ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the effects of the changing political and social landscape of the 1960s on Foreign Office families. Sally James, young wife of a diplomat, wrote in March 1964: The recent Plowden report, which is a review headed by Lord Plowden, on the workings of the Foreign Office, is very good. The predominate anxiety was the enforced periods of separation from children, but the financial hardship resulting from inadequate boarding school and travel allowances were regarded as adding insult to injury, especially among officers from less privileged social backgrounds, who lacked a private income. A good example is the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), launched in 1958, which offered young people an alternative affiliation to the often military structures of existing movements; ‘its mood chimed in with the erosion of the self-disciplined hierarchies of war and empire, whose structured ideals now retreated before a new romanticism that was more egalitarian and participatory in nature.’.
