Alfred Duff Cooper, 1st Viscount Norwich

Duff Cooper (1941)

Alfred Duff Cooper, 1st Viscount Norwich , GCMG , DSO , PC (born February 22, 1890 in London , † January 1, 1954 with Vigo ), was a British politician , diplomat and author. The Duff Cooper Prize , a major British literary prize, was named after him.

Youth and education

Cooper was born the youngest of four children to the respected doctor Sir Alfred Cooper and Lady Agnes Duff, sister of Alexander Duff, 1st Duke of Fife . The young Cooper experienced the traditional upbringing of a scion of the English upper class. He attended Eton College and New College at the University of Oxford and was introduced to the "better society" of London early on.

During his time at Oxford, his friendship with John Henry Montagu Manners, 9th Duke of Rutland , gave him access to the circle of the Coteries, a group of young aristocrats and intellectuals to whom a. Raymond Asquith, the son of Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith , counted.

At the time, Cooper's eloquence and artistry as a poet earned him a reputation for being one of the country's upcoming writers. His inclination to alcohol and gambling as well as the frequently changing acquaintances of women earned him the reputation of a daredevil and salon lion. In addition, during his student years he made his first contacts with people from political life such as Winston Churchill , Reginald McKenna and Andrew Bonar Law .

Military service and marriage

After graduating from college, Cooper joined the Foreign Service. During the First World War he initially remained in his position as a diplomat. In 1917 he joined the Grenadier Guards and took part in highly decorated campaigns on the Western Front in 1918.

In 1919 he married Lady Diana Manners , the sister of his friend John Manners. The marriage was marked by the infidelity of the spouses. Cooper is said to have had affairs with Daisy Fellowes , the heiress of the Singer sewing machine company , and the French writer Louise de Vilmorin .

Political career

Upon returning to the Foreign Service, Cooper served as chief private secretary to two ministers. Accordingly, he played a significant role in the clashes with Turkey and Egypt in the early 1920s. In 1924, he was as MP for the Conservative Party in the House of Commons voted. There Cooper excelled as a gifted speaker and a loyal follower of the Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and Winston Churchill, who was then Chancellor of the Exchequer . Cooper himself became Treasury Secretary in the War Department . In the general election of 1929, in which the Conservative government lost its parliamentary majority, he too lost his seat in parliament.

After the loss of his mandate, Cooper worked as a writer, he published a. a. a critically acclaimed short biography of the French diplomat Talleyrand (1932). In 1931 he returned to parliament after a by- election and was again State Secretary for Finance in the War Ministry. Three years later he moved to the relevant post in the Ministry of Finance .

In 1935 he was accepted into the cabinet as Minister of War . In 1937 he rose to First Lord of the Admiralty (Minister of the Navy). At the same time he published a biography of the British Commander in Chief of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in World War I, Douglas Haig . As the best known and most pronounced internal government critic of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain 's policy of appeasement towards the National Socialist German Reich , Cooper left the cabinet in the fall of 1938 in protest against the Munich Agreement .

In May 1940 he excelled in the parliamentary debate that led to the overthrow of Chamberlain. As information minister, he served a year of propaganda in Winston Churchill's war cabinet until his replacement by Brendan Bracken , and then became Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster . In 1941/42 he briefly represented the British government in Singapore , but left this post in good time before the Japanese conquered . His work in Singapore was judged negatively by contemporaries; Governor Shenton Thomas viewed him and his wife, Lady Diana Duff Cooper, as arrogant and vain self-promoters, "their God is the publicity," Thomas noted in his diary.

From 1943 he acted as a contact for de Gaulle's French government in exile. In 1944 Cooper became British Ambassador in Paris . In 1947 he resigned from this office, was knighted and devoted himself mainly to his literary work.

Late years

In 1952, Cooper was promoted to Viscount Norwich in recognition of his literary and political services . His wife refused to use the title Viscountess Norwich because it sounds like porridge . She announced in a newspaper ad that she would continue to be addressed as Lady Diana Cooper.

The following year he wrote his autobiography.

In 1954, Cooper died at the age of 63.

Cooper's son John Julius Cooper, 2nd Viscount Norwich , became known as a television presenter and author under the name of John Julius Norwich.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Christopher Bayly, Tim Harper: Forgotten Armies. Britain's Asian Empire and the War with Japan. Penguin Press, London 2005, ISBN 0-14-029331-0 , p. 127.
2. ↑ Duff Cooper: Old Men Forget. Faber and Faber, London 2011, ISBN 978-0-571-27958-6 (German translation: That can't be forgotten. Autobiography. Kindler and Schiermeyer, Bad Wörishofen 1954, DNB 450825248 ).

Web links

• Literature by and about Alfred Duff Cooper, 1st Viscount Norwich in the catalog of the German National Library
• Newspaper article about Alfred Duff Cooper, 1st Viscount Norwich in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

predecessor	Office	successor
New title created	Viscount Norwich 1952-1954	John Julius Cooper
Samuel Hoare	First Lord of the Admiralty 1937–1938	James Stanhope