and he at his successive posts. Retirement and death Sandwith spent his retirement quietly in Hove, London and, from 1898, in Surrey. He suffered a further tragedy when, ten months after the death of his daughter, his second son and oldest surviving child died of disease serving with the Army in India. He was active in local church affairs, for he never lost his faith; he followed world affairs and occasionally wrote to The Times; he pursued his charitable instincts, helping raise funds for refugees, selling some ancient Cretan antiquities for charity, and directing in his will that he had only a simple coffin and no tombstone, the £20-£25 thereby saved to be given to a hospital; he twice went on foreign trips with his surviving daughter, on the Nile in 1893 and to Crete and North Africa in 1895. He died in April 1900 after a road accident: out riding his recently acquired bicycle, he fell off when avoiding road works and was run over by a horse and cart. Conclusion Sandwith's career tells us much about the British consular service in the Levant from the mid-nineteenth century. He exemplified the kind of person whom the Foreign Office increasingly wanted to represent the country abroad: British, not born in the Levant, as had once been the case; well-educated, able to acquire the languages of the region and to engage effectively with the Foreign Office, Ambassadors and officials of other governments as befitted a confident country that pursued a robust foreign policy throughout the region. His role shows how consuls in the Ottoman Empire were not just concerned with trade, protection and other traditional consular tasks but were very much political officials, reporting on issues that could directly affect foreign policy on the 'Eastern Question', and sometimes agents in the exercise of that policy; the contrast with his role when he moved to Odessa is striking. He became one of the British so-called 'Consular Collectors' in the nineteenth-century Levant, thereby showing that though his posts could be very demanding, they were not always so. At a more personal level, he experienced the loneliness and isolation that was sometimes the lot of Levant consuls, as he did too the sudden transfers between posts, moved by the Foreign Office without prior consultation and usually without reference to the Ambassador. Bibliography Stephen Boys Smith, Thomas Sandwith: A British Consul in the Levant, 1855-1891,