Eyre Crowe - Early Life

Early Life

Eyre Crowe was born in Leipzig and educated at Düsseldorf and Berlin and in France. His father Joseph Archer Crowe (1825 - 1896) had been a British consul-general and ended his career as commercial attache for all of Europe (1882–1896). His mother was Asta von Barby (c1841 - 1908). His grandfather Eyre Evans Crowe was a journalist, writer and historian, and his uncle, Eyre Crowe, was an artist.

Crowe first visited England in 1882 when he was seventeen to cram for the Foreign Office examination and at the time was not fully fluent in English. Even later in life it was reported that when angry he spoke English with a German accent. He married his widowed German cousin Clema Gerhardt in 1903. Crowe's wife's uncle was Henning von Holzendorff, who was to become the Chief of the German Naval Staff in the First World War. Due to being half-German, Crowe was often attacked in the press and by Christabel Pankhurst and William le Queux for this during the First World War.