THERE EXISTS AMONG the Foreign Office records in the Public Record Office a ‘case history’ volume entitled ‘Mr. Enslie's Grievances’. Case history volumes were special collections of all the papers relating to a particular incident which were bound together, whereas the normal Foreign Office practice then was to collect all papers in chronological order. When writing my Ph.D., I glanced at this volume and found it rather fascinating, but could make little direct use of it. Yet the story it leads into is a fascinating one and one worth telling which throws a number of interesting sidelights on Anglo-Japanese affairs in the 1860s — a stirring time by all accounts.

Who was Mr. Enslie, and what were his grievances? Both questions are easily answered. Mr. Enslie became an interpreter in Japan in February or March 1861. In those days, an interpreter in Japan, of course, meant a Dutch interpreter, since correspondence and exchanges between the Bakufu and the foreign powers were conducted in that language. Quite what Mr. Enslie's connections with the Netherlands were, I am not sure, but they appear to have been close. The then Permanent Under-Secretary of the Foreign Office, Sir Edmond Hammond, noted in November 1866 that: ‘The Queen of Holland takes a great interest in him, on account I believe of his family, and is always urging his promotion .. .’ But although Mr. Enslie's original qualification was in Dutch, he had put himself diligently to work on Japanese, and by 1864 it seems he was a good oral interpreter. Indeed, Mr. Enslie, never one to be slow at blowing his own trumpet, wrote in 1879 that by 1864 he was ‘a most efficient Japanese interpreter’.

For most of the early 1860s, Mr. Enslie enjoyed a successful career, but then he fell well behind his contemporaries. In 1879, he noted that he was earning only £500 a year with no outfit allowance, while the lowest salary earned by any of his original interpreter contemporaries was £825 plus £100 outfit allowance. And that is the answer to the second question. Mr. Enslie's grievance, spelled out in great detail, was lack of promotion.