One the great pleasures of the Knebworth House Archive is visiting academics and authors informing us of stories and facts we did not know about the history of Knebworth House and the Lytton family. A good example of this is the recent visit of author Hiroto Tanaka, who is researching the Lytton Commission, a United Nations visit to Manchuria in the 1930s to check on Japanese aggression, chaired by my great-grandfather Victor Lytton.
Mr Tanaka praised the Commission for the real time and space it gave for negotiations on the Japanese side. He felt there were “genuine efforts to find a dignified way forward, one that did not require either party to lose face”. It is good to hear this praise of my great-grandfather, but what I was not expecting was to hear that he has since become a popular meme in Japan!
This at-the-time famous image of members of the Lytton Commission examining the China Railway track at the site of the explosion which the Japanese used as justification for occupying Manchuria is so familiar in Japanese history books, that people have been recreating it. That’s my great-grandfather, second from the left… and here are some of the recreations of him and his United Nations team that are apparently flooding the internet in Japan!
Henry Lytton Cobbold
@HenryCobboldKH
@HenryCobbold 
