John Rupert Colville

Sir John Rupert Colville , Jock for short , (born January 28, 1915 , † November 19, 1987 ) was private secretary of various British Prime Ministers and Princess Elisabeth .

Life

Colville was one of the three sons of the Hon. George and Lady Cynthia Colville. His paternal grandfather was 1st Viscount Colville of Culross and his maternal grandfather was 1st Marquess of Crewe . Not personally wealthy, he had access to the British nobility, which boosted his career and social life.

Graduated from Trinity College (Cambridge) , Colville had traveled through the Soviet Union, to Athos and down the Danube. He spoke fluent German and French, after a trip to Italy in September 1937 he joined the Eastern Department of the British Foreign Office in Whitehall as 3rd Secretary and was involved with Persia , Turkey, Palestine and the Gulf States . Two years later he became one of Arthur Neville Chamberlain's private secretaries and Winston Churchill from 1940 to 1945 , interrupted by a year of service as an aviator in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve (1942) with training in South Africa. In 1945, Colville was taken over by Clement Attlee and then returned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Southeastern Europe area. From 1947 to 1949 he was Princess Elisabeth's private secretary and then for two years head of the British Embassy in Lisbon . When Churchill was Prime Minister again from 1951 to 1955, he became his first private secretary. He then left politics to work in banking and finance for another 30 years. Among other things, he managed the property of the Churchills, was director of the Ottoman Bank and 25 years of the British subsidiary of BASF .

Colville married Lady Margaret Egerton, one of Elizabeth's ladies-in- waiting, in 1948 . They both had two sons and a daughter and lived in Hampshire . 1949 he was appointed as Commander of the Royal Victorian Order , and in 1955 as a Companion of the Bath Award and received in 1974 the accolade as a Knight Bachelor .

Author of several books, best known today is his 10 Downing Street diaries 1939-1955 . In it, he describes the various actors in Allied politics and the political decisions of that time in a factual and relatively unemotional manner. In Churchill College , Cambridge, which is connected to the Churchill Archives Center and where his diaries are stored, an honorary room is named after him.

Works

• Fools' Pleasure. A leisurely journey down the Danube, to the Black Sea, the Greek Islands and Dalmatia. Methuen & Co., London 1935.
• Man of valor. The life of Field-Marshal the Viscount Gort , VC, GCB, DSO, MVO, MC . Collins, London 1972
• Footprints in Time. Memories . Collins, 1976
• Portrait of a general. A Chronicle of the Napoleonic Wars. Michael Russell, Salisbury 1980.
• Strange inheritance . Michael Russell, Salisbury 1983.
• The Fringes of Power. Downing Street Diaries, 1939–55: September 1939 – September 1955 B.C. 1 . Scepter, 1986, ISBN 0340402695
• The Churchillians . Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986
• Downing Street Diaries 1939-1945 . Settlers, 1988
• Those Lambtons! . Hodder & Stoughton, London 1988.