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1914-1999
Throughout his successful diplomatic career, Henry Hankey led a full and varied life, not least during the night of September 2, 1939, when he was on overnight duty at the Foreign Office, awaiting the reply to Britain’s ultimatum to Germany that if it did not pull out of Poland, there would be a declaration of war.
It was not an entirely straightforward affair. On his shift it was discovered that the cipher books had been locked into an office. He climbed from one upstairs window to another and retrieved them. Most of that night he held open the telephone line to Berlin, and on the next day it was he who reported to the Cabinet that there had been no reply to the ultimatum. The Prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, then informed the country on the wireless that we were at war with Germany.
Henry Arthur Alers Hankey was named after his godfathers, Henry Asquith and Arthur Balfour, with whom his father, Maurice Alers (the first baron) Hankey, served as secretary of the Cabinet from 1915 and later as a member of the war Cabinet in the early part of the Second World War.
Educated at Rugby and New College, Oxford, he won a travelling fellowship to Paris, Tours and Bonn before joining the Diplomatic Service in 1937. After being caught up in the momentous events of September 1939, he was posted to Paris. In May 1940 when the Germans invaded France he was engaged in destroying embassy documents to prevent them falling into German hands when he found that his superior, Donald McLean, had taken his car in order to get married.
The embassy cars had already left, so he escaped on a bicycle to rejoin his colleagues at Tours. He always regretted having had to throw the bicycle into a canal. Later he made his way to Arcachon, where, after a perilous boat journey, he was taken aboard the Canadian warship Fraser, an escape that has been documented in Oliver Harvey’s Diplomatic Diaries.
During the London Blitz he met and married his wife, Vronwy Fisher, who became a distinguished classical scholar and archaeologist. She had herself returned hazardously from Athens by flying boat via Bordeaux just as the embassy party were making their departure.
Together they were posted to Madrid in 1942 and there he and Sir Michael Cresswell were active in smuggling escapers from the French border to Gibraltar. Often these Journeys across Spain were made with Vronwy at his side and a soldier in the boot of the car.
In 1946 he moved to Rome as First Secretary and head of the political section; four years later he became Consul in San Francisco, where he developed a deep interest in North American affairs. A move to Santiago, Chile, in 1953 then widened his knowledge of the American continent, the stamping ground of his later career.
In 1956 he moved to the Foreign Office as Head of the American Department. During this period he was instrumental in obtaining the release of Margot Fonteyn from prison in Panama after the abortive coup by her husband, Roberto Arias, in 1959. He accompanied the Duchess of Kent and Princess Alexandra on their South American tour, which he organised and for which he was appointed CVO.
As architect of the first Antarctic treaty, which was signed in 1959, he was appointed CMG in 1960. The treaty has been described as unique in the field of international relations, and it continues to provide a lasting framework for research and protection of the environment in the Antarctic.
He was Counsellor in Beirut from 1962 to 1966, when Lebanon was at peace. He and Vronwy here as always travelled widely in the region and acquired a deep understanding of it, making many friends, so that the subsequent conflict was a source of enormous sadness.
He was Ambassador to Panama from 1966 to 1969, so consolidating his knowledge of Latin America before his final appointment as Assistant Under Secretary of State in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He retired in 1974 and the following year became a director of Lloyds Bank International. He later also became a trustee of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom Trust.
In retirement he devoted himself to his family and his 11 grandchildren, his painting, music and skiing. He was an excellent pianist for whom chamber music especially was the basis of many lasting friendships. More irreverently he produced and published two volumes of humorous achaeological cartoons.
His wife died in 1998, but he is survived by their three sons and a daughter.