Sir Richard Hanbury-tenison
Popular wartime Army officer turned diplomat who served in Cold War postings in Central Europe
SIR RICHARD HANBURY TENISON, who has died aged 92, was one of the last of the generation of British diplomats who saw active service in the Second World War and then saw victory descend into the Cold War. He was commissioned into the Irish Guards in 1943, having just left school, and sent to join the 3rd Battalion on the Belgian-dutch border. Landing in Dieppe three months after D Day in pitch darkness and with no signposts, his convoy soon got lost. None of the Flemish population spoke French, so Hanbury-tenison twice resorted to finding the village priest and asking the way in Latin – the only time, he later remarked, that he found his classical education of the slightest use.
Having fought their way through Holland, where Hanbury-tenison was wounded but patched up and back on duty within 48 hours, his battalion was in the vanguard of the 21st Army Group as they crossed into Germany in February 1945.
Ordered to take a fighting patrol to sort out a German position on high ground that was directing artillery fire on the battalion, in the ensuing action Hanbury-tenison was badly wounded in the foot and spent several hours in a shell hole before stretcher bearers could reach him. By the time he had recovered from his wound, the war was over. Many years later he was appointed Honorary Colonel of the 3rd (TA) Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Wales.
Richard Hanbury-tenison was born on January 3 1925, the son of Major GEF Tenison of Co Monaghan and the former Ruth Hanbury, and educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford. The Hanburys had mined iron ore and developed forges and the first rolling mills around Pontypool in the late 16th century – the foundation of the family wealth.
Hanbury-tenison joined the Foreign Office in 1949 and had early postings to Brazil and Cambodia. In 1956 he was sent to the embassy in Vienna. It was less than a year after the State Treaty had been signed granting Austria independence. The Four Powers were gone, but Vienna was still a bleak city with dilapidated buildings and empty shops.
The Hungarian Revolution of October 1956 led to a flood of refugees into Austria and an immensely tense time in Central Europe. Hanburytenison was in the thick of it, advising aid convoys, helping to evacuate the embassy in Budapest and briefing journalists.
It was his first taste of Central Europe, and was to serve him well when he was posted to Bucharest in 1966. Ceausescu’s Romania was a harsh police state that kept diplomats and foreigners away from ordinary Romanians. This was not Hanburytenison’s style. He travelled widely and, with his easy-going manner, made friends wherever he went. To relieve the tedium he hired a Tarom aeroplane and flew the entire embassy staff to Constanta for a boat trip in the Danube Delta and paid for the expedition himself. The Securitate had a hard time keeping up and were finally defeated by the mosquitoes.
Without being at all stuffy, Hanburytenison liked to observe English social convention and entertained generously. On one occasion, having delivered an important telegram to the ambassador at the Residence, he reported that he had found Sir John and Lady Chadwick in the kitchen lunching on a pork pie. The immediate response back at the embassy was not the anticipated disapproval but “Where did they get it?”, pork pies being an unobtainable luxury in Bucharest.
After Bucharest, there followed senior posts as political counsellor in Bonn and in Brussels. Bonn in 1968 was particularly challenging. It was a time of student protests and social unrest, and after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia underlined the ability of the Russians to do as they liked in Eastern Europe, keeping West Germany on side within Nato and resisting any encroachment from the east on the status of Berlin was a major task of the Embassy.
Hanbury-tenison’s next post would certainly have been an ambassadorship, probably in some distant land. He had always been torn between a love of travel and his devotion to life in Wales and to Co Monaghan in Ireland where he had a house. Whenever the diplomatic bag arrived he would open the letters from his gamekeeper first and read the Abergavenny Chronicle before turning to his official duties.
To the dismay of his colleagues, therefore, he decided in 1975 to leave the Diplomatic Service and to live permanently at Clytha Park in Gwent, a house that he had lovingly and meticulously restored after wartime damage and neglect and which is one of the finest neoclassical houses in Wales.
Clytha Park became a venue for charitable and cultural events and Hanbury-tenison threw himself into many local activities including the National Trust for Wales, the National Museum of Wales, the Territorial Army, the Gwent County Historical Association and forestry projects. He was appointed High Sheriff of Gwent in 1977 and was a natural choice to be appointed Lord Lieutenant of Gwent in 1979. He served for 21 years, bringing to the office a fine sense of duty, generosity and good humour. He was appointed KCVO in 1995.
Richard Hanbury-tenison married Euphan Wardlaw-ramsay in 1955. She died in 2012. Their three sons and two daughters survive him.
Sir Richard Hanbury-tenison, born January 3 1925, died August 14 2017