ABSTRACT
Margaret Morris was an individual – and presumably a stranger to the diplomatic children she was offering to care for in her own home. The advertisement contains no reference to testimonials or membership of professional childcare bodies. Its appearance in a Foreign Office in-house magazine suggests that the Diplomatic Service still recognised and relied on the informal systems of childcare that had prospered on the sidelines of colonial life. The ‘persistent gendering of expatriate lives’ and gender roles within Diplomatic Service families remained fixed well into the period under discussion. The autumn of 1990 also saw a story about a Diplomatic Service family’s experience of adoption. The gradual adoption of international school as a serious option for British Diplomatic Service children raises questions about the way in which the behaviours of transnational families developed at the end of the twentieth century, especially in terms of the way in which elite identities were revised to suit a new, post-imperial era.
