Our Ablest Public Servant: Sir Eyre Crowe GCB, GCMG, KCB, KCMG: 1864-1925.

Neilson, Keith

by Sibyl Crowe and Edward Corp. Devon, England, Merlin Books, 1993. xxviii, 522 pp. 17.95 [pounds].

Eyre Crowe is known for two things: his tenure (1920-25) as permanent undersecretary (P.U.S.) at the Foreign Office and his often-quoted memorandum of 1907 outlining the principles of British foreign policy. This biography of him has been eagerly anticipated, since it was well-known in historical circles that Crowe's daughter, Sibyl, the co-author of Our Ablest Public Servant and a historian at Oxford, possessed the private papers of her father. In several articles, published in the 1970s, Dr. Crowe gave tantalizing glimpses of her father's time as P.U.S. This book, jointly written with Edward Corp, himself the author of several articles on the foreign office, unfortunately has not been worth the wait.

This results from the fact that Our Ablest Public Servant is an extended apologia masquerading as a biography. The book is a combative attempt at refuting any criticism of Crowe and his ideas, whether that criticism was uttered by his contemporaries or written subsequently by historians. There is no room for legitimate differences of opinion. Those, like Sir Charles Hardinge, one of Crowe's predecessors as P.U.S., who failed to promote Crowe as rapidly as his daughter asserts should have been the case, are portrayed as acting from the basest of motives. The possibility that Hardinge might have considered others to be equally qualified for advancement is not considered. Those, like Zara Steiner, author of The Foreign Office and Foreign Policy 1898-1914 (Cambridge, 1969), the best study of the pre-1914 foreign office who see Crowe as only one of the influential civil servants who helped shape foreign policy, are taken to task for failing to realize the absolute centrality of Crowe and the luminosity of his vision.

So determined are the authors to demonstrate the superiority of Crowe's views on an approach to foreign policy that they often lurch into the ludicrous. For example, during Lord Salisbury's last tenure as foreign secretary, from 1895 to 1900, Crowe was an extremely junior member of the foreign office. In 1907, in his famous memorandum, Crowe complained that Salisbury's secretive methods had left documentary gaps in the diplomatic records of what had transpired during this period. Subsequently, historians writing with access to Salisbury's private papers have argued that Crowe's charges lack force, since Salisbury kept private records of his negotiations and these were undoubtedly available at the time to those in the foreign office with a need to know. This is not acceptable to Sibyl Crowe and Corp. Failing to understand the nature of the foreign office under Salisbury, they contend that Salisbury should have acted in the bureaucratic fashion that gradually became the accepted practice after he left office. Implicit in this argument is the amusing assumption that Salisbury, prime minister, foreign secretary and the leading statesman of his day, should have kept people in such minor posts as Crowe occupied fully informed of his actions. Equally, the authors take historians, particularly J.A.S. Grenville (the author of the standard account of Salisbury's foreign policy) and Steiner, to task for defending Salisbury's habits and for daring to argue that Crowe's allegations were based on imperfect knowledge.

All of this would be acceptable if the authors provided sufficient evidence to prove their assertions. However, this is not the case. The Crowe papers throw new light on only two issues of note, Crowe's time at the Hague Conference of 1907 and his efforts at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. They do not appear to provide any new information about the Zinoviev letter, the most controversial event in Crowe's career and one in which he was a central figure. Indeed, on this subject the authors do not add substantial to what can be found in Christopher Andrew's Secret Service (London, 1985). In fact, for the most part the Crowe papers seem valuable only for the information that they provide about his personal life. This is interesting, and, indeed, the stuff of biography, but does not justify the tone of the book. The rest of the documentary evidence utilized by Crowe and Corp is mundane; in fact, they have not utilized several of the private collections of pre-1914 diplomats that throw light on their topic. Their secondary research is similarly sporadic. Very little written since the mid-1970s appears in the notes (there is no bibliography). And the notes themselves are unsatisfactory, often not seeming to correspond to the material quoted in the text and, on occasion, a reference is omitted entirely.

In short, this is a missed opportunity. A biography of Crowe that utilized his papers and treated him in the context of his time would be extremely valuable. His time as P.U.S., in particular, was pivotal for British foreign policy in the interwar period. This book, whose most appropriate subtitle might be "Daddy was always right," is only a pale shadow of such an endeavour. The contrast between this book, with its single-track approach, and Steiner's volume, with its more subtle and nuanced approach, underlines just how much could have been done. The definitive biography of Crowe remains to be written.