Alan Furness Tropical Diplomat

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ALAN FURNESS

Tropical Diplomat covers the diplomatic activities of Alan Furness at his postings abroad in India, Indonesia, Poland and francophone West Africa, both his dealings with the foreign governments there, as well as the internal workings of the diplomatic posts he served in. Some of these posts were in countries that had been subject to colonial rule, whether British, French or Dutch (or one could add, Russian, as far as Poland was concerned) and where their relations with the former colonial powers were especially interesting, to put it politely.

Visiting British ministers could also be a problem as well as an opportunity. Sir Geoffrey Howe’s visit to Warsaw in 1985, evoked some responses within the British Embassy that were not wholly concordant.

Diplomatic activities is an expression that covers his relations with the British ambassadors he served under, and his relations with other members of the staff, especially when he was the Head of Post himself, as in Bombay in the 1980s and in Dakar in the 1990s.

His diplomatic activities concluded on an unusual note for a British Ambassador, when he became the Sovereign Order of Malta’s Ambassador to Senegal. 

AUTHOR

Alan Furness was born in 1937. He was educated at Eltham College and at Jesus College,Cambridge, where he read history. He then spent a year at the University College of the West Indies (as it was then called) in Jamaica, doing research into the period of plantation slavery, a subject as fraught then as it still is today. But he decided that an academic career was not for him. 

He joined what was later to become HM Diplomatic Service, starting work in the Commonwealth Relations Office, including a period as Private Secretary to the Parliamentary Under- Secretary of State, the 11th Duke of Devonshire, whom he accompanied on visits to Nigeria and to Canada.

His career in the Diplomatic Service then took him to India (twice), to the UK Delegation to the European Communities during the negotiations for British entry into the Common Market. He met and married his wife, Elizabeth, in Brussels in 1971. She too was working in the UK Delegation. Thereafter, their service overseas took them to Dakar (twice), to Jakarta, to Warsaw in the early 1980s when the Solidarity movement was being suppressed, and to Bombay.

After he reached the compulsory retirement age of 60 in 1997, a second overseas career beckoned. He had been received into the Catholic Church in 1979 in Jakarta; and in 2000, he became the Ambassador to Senegal of the Sovereign Order of Malta. He and his wife continued to live in their own house in Dakar, until they returned to England in 2008. He continued to undertake various activities with the Order of Malta in England.