Basil Boothby

British diplomat
The basics

Quick Facts

IntroBritish diplomat
PlacesUnited Kingdom Great Britain
wasDiplomat
Work fieldPolitics
Gender
Male
Birth9 September 1910
Death9 February 1990 (aged 79 years)
Star signVirgo
Family
Mother:Katharine Georgina Knox
Father:Basil Tanfield Beridge Boothby
Children:John Joseph Boothby Emily Albertine Boothby Philip Sebastian Boothby Henry Alexander Boothby
Education
Corpus Christi College
Winchester College
Awards
Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George 
The details

Biography

Basil Boothby CMG (9 September 1910 – 9 February 1990) was a British ambassador.

Career

Evelyn Basil Boothby (of the family of the Boothby baronets) was educated at Winchester College and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He joined the Diplomatic Service in 1933 as a student interpreter in the China Consular Service, and continued to work in China until 1945 except for brief interludes in the United States and India during World War II. After the war he was appointed vice-consul in Athens where he met Susan Asquith, granddaughter of H. H. Asquith: they married in 1946. Later he was Counsellor in Rangoon 1951–54, acting as chargé d'affaires between ambassadors. He was Counsellor in the British Embassy in Brussels 1954–59, Head of the African Department at the Foreign Office 1959–62, Ambassador to Iceland 1962–65 and Permanent Representative to the Council of Europe 1965–69. After retiring from the Diplomatic Service he taught at Morley College and later at the Department of Extra-Mural Studies, University of London.

"Basil Boothby was a diplomat more successful in giving foreigners a good impression of Britain than in giving his superiors a good impression of himself. Had it been the other way round, he would almost certainly have risen higher than he did." — The Times, London, 22 February 1990, page 16
The contents of this page are sourced from Wikipedia article on 26 Jun 2020. The contents are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.