Archibald Clark Kerr, 1st Baron Inverchapel

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Archibald John Kerr Clark Kerr, 1st Baron Inverchapel , GCMG , PC (born March 17, 1882 in Australia , † July 5, 1951 in Greenock ) was a British diplomat .

He was born in 1882 with the name Archibald John Kerr Clark, the son of John Clark († 1836) of Scottish descent in Australia. In 1911 he changed his family name from "Clark" to "Clark Kerr".

In 1906 he went into the diplomatic service, u. a. in Berlin and Rome and (around 1915) as British legation secretary in Teheran. He served as the British ambassador to China during the Japanese occupation in the late 1930s. In February 1942 he was transferred to Moscow as the successor of Sir Richard Stafford Cripps as British ambassador, where he developed an excellent relationship with Joseph Stalin. In 1935 he was knighted as the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George . In 1943 he took part as a diplomat at the conferences of the Big Three ( Stalin , Churchill , Roosevelt ) in Tehran , Cairo and Yalta .

After the war he went to the United States as the British ambassador . In the initial phase of the Cold War , there coordinated the tasks arising in Washington in the course of the British engagement in NATO and the Marshall Plan . On April 5, 1946 he was raised to hereditary peer as Baron Inverchapel , of Loch Eck in the County of Argyll , which was connected to a seat in the House of Lords . During his tenure in Washington, the British US diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean defected to the USSR.

His political stance was essentially left-wing, anti-imperialist and a little unconventional in interpersonal dealings, which is why some contemporaries suspected him of being a communist agent.

In addition, Kerr was known for his dazzling private life: in the years before the First World War he was a close confidante of Victoria of Prussia , a sister of the German Emperor Wilhelm II , he was a disappointed solicitor for the hand of Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon , the later wife of King George VI. and mother of Queen Elizabeth II. He was married twice to a Chilean woman who was 29 years younger than him. Since he remained childless, his title of nobility expired on his death in 1951.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ English documents on the strangulation of Persia. Verlag Der Neue Orient, Berlin 1917, pp. 73 f. and 92 f.
  2. ↑ The London Gazette : No. 37524, p. 1744 , April 5, 1946.

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personal data
SURNAME Clark Kerr, Archibald, 1st Baron Inverchapel
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Clark Kerr, Archibald John Kerr, 1st Baron Inverchapel; Clark, Archibald John Kerr
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British diplomat
DATE OF BIRTH March 17, 1882
PLACE OF BIRTH Australia
DATE OF DEATH 5th July 1951
Place of death Greenock