| |
chancelier
Earlier known as a cancellier, an administrator or clerk in a diplomatic mission trusted with the keeping and handling of confidential documents. Conceived as the institutional memory, such persons have generally been expected to have an easy familiarity with local languages and customs and be a permanent fixture in their embassy. Sometimes but by no means frequently they are members of the diplomatic staff. Most diplomatic services now employ such people, whether they go by this name (as in the French Diplomatic Service) or not, but their introduction was fiercely resisted by the British Diplomatic Service in the second half of the nineteenth century on the grounds that the lower social class origins of such people made them in fact untrustworthy. (However, one had for long been employed in the British embassy in Istanbul.) The result was that junior entrants to the diplomatic profession had to spend too much time on routine clerical work, including copying of despatches, and at best suffered a poor apprenticeship for their craft and at worst got bored and left. Under mounting pressure of routine chancery work, a version of the chancelier was finally introduced into the British Diplomatic Service in the first decade of the twentieth century, though styled an ‘archivist’. See also diplomatic archives; registry. |
|
