By the autumn of 1916 the diplomatic community in wartime Petrograd was dominated by the Allied embassies of Britain, France and Italy, and the still-neutral USA – the large diplomatic contingent of Germany and Austria-Hungary having departed in 1914. Expatriate life in the city had always traditionally devolved to the dominating presence of the British colony of some two thousand or so nationals, its embassy and its gossipy focal point, the Anglican Church on the English Embankment, popularly known as the ‘English Church’. Recalling his years in Petrograd, the church’s resident priest, Rev. Bousfield Swan Lombard (who also served as chaplain to the British embassy from 1908), spoke of a community that was ‘hospitable beyond all expectation’, but whose outlook on life he had found disturbingly ‘ultra-conservative’. ‘So far from being broad and unfettered’, the colony was ‘narrowed by convention to such an extent that it took me quite a long time to realize that such conventionality was possible’. It was a highly insular community that had remained mistrustful of change or innovation. ‘Any new suggestion was met, not by “it is impracticable, or unworkable”,’ wrote Lombard, ‘but by either “it has never been the custom here” or it is “quite out of the question”.’6 He admitted regretfully that he was ‘amazed at the narrowness and small-mindedness of the British colony; it resembled a little gossipy English village, or perhaps better still, a Cathedral close’.7
Life in this socially incestuous Barchester-like enclave was largely reduced to ‘small coteries of intimate friends’, as antiques dealer and socialite Bertie Stopford remembered.8 Many doggedly clung to their English ways, to the extent of refusing to learn or speak Russian, and sent their children back to boarding school in England; most of the rest insisted on English or Scottish governesses and tutors, or else, failing that, French ones. For their social life the British colony tended to prefer their own parties, concerts and theatricals, though they all loved the Russian ballet. They baffled the Russians with their passion for sport, and ran their own cricket, football, tennis, yachting and rowing clubs; they even had a club for racing pigeons. They played golf together at Murino – a course they had constructed ten miles north-east of Petrograd, ‘in a stubborn attempt to let nothing stand in their way of expressing themselves’.9*
The closed, clannish society of the British colony extended also to its New English Club at number 36 Bolshaya Morskaya. Although a few British diplomats were allowed honorary membership of the ultra-elitist Imperial Yacht Club immediately opposite – patronised by the aristocracy and senior members of the court and imperial civil service – it was the New English Club that was the exclusive preserve of the colony, frequented by ‘practically all the clubbable Britons’ in the city, its chief function being to promote the interests of British business under the chairmanship of the resident ambassador.10 It allowed only a handful of chosen Americans to be members. Negley Farson, an American entrepreneur who had been in Petrograd for some time grappling with venal officialdom in his attempts to sell motorcycles to the Imperial Russian Army, abhorred this narrow world. The British expats ‘lived like feudal lords … in baronial fashion, with their abonnement [subscription] at the Ballet, their belligerent private coachmen, their New English Club on the Morskayia, their golf club, their tennis club, their “English Magazine” [the Magasin Anglais]’, which was the ‘only place in Russia where one could get good shoes or leather goods’, and their ‘hordes of servants’. He resented the social cachet they enjoyed, which opened doors far more easily than those he was banging on, notably at the Russian War Ministry. ‘An Englishman, any Englishman in Tsarist Russia, was automatically a Milord – and treated as such,’ he noted.11
In Petrograd during the war years there was certainly no ‘Milord’ more to the manner born than the British ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, who oversaw the diplomatic mission and the British Chancery at its prime position at number 4 Palace Embankment, located a short walk from the Winter Palace and facing the River Neva. The embassy occupied a section of a grand mansion rented from the Saltykov family, who retained rooms at the back of the house facing the Field of Mars – the large military parade ground located not far from the Winter Palace. Arriving in St Petersburg in 1910 from an ambassadorship in Sofia, Bulgaria,* Buchanan and his wife Lady Georgina had inherited the existing furnishings of reproduction Louis XVI furniture and de rigueur crystal chandeliers and red brocade hangings of any embassy, but had augmented them with their own collection of fine furniture, books and paintings collected during their long diplomatic life in Europe. This personal touch, as their daughter Meriel recalled, gave the rooms ‘a more homelike appearance, so that sometimes with the curtains drawn, one could almost imagine oneself in some old London square’.12
Sir George had in fact been contemplating removing the embassy to better premises for some time, only for the outbreak of war in 1914 to put paid to such ambitions. Although it might have looked grand on the surface, the embassy had several shortcomings. Its sewerage system was antediluvian and the building was in need of considerable restoration and redecoration. It required a substantial staff to maintain its baroque state rooms, its Chancery offices, located on the first floor, and – two flights of circular stairs above – the ballroom and large dining room that were used for bigger official functions. An all-essential English butler, William, was supported by a host of footmen, housemaids and an Italian chef, as well as numberless Russians employed to do menial household tasks and run the kitchens.13 The Buchanans had brought a motor car with them, and their own English chauffeur, but also maintained carriages and sledges and a Russian coachman to drive them.
Occupying centre stage not just at his own embassy, but as the acknowledged dean of the diplomatic community in Petrograd, Sir George Buchanan was highly regarded by Russians and foreigners alike and inspired the greatest loyalty – if not hero worship – in those who worked for him. He was that archetypal gentleman-diplomat: an austere, monocled Old Etonian, the son of Sir Andrew Buchanan (himself a diplomat who had also served at the embassy in St Petersburg), and a man of honour in the old-fashioned sense of the word. Tall, slim and urbane, Buchanan was a classical scholar and a good linguist (though he spoke no Russian), who was widely read but who secretly loved detective novels and enjoyed nothing better than an undemanding game of bridge. His ‘imperturbable serenity’ and formality could at times be misinterpreted as excessively austere, and some of his staff found his ‘baffling simplicity’ and slightly effete absent-mindedness disconcerting. ‘He was as gentle at bridge as in all else, but dreamily unaware of whether he was playing bridge or Happy Families,’ recalled one of his staff.14
But there was no doubting Buchanan’s modesty and – when the time came – his courage, or his unswerving loyalty towards those in his employ. It was abundantly clear to all who worked with him in those last dying days of imperial Russia that Sir George was by now a sick man, whose ill health, eroded by his unstinting dedication to duty and an increased workload during the war, had been made worse by his anxieties about the precarious position of the Tsar and the growing threat of revolution.* Although Sir George occasionally managed a fishing trip to Finland or a game of golf at Murino, by the end of 1916 he seemed, to British diplomat Robert Bruce Lockhart, ‘a frail-looking man with a tired, sad expression’. But he had become a familiar and respected figure on the streets of the capital, and ‘when he took his daily walk to the Russian Foreign Office, his hat cocked on one side, his tall, lean figure slightly drooping under his many cares, every Englishman felt that here as much as the diplomatic precincts of the Embassy itself was a piece of the soil of England’.15