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History at the heart of diplomacy
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.
Foreign affairs and diplomacy
The war that did not end at 11am on 11 November
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.
1968 and all that: the creation of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office
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 …
The flu that wasn’t Spanish
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, …
Soviet forces invade Czechoslovakia, 20-21 August 1968
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, …
The Battle of Amiens
General Ludendorff described 8th 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 …
Coal, Calories and Candy Bombers: the Berlin Airlift 1948-9
The Berlin Blockade began 70 years ago, in June 1948, and became one of the first great tests of the Cold War. The Allied response, in the form of the Berlin Airlift, contributed to the formation of NATO and the …
A very British catastrophe: Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s final journey
Captain Robert Scott’s legacy will forever be an irreconcilable contradiction. At times, he has been venerated as an icon of Edwardian masculinity: a stoical, humble pioneer whose Antarctic expeditions discovered the Polar Plateau and made many significant contributions to scientific …
The raids on Zeebrugge and Ostend
100 years ago this day saw the execution of one of the most daring amphibious raids of the First World War, in an attempt to stop German U-boats from attacking British ships. German submarines posed a constant threat to British …
They seek him here… the life and death of the Red Baron
21 April marks the centenary of the death of the highest scoring fighter ace of the First World War, Baron Manfred von Richthofen.[1] Known to the French as the Red Devil, because of the colour of his aircraft, it was …