Valentine Chirol

Sir Ignatius Valentine Chirol (28 May 1852 – 22 October 1929) was a British journalist, author, historian and diplomat.

Early life

He was the son of the Rev. Alexander Chirol and Harriet Chirol. His education was mostly in France and Germany. Growing up in France with his parents, Chirol lived in the city of Versailles, where he also finished secondary school.

In 1869, the young Chirol, already bilingual, moved to Germany, residing in a small town near Frankfurt am Main. By 1870, the Franco-Prussian War had broken out, which Chirol experienced from both sides. He returned to Paris in 1871, just in time to see the Germans enter the city.

Thanks to his good French and German, he was able to come and go easily passing for a citizen of either side, and he began to acquire his taste for adventure and politics.

Given the chaos in France, the Chirols returned to their family home in Hove. In April 1872, Chirol joined the Foreign Office where he worked for until spring 1876. Unsatisfied with the slow pace of life in the Foreign Office, Chirol returned to travelling where things were much quicker.

Having begun to learn Arabic before he left England, he set off to Egypt arriving in Cairo where he took up residence. In 1879, he set off for Beirut not long after the British had taken control of Cyprus. From there, he travelled inland through Syria with Laurence Oliphant from whom he would later learn to draw. In the Middle East, he took up journalism for the first time, for the Levant Herald, then the leading newspaper in the Near East.