Robert Cecil (British diplomat)


Robert Cecil, MA was a British diplomat and writer.

Life and career

Robert Cecil was born in Southbourne, a suburb of Bournemouth, Dorset in southern England on 25 March 1913. He married Kathleen Marindin in 1938, and they had one son and two daughters.
During his career in the diplomatic service, from 1945 to 1967, Cecil served in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office; as First Secretary in Washington, D.C.; as a Counsellor and Consul General in Europe, as Director-General of British Information Services, and latterly as Head of the Cultural Relations Department at the Foreign Office. He had been made a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George in the 1959 Birthday Honours.
According to Cecil's obituary in The Independent, from childhood he had a close personal relationship with Donald Maclean, and the two both studied at Cambridge and worked together in the Foreign Office. Maclean was a member of the Cambridge Five, who acted as spies for the Soviet Union. There was some speculation that this relationship "cost the promotion to the highest echelons of the diplomatic service which his talents merited." Cecil would later write a biography of Maclean.
Cecil went on to become a reader in Contemporary German History from 1968–78, and chairman of the Graduate School of Contemporary European Studies from 1976–78, at the University of Reading. From 1968–94 he was chairman of the London-based Institute for Cultural Research, founded by the writer, thinker and teacher in the Sufi mystical tradition, Idries Shah. Cecil wrote three monographs for the institute, and also published several books, including The King's Son, co-compiled for Shah's publishing house, Octagon Press.
As well as his interest in Sufism, Cecil had a prior interest in the esoteric work of the Russian mystic, P. D. Ouspensky. Ouspensky lectured in New York, and had been a student of George Gurdjieff whose school became known as the Fourth Way.

Death

Robert Cecil died in the village of Hambledon, Hampshire on 28 February 1994.

Works

ICR monographs