A.B. Mitford

Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford, 1st Baron Redesdale, GCVO, KCB, DL (24 February 1837 – 17 August 1916) was a British diplomat, collector and writer. Nicknamed "Barty", he was the paternal grandfather of the Mitford sisters.

Freeman-Mitford was the son of Henry Reveley Mitford (1804–1883) of Exbury House, Exbury, Hampshire and the great-grandson of the historian William Mitford, and was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford. While his paternal ancestors were landed gentry, whose holdings had once included Mitford Castle in Northumberland, his mother (Georgiana) Jemima was a daughter of the courtier the 3rd Earl of Ashburnham, with a noble ancestry through the earls of Beverley. His parents separated in 1840 when Redesdale was just three years old, and his mother remarried to a Mr. Molyneaux.

Like his cousin Swinburne, he was named Algernon after his grandfather Algernon Percy, 1st Earl of Beverley.

Entering the Foreign Office in 1858, Mitford was appointed Third Secretary of the British Embassy in St Petersburg. After service in the Diplomatic Corps in Shanghai, he went to Japan as second secretary to the British Legation at the time of the migration of the Japanese Seat of Power from Kyoto to Edo (modern-day Tokyo, known as the "Meiji Restoration". Mitford`s memoirs recount the troubled time of the foreign settlements at Kobe over the fortnight following American Rear-Admiral Henry Bell`s death, and the death of British consul Francis Gerard Mijburgh. Rededale served as secretary under Myburgh`s replacement, John Frederik Lowder. There he met Ernest Satow and wrote Tales of Old Japan (1871), a book credited with making such Japanese Classics as "The Forty-seven Ronin" first known to a wide Western public. He resigned from the diplomatic service in 1873.

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