ABSTRACT
In the mid-1860s, Charles James Wills, who had just qualified as a medical man, answered an advertisement from the Indian government and got a position in Iran as a doctor in the Indo-European Telegraph Department. The family’s long-standing implantation in the East, and in Iran in particular, meant that Sidney Churchill was well-acquainted with the language and the literature of the country, and with the life and habits of its people. Richard was excellently equipped to act as an amateur and/or a dealer of antiques: his work as a photographer and a translator put him in contact with the upper circles of court and Iranian society, but he was also well acquainted with the Jewish brokers of Kashan and Isfahan. Viewed from a Western point of view, Iran became a pawn within the “Great Game” played by Britain and Russia on the vast chessboard of Central Asia—tensions suggesting something of a “Victorian Cold War.”.
