Sir Nicholas Henderson

Nicholas Henderson’s schooling at Stowe was interrupted by tuberculosis, but he went on to Hertford College, Oxford, and became president of the Oxford Union. He worked in the minister of state’s office in Cairo in 1943. His later ambassadorial postings in Warsaw, Bonn, and Paris made European affairs a central concern. He advocated a more committed British role in Europe. ¹

Henderson expected to retire in 1979. Instead, Lord Carrington recalled him to serve in Washington. In his oral history Henderson corrected the suggestion that the initiative had come directly from Margaret Thatcher, while acknowledging her agreement. His final dispatch from Paris, which assessed Britain’s relative decline and appeared in The Economist, had attracted attention. He described using official statistics and the expertise of his embassy staff to assemble its argument. ²

The Falklands War dominated his final year in Washington. Henderson worked to secure American support for Britain, including practical military assistance. Contemporary American records also show the ambassador’s role as an immediate source of information: on 21 May 1982 Alexander Haig sent Reagan Henderson’s account of the British landing at San Carlos and the losses then reported. ^{1, 3}

After leaving diplomacy, Henderson chaired the Channel Tunnel Group and became a company director and National Gallery trustee. He also wrote extensively, including a life of Prince Eugene of Savoy, portraits of foreign secretaries, and Mandarin, drawn from his ambassadorial diaries. In his interview he explained the prolonged dispute over official permission to publish those diaries. He died in 2009. ^{1, 2}