On 31 March 1939 Neville Chamberlain committed Britain to defending Polish independence. After years of trying to preserve peace and buy time for rearmament, he recognised that international developments and domestic opinion meant this guarantee was necessary, though it was to mean war with Germany 6 months later.
Today is the memorial service for the former foreign secretary Lord (Peter) Carrington, who died July 2018 aged 99. We remember a life-time of his public service and his time as foreign secretary.
The armistice agreement with Germany was signed on 11 November 1918, but the Peace Conference did not start proceedings until 18 January 1919. With so much at stake, why did it take 2 months for discussions to start?
In what has been termed the khaki election (1918), the first election in which (some) women could vote, a woman in green was elected to be the first woman member of parliament.
On 15 November, the Foreign & Commonwealth Office Historians gathered in the Locarno Suite of the Foreign Office to mark our centenary. Joining us were former and current members of staff.
On 11 November we remember the guns ceasing firing. We imagine universal relief that the carnage of war was finally over, at least in the victorious countries. There is just one problem: that is not the complete truth.
On this day in 1968 the Foreign and Commonwealth Office was created. But how did it come about, and what changes has the organisation seen in the last 50 years? The hole in the wall Back in 1963, a confrontation …
In 1918, the death rate in Britain exceeded the birth rate for the first year since Government started maintaining records in 1837. Yet this was not due to the First World War, but to so-called ‘Spanish Flu’. At the time, …
This is not the action of strong ‘expansionist’ leaders, but of frightened men reacting indecisively to a situation which they judged to be crucially dangerous, but with which they did not know how to deal.[i] On the night of Tuesday, …
General Ludendorff described 8 August as ‘the black day of the German Army’. Many British Historians consider it the final turning point in the First World War. To say that the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, and Field Marshal Haig …
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