| This thesis is a biographical study of the future Foreign Editor of The Times of London, Valentine Chirol, during the four years he spent in Berlin working as the paper's correspondent. From his post in the German capital, Chirol informed not only the editorial staff and the general readership of The Times about Germany in the first half of the 1890's, he also provided information about and analyses of German politics (both domestic and foreign) to the official information gathering and policy-making elite in London. Unusually well-connected for a journalist, Chirol was in a position to pass along information to the British Foreign Office that gave reports from accredited representatives added depth and resonance.; The study of Chirol, both of his character and his work, shows that a double transition was underway in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. On the one hand it discusses the deterioration of Anglo-German relations in the last two decades before the First World War, a deterioration that would help force England to make fundamental and lasting changes in her foreign policy assumptions and practices. Chirol's reports from Berlin helped British officialdom to make this change by describing Germany as a politically unstable and potentially unreliable, if not directly competitive, European power with large, and increasing, economic and military capabilities.; On the other hand it shows how the elitist, secret diplomacy of earlier centuries, based on personal exchanges between men of similar background and training, was being swept away by an incoming tide of politics as mass entertainment, with modern journalism as a major promoter and beneficiary of the change. Chirol is an apt exemplar of this two-fold change. Trained briefly in the British Foreign Office, and elitist by nature, he considered himself a traditional diplomat and behaved accordingly. At the same time, his background and his character made him something of an outsider, and he spent the best part of a productive life working as a journalist. |
