Rennell Rodd

Artist Info

Rennell RoddLondon, 1858 - 1941, Surrey

Biography:

Rodd, James Rennell, first Baron Rennell (1858–1941), diplomatist and classical scholar, was born in London on 9 November 1858, the only son of a Cornishman, Major James Rennell Rodd, of the Duke of Cornwall's light infantry, and his wife, Elizabeth Anne, third daughter of Dr Anthony Todd Thompson. He was a grandson of Vice-Admiral Sir John Tremayne Rodd, and James Rennell, the geographer, was his great-grandfather. He was educated at Haileybury College and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was awarded a third class in honour moderations (1878) and a second class in literae humaniores (1880). He won the Newdigate prize for English verse in 1880 with a poem on Sir Walter Raleigh.

After travelling in France and Italy, Rodd frequented the artistic and literary world of London, and associated with Edward Burne-Jones, who urged him to become a painter, Oscar Wilde, and J. A. McN. Whistler. He eventually decided, however, in favour of a career in diplomacy. He took the Foreign Office examination and succeeded at the second attempt, having been failed the first time for bad handwriting. In 1884 he went to the embassy at Berlin, where he won the esteem of the crown prince and crown princess of Prussia (the sister of King Edward VII, who subsequently became the Empress Frederick). With the help of the empress he wrote a biography of her husband, Frederick, Crown Prince and Emperor. This gave great offence to their son, Kaiser Wilhelm II.

From Berlin, Rodd was moved in 1888 to become second secretary at Athens, his first post in the Mediterranean area, where his most important diplomatic and scholarly work was done. Three years later he went to Rome, which he could remember in the days of papal rule, and which he had visited in 1879 and 1880. He transferred in 1892 to Paris, but his stay there was short, as in 1893 he was given charge of the British agency at Zanzibar and appointed acting commissioner for British East Africa. As such he was in command of the expedition known as the second Witu campaign, and was present at the actions of Pumwani and Jongeni. From Zanzibar he was transferred in 1894 to Cairo, where he worked under Lord Cromer and took charge during his absences on leave. His first important mission was in 1897, when he was sent to Abyssinia as a special envoy to negotiate a treaty with the emperor Menelik. He secured permanent British representation at the emperor's court, a most-favoured-nation arrangement in regard to commerce, the prevention of war munitions for the Mahdists passing through Abyssinia, and a delineation of frontiers on the north and east of that country, though not on the south and west. He was rewarded by appointment as CB and in 1899 as KCMG for his management of the work in the agency at Cairo during the Fashoda crisis. After returning to Rome in 1902 as first secretary, he negotiated several treaties of delimitation of African territories with the Italian government, and after promotion to the rank of counsellor of embassy he was transferred to Stockholm as minister; he received the GCVO in 1905.

There followed the most notable appointment in Rodd's career. During his tenure of the embassy at Rome from 1908 to 1919, not only did he prove to be persona gratissima in all circles but his judgement was invaluable to the British government during the anxious days before Italy joined the allies in 1915.

In his memoirs Rodd gives a modest account of his own role in persuading key Italian ministers that it would be in Italy's interests to join the allies in spite of the blandishments of the Germans, who sent a former foreign minister, von Bülow, to Rome with the special mission of preventing what they saw as an Italian defection. When this German mission failed, Rodd was the subject of savage cartoons in the German press, depicting him as a tyrant and bully. He had in fact refrained from exerting direct pressure on the Italian government since he was convinced that true national interests would cause them to choose the allied side in spite of their economic weakness and lack of adequate military preparation. Clearly Rodd's advocacy was effective and he was rewarded with the GCMG. At the end of his service in Italy he could look back not only on this diplomatic success but on the earlier establishment in Rome of two institutions which have since proved of great value to the cultural relations between Italy and the United Kingdom. One was the Keats–Shelley Association, established in 1908, based at Keats's house by the Spanish Steps. The other was the British School of Archaeology and the Arts, created in 1911. Both owed much to Rodd's support. He left the embassy in 1919, on being transferred to Viscount Milner's special commission on the status of Egypt, and, having been promoted GCB in 1920, he retired from the diplomatic service in 1921.

Retirement did not mean the close of Rodd's active work in foreign affairs. In 1921 and 1923 he was a representative of the British government at the general assembly of the League of Nations; in 1925 he was president of the court of conciliation between Austria and Switzerland; in 1928 he sat on the permanent commission of conciliation between Italy and Chile, and he was a member of the permanent international commission for the advancement of peace between the United States and Venezuela. He turned to home politics and represented Marylebone as a Conservative from 1928 to 1932. In 1933 he was raised to the peerage as Baron Rennell of Rodd, in the county of Hereford. He had been sworn of the privy council in 1908.

Considering the heavy claims made on Rodd's time by official work, his output of literary and scholarly work was remarkable. Between 1881 and 1940 he published some twenty volumes, including a number of collections of poems, of which those to become the best-known were Ballads of the Fleet, first published as 1897, and some renderings from the Greek anthology, first published as Love, Worship and Death in 1916. His reminiscences, Social and Diplomatic Memories (3 vols., 1922–5), give an account of the years of his official life. His classical and medieval studies bore fruit in Customs and Lore of Modern Greece (1892) and The Princes of Achaia and the Chronicles of Morea (2 vols., 1907). His detailed knowledge of the city of Rome is exhibited in what, outside learned circles, is his best-known work, Rome of the Renaissance and of Today (1932). He himself in later years took most pride in his scholarly work entitled Homer's Ithaca: a Vindication of Tradition (1927).

Courteous, unassuming, modest, but resolute, Rodd quickly won the devotion of his subordinates, the respect of the statesmen with whom he had to deal, and the affection of the learned men at Rome. His hobby was archaeology, and in pursuit of it, at the age of seventy-six, he narrowly escaped shipwreck. Sailing yachts was another of his interests. Wherever he went he was supported by the talent and enterprise of his wife, whom he married in 1894, Lilias Georgina (d. 1951), fifth daughter of James Alexander Guthrie, of Craigie, Forfar. They had four sons and two daughters, the elder of whom was the politician Evelyn Violet Elizabeth Emmet, and he was succeeded by his eldest son, Francis James Rennell Rodd (1895–1978). Rodd received numerous honours in foreign countries such as the Italian order of SS. Maurizio e Lazzaro and the Greek order of the Redeemer, but none did he appreciate more than his election to the Accademia dei Lincei. He died at Ardath, Shamley Green, Surrey, on 26 July 1941.

Rodd's career as a diplomat and a scholar was unquestionably one of great distinction. He could claim outstanding success as British ambassador to Italy at a critical period and his service to the crown there and earlier in Africa was altogether exceptional. His archaeological work was also remarkable, even if he himself regarded it as a hobby.

Percy Loraine, rev. Alan Campbell

Sources J. R. Rodd, Social and diplomatic memories, 3 vols. (1922–5) · The Times (28 July 1941) · private information (1941) · personal knowledge (1941) · CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1941)

Archives Bodl. Oxf., corresp. and papers · NL Scot., corresp. :: BL, corresp. with Arthur James Balfour, Add. MS 49745, passim · BL, corresp. with Macmillans, Add. MS 55246 · BL OIOC, letters to Lord Curzon, MSS Eur. F 111–112 · Bodl. Oxf., corresp. with Lord Kimberley · CAC Cam., corresp. with Sir Cecil Spring-Rice · CUL, corresp. with Lord Hardinge · Cumbria AS, Carlisle, letters to Lord Howard of Penrith · King's Lond., Liddell Hart C., corresp. with Sir B. H. Liddell Hart · Parl. Arch., corresp. with John St Loe Strachey · Royal Society of Literature, letters to Royal Society of Literature · U. Newcastle, Robinson L., corresp. · V&A NAL, letters to Isidore Spielmann

Likenesses S. Elwes, oils, Haileybury College, Hertfordshire · Herkomer junior, portrait, priv. coll. · duchess of Rutland, silverpoints · Spy [L. Ward], caricature, watercolour, NPG; repro. in VF (7 Jan 1897)

Wealth at death £216,810 4s. 3d.: probate, 25 Nov 1941, CGPLA Eng. & Wales

Percy Loraine, ‘Rodd, James Rennell, first Baron Rennell (1858–1941)’, rev. Alan Campbell, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/35809, accessed 30 Oct 2015]