Leet man co-authors book about Anne Warburton, UK's first female ambassador

When siblings Richard and Elizabeth Warburton attended their aunt’s funeral in 2015, they had an idea to write a book chronicling their beloved relative’s life as the UK’s first female ambassador.

Six years and 288 pages later, “Women of the Foreign Office” published by England’s History Press on March 1 — during Women’s History Month. It focuses on Dame Anne Warburton, who took office as the UK’s first female ambassador of the Foreign Office in 1976.

The Foreign Office, which is now called the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, is the UK’s foreign affairs department. Barbara Salt became the first female ambassador to be appointed to a post in Israel in 1962, but her health prevented her from taking the job.

So, Anne Warburton became the first female to actually serve as an ambassador and was posted in Denmark. She died in June 2015 at age 87.

“During the funeral, we were impressed by the many aging dignitaries saying how much our aunt had done, much of it we had not heard before, and realized that within a decade or two most of these people would be gone,” said Richard Warburton, who grew up in the UK and now lives in Leet.

He moved to the U.S. in 1989 and then to Pittsburgh for a job in 1992. He now works as general counsel and CTO for ChemDAQ Inc. in Robinson and has lived in Leet with his wife, Jenny, since 2007.

He said he and his sister, of Perth, Australia, set out to write Anne Warburton’s biography. Elizabeth worked for the same office as her aunt. She then became a researcher for print and broadcast media before serving as an administrator for St. Hilda’s Anglican School for Girls in Perth.

As they researched the book, they realized her story was just a piece of a much larger story of women in the British Foreign Office.

Historically, the diplomatic department was a “bastion of conservatism and tradition,” according to Richard Warburton. He said the office was against innovations such as having women in the workplace.

“The book describes the history from the first female typist, Sofia Fulcher, in 1889, to opening the admission exam to women in 1946, the marriage bar and the development through the present day to where the Foreign Office has transformed into a leading advocate for diversity and equal opportunity regardless of gender, race and sexual orientation,” he said.

He said that when women were allowed in the office in the 1940s, the department established what’s known as a marriage bar, which mandated women to resign from their positions upon getting married.

“There was an assumption that women would leave when they got married. And it was usually quite right,” he said. “But the reason, at the time, is men couldn’t imagine women having a career after marriage. What would the husband do? Would he trail behind her? They couldn’t get around that thinking process.”

He said the marriage bar wasn’t abolished in 1977, one year following his aunt’s appointment.

He hopes that when people read the book they gain an appreciation for how much the office, and the world, has changed.

“If you went back to the 1920s, it would have been almost inconceivable to have a female ambassador. Now, a third of ambassadors for the U.S. or the U.K. are female. That’s a massive societal change,” he said.

The siblings split the work, corresponding mostly through email and FaceTime. The book’s first draft was written by Richard; Elizabeth added new sections to the book, which included accounts from people she worked with.

“There were a lot of weekends and evenings. I mean, we would have had it done in a few months if we didn’t both work,” he said.

The book is available for purchase through Amazon for $35 and other booksellers.