Diplomat, soldier, diplomat again, humanitarian, environmentalist: you cannot plan a career like that today. But that has been the CV of John Henniker, otherwise Major Henniker-Major MC, now the eighth Lord Henniker, who, in his late eighties, has written a modest and readable account of his life and work.
Born in 1916, and following a conventional education, he had an exciting war. He is the last survivor of that sparky band of officers — Evelyn Waugh, Bill Deakin, Randolph Churchill and Fitzroy Maclean — who were parachuted into Yugoslavia to establish contact with Tito. Resuming a Foreign Office career, he opened a post-war embassy in Belgrade before transfer to London, to work in Ernest Bevin’s Private Office.
For most of the Fifties he was a youthful Head of Personnel in London, coping with the slump in Foreign Office morale after the defection of Burgess and Maclean.
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