Gladwyn Jebb

Hubert Miles Gladwyn Jebb, 1st Baron Gladwyn (25 April 1900 – 24 October 1996) was a prominent British civil servant, diplomat and politician who served as the acting secretary-general of the United Nations between 1945 and 1946.

The son of Sydney Gladwyn Jebb JP, of Firbeck Hall, Yorkshire (a grandson of Sir Joshua Jebb and a maternal nephew of the 5th and 6th Viscounts Melville) and Rose Eleanor Chichester, Jebb attended Sandroyd School and Eton College before graduating from Magdalen College, Oxford with a first class honours degree in history.

Jebb entered the British Diplomatic Service in 1924 and served in Tehran, where he got to know Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West.

He later served in Rome and at the Foreign Office in Westminster, where he served as Private Secretary to the Head of the Diplomatic Service.

In 1929, Jebb married Cynthia Noble, daughter of Sir Saxton Noble, 3rd Baronet.

She was a granddaughter of the gun-developer Sir Andrew Noble, 1st Baronet, and a great-granddaughter of Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

The couple had three children, one son, Miles, and two daughters: Vanessa, who married the historian Hugh Thomas, and Stella, who married the scientist Joel de Rosnay and was the mother of the French writer Tatiana de Rosnay.

For part of the War of 1939 to 1945, Jebb left the Foreign Office to serve as the Central Executive Officer for the Special Operations Executive, where he was from 1940 to 1942.

On his return to the Foreign Office, Jebb asked to be posted to Madagascar, but this application was rejected, and he was sent to the Treasury for economic training.

After the Second World War, Jebb served as Executive Secretary of the Preparatory Commission of the United Nations in August 1945 and served as Acting United Nations Secretary-General from October 1945 to February 1946, when the first Secretary-General was appointed, Trygve Lie.

Jebb remains the only UN Secretary-General or Acting Secretary-General to come from a permanent member state of the UN Security Council.

Returning to London, Jebb served as Deputy to the Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin at the Conference of Foreign Ministers before serving as the Foreign Office's United Nations Adviser (1946–1947).

He represented the United Kingdom at the Brussels Treaty Permanent Commission with personal rank of ambassador.

Jebb was knighted in 1949.

Jebb became the United Kingdom's Ambassador to the United Nations from 1950 to 1954 and to Paris from 1954 to 1960.

He was the first permanent UN representative of the United Kingdom.

In the latter role, he was angered that secret negotiations between the British, French and Israelis in advance of the Suez invasion in 1956 took place at Sèvres without his knowledge and, in certain respects, that he was sidelined by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan at the Paris "big power" summit in 1960.

Jebb's rather "grand" manner caused Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd to coin an epigram: "You're a deb, Sir Gladwyn Jebb".

In an episode of The Goon Show broadcast on 16 February 1959 entitled "The Gold Plate Robbery", Major Bloodnok – in his rôle as 'the last British Ambassador in Marrakesh' – is heard to muse aloud "Now, for a kip on full Ambassador's pay. Gad! I wonder what old Gladwyn Jebb's doing".

On 12 April 1960 Jebb was created a hereditary peer and as Baron Gladwyn, of Bramfield in the County of Suffolk.

He became involved in politics as a member of the Liberal Party.

When asked in the early 1960s why he had joined the Liberal Party, he replied that the Liberals were a party without a general and that he was a general without a party.

Like many Liberals, he passionately believed that education was the key to social reform.

He was Deputy Leader of the Liberals in the House of Lords from 1965 to 1988 and spokesman on foreign affairs and defence.

An ardent European, he served as a Member of the European Parliament from 1973 to 1976, where he was also the Vice-President of the Parliament's Political Committee.

Jebb unsuccessfully contested the Suffolk seat in the European Parliament in 1979.

Jebb died on 24 October 1996 at the age of 96, the 51st anniversary of the founding of the United Nations.

He is buried at St Andrew's Church, Bramfield in Suffolk.

Publications by Jebb include:

Jebb's papers were deposited at the Churchill Archives Centre of the University of Cambridge by his son, Miles Gladwyn Jebb, 2nd Baron Gladwyn, between 1998 and 2000.