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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.