Upstream

Sir Eugen Millington Drake was the British Minister to Uruguay during


the Battle of the River Plate in 1939. The German pocket battleship


Graf Spee was damaged in the battle and had taken refuge in the neutral


port of Montevideo. Millington Drake led the very delicate diplomatic


negotiations to persuade the Uruguayan government first of all to get the


Graf Spee out of Montevideo harbour so that Commodore Harwood’s


small squadron could resume the battle and stop her scouring the South


Atlantic sinking ships carrying wartime supplies to Britain; and then,


when Harwood received news that a powerful force was racing to his


aid, to keep her in the harbour until it arrived. It was a complete change


of tactics by Britain and only someone of Millington Drake’s supreme


tact, and local knowledge, could have brought it off . The upshot was


that the Graf Spee’s captain scuttled her rather than let her with all her


modern technology fall into enemy hands, and the threat she posed to


Britain’s vital supply lines was removed.


Millington-Drake had a high flying career in Europe and South America


from 1912 to 1946 and a fascinating background. He was born and brought


up 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 Petersburg


where he witnessed the beginning of the end of Imperial Russia in its


last glittering days before the outbreak of war, an intensely interesting


historic period which is covered in this book, along with his childhood in


1890 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 had


not got beyond 1915, the year he was transferred to Buenos Aires for


the first of the four long postings in the River Plate area with which


his name will always be associated. He used to write ‘diary letters’ to


his family wherever he was and kept an actual diary from his Oxford


days until he went to Montevideo in 1934 as Minister and was too busy


to maintain it. He was going to draw heavily on these sources for his


memoirs but, as he couldn’t complete the job, after his death his PA did


it for him and this book, which would have been Volume I (probably of


several!), is the result.