Gerard Corley Smith - Diplomat

Diplomat

Corley Smith joined the consular service in 1931 and was posted to Paris, Oran, Detroit, La Paz and Milan. During World War II he was in St Louis and New York, and was engaged in the effort to persuade Americans that Britain's lonely resistance to the Nazis was a grim battle for freedom that the United States should recognise to be in their interest to join.

The possibility of a full diplomatic career only opened up to Corley Smith and to others with no private means after the Eden reforms of the 1940s. He was appointed as labour attaché in Brussels in 1945, and caught the attention of Ernest Bevin, foreign secretary in the post-war Labour government. Bevin, keen to encourage closer ties with European trade unions, saw Corley Smith as well suited to work in this new area. He was posted to UN headquarters in 1949 as counsellor at the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. As Britain's EcoSoc representative, Corley Smith was chosen to present the case against the Soviet forced labour camps, or gulags, the existence of which was only then beginning to be revealed to the world. It was a task that predictably earned him the anger and disapproval of the Eastern bloc delegations and their press. Much of his time in New York was taken up in drafting the UN Charter on Employment following the adoption of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Art.23), which stated inter alia: "Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment." Member states were unable to agree on the wording or the substance of the draft charter, and it was not adopted by the UN.

Corley Smith returned to Europe in 1952 and was awarded the CMG. He spent two years in Paris and five in Madrid before being appointed British ambassador to Haiti, which was ruled by François 'Papa Doc' Duvalier. With little he could do diplomatically in Haiti where, according to Graham Greene, "it was impossible to deepen the night", Corley Smith was able to develop his hobby of bird-watching. Eventually, he was chosen as the spokesman for a number of foreign embassies to protest to Duvalier about the reign of terror and extortion by the Tonton Macoute, Duvalier's private mafia. The result was immediate denunciation as an "impertinent British colonialist", and a demand for his recall. Corley Smith regarded being thrown out of Haiti as an honour, and certainly a better fate than was usually meted out to critics of Duvalier's regime. Years later, he said: "I find it difficult to conceive of any solution to Haiti's problems. The country has been independent for two centuries now and it has never had a good leader."

His final posting was as ambassador to Ecuador, where he found many opportunities for ornithology in a country with a wide variety of climates from tropical Amazonia to the high Andes.