. And what about the Vatican City? Because there's a good story there. What was happening to the ambassador in the Vatican City?
- [15:53]
Lord Peter Ricketts
Well, this is another story about a diplomat effectively cut off by the war. Again, when Italy declared war on the uk, the our man in the Vatican, who's called Francis d' Arcy Osborne, was living in Rome, but was the British ambassador to the Vatican separate from the British ambassador to the Italian state? The British ambassador to Italy obviously pulled out at that point, but the Foreign Office decided that it would be worth keeping our ambassador to the Vatican there, because the Vatican had a great network of priests right across occupied Europe. They were getting useful political intelligence and a source of influence on the Pope. So Francis d' Arcy Osborne moved into the Vatican with his butler, his secretary and his dog, Jeremy, and took up residence in one of the convent areas of the Vatican and was basically in that gilded cage for four years. He only left once for a short visit to London in four years, otherwise he was surrounded by occupied Italy, hostile territory. He did work closely with the Pope and the Vatican network. He was one of the first to hear reports of the Holocaust that the priests were picking up in occupied Europe. But he really came into his own towards the end of the war. The rather complicated saga of. Of Mussolini being deposed by the King, replaced by an interim Italian government headed by a General Pagdoglio, who was desperately keen to make contact with the Allies. And the Germans were advancing towards Rome and d' Arcy Osborne actually was used to authenticate the representatives sent to talk to the Allies in Lisbon. By doing that, he was taking a risk to the neutrality of the Vatican. There was a real worry that when the Germans arrived, they might just sweep straight into the Vatican as well. But d' Arcy Osborne took that risk. And then he was involved in a series of further exchanges validating the Italian interlocutors who eventually became the government and dealt with the Allied armies. One more remarkable thing he did was a number of British officers arrived in the Vatican after the Germans got to Rome to seek refuge. He took one of them on, hid him in his rooms in the Vatican. And with this officer, Sam Derry, set up an escape line for Allied prisoners of war who got away. And from inside the walls of the Vatican, with help from a priest called Monsignor Hugo Flacher, they ran an escape line which saved thousands of Allied prisoners. Found them money. D' Arcy Osborne got money from London rations, hid them, found safe havens until they could get to freedom. So that was done from within the walls of what was supposedly a neutral territory, taking considerable risk, but he did a great deal to save lives in Italy. It's quite a remarkable story. It's been dramatized in a book called the Scarlet and the Black, which has Monsignor Hugh Flacarty as the hero. But to me, the hero was really Osborne in the background organizing all this right under the noses of the Germans who are occupying Rome.
- [18:55]
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- [21:45]
David Musgrove
you've mentioned a couple of times the close relationship, or at least I'm reading from what you're saying, the close relationship between diplomacy and spying and sort of espionage. How close was that relationship and how often did it get diplomats in trouble?
- [21:59]
Lord Peter Ricketts
Would you say it was the wrong then and is still the role now for a British Embassy to be the safe haven for intelligence officers working undercover in the different countries in wartime. Of course that was very dangerous for the spies, and particularly so in the neutral countries like Switzerland or Spain, where they're also thick with Nazi agents, provocateurs, collaborators among the refugees and the dissidents populations. But it was also a prime place to pick up both military Intelligence, but also the political intelligence that diplomats normally collect as well. And so in that space, the embassies were providing cover for the spies, but some people were on the cusp between the two. So one of the women that I talk about in the book, Elisabeth Whiskerman, had been an expert on Germany before the war as a journalist, particularly on the Sudetenland, the first part that Germany had occupied of Czechoslovakia and was sent to Switzerland by the political Intelligence department of the Foreign Office to precisely lurk in the shadows and pick up intelligence about what was happening in occupied Europe. And she did it very effectively. Sometimes the spies could be a real problem. There is a wonderful story in the book from Spain. The ambassador in Spain, Sam Hoare, had been sent there by Churchill to do a very important job of keeping French Franco out of the German grasp, keeping him neutral, not least because we had enormous interests in not allowing the Germans to get to the Straits of Gibraltar and be able to observe Allied convoys. In the middle of that very delicate work, a gentleman presented himself in the embassy saying that he was a Times correspondent called Dudley Wrangell Clark, showing an odd familiarity with naval intelligence matters. But I think the defense attache who saw him didn't think more of it. The next day, the Spanish police reported that they had taken into custody a man entirely dressed as a woman, walking up a main street in Madrid, as the rather shocked embassy telegram back to London said, dressed as a woman down to a brassiere. Turned out to be Clark. When the British Embassy extracted him out of police custody and got him away to Gibraltar, it was completely unclear what on earth he was doing dressed as a woman. Turned out that he, he was an intelligence officer attached to the Commander in Chief Middle East Auchinlek in Cairo and head of his deceptions operation. Very, very odd story. Nobody's ever quite explained what on earth he was doing. When Clark was got to Gibraltar, Churchill said, get him home. So he got on a ship which was torpedoed and he was able to scramble onto a destroyer that took him back to Gibraltar. And at that point they said, well, let's just send him back to Cairo. He's too complicated to be dealing with. And he went on. Very gallant war ahead of the deception operation that helped the Allied forces to victory in the battles of the desert like El Alamein. But for the ambassador, it was not what he needed. At that point, the embassy were very, very cross that they'd had no knowledge of this person being in Spain. They got him away and it was a distraction to the really important War work that they were trying to do.
- [25:10]
David Musgrove
A very curious incident, I agree. We talked quite a lot about Europe here. We need to think about one of the big themes of the war, which is the special relationship. What was going on between the and the us what role did British diplomats and the Foreign Office play in sort of keeping that relationship alive during the war?
- [25:28]
Lord Peter Ricketts
The special relationship with Roosevelt was very much Churchill territory, but he needed the Foreign Office to help him with that daily relationship. Alec Cadogan, who sat in on all the cabinet discussions, drafted the telegrams, the messages from Churchill to Roosevelt. He perfected Churchill writing style so he could pretty much knock off a message as if it had come from Churchill, take it over to Churchill in bed at 7 o' clock the following morning and Churchill would sign it off. So the Foreign Office was very much involved in the logistics of that top level relationship which was so critical to the war. But it was also doing some very important policy thinking with the Americans from the middle of the war about what the future peace should. And that must have been quite hard to find the bandwidth to do that. But Alec Cadogan brought in a brilliant younger diplomat called Gladwin Jeb, who had been working with the Special Operations Executive soe and he put him in charge of a new department called rather banal way Economic and Reconstruction Department. But Jeb, who was a real intellectual, was not going to get bogged down in day to day work in the economic area. I'm going to think about the future of the world, he said. How can we design a future piece which will not mean the world staggers back into another global war in another 20 or 30 years, which takes account of the major powers, but also gives a role to the smaller powers and in particular guarantees a role for the UK at the center of the post war international order, which is effectively what Gladwin Jebb was beginning to design. And he worked up a blueprint for what would become the un. He took it to Washington. The State Department was beginning to think about the same thing. They melded their two drafts into a document which was then, then put to the Russians and the Chinese and then to other independent countries and eventually agreed as the UN Charter. But the essential thinking was started in the State Department, but at the same time more or less by Gladwin German and a tiny team in London, including one professional historian, Charles Webster. Churchill was very slow to accept that this was useful work. He was so occupied in winning the war, he didn't really want to know about plans for the future peace. He had a few thoughts of his own which were very broad brush that basically the Big Three, Britain, the US and the Soviet Union would continue to be dominating the world and guaranteeing the future peace. And the Foreign Office had the foresight to see that that wasn't going to happen. We couldn't rely on a relationship with Stalin after the war and that we needed a structure which would work better than the League of Nations done after the First World War. In particular by ensuring the Americans became part of this new order that involved some difficult compromises like for example the veto power for the major powers. But they got both the Americans and the Soviets into this organization which was the center of what became the international rules based order. We now hear so much about it beginning to break down. But the Foreign Office and Gladwin Job were at the center of that from the beginning. From 1942.
- [28:40]
David Musgrove
Yeah. And that's probably kind of the biggest, strongest argument in your book. You've got some great stories in there as well as we talked about. But in terms of the long term legacy important we've skipped over one bit which I really wanted to talk about, which is the relationship between Churchill and Stalin. You've talked about the Soviet Union there and you've got a great story there about how our man in Moscow managed to keep Churchill and Stalin together. Tell us about the walk in the woods.
- [29:02]
Lord Peter Ricketts
Well, now we introduce to the story a gentleman called Archie Clark Kerr, who was a maverick diplomat, a very brilliant man but very unconventional and had had an unconventional career falling out with the Foreign Office at various times from kind of 1917 onwards. And he'd been ambassador in Nationalist China. They wanted a strong figure to send to Moscow in 1941, 1942. So they sent Clark Kerr and one of his key roles was to get along with Stalin. They shared an interest in bawdy jokes and tobacco. And through several long Kremlin banquets, Clarker struck up quite a good relationship relationship with Stalin which came in very handy when Churchill went to Moscow for his first Visit there in 1942, summer of 1942. He'd got the difficult job of telling Stalin that we were not going to go into Western Europe in the next year to relieve the pressure on the Russians who were absolutely under the cosh of the German invading armies. It was too early to mount an invasion of Western Europe in 1943. That was a very unwelcome message to Stalin. Britain had also just cut off the convoys of military material that they'd been sending around by the Arctic because they'd been taking desperate losses from U boats. And at their first meeting, everything went wrong with Stalin. They had a big shouting match. Churchill was furious. He'd gone all the way to Moscow. He stormed back to the embassy saying, I'm never going to see that little man again. I'm going home. I've had it with him. Too bad. Plotka saw the that it would be disastrous to the war effort if Stalin and Churchill fell out at their first meeting. And so he took the risk to his career, a major risk of taking Churchill for a walk in the woods outside the embassy. And he basically said to him, you're making a mess of this. You've got to understand, these are peasants. They're not people like you. You're a great man. You've got to make allowances for it. You must not let the relationship fall on your anger. Churchill was. Looked pretty furious at him. But being Churchill, he also thought about it. And later that day he accepted in a discussion with Clark Kerr and Cadogan that, yeah, he probably did need to make another effort with Stalin. So Churchill went to the banquet at the Kremlin. They had. They got on like a house on fire. Churchill came back convinced he had a special link to Stalin, which really lasted throughout the war despite all the ups and downs of the relationship. But it was due to Clark Kerr being brave enough to speak truth to power and tell Churchill he'd got it wrong. And to do credit to Churchill, in the end, he listened.
- [31:41]
David Musgrove
I was gonna say, it's a classic case of speaking truth to power in our modern parlance, isn't it? Again, a brilliant story. And listeners, if you're interested in the Arctic convoys, I did a really interesting podcast with Hugh Sebag Montefiore about those Arctic convoys and why they were stopped in 42. So listen in for that if you want a bit more on that. So back to the story. We need to sort of get towards the. You've talked a little bit about planning for peace and how far that went back in time. Just sum up for us the significance of this idea of planning for peace in the middle of war and what sort of effort that must have taken on the part of the Foreign Office and the diplomats to be thinking about that, to be thinking about the war, needing to have an end, needing a better outcome than maybe what happened in the First World War. What was the significance of that whole comment?
- [32:30]
Lord Peter Ricketts
I mean, you're absolutely right. It is quite remarkable. When you look back, the entire British government, the entire British nation, were focused on surviving the war and then winning the war with the Americans. And other allies. But these people in the Foreign Office, these were men who had lived through two world wars in their lifetime and they were determined that there wasn't going to be a third. And so they did find the banter with and the people to step back from the day to day crisis, managing to think much more deeply and strategically about the future. And Gladwin Jeb I've mentioned, was at the center of that. Cadogan himself was so busy he couldn't really do it himself, but he found the best man he could and a small team to do it. And they didn't only think about the un which was going to be the global body, to be more effective than the League of Nations had ever been. They also recognized, especially when they had to make the concession of a veto power for the major powers, that this was likely to get logjammed. If after the war the us, uk, Soviet Union fell out and were at loggerheads with each other, the UN system would be paralyzed. And they were suspicious of Stalin's intentions after the war. So they also started thinking about a security pact for the Western countries again during the, during the war they were beginning to develop ideas for collective security against the risk of a Soviet threat while the Soviet Union was still our ally in combating the Germans. That is what Ernest Bevin inherited in 1945 at the end of the war and which he developed into first of all a European security pact called the Western European union, signed in 1948 and then NATO. And it was Bevin, working with Marshall in the US and Senator Vandenberg and other key figures who basically developed the blueprint for NATO which was then signed in the Washington Treaty of 1949. And these are the structuring institutions of this post war order designed essentially to make war between the major powers as unlikely as possible, especially with the arrival of nuclear weapons. The very existence of human life depended on that. The Foreign Office did one other thing as well in the middle of the war, which is start designing an occupation regime for Germany, recognizing Germany would be absolutely on its knees at the end of the war, that the Allied powers would be expected to take it over and run it at least for a few years. And so the British Foreign Office set up a committee called the European Advisory Committee with a British diplomat, William Strang. And this committee with the Americans. And the Russians met very regularly from 1943 planning out what the surrender would look like, what the occupation regime would look like. And when the surrender came, this mechanism was able to click into place with a Russian zone A British zone and an American zone, and in due course a French zone and tripartite running of Berlin. It wasn't smooth. I mean, occupations never are. There was a British Control Commission with thousands of British civil servants set up under William Strang to run the British occupation zone. The Russians, of course, did their own thing in the eastern part of Germany. Asset stripped it, imposed communism on it. But the western sectors were able to develop quite quickly and by 1949 became the Independent Federal Republic of Germany. That went on to be the economic powerhouse of Western Europe. But I would argue that that happened because of a lot of planning beforehand and a lot of effort put into it. Contrast with what happened over Iraq in 2003, where frankly the Americans and the British failed in the planning for the post conflict. In 1945, they had got that right by dint of a great deal of work, again right in the middle of world war going on around them.
- [36:23]
David Musgrove
And all that work, as you outline in the book, did also secure Britain's sort of global position after the war as well.
- [36:29]
Lord Peter Ricketts
Yes, I think it's fair to say that in 1945, although Britain was economic, economically, in desperately bad straits, our reputation as one of the three major powers who were victorious in the war was very high. And our stake in this post war international order, our permanent membership of the UN Security Council, our leading role in NATO, our major role in the occupation of Germany, and many other places around the world as well, where we still had substantial British forces, I think gave us an outsized role in the early post war period. Period. In the end, not one we could sustain. I mean, our economy wasn't up to it, other powers were developing and perhaps one of Britain's problems over the last 70 or 80 years is adjusting to the fact that we were even at that time one of the great powers. Arguable now that that is no longer the case.
- [37:17]
David Musgrove
One thing that we haven't talked about here that I did want to pick up on is one of the themes in your book is the place of women in the Foreign Office and how far they contributed and how far the war and the work they did sort of changed the roles that they could do afterwards. So do you want to just give us a bit more on that before we finish?
- [37:33]
Lord Peter Ricketts
At the start of the war, the only women in the Foreign Office in London or in embassies abroad were secretaries or clerical officers. They were barred from being diplomats, policymakers by law. There was a push by a group of women MPs who formed themselves into something called the Women Power Commission Committee to push ministers into accepting that women should play more of a role. Anthony Eden rather reluctantly agreed that perhaps one or two women could move into managerial positions. But hundreds and hundreds of young women joined the Foreign Office, partly to substitute for men who'd been called up. They took over the deciphering operation of the vital telegrams, putting them into cipher, deciphering them again as they flashed around the world. All the secretaries were women. Most of the clerical officers were women, a very large female cohort, including abroad and abroad a number of women showed that the Foreign Office assumption that it would be impossible for women to work in certain societies as diplomats, that that assumption was completely wrong. So I tell the story of three women in the book. One, Freyr Stark, who is well known as a traveler, an adventurer before the Second World War, fluent in Arabic, lived right across the Middle east, wrote very well received books about her adventures. She volunteered in 1939, she was sent to a pretty demanding place at the port of Aden in the Yemen. And then she was sent up country to Sana', a, now the capital of Yemen, which would have been very, very old fashioned Arabic capital, but she found that she had access to the harbor harems as a woman and she befriended the women. And when the men came home at the end of the day, the men as they relaxed in the harem. Freyr Stark was able to pass all kinds of messages about why they should support the uk. She took a projector and showed films about the Royal Navy and Britain. And she showed a remarkable capacity to influence in Arab societies. She went on to form something called the Brotherhood of Freedom in Italy, which has six or seven thousand Egyptians recruited across the country who were promoting the British message, but in Egyptian voice, as it were. She did the same thing in Iraq later on in the war. So a remarkable influencer, working in places where in Foreign Office doctrine she shouldn't have been able to. Nancy Lampton was a Persian scholar and she was in Tehran in 1939 and the number two in the embassy met her on the tennis court and thought, wow, this would be a fantastic person to have it. So she became the press attache and was in Tehran throughout the war, traveling right across the country. She was taken by the ambassador to his presentation of credentials with the Shah. The problem was she didn't have a diplomatic uniform, so they had to make up a sort of uniform for her with an academic hat and a robe and so on. There's a picture in the book of Nancy Lampton going with the ambassador again, somewhere where women should never have been able to go, but her sheer ability and her fluency in the language helped. I've talked about Elizabeth Whiskerman in Switzerland, a remarkable one person intelligence operation picking up what was circulating there. So these women broke the taboo and after the war it was impossible to maintain this bar on women in the Foreign Service, so it was lifted in 1945. Women began to be allowed to have more senior jobs, but there was a marriage bar until 1973. Female diplomats who married had to resign until 1973. And so that was a huge break on women rising to senior jobs in the Foreign Office. It's only after that marriage bar was swept away that women got to the very top jobs which, thank heavens, they now occupy. But I would say that the war changed the Foreign Office as much as the Foreign Office shaped Britain's attitude to the war. That was Lord Peter Ricketts, former head of the Diplomatic Service, speaking to David Musgrove. His book Shaping the Modern the men and women of the Foreign Office in the Second World War is out now.