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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.