Upstream - Forty Years On The Thames and the Plate

Jill Quaife

Sinossi

Sir Eugen Millington Drake was the British Minister to Uruguay duringthe Battle of the River Plate in 1939. The German pocket battleshipGraf Spee was damaged in the battle and had taken refuge in the neutralport of Montevideo. Millington Drake led the very delicate diplomaticnegotiations to persuade the Uruguayan government first of all to get theGraf Spee out of Montevideo harbour so that Commodore Harwood’ssmall squadron could resume the battle and stop her scouring the SouthAtlantic sinking ships carrying wartime supplies to Britain; and then,when Harwood received news that a powerful force was racing to hisaid, to keep her in the harbour until it arrived. It was a complete changeof tactics by Britain and only someone of Millington Drake’s supremetact, and local knowledge, could have brought it off . The upshot wasthat the Graf Spee’s captain scuttled her rather than let her with all hermodern technology fall into enemy hands, and the threat she posed toBritain’s vital supply lines was removed.Millington-Drake had a high flying career in Europe and South Americafrom 1912 to 1946 and a fascinating background. He was born and broughtup 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 Petersburgwhere he witnessed the beginning of the end of Imperial Russia in itslast glittering days before the outbreak of war, an intensely interestinghistoric period which is covered in this book, along with his childhood in1890 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 hadnot got beyond 1915, the year he was transferred to Buenos Aires forthe first of the four long postings in the River Plate area with whichhis name will always be associated. He used to write ‘diary letters’ tohis family wherever he was and kept an actual diary from his Oxforddays until he went to Montevideo in 1934 as Minister and was too busyto maintain it. He was going to draw heavily on these sources for hismemoirs but, as he couldn’t complete the job, after his death his PA didit for him and this book, which would have been Volume I (probably ofseveral!), is the result.

Disponibile da: 13/03/2022.

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