Eyre Crowe

British diplomat (1864–1925)
the British artist

Sir Eyre Alexander Barby Wichart Crowe (30 July 1864 – 28 April 1925) was a British diplomat, an expert on Germany in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He is best known for his vehement warning, in 1907, that Germany's expansionism was motivated by animosity towards Britain and should provoke a closer Entente Cordiale between the British Empire and France. At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, Crowe worked with the French President Georges Clemenceau. Although Lloyd George and Crowe's rivals in the Foreign Office tried to prevent his promotion and lessen his influence, Crowe served as Permanent Under Secretary at the Foreign Office from 1920 until his death in 1925, as a consequence of his patronage by the Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon.

Half German, Crowe was born in Leipzig in 1864. He was educated at Düsseldorf, at Berlin, and in France. His father, Joseph Archer Crowe (1825–1896), was a British Consul General and Chief European Commercial Attaché between 1882 and 1896, and also an art historian. His mother was Asta von Barby (c. 1841 – 1908). His grandfather Eyre Evans Crowe was a journalist and historian, and his uncle, Eyre Crowe, was an artist. Crowe first visited England in 1882, when he was seventeen, to cram for the Foreign Office examination. At the time, he was not fully fluent in English. Even later in life it was reported that when angry he spoke English with a German accent.

In 1903, Crowe married his widowed maternal first cousin Clema Gerhardt, a niece of Henning von Holtzendorff, who was to become the Chief of the German Naval Staff in the First World War. Due to being half German and having other German connections, Crowe was often attacked in the press during the First World War, especially by Christabel Pankhurst and William le Queux.

Stanley Baldwin called Crowe "our ablest public servant". Lord Vansittart in his memoirs said of him: " a dowdy, meticulous, conscientious agnostic with small faith in anything but his brain and his Britain". Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick said Crowe was:

probably the most efficient public servant ever produced by the Foreign Office. His mother was German, he spoke with a guttural accent and he had a mind of truly Germanic clarity and orderliness. No one since his time has ever kept so tight a grip on the work of the whole office. He read a copy of every inward and outward telegram (there were fewer in those days) and sent his marginal notes on them by urgent box to the appropriate department. He sometimes telephoned to juniors to make known his views or his disapproval. I was paralysed one day to pick up the telephone to hear his voice: ‘I have just r r read your minute. Either you do not mean what you say, in which case you are wasting my time. Or you do mean it, in which case you are wr r riting r r rot.’ And with that he put down the receiver. Crowe's industry was prodigious. In December 1921 Lord Curzon asked for the office perspective on Anglo French relations. Crowe regarded this as a suitable holiday task for himself, and on our return from the Christmas holidays we found a 20,000 word manuscript memorandum in his inimitable limpid style. It was unfortunate for Crowe that he should have served under a chief who never appreciated his quality and who was apt to take advantage of his zeal. The work which Curzon heaped on his willing shoulders probably accelerated his premature death whilst still in harness. A. J. P. Taylor claimed "Crowe always thought he knew better than his political superiors". Zara Steiner and Keith Neilson have described Crowe as "the leading German expert in the pre war Foreign Office He was a master of detail but also interested in the broader complex of international and military relations Crowe was the arch anti appeaser. With ruthless logic and in a forthright manner, he opposed every effort to come to terms with Berlin A prodigious worker, Crowe's knowledge and skill earned him a very special place in the Foreign Office hierarchy and his comments were read with attention if not always with approval".

In the 2014 BBC mini series 37 Days, Crowe is portrayed by actor Nicholas Farrell. Crowe is depicted as a competent and shrewd administrator but one who is exasperated and confused by the Foreign Secretary's (Sir Edward Grey; portrayed by Ian McDiarmid) superior diplomatic prowess. The narrator of the series, a Second Division Clerk in the Foreign Office (portrayed by actor James McArdle), also describes Crowe as: "German born, educated in Berlin, but more British than any one of us".