Lacking both friends and money, he lived precariously. In the summer of 1917, Dimitri left the Russian occupation zone moving to Tehran. Dimitri stayed briefly with General Meidel, then the head of the Persian Cossack Division, before being taken in by the British Minister to Tehran, Sir Charles Murray Marling, and his wife, Lucia. Through 1917 and most of 1918 Grand Duke Dimitri lived with the Marlings. Sir Charles obtained an honorary commission for Dimitri as a liaison officer with the British Mission and eventually persuaded the British Foreign Office in 1918 that Dimitri would become the next Emperor of Russia, gaining his admission to England after many previous rejections. Marling became an important father figure to Grand Duke Dimitri, and the relationship there established between the Grand Duke and the entire Marling family would prove to be close and enduring. Marling and his family took Dimitri with them when they left Tehran for England at the end of 1918. During the long journey to England in a slow steamer, Grand Duke Dimitri fell ill with typhoid fever in Bombay and nearly died. He had to recuperate in Cairo. In January 1919 he arrived in France via Egypt. He crossed the Mediterranean disembarked in Marseilles continuing by land to Paris. He had kept an apartment at the Hotel Georges V and in France, he learned of the tragic end of many of his Romanovs relatives.The Marlings took him to London where he was reunited with his maternal aunt Grand Duchess Maria Georgievna. She provided him with the money from the proceeds from the sale of his St Petersburg palace, which had gone through before the Bolsheviks seized to power. Dimitri took a room at the Ritz and spent most of his time with his aunt. He went to Sussex and visited Natalia Brasova, his youthful crush. She was devastated but the loss of her husband, Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich, and Dimitri quickly returned to his own life. Lady Marling went to see the King's assistant private secretary Lord Cromer to inform him of the grand duke's arrival. But George V was horrified at the development and Dimitri was quickly visited by a Foreign Office representative who asked him to leave Britain, suggesting him to go to Malta. He refused unless the order came directly from George V and the matter was dropped. He was the only Romanov Grand Duke permitted to live in England but his presence was an inconvenience to the British government that did not want to upset the new Bolshevik regime and the Tsar's regime had been seen in Britain as brutal and bloody.