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Gerald Fitzmaurice (1865-1939)
Chief Dragoman of the British Embassy in Turkey

By G.R. Berridge
Published by Martinus Nijhoff

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Excerpts from an article by David Barchard to be published in Cornucopia 39 Spring 2008

Gerald FitzMaurice was recognized by friend and foe alike as the eminence grise of British diplomacy in Turkey in the years before World War One. An Irishman who served the British Empire faithfully, he was on good terms with Abdulhamit and has been blamed in Turkey for the coup attempt to restore him to power in April 1909. Fitzmaurice loved to live in the shadows and deliberately left as few fingerprints as he could either in the official records or the press of his day, but Professor Geoffrey Berridge has tracked him down through letters written to his friends and produced a fascinating and well-written monograph which enables us for the first time to see FitzMaurice in the round as a human being and to strip away the folklore and appreciate his work as a diplomatist and dragoman.

Gerald Fitzmaurice, Senior Dragoman or Turkish-speaking consular officer at the British Embassy from 1907 to 1914, is unique in Anglo-Turkish diplomatic history. Though well down the embassy pecking order, his reputation, both in his own lifetime and subsequently, cast a much longer shadow than those of the ambassadors he served. Gertrude Bell on a visit to Turkey in 1907 found him “the most interesting man” in Istanbul. His one-time embassy colleague, the writer and politician Aubrey Herbert, thought he was “cunning as a weasel and as savage.”

The historian Harold Temperley called him an “unrivalled authority”. Fitzmaurice lives on particularly vividly in popular Turkish history books as a sort of conspirator demon king, Dogan Avcõoilu and other Turkish writers denouncing him as the hidden hand behind the reactionary religious uprising to restore Abdulhamit II in April 1909. More generally Fitzmaurice has been blamed for the failure of Britain’s relations with Turkey during the Young Turk period. Much of his work probably consisted of running an intelligence operation via local agents, but of this we shall never know ...

"Fitzmaurice played a key role in the international diplomacy of the Balkans and the Near East before the First World War.
Based on extensive research, G R Berridge's lucid biography brings this complex and intriguing man and his world wonderfully to life"
Dr T G Otte, Senior Lecturer in History, University of East Anglia

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