Auction Catalogue
Create new listThe historically important group to The Rt. Hon. Sir Mortimer Durand, G.C.M.G., K.C.S.I., K.C.I.E., ‘Boundary-Maker’ and ‘Peace-Maker’, and architect of the Durand Line which finally settled the frontiers of the Indian Empire with Afghanistan
(a) The Most Distinguished Order of St. Michael and St. George, G.C.M.G., Knight Grand Cross set of insignia, comprising collar chain, silver-gilt and enamels; sash badge, large type, silver-gilt and enamels; and breast star, silver-gilt and enamels, a few chips and flakes to the centres of the badge, otherwise good very fine
(b) The Most Exalted Order of the Star of India, K.C.S.I., Knight Commander’s set of insignia, comprising neck badge in gold, silver and enamels, the central carved cameo of Queen Victoria boldly executed and surrounded by the motto of the Order set with diamonds; and breast star in silver, gold and enamels, the central motto of the Order set with diamonds, some very minor chipping and repairs to enamel on star, otherwise nearly extremely fine
(c) The Most Eminent Order of the Indian Empire, K.C.I.E., Knight Commander’s set of insignia, comprising neck badge in gold and enamels; and breast star in silver, gold and enamels, enamel chip to centre of star, otherwise extremely fine
(d) Jubilee 1897, silver, unnamed as issued
(e) Coronation 1902, silver, unnamed as issued
(f) Afghanistan 1878-80, 2 clasps, Charasia, Kabul (Mr. H. M. Durand, Bengal C.S. Poll. Offr.)
(g) India General Service 1854-94, 1 clasp, Burma 1885-87 (Mr. H. M. Durand, C.S., C.S.I.)
(h) Spain, Coronation Medal of Alphonso XIII, gilt, the last five mounted ‘Cavalry’ style as originally worn, some contact marks to the medals, otherwise generally good very fine or better
£12000-1500
This lot was sold as part of a special collection, The Brian Ritchie Collection of H.E.I.C. and British India Medals.
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Henry Mortimer Durand, ‘Boundary-Maker’ and ‘Peace-Maker’, was born on 14 February 1850, at Sehore in the Bhopal State. He was the second son of Major-General Sir Henry Marion Durand, the hero of Ghuznee, and his wife, Anne, a daughter of Sir John McCaskill (qv), who was killed at the battle of Moodkee. In 1853 the infant ‘Morty’ was brought to England when his father came home on furlough. On his parents’ return to India in 1856 he was placed with his two brothers and four sisters in the charge of their McCaskill aunts in Switzerland. One day in the late summer of 1857, Pastor Dufour, or ‘Old Duffer’, who was responsible for the children’s education, took Mortimer and his eldest brother to the top of a vineclad hill and broke the news of their mother’s death. She had been with her husband in Central India when the Mutiny broke out and had died in childbirth, worn out by ‘exposure and fatigue’.
In 1858, General Durand returned from India to take up a post in England in connection with the reorganisation of the Indian Army, bringing with him his second wife, whose first husband, the Rev Henry Polehampton, had died during the Defence of Lucknow. The family settled at East Sheen and in 1862, young Durand was sent to school in Norfolk. He looked forward to going on to Harrow and one of the great Universities but was disappointed when he was sent instead to Blackheath Proprietary School.
At sixteen his education was continued at Eton House, Tonbridge, where he developed the urge to become a soldier but it was his father’s wish that he should study for the Indian Civil Service, believing that his own career in India had suffered from the predominance of the Civil Service. It was to remain Durand’s life long regret that he was not permitted to follow his father into the Army. On being presented to Lord Napier of Magdala at a Levee at Fort William during his first weeks in Calcutta, he was filled with ‘confusion and shame’ when the Commander-in-Chief roared “What! a Durand and not a soldier.” Years later Durand told Lord Roberts, “I have never passed a day of my life without a pang of regret at not being a soldier.” Whilst studying for the open competition by which the I.C.S. recruited since the demise of Haileybury, young Durand, who had also become a student at Lincoln’s Inn, learnt of his father’s unfortunate end on the North West Frontier. General Durand was then Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab, and, whilst visiting an Indian chief, protocol demanded that he mount an elephant belonging to the potentate. The animal was led towards a covered gateway too low for it to pass through, and, becoming alarmed, it lunged forward, crushing the howdah and the General against the roof. The General, a man of ‘great height’, was thrown out across a low wall, breaking his back. Before he died he uttered “Tell Morty that he has been a joy and comfort to me all his life, from hard work and trying to do my wishes.”
In the spring of 1871, Durand heard that an aunt was trapped without funds in Paris which was then under the bloody mob rule of the Commune. Durand and a friend started for Paris immediately and after several encounters with lowly Frenchmen and arrogant Germans succeeded in rescuing Madame Durand from her plight. In the summer that followed, the resurgence in the Volunteer movement in England allowed Durand to fulfil in some small part his thwarted military ambition by joining the Inns of Court Volunteers. While ‘paddling along in the mud’ at the Autumn Manoeuvres of 1872 he met his cousin Hugh Gough, a meticulously turned out subaltern of the 10th Hussars, ‘beautifully mounted and very smart in every way, with leopard skin saddle-cloth, incipient moustache and glass in one eye’. Durand’s salute was returned with ‘freezing haughtiness’.
Having delayed his departure for the East in order to be admitted to Lincoln’s Inn in late 1872, Durand finally started for India on 9 January 1873. On account of his father’s popularity he was warmly received by the Bengal Secretariat, and found he had friends in high places. Appointed to the province of Lower Bengal as Assistant Judge at Howrah, young Durand lived in Calcutta and each day crossed the Hooghly to his Court where, having passed his Bengali Lower Standard examination within a few weeks of his arrival, he was let loose to try his first cases. In August 1873 he was transferred 200 miles up country to Bhagalpur, a station with a European population of a dozen or so white administrators and their ladies, and the headquarters of a district containing some two million Indians. The daily routine was scarcely strenuous. Durand would rise about five, ride out and gallop his ‘Waler’ on the race course or walk up some partridge; return home for a bath and breakfast; spend a couple hours in Court listening to petitions and dispensing justice, then make for the racket court, or on ‘ladies days’ go to the recreation ground near the river and play tennis or badminton. In the evenings the Europeans would usually forgather in one or other of their houses, or join the social round of the officers of the 4th Native Infantry in their cantonment two miles down the road. Life at Bhagalpur was further enhanced by the presence of a retired judge’s daughter, Ella Sandys, whom he married in the spring of 1875.
In June 1874 Durand joined the fast track to the top on being appointed Attaché in the Indian Foreign Office, ‘the blue riband of the service’, at Simla, where he quickly made a favourable impression on the Viceroy, Lord Northbrook. In the winter of that year he helped organise the Prince of Wales’ Tour of India, and in 1876 was appointed First Assistant to Alfred Lyall, the Agent to the Governor-General in Rajputana. At the end of the year, Durand attended the Imperial Assemblage at Delhi, seen by many as the most important ceremony to take place since the arrival of the British in India. Durand wrote of the event: ‘Looking down from the historic Ridge, where a little body of Englishmen and loyal Indians had stood at bay, besieging and besieged, through the terrible summer of 1857, one saw in every direction long streets of tents - a real city of canvas. There our fiercest fighting had been twenty years before; there the English Empire was now to be formally proclaimed. It was proclaimed with great pomp, and, on the whole Lord Lytton [Northbrook’s successor] was successful in a very difficult task.’
In November 1877, he was recalled to the Foreign Office, but, in September 1879, Major-General Sir Frederick Roberts applied for Durand ‘to accompany him on his expedition to Kabul, where poor Cavagnari, Jenkyns, Hamilton, the Doctor and seventy of the Guides have been butchered.’ He started from Simla in late September to join Roberts’ Kabul Field Force as Political Officer in the Kurram Valley, wearing ‘a huge claymore’ and ‘an equally large double-barrelled pistol’ in his belt. In December, following the concentration of the British force in the Sherpur cantonments, Durand was actively engaged in the fighting and one occasion, when armed with an oriental sword, ‘which he had little idea how to handle’, his hand was injured when trying to ward off a blow from a man trying to cut at his thigh.
On the 11th December, in the Chardeh Valley, he took part in the recovery of some guns and the dead of the 9th Lancers, who, having fallen in an earlier attempt to save them, had been ‘dreadfully mutilated by Afghan knives’. Major-General Sir Charles MacGregor reported Durand’s valuable services on this occasion, and on the Afghanistan Medal roll, Roberts noted: ‘Mr. Durand was under fire on the 11th December, 1879, on which occasion he behaved with conspicuous gallantry.’ Durand afterwards remarked that he ‘valued the medal and the recommendation that gained it for him, more than any other he was given’.
Durand’s experiences in the Second Afghan War equipped him with an insight and appreciation of the military point of view, rare among ‘civilians’, who tended to look down on military officers. Moreover, his despatches impressed Lyall, who was now Foreign Secretary. He wrote to a friend: ‘Morty Durand sends me excellent letters, so good indeed that the Ghilzais in the Khurd Kabul are in the habit of abducting them; I have lost more than one. I saw one of them printed in the Viceroy’s private collection of papers, but I don’t tell Durand, as it might affect the freedom of his style.’
At the end of January 1880, Durand was recalled to the Foreign Office, as Under-Secretary at Calcutta, to find that Lyall was proceeding to Afghanistan to discuss Roberts’ proposal to divide Afghanistan in to provinces, ruled by Governors subservient to the British. Durand, who was in favour of annexation, condemned division of the country as playing into the hands of the Russians, and making it easier for them to annex provinces situated to the north of the Hindu Kush. Lyall’s absence brought Durand into close contact with the clever and cultured Lytton, whose household he joined. Like many in India, Durand found the Viceroy’s character distasteful. Lytton invariably kept him up until midnight playing whist; ‘They then began work and for several hours discussed replies to the various telegrams that had arrived during the day, after which His Excellency was free to retire to bed, whereas Durand had to work until breakfast-time putting everything into due form, and frequently having to take a bath instead of a night’s rest.’
Under the next Viceroy, Lord Ripon, the Foreign Office continued to be absorbed with the Afghan question at least until Amir Abdur Rahman had asserted his authority over Ayub Khan and his followers at Kandahar in 1881. Internally, Ripon was a reformer and Durand foresaw trouble as a result of his policies. While acting as his Private Secretary, he observed: ‘Lord Ripon will be lucky if he escapes coming to grief before the end of his term of office here. I like him and respect him as a good and honest man, but he is painfully cautious and ‘funky - and he does not support his men as he should do. He has made one or two bad mistakes of late, from sheer timidity.’ In the autumn of 1881, Durand accompanied Ripon on a tour of Rajputana, and as usual was bored by the receptions and banquets. On the return journey to Calcutta he visited his father-in-law, old Judge Sandys, at Bhagalphur and was distressed to find him suffering from senile dementure, living in a tree and spending his waking hours excavating a cave.
Lord Dufferin, however, who was sent out ‘primarily to repair the ravages caused by Lord Ripon’s impulsive optimism’, was rather more to Durand’s liking - ‘By far the best Viceroy I have seen yet’. Durand had good reason for liking Dufferin. He was far less interested in the internal affairs of India than foreign affairs and in 1885 he made Durand Foreign Secretary, at the extremely young age of thirty-five. A year earlier, Durand had been given the choice of acting as Foreign Secretary or taking charge of the Boundary Commission (eventually headed by Lieutenant-Colonel (later Sir) West Ridgeway) which, with a Russian comission, set out to delimit the northern frontier of Afghanistan. The Russian Foreign Office was anxious to come to an agreement in Central Asia, but the Russian War Office continued to urge the inexorable advance towards British India. In early 1885 there was a major crisis when the Russians proceeded to capture and occupy Panjdeh, which Abdur Rahman claimed to be part of his territory. Panjdeh was dangerously close to Herat and since the Government of India had guaranteed the ‘integrity and independence’ of Afghanistan, they were bound, if Abdur Rahman required them to do so, to drive the Russians out of Panjdeh, by force. While neither the British or the Russians wanted to go to war over Panjdeh, Herat was a different matter and for several weeks ‘the occasion of long and miserable war’ was a stark possibility.
By good fortune when news came that the Russians had entered Panjdeh, Abdur Rahman was paying Dufferin a state visit at Rawalpindi, and it fell to Durand to inform him of the disaster. ‘We received the news about dinner time one evening, and I drove at once to tell him of the slaughter of his people and the wounding and death of his general.’ Considering the alarm the crisis was generating elsewhere, Durand was astonished to find the Amir was unmoved. ‘He begged me not to be troubled. He said that the loss of two hundred or two thousand men was a mere nothing, and, as for the general, that was less than nothing. There were lots of generals in Afghanistan.’
Dufferin, having been British Ambassador at St Petersburg, was as anxious for a settlement with Russia as anyone, but being, in Durand’s words, ‘always ready for a bold game’, was fully prepared to send troops to Herat, despite the military authorities ‘throwing the wettest of blankets’ over the idea. While the Amir’s initial reaction to the news was favourable, he afterwards ‘pretended to take the business as an afront’ and there remained the possibility that he might hold the Government to its promise of military intervention. Fortunately Dufferin, through his talks with the Amir, managed to establish a satisfactory relationship.
‘It was a curious thing,’ Durand wrote, ‘to see him and Lord Dufferin together. On the one side the trained diplomatist with his cordial refined manner, playing a bad hand with admirable skill - on the other, the rough strong savage, never yielding the smallest of advantages and striking home at times very forcibly.’ Abdur Rahman reminded Durand of ‘a sort of Afghan Henry VIII and an old boar - the latter similitude being brought home to one by a huge single tusk which formed a marked feature in his countenance until Miller the dentist pulled it out’. In the end, the ministrations of Miller the dentist, the bestowal of the Star of India, and a meeting with the son of the Queen-Empress, the Duke of Connaught, who together with his Duchess, was also in the Viceroy’s camp, all contributed to the Amir’s good humour but had little direct bearing in settling the Panjdeh crisis. All along Abdur Rahman had been prepared to let the matter rest, as he had no wish for his country to be turned into a battlefield for his quarelling neighbours.
Before the end of 1885, Durand was faced with another international crisis when the Burmese government of the effete King Thebaw, intriguing with the French, imposed an unjustified and crippling fine on the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company, and rejected all attempts at abitration. On 21 October Durand told his diary: ‘The season has ended with an ultimatum to Burma. I have advocated annexation and this is agreed upon. We settled it last Sunday after breakfast, sitting in Lord Dufferin’s veranda after the usual custom, with the hum of bees round us, and a sweet sunny breeze.’ Two weeks after British troops crossed the frontier on, 14 November, Thebaw surrendered and was immediately deported to India with his depraved queen, Supayalat. In February 1886, Durand accompanied the Viceroy and the Commander-in-Chief to Mandalay and visited Thebaw’s palace. In the hall containing the peacock throne, before which the British Resident and the burly Scots manager of the Flotilla Company had been forced to postrate themselves, Durand reflected, ‘I could not help but feel the power of the sword, as I saw the palace of the Lord of the White Elephant full of our big Englishmen with their Sam Browne belts and long and straight blades and brown bearded faces’.
In view of the former suzerainty of China over Burma, Nepal and Sikkim, the annexation of Burma became a cause of concern at Peking. The difficulty was resolved by the British refraining from sending a Commercial Mission from India to Lhasa, in exchange for China agreeing to waive her ‘shadowy rights’ over Burma. The Tibetans, believing that the British had retreated before the might of China, invaded Sikkim and persuaded the Raja to strengthen a fort at Lingtu which was in strict contravention to the British right of free passage through the state agreed upon in 1814. Following the failure of British protests, a force was despatched under General Graham which captured the fort and subsequently inflicted a complete defeat on the Tibetans that attempted to recapture it. After this the approach of an Amban (a Chinese representative of the Emperor) was annonunced, and Durand was despatched to Sikkim to negotiate a settlement.
It was Durand’s opinion that the most important internal scheme which he carried through during his Indian career was the creation of Imperial Service Troops, this being the utilization of the armies of the Native States providing they met certain standards of efficiency and equipment. Lords Dufferin and Roberts were both enthusiastic supporters of the scheme, believing that any measure to bind up the interests of the Native States must be beneficial. The Princes were likewise enthusiastic since they might at last resume ‘the profession of arms which they, like the Englishmen of good family, held to be the noblest in which they could engage’. In 1889 Durand inspected the Punjab State Troops of the newly raised force: ‘[They] drill like Guards ... They are as keen as mustard, and the result took me aback. Such fine men too, big Sikhs and Mussulmans full of pride in themselves. Their officers had only one request - “Send us on service the next frontier expedition and let us show you we are fit to fight.” I was greatly pleased with my army.’ In the searching test of the Great War, 26,000 Imperial Service Troops went overseas, of whom some 1,700 officers and men fell on active service and more than 500 won gallantry awards. It has been said that if Durand did nothing else, he ‘deserves a niche in the Temple of Fame for the statesman-like policy of trusting the princes of India to serve shoulder to shoulder against the enemies of the Kaiser-i-Hind’.
On Lord Dufferin’s departure from India he offered his Foreign Secretary a K.C.S.I., but it was suggested that Durand was too young for such an honour and Durand declined to accept it. He was gazetted a K.C.I.E. instead on 1 January 1889. After their last work together was finished Dufferin further expressed his opinion of his Foreign Secretary by saying, “Now Durand, I am going to say something which will surprise you, but literally is true. If I were ever Prime Minister of England, the first thing I would do would be to make you Viceroy of India.” Somewhat taken aback, Durand retorted, laughingly, that he would have no objection. Dufferin assured him that he was entirely serious and added, “I never shall be Prime Minister of England, but I hope I may yet live to see you in my place.”
In the autumn of 1889, Durand’s health broke down and he was sent home on long furlough. On his return to India, he was invited to take command of the somewhat run down Simla Volunteers. Characteristically he took his part-time soldiering extremely seriously, and, in the spirit of the ‘inherited traditions of the Mutiny’, told the Volunteers, “Practice is everything. You can no more make war without practice than you can make boots. For the purposes of defence, which is the main business of volunteers, determined men with rifles in their hands can do a great deal, even if they are not highly drilled troops.’ At Simla he also established the Durand Football Tournament, which ultimately became the leading Association event in India. ‘Two of my best supporters in the original scheme,’ Durand recalled in later life, ‘were a sporting tailor and a man employed in a brewery ... I got somewhat criticized at first for mixing myself up with them, but they organized a town team, and I organized one of young officers and Foreign Office clerks, and we won after a hard fight and the thing caught on.’ Durand, the mainstay of his team, was, of course, captain and centre-forward.
Since the meeting at Rawalpindi, relations between the Government and the Amir had become increasingly strained owing chiefly to his inept attempts to control the major warlike tribes inhabitating the buffer zone between the Russian empire and British India. In 1886, Durand summed up the situation as this: ‘The Amir is a troublesome and unsatisfactory ally, and there is no doubt he is thoroughly detested throughout the country. His cruelties are horrible, and one feels reluctant to support him in power, especially as he shows the utmost jealousy of ourselves. If it were not for the fact that that his fall would throw everything into disorder and give Russia an opening, I should not be sorry to see him driven from the country.’
As time went by it became increasingly apparent that if Afghanistan was to be maintained as a satisfactory cushion, some kind of working arrangement had to be made with the Amir as to where sovereignty lay among the turbulent tribes north the Indian frontier. Thus the questions of Russian expansionism and the border tribes became one, and it was clear there could be no peace until the matter was settled. Durand’s first move was to reassure Abdur Rahman that he was entirely mistaken to think of him as his enemy. This was achieved through the offices of Salter Pyne, who from 1885 had been the Amir’s chief engineer and confidante on matters concerning foreign policy. Pyne, who first and foremost was an Englishman, was briefed during a visit to Calcutta by Durand and sent to Kabul with full explanations as to why the disputed districts had been occupied. He was also to hint that if the proposed mission to Kabul headed by Lord Roberts, the victorious general of the recent war, was to prove objectionable, Durand was prepared to visit Kabul without any escort and rely entirely on the protection of His Highness.
Pyne managed to entirely change the attitude of the Amir, which was just as well because in 1893, the Russian government urgently demanded that the Amir withdraw from the trans-Oxus Roshan and Shignan in accordance with the Agreement of 1873 signed by Amir Shere Ali. In June, Durand wrote: ‘I have been nominated to go to Kabul. I cannot say it is a duty I look forward to with unmixed pleasure, for the Amir is not fond of giving up territory and he is likely to be extremely unpleasant on the subject, as he has already been about the Khushk business. However the thing must be done, and if the Russians do not embroil matters in Shignan and Roshan before we can induce the Amir to withdraw, which is probably their game, I think I shall be able to persuade him not only to come back behind the Oxus, but to be reasonable about our frontier.’
The Durand Mission excited intense interest in India, not least because of the possibility that its members might share the fate of Cavagnari and his staff. So far did this opinion prevail outside official circles that when a prominent hotelier was invited to act as mess caterer, his wife declared that nothing in the world would tempt her husband to cross the frontier - not even a C.I.E.!
The Mission left Peshawar in mid September and was met at the frontier by the twenty-plus stone Afghan Commander, Ghulam Hyder, ‘a very interesting companion’, and a ragged but willing escort. The first town that lay on the line of march was Jellalabad, of which Durand observed, ‘How Sale ever allowed himself to be shut up with a whole brigade in this place, with beautiful flat fighting ground all round him, passes my comphrehension’. Following the official entry into the Kabul, Durand found the Amir much changed: ‘I looked in vain for my old acquaintance of 1885, the Amir of today is a quiet gentlemanly man ... he was most cordial to me personally, repeating that I was an old friend, and that he felt, now I had been sent here, all would go well. He held my hand so long, and was so very affectionate, that I began to feel quite uncomfortable.
The negotiations took place in a garden house, where the Amir took good care to place Durand facing the light, while he was equally careful to turn his back to it. The first matter to be settled was the withdrawal from the trans-Oxus provinces. With regard to this the Amir made his feelings known to Durand in an aside after the first meeting: “We must finish this business first, as you have begun with it, but really the other frontier is the important one. This is a matter between you and me and the Russians. My people will not care, or know, whether I go backwards or forwards in Roshan or Shignan but they care very much to know how they stand on your side.” Within a few days Durand’s skilful arguments brought about the required result and he was able to write, ‘We are in complete accord about the northern frontier. His view now is that the cis-Oxus Darwaz, which he receives in exchange, is really worth more than trans-Oxus Shignan and Roshan, and that he has done the Russians.’ However, Durand felt that the Amir would ‘push us rather harder on our side’.
Durand’s diary entry for 24 October 1893 runs: ‘I sat with the Amir today from 11 till near 4 o’clock. For the first hour and a half he related to us his experience of the Russians, how they had humiliated and ill treated him ... Then he began business, but it was evident from the first that he had no intention of really coming to terms ... nothing was really decided. Pyne told me beforehand nothing would be. He says the Amir never gives any real decision except on Sundays.’ The chief obstruction to a settlement was that of pride, or as the Amir put it “Nám” - name - honour. Finally, however, he declared his true colours and told Durand, “I would fight you if you drove me to it. I am not a coward, and I would fight, though I know what the result would be. I have not forgotten Shir Ali, but I would not give up my independence without a fight for my honour. But remember what I say. Unless you drive me into enmity, I am your friend for life. And why? The Russians want to attack India. You do not want to attack Russian Turkistan. Therefore the Russians want to come through my country and you do not. People say I would join them to attack you. If I did and they won, would they leave my country? Never. I should be their slave and I hate them.’
Thus the basis for a settlement was formed and earnest negotiation began. The Amir retained Asmar and the Waziri district of Birmal, and received an increase in his subsidy of six lakhs of rupees to eighteen lakhs a year, in exchange for a withdrawal of all claims to suzerainty over the frontier tribes from Chitral to the Persian border. He also agreed to accept the railway development at New Chaman and a withdrawal from Chagai, through which a railway from Quetta to Sistan was planned. On 12 November Durand and the Amir signed the Agreement under which the Durand Line was drawn between the Amir’s territory and that of the tribes. Thereafter the border tribes became British Protected Persons, living in a belt of independent but protected republics.
In 1926 Durand’s biographer, Sir Percy Sykes, wrote: ‘For the Indian Empire this successful Mission constituted the most important achievement of external policy during the nineteenth century. Not only did it stop the further advance of Russia towards India, but it removed a constant source of misunderstanding and irritation with that Power. Moreover, it paved the way for the Anglo-Russian Agreement of 1907, which improved relations between the two Powers to such an extent that their co-operation in the Great War was thereby materially facilitated. Of the services rendered to the State by Durand, the great maker of boundaries and thereby the great peacemaker, it is difficult to speak too highly. The Spectator, which referred to him as ‘the strongest man in the Empire,’ did not praise him too highly, and there were other notices of the most complimentary kind in the Press. The Mission to the Amir was his grand climateric of honour and success, while the three decades that have elapsed only prove with what statesmanlike sagacity and foresight this great British official settled the frontiers of the Indian Empire and of Afghanistan.’
Durand left India in the following year on home leave, and was disappointed to receive a K.C.S.I., whereas the closest parallel indicated a G.C.B. Prime Minister Gladstone it was rumoured considered a K.C.S.I. ‘good enough for an Indian official’. After so many years as Foreign Secretary, which although one of the most important posts in India was not one of the highest, Durand was considering an application for a Chief Commissionership, when he was offered the post of Minister Plenipotentiary at Tehran. This he accepted and served in Persia until 1900 when he was created a G.C.M.G. The next year he was appointed a Privy Councillor. From 1900 to 1903 he was Ambassador to Spain, and for the following four years British Ambassador to the United States. Sir Mortimer Durand suffered a stroke in the spring of 1924 from which he never recovered. He died on Whitsunday, 8 June 1924, at Boldon, Minehead.
Refs: Sir Mortimer Durand (Sykes); Debrett.
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