Talk:Archibald Clark Kerr, 1st Baron Inverchapel

This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
It is of interest to the following WikiProjects:

Politics of the United Kingdom

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Politics of the United Kingdom, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Politics of the United Kingdom on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Politics of the United KingdomWikipedia:WikiProject Politics of the United KingdomTemplate:WikiProject Politics of the United KingdomPolitics of the United Kingdom articles

??? This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale.

More information:
/
	This article has been automatically rated by a bot or other tool because one or more other projects use this class. Please ensure the assessment is correct before removing the `\|auto=` parameter.

Biography: Peerage and Baronetage

	Biography portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography, a collaborative effort to create, develop and organize Wikipedia's articles about people. All interested editors are invited to join the project and contribute to the discussion. For instructions on how to use this banner, please refer to the documentation.BiographyWikipedia:WikiProject BiographyTemplate:WikiProject Biographybiography articles
	This article is supported by WikiProject Peerage and Baronetage (assessed as Low-importance).

Untitled

Archibald Clark-Kerr, 1st Baron Inverchapel PC (d. 1951) was a British diplomat.

An Australian-born Scot he entered the Foreign Service in 1906. He served as Ambassador to China during the Japanese occupation of the late 1930s, he was moved to Moscow in February 1942 where he forged a remarkable relationship with Stalin. His work there and at the Big Three Conferences put him at the very centre of international politics.

After the war he was appointed Ambassador to the United States, and was created Baron Inverchapel in 1946. An acquaintance of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean's superior in Washington, he took their defection to the USSR badly, the shock hastening his early death in 1951.

His personal life has been described as colourful: a close confidant of the Kaiser's sister in the years before the Great War, he was also a disappointed suitor of the Queen Mother before his marriage, divorce, and re-marriage, to a Chilean lady 29 years his junior. Politically on the left, witty and unconventional in manner, he was sometimes suspected of excessive understanding for the Soviet position. His biographer, Donald Gillies, considers rumours of pro-Soviet sympathies highly unlikely.

Main reference work: Donald GILLIES, Radical diplomat: the life of Archibald Clark Kerr, Lord Inverchapel, 1882-1951; I.B.Tauris publishers, London and New York, 1999

In April 1943, while British Ambassador to Moscow, Clark Kerr famously addressed the following note to Lord Pembroke at The Foreign Office in London:

"My Dear Reggie, In these dark days man tends to look for little shafts of light that spill from Heaven. My days are probably darker than yours, and I need, my God I do, all the light I can get. But I am a decent fellow, and I do not want to be mean and selfish about what little brightness is shed upon me from time to time. So I propose to share with you a tiny flash that has illuminated my sombre life and tell you that God has given me a new Turkish colleague whose card tells me that he is called Mustapha Kunt. We all feel like that, Reggie, now and then, especially when Spring is upon us, but few of us would care to put it on our cards. It takes a Turk to do that. Sir Archibald Clerk Kerr H.M. Ambassador" GIF of letter is at: http://www.ntk.net/2000/02/25/moscow.gif

Retrieved from "http://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Archibald_Clerk_Kerr%2C_1st_Baron_Inverchapel"

Can we have something about his famous conversation with Churchill after the latter had lost the plot over Stalin's bullying; if you want to have a competition for "Half hours which really changed history" it would have to be up there — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.77.66.163 (talk) 17:17, 23 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

A multifaceted personality

Richard Davenport-Hines in his book Titanic Lives brings to the surface hitherto unfeatured facts about Inverchapel which must have his marriage quite interesting. An excerpt: http://www.thedaily.com/page/2012/03/20/032012-opinions-history-butt-davenport-hines-1-3/ Engleham (talk) 08:42, 22 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Clark Kerr had numerous homosexual relationships in his younger days, as his Bodleian papers attest. Amongst his similarly-inclined companions were Harold Nicolson, Reggie Bridgeman, Francis Agar-Robartes (Viscount Clifden), Gerald Tyrwhitt-Wilson (Lord Berners), and Gerald Villiers. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.152.242.113 (talk) 21:03, 13 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Spelling of name - Clark or Clerk?

Did this gentleman regularly spell his name in two ways? If not, is there a definitive reference? The much circulated humorous letter about his Turkish colleague gives the spelling as 'Clerk'. Presuming the letter to be entirely genuine (and there seems to be little reason to doubt this) we might suppose that since Sir Archibold signed it himself he knew how to spell his name. This Wikipedia entry mispells the name on the letter, perhaps inadvertently, perhaps to avoid the problem.

Further support for 'Clerk' comes from 'On the Fringes of Diplomacy: Influences on British Foreign Policy, 1800-1945' edited by John Fisher and Antony Best (Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2011) which gives 'Clerk Kerr' at every opportunity.

Sufficient of that text (to make the point) can be viewed at: http://books.google.ie/books?id=xwQeBlF4YQwC&pg=PA171&lpg=PA171&dq=Archibald+Clerk+Kerr&source=bl&ots=UbCF1YQZ_K&sig=D9wqhylWfwkAIQYfQrkxbM3FEB4&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ombIUbrCLOKr7Ab-mIG4CA&ved=0CDQQ6AEwATgU#v=onepage&q=Archibald%20Clerk%20Kerr&f=false

The correct spelling is Clark. His grandfather was James Clark (1813-1876), a prosperous Glasgow merchant. His father was John Kerr Clark (1838-1910). Archibald took the family name Clark Kerr to distinguish his side of the family from the 'Barclay' Clarks, children of James Clark's second wife. Clerk is wrong, therefore.

External links modified

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Archibald Clark Kerr, 1st Baron Inverchapel. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20100210221828/http://www.aqk.ca:80/misc/letter.php to http://www.aqk.ca/misc/letter.php

When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true or failed to let others know (documentation at {{Sourcecheck}}).

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 5 June 2024).

If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 06:44, 17 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]