Talk:Archibald Clark Kerr, 1st Baron Inverchapel

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Archibald Clark-Kerr, 1st Baron Inverchapel PC (d. 1951) was a British diplomat.

An Australian-born Scot he entered the Foreign Service in 1906. He served as Ambassador to China during the Japanese occupation of the late 1930s, he was moved to Moscow in February 1942 where he forged a remarkable relationship with Stalin. His work there and at the Big Three Conferences put him at the very centre of international politics.

After the war he was appointed Ambassador to the United States, and was created Baron Inverchapel in 1946. An acquaintance of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean's superior in Washington, he took their defection to the USSR badly, the shock hastening his early death in 1951.

His personal life has been described as colourful: a close confidant of the Kaiser's sister in the years before the Great War, he was also a disappointed suitor of the Queen Mother before his marriage, divorce, and re-marriage, to a Chilean lady 29 years his junior. Politically on the left, witty and unconventional in manner, he was sometimes suspected of excessive understanding for the Soviet position. His biographer, Donald Gillies, considers rumours of pro-Soviet sympathies highly unlikely.

Main reference work: Donald GILLIES, Radical diplomat: the life of Archibald Clark Kerr, Lord Inverchapel, 1882-1951; I.B.Tauris publishers, London and New York, 1999

In April 1943, while British Ambassador to Moscow, Clark Kerr famously addressed the following note to Lord Pembroke at The Foreign Office in London:

"My Dear Reggie, In these dark days man tends to look for little shafts of light that spill from Heaven. My days are probably darker than yours, and I need, my God I do, all the light I can get. But I am a decent fellow, and I do not want to be mean and selfish about what little brightness is shed upon me from time to time. So I propose to share with you a tiny flash that has illuminated my sombre life and tell you that God has given me a new Turkish colleague whose card tells me that he is called Mustapha Kunt. We all feel like that, Reggie, now and then, especially when Spring is upon us, but few of us would care to put it on our cards. It takes a Turk to do that. Sir Archibald Clerk Kerr H.M. Ambassador" GIF of letter is at: http://www.ntk.net/2000/02/25/moscow.gif

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archibald_Clerk_Kerr%2C_1st_Baron_Inverchapel"

Can we have something about his famous conversation with Churchill after the latter had lost the plot over Stalin's bullying; if you want to have a competition for "Half hours which really changed history" it would have to be up there — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.77.66.163 (talk) 17:17, 23 September 2011 (UTC)

A multifaceted personality
Richard Davenport-Hines in his book Titanic Lives brings to the surface hitherto unfeatured facts about Inverchapel which must have his marriage quite interesting. An excerpt: http://www.thedaily.com/page/2012/03/20/032012-opinions-history-butt-davenport-hines-1-3/ Engleham (talk) 08:42, 22 March 2012 (UTC)

Clark Kerr had numerous homosexual relationships in his younger days, as his Bodleian papers attest. Amongst his similarly-inclined companions were Harold Nicolson, Reggie Bridgeman, Francis Agar-Robartes (Viscount Clifden), Gerald Tyrwhitt-Wilson (Lord Berners), and Gerald Villiers. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.152.242.113 (talk) 21:03, 13 October 2015 (UTC)

Spelling of name - Clark or Clerk?
Did this gentleman regularly spell his name in two ways? If not, is there a definitive reference? The much circulated humorous letter about his Turkish colleague gives the spelling as 'Clerk'. Presuming the letter to be entirely genuine (and there seems to be little reason to doubt this) we might suppose that since Sir Archibold signed it himself he knew how to spell his name. This Wikipedia entry mispells the name on the letter, perhaps inadvertently, perhaps to avoid the problem.

Further support for 'Clerk' comes from 'On the Fringes of Diplomacy: Influences on British Foreign Policy, 1800-1945' edited by John Fisher and Antony Best (Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2011) which gives 'Clerk Kerr' at every opportunity.

Sufficient of that text (to make the point) can be viewed at: http://books.google.ie/books?id=xwQeBlF4YQwC&pg=PA171&lpg=PA171&dq=Archibald+Clerk+Kerr&source=bl&ots=UbCF1YQZ_K&sig=D9wqhylWfwkAIQYfQrkxbM3FEB4&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ombIUbrCLOKr7Ab-mIG4CA&ved=0CDQQ6AEwATgU#v=onepage&q=Archibald%20Clerk%20Kerr&f=false

The correct spelling is Clark. His grandfather was James Clark (1813-1876), a prosperous Glasgow merchant. His father was John Kerr Clark (1838-1910). Archibald took the family name Clark Kerr to distinguish his side of the family from the 'Barclay' Clarks, children of James Clark's second wife. Clerk is wrong, therefore.

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