Early Life
O'Brien was born in Aylesbury in the United Kingdom in January 1936. His father was a pilot in the Royal Air Force (RAF) and so in his early years they moved around a lot. In 1940 during the peak of the Battle of Britain the family moved to New Zealand by boat, dodging German U-boats along the way, where his father took up a post as Chief Air Instructor to the Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF) during the Second World War. Shortly after the end of the war, he returned to the United Kingdom to be educated at Beaumont College, and later University College Oxford where he read history. However, following graduation he returned to New Zealand, with which he had developed a great affinity in his early years, and joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade in 1959.
Read more about this topic: Terence O'Brien (New Zealand Diplomat)
Famous quotes related to early life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)