Risk and risk management are essential elements of farming. We show that strategies to cope with risk often go beyond the level of the individual farm. Cooperation, learning and sharing of risks play a vital role in European agriculture. An enabling environment should support cooperative approaches, enable a diversity of risk management solutions and harness novel technological opportunities.

Stoke on Trent, in Staffordshire, known locally as Stoke, was formed in 1910 from an amalgamation of six towns – Tunstall, Burslem, Hanley, Stoke, Fenton and Longton – and became a city in 1925. The main industry in all these towns was the production of earthenware and stoneware, and among the dozens of companies were world-famous ones such as Royal Doulton, Spode and Wedgwood. Such was the concentration of these industries that the area was known as ‘The Potteries’.

Over the years the location of the US consulate changed in line with the municipal changes, but it was always unique since there were no other consulates in any of the towns. The first consular office was an agency established in Tunstall in 1863 headed by Thomas Llewellyn; by 1869 it had been upgraded to a consulate headed by J. S. Runnels and moved to Burslem in 1877 (although it still retained the name of Tunstall), and then finally to Stoke on Trent in 1910. Runnels was succeeded in 1871 by Josiah M. Lucas. Lucas, a lifelong Illinois friend of Abraham Lincoln, had had a fairly chequered career before being appointed to Tunstall. He had been a clerk in the General Land Office, Postmaster of the House of Representatives, an army captain dealing with commissary matters and been nominated (unsuccessfully) for the post of consul at Singapore. In 1873, John Copestake, a local Burslem man, joined the consulate as a junior clerk and began a career that lasted more than fifty-one years. Lucas was followed in 1879 by Edward Ephraim Lane, of Connecticut, who served until 1886. He was evidently held in high regard locally and when he was recalled to the United States he was presented with a silver tea and coffee service by William Woodall, the Member of Parliament for Hanley, on behalf of a number of leading Staffordshire citizens. He died two years after returning to America. Jacob Schoenhof arrived in 1886. He had been born in Germany but had moved to the United States in his early twenties and become a naturalized American citizen. He had been in the wholesale lace business for many years until retiring in 1884. An expert in textile tariffs, wages and economics he was appointed to Burslem by President Grover Cleveland ‘under the belief that his observations there would be of value to the Government’.

Walls on either side of the main entrance to the US Department of State bear memorial plaques carrying the names of American diplomats who have died abroad while serving the country. As I write, there are 248 names on these memorials, a number which will sadly grow as time goes by. The first is that of William Palfrey, lost at sea in 1780 on his way to take up duties as the US Consul General to France. Not far behind comes the name of Abraham Hanson, who immigrated from Great Britain to the United States as a young man and died of African Fever in 1866 while serving as Consul General to Liberia. More recently, Marie Burke, a consular officer assigned to London, was stabbed to death in 1989 in a crime that remains unsolved.

The memorials bear testament to the dangers often faced by US representatives abroad. Looking at the walls and reading the causes of death, the trials and tribulations were particularly acute for our consuls, who lived in the most far-flung parts of the earth. They were posted in most major foreign ports and trading centres performing a critical role in promoting American commerce and influence. Officially, consular officers were responsible for safeguarding seamen and shipping, providing notarial services, and on occasion acting as estate executors for deceased Americans. In actuality, these men and their families were our original diplomatic expeditionary force – working with the US Navy to free the Mediterranean of Barbary pirates, negotiating early trade treaties, and representing the US government around the world.

In recognition of the important role these early diplomats played, I am delighted to have been asked to write the foreword for Nicholas Keegan's book, US Consular Representation in Britain since 1790. As president of the American Foreign Service Association, it has been my mission and privilege to explain the work of the State Department; the role American diplomats have played historically and continue to play today in advancing US strategic interests; and to advocate on behalf of the Foreign Service, our dedicated corps of diplomats who ably represent US interests around the world.

Ireland was part of Great Britain until 1922 when it became the Irish Free State, a dominion within the British Commonwealth. The United States opened its first consulate in Ireland in Dublin in 1790 and six years later it opened another in the north of the island, in Belfast. While the Dublin consul was an American, the Belfast one was British – James Holmes, a local merchant who served for almost twenty years until 1815 when he was succeeded by James Luke, another local businessman. It was not until 1830 that an American, Thomas W. Gilpin of Philadelphia, was appointed. He served until 1842 and had a second appointment from 1845 until 1847. Also in 1830, the first consular office in Londonderry was opened, headed by Thomas Davenport as vice consul. Between then and 1920 the Belfast and Londonderry offices were variously consulates, vice consulates and consular agencies. There were also other consular offices between 1842 and 1908 in Newry, Ballymena, Sligo and Lurgan, which were subordinate to Belfast and Londonderry. In the southern part of the island there were consular offices at various times, sometimes for only short periods, in Athlone, Ballina, Cobh, Cork, Crookhaven, Dundalk, Galway, Kingstown, Limerick, Waterford and Wexford.

Belfast was a busy consulate and the total value of goods exported to America from its district during 1871 and the first quarter of 1872 exceeded £2.5 million, or almost $11 million, and the consulate earned almost $16,000 in fees from certifying these goods. The goods were not shipped direct to America but via Liverpool. The consulate had only one subordinate agency, at Ballymena. In 1881 the consulate moved premises to 5 Donegal Square, and the following year it established an additional agency at Lurgan. In 1885 George Washington Savage, born in New York, was appointed, and nominated his son John Marbacher Savage as his vice consul. Both would later serve in Dundee. Savage was succeeded by Samuel Ruby (1889– 1893) and James B. Taney (1893– 1896). In 1896, Taney appointed Malcolm T. Brice as his vice and deputy consul. Brice was also an American citizen, a native of West Virginia, who after graduation at the Linsly Military Academy in 1893 had gone to Belfast to attend art school in 1894 and then entered the consulate as clerk the following year.

Southampton is an important and busy port in the south of England with a long maritime history. In 1620, the Pilgrim Fathers sailed from there, not from Plymouth as is generally thought, only putting in to Plymouth for repairs to their ships. The city was formerly an important port of call for transatlantic liners, and it was also from there on 10 April 1912 that the Titanic sailed on its ill-fated maiden voyage. Nowadays the port is popular with luxury cruise ships. The city has close links with the Isle of Wight, about ten miles distant, which is reached by frequent ferry services.

The US consular presence in the area was inextricably linked with Cowes, on the Isle of Wight, which was where Thomas Auldjo, a local British businessman was appointed vice consul in 1790. However, as we have seen, his appointment was not recognized by the British government on the grounds that there had never before been a foreign consul in Cowes. As a compromise, the government was prepared to recognize him at Poole, on the mainland, and to overlook the fact that he was residing in Cowes. His recognition as vice consul at Poole therefore dates from 1791. His status changed in 1816 when he was recognized as consul at Cowes. Southampton came within the Cowes consular district. Auldjo's successors were Americans Robert R. Hunter, in 1823, and William Whetten in 1842. When visiting England in 1842 Joseph Rodney Croskey met his friend Whetten who decided that the consular post was not worth his retention and resigned it in favour of Croskey. Croskey had been born in Philadelphia but on his father's death had left there at the age of seven and under his London uncle's care was educated in England until the age of 16. Returning to the United States he embarked on a colourful career which included travel and business in Africa and Central America. He duly served as consul from 1844 until 1849, when he was removed from office by the newly elected President Zachary Taylor. In 1850 Charles W. Fenton of New Jersey was appointed consul for both Southampton and Cowes, based in Southampton. However his appointment was shortlived, as he found the emoluments of the post inadequate and resigned later that year.

Given that America had been a group of British colonies until the end of the third quarter of the eighteenth century, it obviously neither sent nor received consuls. The overseas interests of its sailors and merchants was the responsibility of British consuls. All that changed when the colonies achieved independence and nationhood. The United States now had to be responsible for its own diplomatic and commercial relations with other countries. Therefore, an executive department for administering this had to be created. The colonists were well aware of this and had taken the first steps towards doing so shortly before the Declaration of Independence.

In November 1775, the Second Continental Congress appointed a secret committee, chaired initially by Benjamin Franklin, to correspond with friends and sympathizers in Britain, Ireland and other parts of the world. This was the Committee of Secret Correspondence, which was renamed the Committee for Foreign Affairs in April 1777, with Thomas Paine as its first secretary. However, this committee system of government, and particularly of running foreign affairs, was frequently criticized, and in January 1779 Congress instructed the committee to obtain information about the ways in which other countries administered not only their foreign policy but also other topics. As a result, the committee had a further name change on 10 January 1781 to the Department of Foreign Affairs, headed by a Secretary for Foreign Affairs. The first holder of the office, Robert R. Livingston, was not offered the post until August and mulled it over before accepting it on 20 October. He held the appointment until 4 June 1783 before resigning. He was succeeded almost a year later by John Jay, who served from 7 May 1784 until 4 March 1789. On 27 July 1789 Congress formally established the department, but less than two months later, on 15 September, gave it a number of additional domestic responsibilities, such as custody of the Great Seal of the United States. As a consequence of these new functions it was renamed the Department of State, and was headed by a secretary of state. The first holder of this office was Thomas Jefferson, who was appointed on 26 September 1789 but did not take up his duties until almost six months later, on 22 March 1790.

The American Constitution came into effect in 1789. On 4 June of the following year, the first nominations for consular appointments to Britain were made. These initial appointments were the forerunners of a network of offices that would eventually extend from the Orkney Islands in the north of Scotland to the Channel Islands off the south coast of England. The activities of the consuls brought new challenges for the Consular Service, many of them dealing with topics that nowadays would be described as personnel or human resource related. Later, consuls would experience the same dangers as the British population during two world wars. This chapter discusses a number of topics that taken together give a broad overview of the many different facets of American consular activities and life.

The Extent of the Consular Network

The first American consular appointments to Britain were approved by the Senate in June 1790. They were James Maury of Virginia as consul at Liverpool; William Knox of New York as consul at Dublin; and Thomas Auldjo, an Englishman, as vice consul at Cowes. Two months later, in August, Joshua Johnson of Maryland was approved as consul at London. However, Auldjo faced two additional hurdles. First, his nomination was postponed by the Senate because of initial concerns about appointing foreigners as consular officers – Auldjo was a British subject – but they gave their approval on 17 June. Second, his appointment was not recognized by the British government because there had never been a previous consular appointment in Cowes. Instead, it was intimated to him that if he were appointed to the nearby port of Poole his appointment would be recognized and the fact that he was living in Cowes ‘would not be noticed’. He was therefore reappointed to Poole on 24 February 1791. The honour of being first operational consul in Britain falls to Maury, who began reporting from Liverpool in September 1790, while Knox did not arrive in Dublin until November of that year. Johnson in London did not begin reporting until 2 November. By 1801, there were 16 consulates and consular agencies throughout Britain and Ireland. Numbers increased slowly and in 1859 there were 21, but only 13 years later, in 1872, they had increased by an astonishing 148 per cent, to 52.

An idea of the variety and extent of the United States consular presence in Britain, and Ireland up to independence in 1922, may be gained from the lists shown in the Appendix. The first offices were established in 1790 and over the years there was scarcely a city or town that did not have an American consular presence of some description, whether a consulate general, consulate, vice consulate, consular agency, or commercial agency. It would be difficult to provide a history of all of the offices. However, the 15 shown in Chapters 7 to 21 – Belfast, Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Cardiff, Dublin, Dundee, Dunfermline, Edinburgh and Leith, Falmouth, Liverpool, London, Newcastle upon Tyne, Southampton and Stoke on Trent – have been selected to give a representative sample from all the regions of the United Kingdom, plus Ireland up to 1922. The accounts in each of these micro-histories describe the individuals who staffed the offices, the nature of the business transacted, the office accommodation, mundane as well as important incidents, accommodation, routines, health, dangers faced during wartime, and closures (with the exception of the consulates in Edinburgh and Belfast, both of which have been established for more than two hundred years). All of which will, it is hoped, give a better understanding of this relatively unrecognized, but important, area of foreign relations. One feature that soon becomes noticeable in all of the accounts is the wide variety of previous occupations held by the early consuls who joined the original Consular Service – for example, lawyer, blacksmith, ship's figurehead carver, newspaper editor, army officer, politician, clergyman, rancher, pharmacist, worker in a reindeer enterprise, worker in paving and road construction. Such an interesting and diverse mix of backgrounds inevitably produced many ‘characters’ in the early Consular Service so that there was no stereotypical model of an American consul in those early days. Unlike, for example, in the British Consular Service and its offshoots – the China Consular Service and the Levant Consular Service – whose entrants were drawn largely from similar backgrounds and education and for the most part without the influence of political patronage. This may also have been true of members of the consular services of other European countries at the time. However, there is no denying that the histories of the consulates in these chapters make fascinating reading.

Falmouth is a small maritime town in Cornwall, in the south-west of England. The story of the American consular presence there is unusual in two respects: with only one exception, during a presence of more than a hundred years not only were all the consuls members of the same Quaker family but they were also British nationals. Additionally, the same family, by the name of Fox, provided American consular representation in nearby Plymouth for almost seventy-five years. Indeed, the family had a remarkable record of being consuls for a number of countries well into the end of the twentieth century. For example, between 1859 and 1965 they represented 36 different countries at Falmouth, Plymouth, Southampton and Totland Bay.

Edward Long Fox was nominated as the port's first American consul by George Washington on 19 February 1793 and the appointment was confirmed by the Senate the following day. He had trained at Edinburgh University and was a busy physician, and very active in the new field of establishing ‘lunatic asylums’. However it is doubtful if he actually took up the appointment because just over a year later Washington rescinded it, saying: ‘It now appears that the name of the person intended to be nominated is Robert Weare Fox. I therefore nominate [him].’ The appointment was approved the following day. Robert Weare Fox, the elder, was a mine owner, merchant and shipping agent in Cornwall and principal partner in the family firm of G. C. Fox & Co. The consulate was operated from the company premises at Arwenack Street, Falmouth. He served until his death in 1818, apart from a break of two years due to the war between the United States and Britain from 1812 to 1814. When the war was declared he ‘took down the American coat of arms, stored away the American flag, and waited for the war to run its course. At its conclusion, up went the coat of arms and the American flag, and Mr Fox resumed his duties.’5 He was succeeded by his son Robert Were Fox (the spelling of their middle names was different), a distinguished geologist and physicist who was also a supporter of religious emancipation and the abolition of slavery.

Growing up in Edinburgh, I was always fascinated by the colourful national flags and coats of arms of the many consulates in the city. I was also struck by the unusual, at the time, sight of the left-hand drive chauffeur-driven car conveying the American consul around town. Years later, when working as a civil servant, a colleague and I took the American Consul General Norman Singer for an official lunch at one of Edinburgh's top hotels. This was my first encounter with a consul.

I maintained my interest in the consular world over the years and on leaving the civil service decided to examine the topic in more depth. I undertook graduate research at Durham University into a history of every country that has ever had a consulate in the United Kingdom, from earliest times until the year 2000. This was a unique project and included a major survey of all existing consulates, conducted by means of an extensive questionnaire. Cathy Hurst, the American consul in Edinburgh at the time, was kind enough to do a ‘test drive’ of the draft questionnaire to check for possible flaws in its design. More than two hundred career and honorary consuls representing almost seventy countries participated in the survey. This was about 60 per cent of the total number of consulates, and the data produced results that gave for the first time a detailed picture of the activities and duties of consuls working in the UK.

Having successfully put my PhD behind me, I wanted to continue with my interest in consular relations. At first I thought about researching the French Consular Service and, equipped with my undergraduate degree in French, felt confident enough to read official archives. But after some preliminary research I found that the topic did not hold enough appeal. My thoughts turned again to that lunch with the American consul in Edinburgh and led to an extended visit to Washington, DC, and to College Park, Maryland, where the State Department archives are stored, and to visits to the Department and the embassy in London. I also combed numerous other archives throughout the United States and Britain and corresponded with many officials and private individuals, some of whom were retired diplomats. This book is the result.

Situated some three miles inland from the Firth of Forth, Dunfermline was for several hundred years the capital of Scotland. The town is also the birthplace of Andrew Carnegie, the famous industrialist and philanthropist.

Manufacturers in Dunfermline had to travel to the Edinburgh consulate to have their invoices certified before they could export their goods to the United States. As is explained in the Edinburgh and Leith consulate history (Chapter 15), a group of Dunfermline manufacturers wrote to Colonel John Robeson, the Edinburgh consul, in February 1871 asking him to have a consular agency established in Dunfermline with John Burn Doig as agent. This would save them making the twice-weekly, 34-mile journey to Edinburgh. (The Forth Railway Bridge, which eventually would considerably shorten their journey, did not open until almost twenty years later.) Robeson wrote to the Department that month supporting the request, adding that more than eight hundred of the previous year's two thousand invoices verified at his consulate had come from Dunfermline. The Department agreed to the proposal and 20-year-old Doig was appointed on 24 March. In 1872, the business of verifying invoices was described by a government inspector as ‘quite large’, and for the three quarters ended 31 March 1872 generated fee income of $1,740. Doig remained as consular agent until 1877 when he was replaced by George H. Scidmore of Ohio who was appointed as vice consul. The following year a further agency was opened in nearby Kirkcaldy headed by Andrew Innes, a local solicitor and notary public.

Dunfermline became a commercial agency in 1881, rather than a consular agency, and was headed by Henry Ray Myers, with James Penman as vice commercial agent. Myers had been born in Germany but had become a naturalized American citizen. From 1881, the offices occupied one room in St Margaret's Hall, St Margaret Street. The agency's normal routine was shattered in March 1883 when W. H. Josts, a wealthy New Yorker, committed suicide by shooting in Myers's residence. Newspaper reports suggested that he did so because of an unsuccessful divorce suit.