Dr Richard Smith, Senior Historian at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office and an editor of Documents on British Policy Overseas.
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The death of Lord Kitchener, who drowned when HMS Hampshire sank just off the Orkney’s north-west coast on 5 June 1916, came as a profound shock to the nation. The Secretary of State for War was the public face of …
For almost 80 years the distinguished profile of Sir Edward Grey has looked on as the great and the good have made their way in and out of the ‘Ambassador’s Entrance’ of the Foreign Office. But how did this memorial …
![Francis Bertie in 1915 (Agence Rol [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)](https://history.blog.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/09/Francis_Bertie_1915.jpg)
Dr Richard Smith reveals an exciting new Twitter project by the FCO Historians In 1914 Sir Francis Bertie held the plum posting in the British Diplomatic Service—the ambassadorship to Paris. Not only did it carry a yearly salary of £11,500 …
Diplomacy, and the Foreign Office, played a key role as events unfolded in the run-up to the First World War. For this reason FCO Historians wanted to mark the event but in an innovative way, and joined up with the Digital …
![http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Postcard_for_the_assassination_of_Archduke_Franz_Ferdinand_in_Sarajevo.jpg By Karl Tröstl (Europeanna 1914-1918) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://history.blog.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/06/Postcard.jpg)
Sunday 28 June 1914 was warm and sunny, and most Londoners were enjoying a day of rest. One exception was the resident clerk at the Foreign Office who was on duty to deal with any unexpected crisis that might occur. …
A quick question: how many Foreign Secretaries have there been since the Foreign Office was founded in 1782? Fifty, 100? The answer is 61 - and a portrait of every former foreign secretary hangs on the walls of the Secretary …
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