If at times Sir George might be seen to be fading, his formidable wife made up for his flagging energies. Lady Georgina, née Bathurst, was herself ‘of the purest purple’. ‘As every Britisher knows,’ quipped Negley Farson, ‘there exist only three families: “The Holy Family, the Royal Family – and the Bathursts”.’16 Lady Georgina was an imposing woman, whose ‘heart was in proportion to her bulk’, and her prodigious energies were matched by her decided and well-voiced opinions. She was ‘indiscreet and quick to take offence: a generous friend but a dangerous enemy’, as some of her female associates in the British colony came to discover, and she ‘sat on a dozen committees and quarrelled with the lot’. She ran the domestic life of the embassy ‘like clockwork’ and ‘never fail[ed] in that passion for punctuality which in the Ambassador amounted almost to a mania’.17 Since 1914, Lady Georgina had also risen to the challenge of war work, commandeering the embassy ballroom and filling it with long tables loaded with cotton wool, lint and materials for her twice-weekly sewing parties. Here ladies of the British colony came to ‘roll bandages, to make pneumonia-jackets, all kinds of first-aid dressings, pyjamas, dressing jackets, and dressing gowns’ – some for the wounded at the front, the rest for use in the British Colony Hospital for Wounded Russian Soldiers. Located in a wing of the large Pokrovsky Hospital on Vasilievsky Island, the hospital had become Lady Buchanan’s personal fiefdom after she had set it up on the outbreak of war; her daughter Meriel also worked there as a volunteer nurse.18
After Russia had entered the war in 1914, the old established expatriate community in Petrograd was augmented by the arrival of a newer, brasher breed of Americans: engineers and entrepreneurs dealing in war materiel, manufactured goods and munitions. American staff at International Harvester (the farm-machinery manufacturer), Westinghouse (for several years involved in the electrification of Petrograd’s trams) and the Singer Sewing Machine Company (which had brought the first machines to Russia in 1865) now rubbed shoulders on the streets of the city with fellow countrymen sent from New York to run the Petrograd branches of the National City Bank and the New York Life Insurance Company, not to mention with American YMCA workers who had set up the Russian equivalent – the Mayak (Lighthouse) – there in 1900. In April 1916 the Petrograd diplomatic community had found itself welcoming a new American ambassador, after the incumbent George Marye had unexpectedly resigned – supposedly due to ill health. The gossip suggested, however, that he had been quietly pushed by the State Department, which had thought him too pro-Russian at a time when the USA was still neutral in the war.
Marye’s successor was the most unlikely of candidates. A genial Democrat from Kentucky, David Rowland Francis was a self-made millionaire who had made his money in St Louis from grain-dealing and investments in railway companies. He had served as governor of Missouri (1889–93) and had lobbied for St Louis to stage the highly successful Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904 – better known as the St Louis World’s Fair – as well as the summer Olympics later that same year. His ambassadorial experience was, however, nil, although in 1914 he had been offered and had declined an ambassadorship in Buenos Aires. Nevertheless, the choice of Francis for Petrograd seemed logicaclass="underline" he was a man of proven business acumen, whose primary role would be to renegotiate the US trade treaty with Russia that had been broken off in December 1912 in response to the tsarist government’s anti-Semitic policies. Russia, as Francis well knew, was eager to buy US grain, cotton and armaments.
On 21 April (NS; 8 OS) 1916 Francis had sailed from Hoboken in New Jersey on the Swedish steamship Oscar II with his private secretary, Arthur Dailey, and his devoted black valet-cum-chauffeur, Philip Jordan. His wife Jane stayed at home in St Louis in the care of the couple’s six sons, due to her poor health and her dread of facing the legendarily freezing Russian winters; Francis had not insisted on her accompanying him, knowing full well that his wife ‘would not like it’ in Petrograd.19 In her absence, and reticent about embracing the social life of the city (like his counterpart Buchanan, he spoke no Russian), Francis relied very heavily on the protective ‘Phil’, as he liked to call him: a man he respected as ‘loyal, honest and efficient and intelligent withal’.20
Jordan, whose African American origins are unclear, was a small, wiry man who had grown up in Hog Alley – a squalid slum district of Jefferson, Missouri, notorious (much like New York’s Bowery) as a haunt of thieves, prostitutes and drunks. His early life had been spent as a hard drinker and gang member, regularly caught up in street fights. Later he worked on the riverboats along the Missouri, before, in 1889 – and now ostensibly a reformed character – he had been recommended to Francis, the newly elected governor of Missouri. After a brief period working for the subsequent governor, Jordan returned to the Francis family’s grand mansion in St Louis’s prosperous West End in 1902, serving as valet or, as Americans then termed it, ‘body servant’. Here he had seen four US presidents – Cleveland, Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson – come and go as visitors, and had been taught to read and write by Mrs Francis, who was considerably more forgiving than her husband of Jordan’s occasional lapses into heavy drinking, and to whom Jordan became devoted.21
The culture shock awaiting Francis and Jordan – freshly arrived from the balmy American South to cold, wartime Petrograd – was enormous. During their crossing Francis’s Russian interpreter, a young Slavist named Samuel Harper, had done his best to give the inexperienced ambassador ‘a crash course on what he might expect in Russia’. Harper came to the conclusion, on hearing Francis in conversation with some American businessmen heading to Petrograd on the same ship, that he was a ‘very blunt, outpoken American, who believed in speaking his mind regardless of the rules of diplomacy’.22 The contrast with the buttoned-up and immaculately schooled Sir George Buchanan could not have been clearer; the two ambassadors were to have little in common.
Upon arriving in the Stockholm Express at Petrograd’s Finland Station on 15 April, Francis had headed for the US embassy, only too painfully aware of what awaited him: ‘I had never been in Russia before. I had never been an Ambassador before. My knowledge of Russia up to the time of my appointment had been that of the average intelligent American citizen – unhappily slight and vague.’23 Such disarming candour made it inevitable that his peers in the diplomatic community would view him disparagingly. As Robert Bruce Lockhart put it, ‘Old Francis [did] not know a Left Social Revolutionary from a potato’ but, to his credit, ‘he was as simple and as fearless as a child’. Francis’s kind-hearted, tolerant and well-meaning manner was not, however, admired by some of his more experienced embassy staff, to whom he seemed a ‘hick’ from St Louis with no understanding of Russian politics. Lacking the public-school background and years of assiduous honing in the arts of continental diplomacy that had come so naturally to his colleague Buchanan, Francis seemed ingenuous, to say the least. Arthur Bullard, an unofficial US envoy to Russia, thought him ‘an old fool’; and ‘a stuffed shirt, a dumb head’ was the opinion of Dr Orrin Sage Wightman, who arrived in the city later with a US Red Cross Commission.24 But to the Russians, who saw in America the prospect of lucrative and much-needed commercial relations, the new ambassador was ‘easily the most popular diplomat in Petrograd’.25 Francis, moreover, was socially engaging in a way that his British counterpart was not. He made no bones about his enjoyment of the finest Kentucky bourbon and fat cigars; he chewed plugs of tobacco and was able to ‘ring’ the spittoon at a distance of several feet. Unlike the dithering Buchanan at his games of bridge, Francis’s amiable simplicity did not extend to cards; he was ‘no child at poker’, as Lockhart learned to his cost. Whenever he joined the US ambassador for a game, Francis always cleaned him out.26