Ivor Lucas, who gave signal service to the Society following his retirement from a distinguished career in the Diplomatic Service, died on 7 April 2018; he had taken up residence a year before in the care home to which his wife Christine had moved earlier. A service of remembrance and thanksgiving was held in St Mary’s Church, Wimbledon, on 5 June; tributes were offered by two of Ivor’s three sons, Mark and George. They are literary agents in London and New York respectively; the third son, Crispin, works in finance in Vancouver.
Ivor was the third child and second son of his father George, who was an engineer ennobled as Baron Lucas of Chilworth for his work for the automotive industry in the Second World War – hence Ivor’s “Hon”. Ivor won a scholarship from St Edward’s School, Oxford, to Trinity College, where he read Politics, Philosophy and Economics and scored a “good Second”.
He served in the Army before going up to university, having joined up a week before Germany surrendered. Commissioned into the Royal Artillery, he served in the Canal Zone in Egypt, Palestine and Libya. It was in Libya that he became fired, as he recorded in his very readable book A Road to Damascus (The Radcliffe Press, 1997), with the desire to see more of the Arab way of life. Having joined the Civil Affairs Officer on a trip to see some of the latter’s charges in the desert, he wrote that “the simple and friendly atmosphere of the Bedouin encampment in the middle of nowhere, the genuine warmth of the welcome we were given … struck a chord in me”.
In February 1948 his demobilisation date came up and, already ambitious to join the Foreign Service (as it then was), he was fortunate enough to spend eight months as a temporary employee in the Foreign Office’s German Political Department before going up to Oxford. It was a golden opportunity for him to become confident that he would fit in. When he did duly succeed in joining the Service in late 1951 he volunteered to learn Arabic and was sent first to the School of Oriental and African Studies and then to the FO-run Middle East Centre for Arab Studies in Lebanon. Ivor confessed that he found the background studies at MECAS more absorbing than the language. More important, he became engaged to Christine (Coleman), who was working in the British Legation; they were married in 1954.
Ivor’s first substantive posting was to the Political Residency in the Persian Gulf, followed by the Political Agency in what was then the Trucial States He was struck by the way the status of these territories as British-protected states put the British in the position of having responsibility without power. An incident in Ivor’s own life provides an illustration. In Bahrain he was instructed by the Political Resident to maintain supposedly discreet contact with the reformist Abdul Rahman al-Bakir. Almost immediately the Ruler complained to the PR that it had come to his ears that “some of your young men have been hobnobbing with the opposition” and the contact came to an end. In the Trucial States Ivor felt that much good work was nevertheless done in fostering a sense of unity among the Rulers, which was to stand them in good stead when the United Arab Emirates was formed in 1971.
Despite his liking for the Arab world Ivor would have liked to travel further east on his next posting, say to Kuala Lumpur. No such good fortune: after a spell in Economic Relations Department of the FO, where he learned about the strength of the Treasury in interdepartmental argument, Ivor was posted to Karachi, then the capital of Pakistan, the furthest east he ever got in his career. He found his three and a half years in Pakistan absorbing, on account both of the country’s topography and of its politics, which it was his job to analyse. He judged General Ayub Khan’s martial law regime the best government Pakistan ever had.
In 1962 Ivor returned to Libya, the year in which oil began to transform the economy. He was deeply involved in the British reaction to Prime Minister Mahmud Muntasser’s announcement that Libya would not renew the agreements governing the British and American military facilities in the country; initially, opinion in the Embassy was divided as to how seriously the announcement should be taken. Ivor then had to co-ordinate with the military authorities the British negotiating position, in which again he observed the influence of the Treasury.
In October 1966 Ivor became Assistant Head of the FO’s Central Department, where he was concerned mainly with Greece and Turkey. The experience, where “nearly everything had to be done yesterday, if not the day before”, confirmed his belief that he was not really at home in Whitehall, and he was glad to be posted in 1968, on promotion to Counsellor, to the newly established People’s Republic of South Yemen. It was a difficult time: post-colonial relations were poor, and South Yemen had moved into the Communist camp. Nevertheless, as is so often the case in reportedly difficult posts, Ivor and Christine much enjoyed such facilities as Aden had to offer. The posting did not last long: in June 1968 Ivor left for Kaduna, on posting as Deputy High Commissioner. Another enjoyable post, the north being not much affected by the civil war and the disputes with Britain over Rhodesia and South Africa. Yet a third enjoyable posting followed: in 1972, having scoured the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s post preference system (the FO had become the FCO in 1966) with a view to escaping hot, Muslim, developing countries, Ivor began a three-year posting to Copenhagen.
Ivor paid for these postings with what he called “Four Years Hard”, beginning in January 1975 a stint as Head of the FCO’s Middle East Department, always one of the busiest departments. Problems he had to deal with included the assassination of King Faisal of Saudi Arabia and the visit of Crown Prince Fahd; maintaining the Central Treaty Organisation; the future of the British military relationship with Oman; the arrest of a British commercial employee in Baghdad; and above all the rising tide of opposition to the Shah of Iran. The endless variety of the work included handling the mercurial Foreign Secretary, George Brown, who was inclined to believe that overseas problems could be solved by a visit from him.
Despite Ivor’s aversion to Whitehall his good work in Middle East Department was recognised by his being made CMG. Another recompense was his being posted in May 1979 as Ambassador to Muscat. Ivor found that Britain’s relationship with Oman was indeed “special”, a relationship marked during his mission by the visit in April 1981 of Prime Minister Thatcher.
In 1982 Ivor was transferred as Ambassador to Damascus. This was back to “years hard”. The country’s touristic attractions were more than counter-balanced by Syria’s hard-line stance in the Arab-Israel problem, its ambitions in Lebanon and its siding with Iran against fellow-Ba’thist Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war, not to mention the difficult living conditions of the head of mission. When therefore Ivor was offered the prospect of serving out his time in Damascus (in those days there was a hard retire-at-60 rule) he opted to take early retirement.
It was a full and fulfilling retirement. Apart from visiting with Christine those places further east that had been denied him in the Service, he served as Assistant Secretary-General of the Arab-British Chamber of Commerce for three years; for seven years he was a member of the team reviewing official papers due to be transferred to the Public Record Office; he volunteered for the charity Crisis; he spent three years as Fellow in the International Politics of the Middle East at the Cambridge Centre of International Studies; from 1990 to 1995 he was Chairman of the Anglo-Omani Society.
Ivor was a devoted member of our Society, to which he donated his Collected Papers 1947-2002. The Society also possesses an intricate French embroidered “Silk Route” hanging which he and Christine bought on one of their overseas trips. He was a skilled communicator, using correct, plain, taut English in both speech and writing (he provoked George Brown into remarking: “You’re a downy bird, aren’t you – never use one word where half a word will do!”). He was Chairman of the Editorial Board from 1995 to 2002, and was himself a prolific contributor of reviews to Asian Affairs. When he reached the age of 80 he published 80 of his reviews under the title 80@80. In the Foreword I wrote “In the Diplomatic Service he was known for his preference for rigorous analysis over acceptance of the conventional wisdom, and the same probity comes through in the collection”. I now repeat in tribute to Ivor how fresh his reviews read today.