Ryan, Sir Andrew (1876–1949), consular official and diplomat, was born 5 November 1876 in Cork, son of Edward Ryan, soap and candle manufacturer of Douglas, Cork. He was educated at the Christian Brothers College, Cork; QCC, receiving his BA in Greek and Latin from the Royal University of Ireland in 1896; and Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Ryan was admitted to the Levant consular service of the British Foreign Office as student interpreter in 1897, after passing the competitive entrance examination. The service provided career officers for posts in the Ottoman empire, Egypt, Persia, and Morocco. From 1897 to 1899 he attended the training course for student interpreters arranged by the consular department of the Foreign Office at the University of Cambridge. The curriculum included Turkish, Arabic, and law. Ryan began his career in the British consulate-general at Constantinople, first as consular assistant, and then as vice-consul, to which rank he was promoted in 1903. In 1905 he was sent as acting vice-consul to Uskub (modern Skopje), principal city of the then Turkish province of Macedonia. His principal task was to report on the inter-communal violence that plagued the region.
In 1907 Ryan was transferred to the dragomanate, or oriental secretariat, of the British embassy at Constantinople, where he remained until the outbreak of hostilities in October 1914 between Great Britain and Turkey. The important and difficult work of the dragomanate meant that it was staffed by the most competent men in the service. As well as Ryan himself, these included his fellow Irishman and catholic, G. H. Fitzmaurice (qv), chief dragoman in the embassy and Ryan's immediate superior in the dragomanate. In 1908 Ryan was advanced to the rank of second dragoman in the embassy, to which was added in 1912 the rank of consul. For much of his time in Constantinople, Ryan's head of mission was another catholic Irishman, Sir Nicholas O'Conor (qv).
At the end of the first world war, during which he worked in the contraband department of the Foreign Office in London, Ryan returned to Constantinople. He acted as chief dragoman in what was temporarily the British high commission until 1921, when he was made substantive chief dragoman with the additional local rank of counsellor in the diplomatic service. Ryan's memoirs provide a vivid picture of Constantinople during the turbulent years of the armistice.
In 1924 Ryan was appointed consul-general at Rabat, with responsibility for the French zone of Morocco, a new arrangement provided for in the Tangier agreement of 1923. He remained in Rabat until 1930, when he was appointed British minister at Jeddah, since 1927 the administrative centre of the Saud dynasty, which had put paid to the short-lived Hashemite kingdom of Hijaz. Ryan was the first British envoy to the House of Saud, and only the second member of the Levant consular service to be appointed to a post in the then notoriously exclusive diplomatic service. In 1936 he was transferred to Durazzo (Durres) as minister to Albania. Ryan's mission came to a sudden end when the Italians invaded Albania on Good Friday 1939. He retired in the same year, but continued to act as an unofficial liaison between the Foreign Office and the now exiled King Zog of Albania.
Ryan's honours included the CMG (1916), Silver Jubilee Medal of 1935, and KBE (1925). He married (1913) Ruth Margaret, only daughter of J. R. van Millingen of Dunblane, Perthshire, and niece of Prof. A. van Millingen of Robert College, Constantinople. They had four sons. Ryan died 31 December 1949 in London.
Although Ryan enjoyed a distinguished diplomatic career after the end of the Ottoman empire, temperamentally he belonged to that era, and the peculiar conditions that it engendered, especially for foreign consular representatives. The affinity is reflected in the title he chose for his posthumously published memoirs: Last of the dragomans (1951). These are a valuable adjunct to documentary and other sources for the events he took part in. Ryan's own account and references to him by his contemporaries suggest a highly competent linguist and professional civil servant, not without a serious, religious side to his character, but also possessed of an ironic sense of humour. On the one hand, he was a ‘Cork man with a melancholy manner’ (Graves papers, 1/1, draft autobiography); on the other, ‘many a dull job was enlivened by some comment uttered in his slow drawl’ (Times, 11 Jan. 1950). There are collections of Sir Andrew Ryan's private papers in the PRO (FO 800/240), and the Middle East Centre, St Antony's College, Oxford.