MS 599

Reference code

MS 599

Title

Edward Hope Vere archive

Level

Sub-fonds

Administrative / Biographical history

Hope Vere, Edward James

Edward James Hope Vere, born in 1885, was the elder son of Colonel James Charles Hope Vere, of Craigie Hall and Blackwood, Kirkmuirhill, Lanarkshire; his mother was Marie Elizabeth Francoise Guillemin (d.1932), of Villa Navarre, Pau, the great-grand-daughter of Marshal Lannes, Duc de Montebello. After his education at Beaumont and Eton, Hope Vere decided upon a military life and passed into Sandhurst, but reasons of health compelled him to abandon the Army for the Diplomatic Service, in which he was appointed an Attaché in 1905. In the following year he worked for some months at the Foreign Office, after which he served in turn as Attaché to the Embassy at Madrid and the Legation at Tangiers, Morocco. In 1908 Hope Vere went as Third Secretary to Lisbon; and from 1909 onwards, for several years, he was successively at Constantinople, Belgrade, and Athens. Promotion as Second Secretary came in 1914, when he was appointed to Berlin, but owing to the declaration of war, he never served there. The following year he returned to Madrid as Second Secretary and was promoted to First Secretary to the Residency at Cairo in 1919-20, then to Belgrade in 1921; he was Chargé d'Affaires at Buenos Aires and Montevideo 1921-1923, and at Christiania, Norway in 1924. His non-diplomatic appointments included Justice of the Peace for Lanarkshire and a member of the King's Bodyguard for Scotland (the Royal Company of Archers) in 1916. He was appointed to the Order of Malta in 1921. In his last few years in the Diplomatic Service, his health deteriorated and he retired to France, where he died on 4 November 1924.

Date

1901-1924

Extent & medium

3 boxes, [7 files, 11 volumes], 1 scroll and 1 metal banker's box

Content description

These papers comprise personal and diplomatic correspondence, honours and awards, diaries, photograph and scrap albums, family and religious papers, mostly covering Edward Hope Vere's years in the British Diplomatic Service from 1906 to 1924

Provenance

These papers were bequeathed by Edward Hope Vere to his lifetime friend and fellow Old Etonian Harold (Harco) Andorsen, who received them in banker's boxes from Hope Vere 's Trustees in 1925 (details of which are in Harold Andorsen's archive - MS 667 01 02 17). Andorsen subsequently worked on the papers and there is evidence of disruption to the original order. The papers were received by Eton College in the black metal banker's box in which Harold Andorsen received them from Edward Hope Vere's Trustees, together with Andorsen's own papers. Hope Vere's papers have been separated from Andorsen's papers and catalogued as a discrete archive. Undated letters and related papers of Edward Hope Vere, which were loose in the banker's box, were incorporated by mistake into the Harold F Andorsen archive during initial cataloguing. These papers have been transferred back to the Hope Vere archive.

Arrangement

The papers were disordered and an artificial order has been imposed by the archivist. The papers have been arranged into 8 series:

01 Personal and private correspondence

02 Diplomatic Service appointments and related documents

03 Diplomatic correspondence and papers

04 Honours and awards

05 Family papers

06 Personal diaries

07 Photograph and scrap albums

08 Religious papers

Associated material

Eton College Library also holds archive material relating to Edward Hope Vere in the Harold F Andorsen archive MS 667 01 02 02 : Papers relating to Edward Hope Vere. Hope Vere's letters to Andorsen during his diplomatic career complement Hope Vere's diaries in MS 599 06, diplomatic correspondence in MS 599 03 and photograph scrap albums in MS 599 07