Chocolate for Zedzed Basil Zaharoff and the secret diplomacy of the Great War ‘If your Chairman considers my yesterday ’s letter as important as I do he should spontaneously do the chocolate. ’ Basil Zaharoff1
Basil Zaharoff had a reputation for private wheeler-dealing. He also had an appetite for public honours. Born in 1849 to Greek parents then resident in Mughlia in southwestern Anatolia, he was baptised Basileios. His family, which during a period of exile in Odessa had abandoned the name of Zacharias in favour of the slavic Zaharoff, subsequently migrated to Constantinople and the young Basileios was brought up in Tatavla, one of the poorest quarters of the Ottoman capital. There he learnt the wisdom of the streets, finding employment first as a guide to the red-light district of Galata, and then as a fire-fighter in a service better known for its success in extracting commissions for the rescue of threatened treasures than for its skills in extinguishing flames. Later, after working as a money-changer, he travelled to London, appeared in court in an action concerning the misappropriation of funds, and departed in haste for Athens, where, aged 24, he had the good fortune to befriend the political journalist Stefanos Skouloudis. It was on the latter ’s recommendation that in 1877 Zaharoff was made a representative of the Swedish arms manufacturer, Thorsten Nordenfeldt, a position in which he soon exhibited both his commercial ingenuity and his flare for bribery and deception. He sold steam-driven submarines to the Greek, Ottoman and Russian, navies; he subverted Hiram Maxim ’s efforts to demonstrate his automatic machine gun to the Austrian and Italian armies before buying a half share in Maxim ’s enterprise; and by 1897, when Vickers purchased the Maxim Company, he was already on the way to amassing an immense personal fortune. The ease with which Zaharoff, as arms vendor, and eventually as company director, banker and minorpress baron, moved within the worlds of politics and high and low finance earned for him the description of ‘mystery man of Europe ’.2 After the outbreak of war in 1914 his business contacts and knowledge of the Balkans made him a useful agent of the British Government. His companies profited and he was further rewarded with the recognition he craved – the ‘chocolate ’ of his cryptic correspondence – elevation to the rank of Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire. 27