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Gladwyn Jebb

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Hubert Miles Gladwyn Jebb, 1st Baron Gladwyn, known as Gladwyn Jebb (April 25, 1900October 24, 1996), was a prominent British civil servant, diplomat and politician.

The son of Sydney Jebb, of Firbeck Hall, Yorkshire, Jebb was educated at Eton College, then Magdalen College, Oxford, gaining a first in History. In 1929 he married Cynthia Noble, with whom he had one son and two daughters, Miles, Vanessa, married to the historian Hugh Thomas, and Stella, married to the scientist Joel de Rosnay.

Jebb entered the Foreign Service in 1924, served in Tehran, where he became known to Harold Nicolson and to Vita Sackville-West and in Rome, as well as at the Foreign Office. He was a friend of Cyril Connelly and of Nancy Mitford. In1940, he was appointed chief exective of Special Operations Executive (SOE), the organization that spawned the French Resistance, and in June of that year, as France fell to the Nazi advance, advised General de Gaulle on his BBC addresses to France. In 1942 he was made head of the British postwar planning department, and attended the Tehran Conference and its successor meeting, the Yalta Conference. After World War II, he served first as the first Acting United Nations Secretary-General 1945-1946, then in the Ernest Bevin Foreign Office, where he negotiated the North Atlantic Treaty which created NATO. He became the United Kingdom's Ambassador to the United Nations 1950-1954 and to Paris 1954-1960.

In 1960. Jebb was made a hereditary peer and as Baron Gladwyn and became involved in Liberal Party politics. He was Deputy Leader of the Party 1965-1988, spokesman on foreign affairs and defence, and from 1960 was a declared European. He served as a Member of the European Parliament 1973-1976 and contested the Suffolk seat in the European Parliament in 1979. He died in 1996, and is buried at St. Andrew's, Bramfield in the county of Suffolk. He became a good cook and for a long time was chairman of the British government's wine committee. A good shot, never ceased to be interested by rural pursuits; and as a patrician rarely ceased to believe that education was the pillar of social reform. When asked why he had joined the Liberal party in the early 1960s, he replied that the Liberals were a party without a general and that he was a general without a party.

Jebb's wife, Cynthia, Lady Gladwyn, was a noted diarist of their times in Paris and a hostess of Liberal and London politics. She was the great-grand daughter of Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

Preceded by– Baron Gladwyn Succeeded byMiles Gladwyn Jebb
Preceded bySir Oliver Harvey British Ambassador to France
1954-1960
Succeeded bySir Pierson Dixon
Preceded by– Acting Secretary-General of the United Nations
1945-1946
Succeeded byTrygve Lie
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