The Interviewees
Interview with Stephen Boys Smith - May 2024
1- Your talk was focussed on ‘Britain in Levant’ and not ‘British in the Levant’, so putting an official angle on that long relationship. Yet your talk was on the life and times of Thomas Sandwith who was a Vice Consul in Syria 1857 to 1865, and then Vice Consul in Cyprus between 1865 and 1870. He was Consul in Chania, Crete from 1870 to 1885, in Tunis 1885 to 1888 and Consul-General in Odessa 1888 to 1891, so of considerable length of time in the British Levant Consular service, and clearly good at his job. To what extent the Consuls of that service were able to influence official policy in London through reports and was this the main flow of diplomatic information that directed Government reactions to situations and emergencies?
As to my talk, I was using Sandwith as a means of illustrating some of the activities of the British government in the Levant, as reported at a local rather than ambassadorial level – hence my title “Through Consular Eyes”. Taking your other questions: (i) consular influence on British policy: There are two aspects to this. On major current issues, it depended very much on the circumstances of the moment. If the Consul was in a place and at a time that was important in diplomatic terms, then their reporting could be very important. This was most strikingly the case with Sandwith in Crete during the so-called Balkan Crisis of 1875-76. Had there been another rising in Crete as there had been 1866-69 it would quickly have become of major concern to the European powers. For a period in 1878 Crete teetered on the edge of such a rising. The Foreign Office needed to know what was happening and followed his reports in great detail; one sign of the importance they attached to them was whether they were read personally by the Foreign Secretary, at that time Lord Salisbury. He read them all, as you can tell from the bold initial “S” in red ink with which he marked them when he had. As I said in my talk, Sandwith’s brokering of the agreement (the Pact of Chalepa) between the Ottoman authorities and the Cretan Christian leaders prevented another rising. Over those months Sandwith’s reports were fundamental to policy. And of course it was essential that the Foreign Office supported Sandwith’s brokering, as it firmly did. Another period for Sandwith was when he was in Odessa and there was much concern in London about the risk of Russian military adventures in central Asia, even perhaps to India. Salisbury again was much exercised about this. I mentioned in my talk how Sandwith had recruited a secret agent to report to him on Russian warships in the harbour at Odessa. Other elaborate arrangements were made at the same period to report in code to London about all forms of Russian military activity. Salisbury again followed all this personally and the intelligence departments of the War Office and the Admiralty produced reports for their respective Generals/Admirals. (ii) more generally, and away from times/places of concern, consular reports all helped both the Ambassador in Constantinople and the Foreign Office build up a picture of the state of the Ottoman Empire. They had an enormous appetite for information on political and economic affairs on which consuls regularly reported. There were occasional little flurries to do with individual grievances that could, for example, lead the Ambassador to call and remonstrate with the Grand Vizier – European countries were constantly interfering in Ottoman affairs and did not hesitate to tell even the Sultan what they thought he should be doing. They also took a close interest in the position of Christians in the Ottoman Empire, on which consuls all round the Levant submitted regular reports – e.g. on how Christians were being treated in courts of law. The broad picture thus built up from a myriad of consular and ambassadorial reports established the background to policy thinking. As I said in my talk, consuls in the Ottoman Empire were involved in this kind of reporting to an extent not seen elsewhere in the world, with the possible exception of the Far East (on which I cannot comment). And finally, of course remember that the Ambassador was the main interlocutor with the Foreign Office on foreign policy and strategic issues.
2- Sandwith’s career coincided with the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the zenith of the ascendancy of Britain with its Empire and also its important position in the Levant. The consular presence of Britain in the Levant area was of a great concentration during this time reporting on political events in connection with the ‘Eastern question’. Are all of Sandwith’s reports and other writings freely accessible and was this your main source of information for your book?
All Sandwith’s surviving reports to the Foreign Office and to the Ambassador in Constantinople are available for study in the British National Archives at Kew. They were my main source. The great bulk survive though in the nature of things it is impossible to say what if any do not survive. Despatches dealing with routine day-to-day administrative things do not all survive though a surprising number do. One example of the administrative survivors that seem to have plagued Sandwith over many years was the cost of replacing the union jack flags that always flew outside the consulate. The Foreign Office was notoriously tight-fisted and used to grumble sometimes when he said he need a replacement flag before they reckoned the existing one should have worn out. On his other writings, please see my response to Question 10 below.
3- You mention in your talk the Levant Consuls as the ‘unsung heroes’ and the ‘infantry on the ground to build policy by the Ambassador and the Foreign Office’ and Britain after 1825 made an effort to employ ‘British people’ as opposed as those with roots in the Levant as was typical during the earlier time when the Levant Company which employed and paid for these consuls? Do you think the reasoning behind that ‘moving away from the natives’ displayed suspicion of the possible divided loyalties of Levantines and other minorities often employed in these roles or a drive towards professionalising the system where career diplomats were encouraged or were nurtured with long tenures?
Concern about divided loyalties was undoubtedly one concern behind this approach. People, and the press, said so in terms. In addition, were factors such as a feeling that people whose roots were in the Levant would not know enough about Britain and so would be less than adequate national representatives. It is important to remember that consuls under the Levant Company were a pretty mixed bunch. Some, especially in the important posts like Smyrna, might come from British families long living in the Levant which had retained their links to Britain. But others were very different. The Vice Consul in Cyprus from 1799-1838 was a Greek- and Italian-speaking Ionian merchant of Venetian origin. His working language was Italian, not English. This was just the kind of person that was increasingly felt to be unsuitable to represent Britain. And bear in mind that whereas before 1825 consuls had spoken for the Levant Company, now they represented an increasingly assertive British Government that saw the Eastern Question as one of its major strategic diplomatic challenges. In Sandwith’s time, I do not see the move to employ British people as a drive to enhance professionalism. That came later, for diplomats and consuls. (Please see also my following answer).
4- Thomas Sandwith started his career in the British Levant Consular Service in 1855, a year into the Crimean War for James Henry Skene who was vice Consul in Constantinople as unpaid assistant, though events intervened and had to accompany this consul to the Dardanelles to handle disputes in the British-funded Turkish irregular cavalry. Was this free work normal practice, like an apprenticeship system to test out potential future consuls?
I cannot say that this sort of thing was normal practice though Sandwith’s experience was by no means exceptional. His unofficial post with Skene was a means of establishing himself and becoming known to the Foreign Office. He secured his first appointment as an established and salaried Vice Consul entirely on the basis of the reports Skene had made about him and the period he spent in Skene’s consular district as an unpaid Vice Consul. It was Skene who got him these unpaid posts. He did so by arguing to the Foreign Office that it was important to have a British person in these locations, and word came back to him from London that the Foreign Secretary (then Lord Clarendon) fully agreed with this point. When making him an established and salaried Vice Consul the Foreign Office had never met Sandwith. It is worth remembering that although by this time reforms were being made to the recruitment of home civil servants (fair and open competition etc, post-Northcote-Trevelyan) the Foreign Office was famously slow to adopt the same approach.
5- Do you detect in Sandwith’s diplomatic dispatches pointers to a declining Ottoman grip on its domains with a tenuous control of power outside main towns and describing the taxation in Cyprus where he was posted as ‘careless and vicious’ and in Crete describing one of the Ottoman governors as ‘displaying religious bigotry towards Christians’ etc. Was this colourful language normal for diplomatic reports and did the Foreign Office expect this granular reporting right down to impressions of individual officials’ conduct and do you think it put the British ahead of other powers in understanding the complex interplay between officials and locals in these restive provinces?
On your first point, yes, there are ample indications of the weaknesses in Ottoman provincial government (and please remember, Sandwith saw only what was happening in the province in which he was working at the time – generalising from this is unwise). One of the well-known weaknesses was the speed of turnover of the provincial Governors. During his fifteen years in Crete, he worked with fourteen different Governors – nobody can get to grips with a complex post and have a useful impact with that sort of turnover. But I would not want to suggest as a result that this all pointed towards “decline”. During the Tanzimat period major changes were made. The Tanzimat leaders were enlightened, able and courageous. But nevertheless the authorities could find it difficult to implement change on the ground and the process of modernisation did not always run smoothly. On your next point, Sandwith’s colourful language was rare, and the more effective therefore when he used it. It was not normal in consular despatches, including his. But, as I say in my answer to Question 1, there was an enormous appetite in London for information on what was happening in the Ottoman Empire. Sometimes the Foreign Office sent round a circular instruction calling for reports from all consular posts on some theme or other – say taxation, how the law courts operated and whether they discriminated against Christians, the education system…. Sandwith’s replies to these circulars were always very full and reflected a lot of work on his part. They were always carefully written and it is clear that with these comprehensive reports the version which issued was not the first draft. I cannot say if the British government had a better picture of what was happening than some others. I do not have the in-depth understanding of the despatches sent to other capitals to make that assessment. But in so far as I can express a view, I came across instances during his time in Cyprus where it is clear that the reports being sent by the French and American consuls were a great deal less full. Whether that represents a wider picture or was because of the individuals involved, I cannot say.
6- Clearly Sandwith put a lot of effort to learn languages including Greek and Turkish and so perhaps was unique in Levant Consuls in being able to communicate with Ottoman officials in their native language rather than the lingua-franca of the day which was French. He also travelled a lot particularly in Crete with his own tent and mules and his interest in antiquities and archaeology. Would you describe him as a ‘Renaissance man’ of the Levant as he clearly must have had a huge circle of acquaintances from different fields?
On his languages, I cannot speak with authority on how many other consuls acquired the ability to speak/read/write in the local tongue. Many may have acquired at least some proficiency but I suspect few did to a very high level. It is important to remember the role of the dragoman(s). They were significant figures in Constantinople as go-betweens and translators with the Ottoman government and embassies; very few foreign diplomats in Constantinople learnt Turkish. No nineteenth-century British Ambassador did, so far as I am aware. Consuls also had dragomans who would generally be able to operate in at least one European language; Sandwith’s could even if he did not need them as translators. Senior and better educated Ottoman officials had French, many to a very high standard; Ottoman Ambassadors and the Foreign Ministry in Constantinople used to write to each other in French, not Turkish, by the middle of the century. This was a symbol of Tanzimat modernisation and is also a blessing for those now working on Ottoman history of the period. Sandwith certainly used French with many of the provincial Governors he worked with. And one other point: you say that French was the lingua franca, and it certainly was of course for Europeans. But Italian was also widely used in the Levant, though not as widely as it had once been. Sandwith’s Vice Consul in Rethymnon in Crete was an Italian and several of the Vice Consuls along the coast of Tunisia were Italian-speaking Maltese; with all of these Sandwith communicated in Italian, at least on paper. And “lingua franca” (i.e. the language of the Franks) had been a garbled and simplified form of Italian used in the Levant from the Middle Ages when Genoese and Venetian merchants were the most significant foreign presence. It was a spoken, not written, means of communication and survived until the mid-nineteenth century. Though I have no specific evidence to back this up, Sandwith would almost certainly have encountered it when he went to Aleppo with Skene in 1855. Some inhabitants of that city were still speaking it at that time. And as to “Renaissance man”, I must I am afraid bow out. It is not a term I would use.
7- In 1885, Sandwith was suddenly transferred to be Consul in Tunisia, which had recently become a French protectorate. Anglo-French relations at the time were at a low ebb, especially following Britain’s invasion of Egypt in 1882, and local relation in Tunisia were especially soured. It fell to Sandwith to help put them back on an even keel, working with successive French officials, whilst at the same time upholding Britain’s interests and those of a large and somewhat disputatious British community. Would you describe Sandwith being used by the Foreign Office as the ‘fireman’ brought at little or short notice to resolve diplomatic emergencies, but his experience helping him to succeed in these tasks?
The only occasion when I see him performing the “fireman” role was when he was sent to Tunis in 1885. Local relations in Tunis were then at a very low ebb. Sandwith had proved himself in Crete as a big hitter. It was important that Tunis did not become a source of continued friction with the French – there was enough of that already because of the British occupation of Egypt in 1882. But being moved without notice was the norm. Every change of post for Sandwith came out of the blue. He was told, not consulted, and was expected to get on his way (home and family, remember, not just a change of office), often quite quickly.
8- Sandwith then gets transferred to Odessa in 1888 which clearly was a disappointment for him as there were no serious challenges to sort out. Do you think this was a missed opportunity and he would have been better suited to be a Consul of a major Levant port such as Constantinople? Do you detect a change in policy within the Foreign Office where perhaps the Levant was no longer seen as a critical area of concern and Odessa was perhaps bundled in that wider geography when strategically it clearly wasn’t?
I think that in many ways Sandwith might have been better employed as a Consul General in the Ottoman Empire than in Russia. Perhaps the Foreign Office missed a trick there. But there were very few Consul General posts and so far as I know none were then available in the Ottoman Empire. On the face of it, the move was an excellent one for Sandwith personally, simply because so few Consuls got promoted to that level. He was not to know before he arrived that it would be a professional disappointment. And his consular district was enormous – the modern Ukraine (the real Ukraine, including the Crimea) + Moldova + some neighbouring parts of Russia, and he was in charge of such limited consular cover that Britain had all the way across modern Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan to Baku on the Caspian. It was a major responsibility. The disappointment emerged from the more limited non-political role that consuls had in Russia and other European countries as compared to those in the Ottoman Empire – a point I made in my talk.
9- The British Consular Service evolved over time and Sandwith missed on the later more organised system of the schooling done in Ortaköy in Istanbul and the first batch of 6 students entered the programme in 1877 and the examinations were done in at least 6 languages and in 1894 the schooling was moved to British Universities to save money, that training programme ended in 1916 having recruited 88 consular officers and the Levant Consular Service was fully ended in 1936. Have you had a chance to look at the trajectory of some of these graduates and do you detect a gradual fall in the ability of Britain to exercise soft power in the region with the decline of this training over time?
Though I am aware of the training later given to Consuls I am afraid that I do not have a view about the course it took or its impact. These changes did not impact on Sandwith. Incidentally, there had been earlier efforts to introduce people with language skills in the Embassy in Constantinople but they had not prospered.
10- You are descended from Thomas Sandwith. Did he leave behind material of a personal letter such as letters or notebooks that helped you reconstruct his professional career and how well was he known in your family for his work before you embarked on this book?
None of his strictly personal letters survive, though there are a few letters that he wrote in a personal capacity in archives such as those of the British Museum. There are no notebooks though some rough notes of either an article or talk he planned to give on his time in Crete have survived from after he had retired. My main source for the biography were his despatches in the British National Archives at Kew (well over 2,000) and the despatches the Foreign Office and his successive Ambassadors sent to him. There are a few references to him in contemporary published accounts, as there are in more recent histories of the region. My reconstruction of his career did draw on contemporary accounts and other secondary sources about the places in which he served, whether he was mentioned in them or not. The only personal document of substance to survive was a diary he wrote of a two-month trip he made on the Nile accompanied by his elder daughter in 1893, two years after he had retired. It survived in the form in which he wrote it on the dahabiya. I have transcribed, introduced and edited it and hope to be able to get it published in due course.
Interview conducted by Craig Encer