Introduction

Waterlow is one of the constant yet discreet figures in KM’s life story who recurs regularly over the years via a host of unexpected links and connections with family, friends and acquaintances. He was her second cousin, being the eldest son of Charlotte Elizabeth Beauchamp – Elizabeth von Arnim’s sister, also rather misleadingly known as ‘Chaddie’ within the family – and her husband, Sir Sydney Waterlow, a highly respected politician, social reformer and philanthropist. Waterlow moved into the emerging Bloomsbury circles when he went up to Cambridge, proving to be a brilliant classics scholar at Trinity College. Unlike a number of his illustrious contemporaries, he was never admitted to the Apostles, however, which proved a source of lasting disappointment. During the Cambridge years, Waterlow forged lasting links with Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, E. M. Forster and J. W. N. Sullivan, but moved away from the tighter group of friends when he took up his first diplomatic posting in Washington, in 1900. Initially unconvinced by this career choice, and distressed by a first, unhappy, marriage, he then left the Foreign Office to take up university teaching. In the same years he became a close confident of T. S. Eliot, especially during the difficult years of Eliot’s first, unstable, marriage; a respected writer, translator and co-editor / translator (with Koteliansky); and – after the annulment of his first marriage – even a hopeful suitor of Virginia Woolf, who declined his proposal in 1911. Waterlow married his second wife, Margery Eckard (often referred to as ‘Dawks’ by the closer Bloomsbury set), in 1913, forming a family unit which Virginia Woolf rather dispiritedly described as ‘humble, aspiring & without illusions’ (DVW1, p. 155).

This rather humdrum, unfulfilled life changed again when Waterlow returned once more to the Foreign Office at the outbreak of the war. It was a career move that decided his professional path, and inevitably his social networks and geographical base until the end of his life. As a result of strategic, successful postings during the war years, he was, by 1919, Acting First Secretary of the Foreign Office, a function that made him one of the key British representatives at the Paris Peace Conference, alongside Sir Robert Cecil, Philip Noel-Baker, Molly Hamilton and Helena Swanwick, as well as a major architect of the emerging League of Nations framework (the mainstays of which were directly taken from Leonard Woolf’s International Government, as Waterlow scrupulously underlined).