Upstream: Forty Years On The Thames and the Plate

By Dolman Scott Publishing

Sir Eugen Millington Drake was the British Minister to Uruguay during
the Battle of the River Plate in 1939. The German pocket battleship
Graf Spee was damaged in the battle and had taken refuge in the neutral
port of Montevideo. Millington Drake led the very delicate diplomatic
negotiations to persuade the Uruguayan government first of all to get the
Graf Spee out of Montevideo harbour so that Commodore Harwood’s
small squadron could resume the battle and stop her scouring the South
Atlantic sinking ships carrying wartime supplies to Britain; and then,
when Harwood received news that a powerful force was racing to his
aid, to keep her in the harbour until it arrived. It was a complete change
of tactics by Britain and only someone of Millington Drake’s supreme
tact, and local knowledge, could have brought it off . The upshot was
that the Graf Spee’s captain scuttled her rather than let her with all her
modern technology fall into enemy hands, and the threat she posed to
Britain’s vital supply lines was removed.
Millington-Drake had a high flying career in Europe and South America
from 1912 to 1946 and a fascinating background. He was born and brought
up in the Paris of the Belle Epoque, where his family knew everyone,
and educated at Eton and Oxford where he was a leading rowing Blue.
Having entered the Foreign Office, in 1913 he was posted to St Petersburg
where he witnessed the beginning of the end of Imperial Russia in its
last glittering days before the outbreak of war, an intensely interesting
historic period which is covered in this book, along with his childhood in
1890 s Paris and his years at school and university in the Edwardian era.
He had started to write his memoirs but when he died in 1972 he had
not got beyond 1915, the year he was transferred to Buenos Aires for
the first of the four long postings in the River Plate area with which
his name will always be associated. He used to write ‘diary letters’ to
his family wherever he was and kept an actual diary from his Oxford
days until he went to Montevideo in 1934 as Minister and was too busy
to maintain it. He was going to draw heavily on these sources for his
memoirs but, as he couldn’t complete the job, after his death his PA did
it for him and this book, which would have been Volume I (probably of
several!), is the result.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dolman Scott Publishing
• Release date: Mar 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9781915351050

Book preview

Introduction

When the film The Battle of the River Plate was released in 1956 it was said by the film critics of the day that Anthony Bushell, the actor who took the part of Eugen Millington-Drake, the British Minister at Montevideo in 1939, played him as a copybook diplomat. Millington-Drake was never that, as he said himself, but he was the proverbial man in the right place at the time of the battle, for his skilful handling of the diplomatic negotiations brought about the outcome desired by Britain, namely the destruction of the German pocket battleship Graf Spee and the consequent removal of the threat she posed to British shipping in the South Atlantic at that early stage of the war.

Millington-Drake, whose name will always be associated with the River Plate, both the battle and the region, was able to achieve what he did because of his excellent relations with the Uruguayan government and the strong ties of friendship and support for Britain which by tremendous personal efforts he had himself built up in the country. His energy was phenomenal and from the moment he arrived in Uruguay in 1934 he had set out to gain goodwill for Britain by every means at his disposal, what he called ‘nursing the constituency’. He founded the Anglo-Uruguayan Cultural Institute in Montevideo for the teaching of English, and a string of associated institutes in the provinces, established numerous prizes and scholarships for Uruguayan students at British universities, organised exchange visits between the two countries not only for students but for many other groups, arranged lectures and concerts with English themes, lectured and broadcast on such themes himself, visited every corner of Uruguay, even the smallest towns, which no British diplomat had done before, persuaded visiting figures such as the Marquess of Willingdon and Field Marshal Lord Milne to present medals to long-serving employees of British companies and members of the Uruguayan armed forces, and contributed significantly to the development of Uruguayan sport, especially rowing and tennis in which he often participated himself in order to encourage others (and also because he enjoyed it). Above all he was always ready to listen to and help the individual as well as the organisation or official body, and he had the great gift of being exactly the same with everyone, from the President of the Republic to the local taxi drivers.

This personal involvement was not just diplomatic expediency but was prompted by genuine interest in the country and people, which the Uruguayans were quick to recognise and respond to. By the time of the Battle of the Plate Millington-Drake was a legend in Uruguay, loved not only for his espousal of everything Uruguayan and his great generosity and unremitting hard work but for his mild eccentricity and little foibles, one of which was to receive visitors and conduct meetings while doing his physical jerks on the lawn of the Legation residence. When he left Montevideo in 1941 ten thousand people lined the streets to see him off and the crowd broke ranks to drag his car bodily to the port (a spontaneous gesture of affection of the kind deplored by the Foreign Office).

If he was a legend in Uruguay in later life, Eugen Millington-Drake had the kind of background from which legends tend to spring. He was born and brought up in the Paris of the Belle Epoque, the son of parents who moved in fashionable circles, godson of Prince Eugen of Sweden (from whom he took the unusual spelling of his name), presented to Empress Eugénie when he was seven, blessed with good looks, and educated at Eton and Oxford, where he was one of the leading oarsmen of his generation.

Eugen’s father, Henry Drake, was the Paris representative of the family firm of Mincing Lane sugar brokers, J.V. Drake & Co. Ltd. Henry was President of the British Chamber of Commerce in Paris, an officer of the Légion d’Honneur, and respected by French and British alike. He was prosperous but not ostentatiously wealthy. The Drakes were a solidly English family with a proud name going back, it is thought, to John Drake, one of the brothers of Sir Francis Drake, and their firm was old-established in the City of London, where it is (or was) still trading, though under a slightly different name, Woodhouse, Drake, & Carey Ltd., having amalgamated with another firm. Strangely enough, the Woodhouses in that firm were the family of Admiral Sir Charles Woodhouse, one of the British commanders in the Battle of the Plate.

Henry Drake had married Ellen Millington, an American-born girl of English descent, whose parents had emigrated to the United States, and in 1901 Henry added her name to his by Deed Poll as she was the last of her family. Her parents had died when she was a child and though family friends took on her guardianship and brought her up as her parents would have wished she learnt early to fend for herself and exhibited great toughness and independence. She had qualified as a teacher in the US but did not practise as such and instead took herself to Paris where she worked as a journalist at a time when few young women did such a thing. Being a person of very strong not to say domineering character she was a most powerful influence in her son’s formative years and had set ideas for his future. She was also overweeningly ambitious. It was she who determined to get Eugen into Eton, where he came into contact with the other person who profoundly affected his development. This was his housemaster, Hugh Macnaghten, a famous Eton master who inspired in his pupils loyalty and devotion of no common order.

Millington-Drake was at Eton an exceptionally long time, from the early age of twelve, whereas most boys did not go there until they were thirteen or fourteen, until he was nineteen and a half, and because his family lived abroad he came to regard it as his home in England and was very happy there, in some ways perhaps happier than he was anywhere else in his life. Despite the apparent privileges of his background his childhood was not always an easy time for him. He tried to live up to his mother’s high ideals but there were inevitable clashes between them and occasions when her sharp tongue and forcefully-expressed opinions hurt. But at Eton, under Macnaghten’s sympathetic guidance, he was able to develop at his own pace.

It was at Eton that Millington-Drake first attracted attention, at Speeches in 1907, with an electrifying rendering in French of the monologue from The Marriage of Figaro, which was reported in the national press and resulted in his receiving several offers from theatrical managers, much to the alarm of his mother who had long since made up her mind that he would enter the Diplomatic Service and must have seen him as a future Ambassador to France. In fact the theatre was one of Millington-Drake’s lifelong interests and as a boy in Paris he had had lessons in diction with Pierre Laugier and other leading actors of the Comédie Française, as he tells in this memoir.

Many years later, travelling home for consultations from Montevideo via the west coast of America, he was taken to Hollywood to see a morning’s shooting on the set of the MGM film of David Copperfield, and at lunch, at which the director, cast, film crew, extras and visitors all ate together democratically at long tables, George Cukor looked down his table and seeing a striking-looking man somewhere near the bottom sent him a note saying he would like to do a screen test of him that afternoon. It had to be explained to Cukor that His Majesty’s Minister could not enter into such a thing, but for the Minister himself there was a tinge of the might-have-been about this incident.

The other sphere in which Millington-Drake made his mark at Eton was rowing, and he rose to be Captain of the Boats and went up to Oxford with a high reputation, but the university just then was full of some of the oarsmen of the century and what was worse was that most of them were at Magdalen, where he went himself. In his first term he was unwell and then out of form, and he had a long and dispiriting struggle to regain it and get into first the Magdalen eight, which he did in 1910, and then the Blue boat of the following year. However, he had the satisfaction of knowing that the 1910 Magdalen crew, which won the Grand Challenge Cup at Henley, was considered one of the finest ever seen, and the Oxford crew of 1911 won the Boat Race in what was then the record time.

After a year spent at the Universities of Berlin and Munich Millington-Drake eventually fulfilled his mother’s great wish by passing third into the Diplomatic Service in 1912. He had done the very searching entrance examination immediately after his university finals, something which at that time had never been attempted before, and perhaps it should not have been attempted then, for he was under immense pressure from his mother and the strain took its toll on his health, though he quickly recovered and in 1913 was posted to St. Petersburg as an attaché.

It was an intensely interesting moment, with Russia heading for revolution and Europe soon to be plunged into war, and in the British Embassy Millington-Drake was witnessing history in the making. In his off-duty hours there were the fantastic balls and receptions of Russian society in the last season before it was swept away for ever. Presentable young diplomats from the European embassies were welcomed by the St. Petersburg hostesses, and in Millington-Drake’s case he had the entrée into the very highest circles, not only because the British Embassy was what was known as en famille as the Empress was the granddaughter of Queen Victoria and the Emperor was also closely related to the British royal family, but also because of his friendship at Oxford with a young Russian he had known there as Count Felix Elston. When he got to St. Petersburg ‘Count Felix Elston’ turned out to be Prince Felix Youssoupoff, the heir of one of the oldest families in Russia and the intended husband of the niece of the Czar. He was also, of course, later to become much more widely known as the principal murderer of Rasputin, and Millington-Drake remained friends with him all his life.

Then the crisis broke, the parties stopped, and the work in the Embassy, which had been hard but interesting before, quadrupled in volume and importance. Millington-Drake was the resident attaché, liable to be called at any hour of the day or night to decipher urgent telegrams, and as such he had to have when necessary immediate access to the Ambassador, Sir George Buchanan. For this reason he had been given two rooms to live in in the great palace on the Neva which housed both the Chancery and the Ambassador’s residence. Here he became the first person in Russia to know that England was at war when on 5th August 1914 he was woken by the old Embassy porter at five o’clock in the morning and handed the historic telegram from Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, containing three words only – ‘WAR GERMANY ACT’ – which were a pre-arranged signal confirming Britain’s declaration of war on Germany.

A few months later Millington-Drake was deciphering another telegram of almost greater import for him personally, since it was the one transferring him to Buenos Aires for the first of his four long assignments in South America. He was loath to leave Russia at such a momentous time and not at all anxious to go to Buenos Aires, about which he knew next to nothing, not then foreseeing what an impact South America was to have on him, or he, later, on it. But with the facility which he had all his life for making the best of everything he soon began to feel that at Buenos Aires, where he would be the only career secretary (his transfer brought with it promotion to Third Secretary), working directly with the Minister, Sir Reginald Tower, in a very small but increasingly important legation, he would find greater scope for his own particular talents than at the larger more impersonal mission at St. Petersburg. This proved to be the case, for throughout the First World War he operated practically single-handedly the Legation’s ‘Black List’, which stopped Argentine businessmen from dealing with German or German-connected firms if they wanted to use Allied shipping to or from Europe and hampered Germany’s war effort accordingly. He had also realised on further reading that the River Plate region was a much more attractive area than he had imagined, and so it was in a perfectly happy and contented frame of mind that he set out on an epic wartime journey, one leg of it by sleigh on the edge of the Arctic Circle in northern Finland, and reached Buenos Aires in January 1915.

That is the period covered by this volume.

After the war Millington-Drake, at last back in Europe after five long years with no home leave, was appointed to the British delegation to the Paris Peace Conference and subsequently the Ambassadors’ Conference and on occasions interpreted for Lloyd George. There followed his marriage in 1920 to Effie Mackay, the youngest daughter of Lord Inchcape (later the first Earl of Inchcape, one of the developers of the P & O), who supported him staunchly in all (or most of!) his undertakings, and ten years of European posts in Paris, Brussels, Bucharest and Copenhagen. It was during this time that he started what was to become one of his major projects. This was the assembling of books for the future Macnaghten War Memorial Library at Eton, a collection of volumes about every aspect of the First World War, almost all of them signed, and most of them inscribed, by their authors. Fifty-three old boys of Macnaghten’s house had been killed in the war, more than from any other house at Eton, and most of them were contemporaries and friends of Millington-Drake, who would probably have been among them if he had not been refused leave to volunteer for the Army which he wished to do but was forbidden by Sir George Buchanan, his Ambassador at St. Petersburg, because the Foreign Office was afraid of losing half the junior members of its staff at a time when it was more necessary than ever that diplomats should be at their posts so that diplomacy did not collapse altogether.

Millington-Drake had long wanted to make his own tribute to these boys and in 1922 he hit upon the idea of presenting a library to Eton in memory of them, its subject to be the war in which they had given their lives, with the theory that no one reading about that war would ever advocate going to war again. To acquire the books and get every one signed by its author was a huge labour, and took Millington-Drake and his personal secretary, Evelyn Stuart, altogether sixteen years in the first instance and several more years later when he added a smaller but representative section of books on the Second World War and books about the First World War published after his original donation. The library was named after Hugh Macnaghten, who had himself died in tragic circumstances by drowning in the Thames in 1929, and officially opened in 1938, ironically enough when the next war was on the horizon. It is now a very valuable centre for research for historians of 1914-18 and a lasting memorial not only to Macnaghten and the heroic dead of his house but to Millington-Drake as well. [2015: After Sir Eugen’s death the Library was moved to the Millington-Drake Room, which was named in his honour, behind its original home, and then in 2005 it was relocated to the Provost’s Lodge in the most historic part of the old College buildings and reopened by General Sir Mike Jackson, then head of the British Army. Ed.]

In 1929 Millington-Drake returned to Buenos Aires as Counsellor and from there devoted himself in earnest to strengthening the cultural links between Britain and the River Plate countries, in one or other of which he was to serve continuously until 1946. Among countless other activities he founded, with his own money, and before the British Council existed, the Argentine Association of English Culture, which is a thriving institution today, established awards such as the Prince of Wales Scholarships at Oxford, and discovered Walter Owen’s translation of the epic Hispanic poem of gaucho life, Martín Fierro, which was published in Oxford by Basil Blackwell, one of his oldest friends, who later published other translations by this Scottish-born Argentine-domiciled poet and mystic.

All this was the same work which Millington-Drake carried out on an even greater scale when he was appointed to Uruguay as Minister five years later and continued when in 1941 he was seconded to the British Council to be its Chief Representative in the whole of Spanish-speaking South America with headquarters at Buenos Aires. This post was a specially-created one of particular importance during the war when Britain depended heavily on South American countries for food and other supplies and needed to influence public opinion in the region in her favour, something which Millington-Drake was ideally equipped to do. But the work also required money and when the Foreign Office was slow to provide this Millington-Drake was apt to raise it himself, which was not popular in Whitehall at the time, though in after years the Foreign Office acknowledged the great value of all he had done.

When Sir Eugen, as he now was, eventually retired from the Diplomatic Service in 1946 to be Chairman of the Reception Committee of the London Olympic Games in 1948, another post after his own heart, his life up to that point had already provided the material for a substantial autobiography, quite apart from a wealth of experiences still to come in his so-called retirement, and he was indeed always going to write his memoirs and call them Upstream: Forty Years on the Thames and the Plate. ‘Upstream’ was his own acknowledgment of the fact that he had sometimes, in fact often, gone against the current of official policy, in the Foreign Office and elsewhere. The forty years on the Thames and the Plate was from 1901 when he went to Eton at the age of twelve to 1946 when he retired as Chief Representative of the British Council in Spanish-speaking South America. Although there were the ten years of European posts within this timespan Sir Eugen maintained the closest possible links with both the Thames and the Plate during that period.

As time went on and the book wasn’t written the period to be covered increased to fifty, then sixty and finally seventy years* for even after his retirement Sir Eugen was still closely connected with both the Thames and the Plate, keeping in constant touch with developments at Eton and other rowing schools on the Thames in which he was interested (e.g. Radley and St. George’s College, Weybridge), and working as tirelessly as ever to promote and maintain good relations with the countries of the River Plate, both in a private capacity and in his role as a Vice-President of the Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Councils. He was a most generous benefactor of these Councils (later unified as a single entity), and notably he gave them the library of Hudson House, a centre for visiting South American students which he had set up in 1946 in London but closed when the Councils acquired their own London headquarters, at Canning House, 2 Belgrave Square, to avoid duplication of effort. The Hudson House collection formed the nucleus of the Councils’ own library which is now the largest one on Hispanic subjects open to the public in the United Kingdom. [2021: Very regrettably the library was closed to the public in 2011 and the more valuable parts of it were subsumed into the new King’s College Library in 2012 when Canning House itself closed. What Sir Eugen would have thought of these closures can be imagined. In 1940 he and Lady Effie had given the British government £50,000 – which today would be worth millions of pounds and was an incredible amount even then – towards the war effort, and the government had set some of it aside to be used for the promotion of Anglo-South American relations after the war because of Sir Eugen’s great interest in that field. £25,000 of it was in fact used for the purchase of the lease of Canning House in 1953. Ed.]

In the postwar years Sir Eugen made several world tours lecturing on everything from the Battle of the Plate to gems of English literature, donated the Prix Leclerc for an annual shooting competition between the NATO armies, and in 1964 published his book on the battle.* There were eight years of the most minute research into every detail of the battle and its aftermath before the book finally appeared and though several earlier dates had been set for publication they all passed because something new was always turning up to be investigated and slipped in under the nose of the publisher. The book has since come to be considered the definitive work on the subject, if there can ever be such a thing, but the result that gave Sir Eugen most pleasure was the friendship formed between British and German survivors of the action whom he had brought together during the long period of preparation, and this helped towards the Anglo-German reconciliation that he had always advocated.

Between 1964 and 1970 Sir Eugen made four extensive lecture tours of Uruguay and Argentina and, having in 1963 instituted the Canning Scholarships, which enabled students who might never otherwise have had the opportunity to do so to travel in that area, during the same period he made himself personally responsible for arranging every detail of the scholars’ visits. The way in which he did this shows exactly the way he had tackled his assignments in the past. It was an exercise in public relations, required exhaustive correspondence, and could only have been done by someone with his exceptional local knowledge, charm, perseverance, contacts at all levels, and stunning flair for getting other people to do things – attributes which he brought to everything he undertook.

At the same time Sir Eugen was carrying on what was for him his normal way of life even in retirement, writing articles and lecturing throughout Europe on a variety of subjects, scouring the serious newspapers for reviews of books suitable for inclusion in the Macnaghten Library, getting them signed by their authors, commuting to London from the family home in Rome, organising, with months of meticulous planning, an annual dinner for old friends and new acquaintances at his club, the Garrick, keeping the old boys of Macnaghten’s house at Eton in touch with each other by editing a regular newsletter overflowing with Eton reminiscences, seeing, when he had time, the latest plays in both London and Paris, writing letters all over the world, and helping other people.

Sir Eugen was never too busy to do anything he could for anyone who had sought his help or advice, but he was too busy to concentrate on his memoirs and he was still preparing the groundwork when he died in Paris, his birthplace, on 12th December 1972, the eve of the thirty-third anniversary of the Battle of the Plate. However, he did write down a number of descriptions of his early life, he composed many passages in the Macnaghten newsletters with the express intention of using them in his memoirs when the time came, and his family had copies of nearly all his letters to them and some of their replies over many years, as well as his personal diaries from his boyhood up to 1934 when he became Minister at Montevideo. (After that he had no time to keep a regular diary.) From these sources I have put together these memoirs. The Oxford and Russian chapters are based entirely on his diaries, with minimal editing where it seemed necessary for clarity.

The present volume deals with Sir Eugen’s childhood in Paris, his strict upbringing by his formidable mother, his schooling at Eton under the ægis of Hugh Macnaghten, his struggles and triumphs as an oarsman at Oxford, and his initiation into the Diplomatic Service in the kaleidoscopic brilliance of the last days of Imperial Russia. It ends with his first arrival on the banks of the River Plate in 1915, a natural breaking-off point as it was during the years before that time that there were laid the foundations of a long, honourable and unusual career.

Jill Quaife, December 1984

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* The original sub-title has been restored in this volume.

* The Drama of Graf Spee and the Battle of the Plate. A Documentary Anthology, 1914-1964. Peter Davies, 1964

Chapter 1

My birth in Paris in 1889; Scenes of old Paris; The Drake family; Our flat in the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne

I was born in Paris in 1889, which was exactly a hundred years after the French Revolution and two hundred years after the Bill of Rights which anticipated by a century the Droits de l’Homme. It was the year of an international exhibition in Paris, to which some foreign sovereigns refused to go officially because it was publicised as commemorating the Revolution. Within the exhibition grounds was built the Eiffel Tower, rising to a height of 984 feet, which was then the tallest building in the world and was named after the engineer who designed it. The only comparable feat of construction in Britain was the Forth Bridge, which was opened in 1890.

1889 was the year of the Mayerling tragedy, when the Crown Prince of Austria, the only son of the Emperor Franz Joseph, when ordered to break off his liaison with the young Baroness Vetsera, shot her and then himself at his hunting lodge at Mayerling near Vienna. This incident was among those that led directly, though slowly, and no one could have foreseen it at the time, to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.

1889 was also the year in which General Boulanger could have become dictator of France on the wave of public feeling seeking revenge against Germany for the humiliations of 1870, but he failed miserably to rise to the occasion. I often heard my father and uncle talking about what might have been.

My father, Henry Drake as he then was, was the Paris representative of the family firm of Mincing Lane sugar brokers, J.V. Drake & Co. He was the second of five brothers, of whom the eldest, John, and the youngest, Charles, worked in the London office of the firm. Alfred, who came next in age after my father, was their representative in Magdeburg which was the centre of the sugar-beet region in Germany, until 1905 when he retired and was succeeded by the second youngest brother, Edgar, who up till then had assisted my father in Paris. Edgar became British Vice-Consul at Magdeburg, and only just got away from there in time before the outbreak of war in 1914. After the Second World War Magdeburg became part of East Germany and therefore behind the Iron Curtain.

My father used to tell me how the enormous production of beetroot sugar in Europe all sprang from the endeavours of Napoleon to make France self-supporting at the time of the Napoleonic wars. Sugar was kept out of France by the British blockade and in his search for a substitute he hit upon the beetroot. Thus France was the pioneer of the industry in Europe. J.V. Drake & Co. were the government sugar brokers in the First World War and the firm was still flourishing in the City of London, though the name was changed to Woodhouse, Drake & Carey Ltd., when my first cousin, Colonel Francis Collingwood Drake, youngest son of my Uncle John, retired from it after many years and it amalgamated with Woodhouse, Carey & Brown, fellow produce merchants and Liverymen of the Grocers’ Company. I was to discover that by a happy coincidence the Woodhouses of this firm were the family of Admiral Sir Charles Woodhouse, the captain of HMS Ajax, Harwood’s flagship at the Battle of the River Plate in 1939, with whom later I was to have much to do.

The Drake family is generally thought to be descended from John Drake, one of the brothers of Sir Francis Drake, and this was established to the moral though not legal satisfaction of my grandfather who went into the family history very thoroughly and found that there was a single missing link in the chain of evidence, a church register which had been destroyed by fire, so that the whole thing could never be proved conclusively.

Though until my marriage I used only one of my Christian names, Eugen (and that only officially – I was known as Millers at Eton, Oxford and in the Foreign Office, and as Boy to my family!) I had three others, John, Henry, (Eugen), and Vanderstegen. John was a name much used in the Drake family, Henry was my father’s name and I was called Eugen, spelt in the Germanic way without the final ‘e’, after my godfather, Prince Eugen of Sweden. When my parents were a young married couple in Paris Prince Eugen and a friend of his, the son of the Swedish statesman Gunnar Wennerburg, were both studying art there and were frequent guests at the entertainments my parents used to give for their cosmopolitan friends, and so when I was born they not unnaturally turned to the prince to be my godfather. He remained in Paris for several years and as a child I saw him often and remember him well. After he left there I was to see him but once again and that was in November 1914 when as a young diplomat I was passing through Stockholm on my way from St. Petersburg to London, before taking up my appointment as Third Secretary at our Legation in Buenos Aires. The prince was a landscape artist of real merit (but not a good portrait painter – he had done a very bad portrait of my mother which had to be hidden except when he came to visit her) and on this occasion he showed me the pictures in the semi-subterranean private gallery which he had had built at his house. Later he gave these pictures to the city of Stockholm.

Vanderstegen, which is Belgian and can be traced back to Jan Baptiste Van der Stegen who was born near Bruges in 1345, is a family name, my paternal great-grandfather, John Drake of Leytonstone, having married Frances Vanderstegen, the daughter of William Henry Vanderstegen of Cane End near Reading in 1823. The son of this marriage, John Vanderstegen Drake, my grandfather, founded the firm for which my father and uncles worked in their turn.

My mother was born Ellen Granger Millington in America and was the only child of English parents who had emigrated and had a house right on the Hudson River near New York, so that she used literally to ‘paddle her own canoe’ in the summer and run an ice yacht in winter. Her parents died when she was young and she developed into a person of very strong character, full of energy, determination, drive and practicality. After her parents’ death she lived with a Mrs. Lee and her daughter Grace at 516 Fifth Avenue, and it must have been there, when still a young girl, that she met and fell in love with Dion Boucicault, the Irish-American actor and playwright. Old enough to be her father, with five children of his own, he wrote her a charming letter gently pointing this out and adding ‘And the time will come, years hence, when I am gone, and you are the happy mother of a beloved family, [when] you will look back on this moment and while you thank God that he preserved you with his strong hand when you were weak you will not forget to remember the vagabond [her name for him] who was delighted to seem cruel only to be kind…. The little bird, before it leaves the nest, whose horizon is bounded by the foliage of the tree in which it lives, knows as much of the world as you do – and is more fitted to battle with it.’ The letter, which she kept, is undated. Several others, of friendship only, which were dated, were written from London in the winter of 1875-76 when Boucicault was appearing at Drury Lane, and from places on the Continent where he went to try to get over the death of his son Willie early in 1876.

My mother qualified as a teacher in America but as far as we know she never worked as such and by1878 she was in Paris where instead she became a journalist, an unusual thing for a girl at that time. She lived in the Rue Galilée for some years, and married my father at the American church of Holy Trinity in the Avenue de l’Alma (now Avenue Georges V) in 1888.

In 1900 my parents decided to add my mother’s maiden name to that of Drake, partly because she was the last of her family but also to distinguish me from my four Drake cousins, the sons of my father’s eldest brother John. These four boys were all either at or going to Eton and although it had not then been decided to send me there my parents felt that it would save confusion in later life if my name was slightly different and accordingly they took the name Millington-Drake by Deed Poll.

At the time of my birth my parents occupied a flat at 43