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BR/3/126
No full textBroadcast for BBC overseasBBC Overseas
17/3/61
Harold Beeley, our new Ambassador, who has the difficult task of restoring those Anglo-Egyptian relations severed by the Suez venture, is one of a number of British diplomats who entered the Foreign Service almost by accident. He first made a name for himself when he was appointed Secretary to the Anglo-American commission on Palestine in 1946 and became Ernest Bevin's closest adviser on the Arab-Jewish problem. At this time, however, he was a member not of the Foreign Service but of the staff of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, where he had worked under Arnold Toynbee and written the sections of the Annual Survey dealing with the Middle East. Before that it had seemed certain that Beeley, who won a brilliant history degree at Oxford in 1930, would devote himself to academic research. This gaunt, stooping figure - shy, grey-cheeked and with a nervous twitch - was surely destined for a professorial Chair. But Beeley was by no means the remote, ineffectual don that he appeared. Endowed with a keen zest for life, a sardonic sense of humour and the palate of an epicure, he was soon tempted across the border that divides the study of contemporary history from history-making. As Ernest Bevin's right-hand man, he saw politics being made in one of the most turbulent corners of the world, and in 1946 entered the Foreign Service and served as Counsellor in Baghdad and Ambassador to Saudi Arabia during 1955, where his passionate interest in Arab civilisation served him well.
More surprising was his success first in Washington and, more recently, as British Minister on the United Nations. Once again Beeley proved that it is not the conventional British diplomat, but the real character, that goes down with the Americans. Now he faces his hardest task in Cairo. He will go there purged of some of the romantic illusions about the Arab world that clouded his vision when I first met him in 1946.
His brilliant, darting mind is now tempered by experience, which, however, has not blunted his irreverent sense of humour or destroyed that combination of intellectual integrity and intellectual humility that he has retained from his academic days. I can think of no man whose personality is better suited - by pertinacity and, at the right moment, by the calculated indiscretion - to regain the confidence of President Nasser
