Meriel Buchanan

Meriel Buchanan (5 September 1886 – 6 February 1959) was a British memorialist. The daughter of the last British Ambassador to Imperial Russia, she wrote a number of articles and books about her experiences during that time, most notably: Recollections of imperial Russia (1923) and Ambassador's daughter (1958). Life Meriel Buchanan was the only child of Sir George Buchanan (1854-1924), and his wife Lady Georgina Meriel Bathurst (1863-1922). As her father was a career diplomat, Meriel's early life was spent in the many countries where her father was posted: Hesse, Baden, Bulgaria, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. During World War I, Meriel and her family remained in Russia. Her mother took charge of the organization of a hospital where Meriel worked as a nurse. Her father remained as the British Ambassador even after the fall of the Romanovs. The family left Russia in January 1918. Meriel's two novels, published before the war, were not a success. She then turned to non-fiction, writing a number of books about the Romanov family, the Russian nobility and her experiences living in Russia during the last years of the reign of Tsar Nicholas II, beginning with Petrograd, the city of trouble, 1914-1918, published in 1918. She married in 1925 Major Harold Wilfred Knowling of the Welsh Guards (d. 1954), and had one son: Michael George Alexander Knowling (b 1929). In 1958, the year before her death, she published an account of her father's diplomatic career under the title Ambassador's Daughter.