Letters, photographs and other items relating to Andrew Smith’s time in Persia.

In the summer of 1937 Andrew Smith travelled from England to take up a post at the American Legation in Tehran, as private tutor to the son of the US Consul, Cornelius Van H. Engert. Until April 1938, when he returned to England, Smith wrote regular letters to his mother, largely responding to her family news, together with his accounts of his time in Tehran. As well as attending numerous dinners at the American and other diplomatic legations, he was adopted by the British community in Tehran, partaking in social and sporting activities in his free time. The high points of the trip were the visits he took with the Engert family by car in October 1937, first to the Caspian Sea and later to the south, visiting the ancient sites of Qum, Isfahan and Persepolis. He wrote detailed accounts of these trips, with two sets of numbered photographs.

At one of the formal dinners he met Karen Blixen, a guest of the Swedish legation, who had driven to Tehran from Stockholm, hoping to receive permits for onward travel along the Silk Road into Central Asia. He also met the American journalist John Gunther, who wrote ‘Inside Europe’. In his sole letter to his brother, Smith describes in detail his developing left-wing political views and his reappraisal of Persian history in the light of the trip to the south. In March of 1938, current European events intruded, with his comments on the German Anschluss with Austria, the political situation in England and the likelihood of war.

The related documents include a typescript article by Freya Stark describing her journey along the Alamut Valley to the Caspian Sea, in which she mentions that Andrew Smith climbed the Alamut Rock in the Chala pass in the autumn of 1937, the first European to do so. His son Nicholas has added a note: ‘this is puzzling – nothing in Father’s letters to confirm this claim’. Also with the collection are Nicholas Smith’s notes, summarising and indexing his father’s correspondence, his lists of the photographs, as well as copies of articles relating to Engert’s diplomatic career, his correspondence and papers.