Years later I met a M. Roche, who had been the French examiner. He told me that I was not going to be let through; (as I suspected, I had not passed in arithmetic), but that he had gone to the Board of Examiners and had told them the French essay I had written might have been written by a Frenchman. When the result of the examination was announced I was not in the first three, but when the first vacancy occurred later, I was given it, and on 20th June 1898 I received a letter from the Civil Service Commission saying that, owing to an additional vacancy having been reported, I had been placed in the position of a successful candidate, and asking me to furnish evidence of my age.
I was able to do this, and was admitted into the Foreign Office and placed in the African Department.
I enjoyed my first summer at the Foreign Office before the newness of the work and surroundings wore off. The African Department was interesting. It has since been taken over by the Colonial Office. Officials from West Africa would drift in and tell us interesting things, and there was in the Department a senior clerk whose devotion to office work was such that his leave, on the rare occasions he took it, used to consist in his coming down to the office at eleven in the morning instead of at ten. At the end of the summer I was moved up into the Commercial Department, which was a haven of rest in the Foreign Office, as no registering had to be done there, and no putting away of papers; and the junior clerks used to write drafts on commercial matters—tenders and automatic couplings. In the other departments they had to serve a fifteen-year apprenticeship before being allowed to write a draft.
Suddenly, in that autumn, the whole life of the Office was made exciting by the Fashoda crisis. We were actually on the brink of a European war. The question which used to be discussed from morning till night in the Office was: “Will Lord Salisbury climb down?” The Office thought we always climbed down; that Lord Salisbury was the King of Climbers-down. But Lord Salisbury had no intention of climbing down this time, and did not do so. I remember my Uncle Cromer saying one day, when someone attacked what he called Lord Salisbury’s vacillating and weak policy: “Lord Salisbury knows his Europe; he has an eye on what is going on in all the countries and on our interests all over the world, and not only on one small part of the world.” During this crisis, the tension between France and England was extreme; it was made worse by the inflammatory speeches that irresponsible members of Parliament made all over England at the time. I believe they shared the Foreign Office view that Lord Salisbury would climb down at the end, and were trying to burn his boats for him; but they need not have troubled, and their speeches did far more harm than good. They had no effect on the policy of the Foreign Office, which was clearly settled in Lord Salisbury’s mind; all they did was to exasperate the French, and to make matters more difficult for the Government. This was the first experience of what seems to me to recur whenever England is in difficulties. Directly a crisis arises in which England is involved, dozens of irresponsible people, and sometimes even responsible people, set about to make matters far more difficult than they need be. This was especially true during the European War. I never saw Lord Salisbury in person during the time I spent in the Foreign Office, except at a garden-party at Hatfield, where I was one of several hundreds whom he shook hands with. But I had often the opportunity of reading his minutes, and sometimes his reports, written in his own handwriting, of conversations he had held with Foreign Ambassadors. These were always amusing and caustic, and his comments were wise and far sighted.