Henry Hainworth
This article relies largely or entirely on a single source. (December 2009) |
Henry Charles Hainworth
Education
Henry Hainworth was educated at Blundell's School in Tiverton and at Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge.
Diplomatic career
Hainworth joined the
Hainworth was subsequently deployed to the Ministry of Information in Delhi, where he was employed for the rest of the war on public information and propaganda work. In 1946 he went back to Tokyo, among the first diplomats to return to the embassy. They found their offices and houses had been impeccably safeguarded by Japanese staff throughout the war, the only damage had been inflicted by men of the Royal Navy sent to secure the compound as the occupation forces arrived in 1945.
Hainworth spent five-year stint in Tokyo, which was still devastated by wartime firebombings, then, after a spell in London and 30 months in
Hainworth was subsequently promoted to the rank of
Hainworth’s obituary notes:
“He went to a country which had put an end to its undeclared war with Malaysia only two years earlier. In that war British forces had played a leading and vigorous part in defence of Malaysia, grappling with the Indonesians in the jungles of Borneo (see Indonesia–Malaysia confrontation). The Indonesian leader, Sukarno, was gone, but the army leaders who had overthrown him remained, and with them much of his hostility to Britain. Internally, the Indonesian Army’s massacre of many of the Chinese minority had left bitter memories. The country was racked by corruption, ethnic strife and abuse of basic rights. Hainworth played a very positive role in seeking to remove unnecessary causes of friction and looking for what commercial opportunities he could discern in this huge, potentially prosperous country.
From Indonesia Hainworth moved to his last official appointment, as ambassador and representative to the disarmament conference in Geneva. The work was intellectually demanding even as the talks went nowhere, and Hainworth carried out his job, as all his others, with solid distinction.”
Hainworth was appointed
Publications
Hainworth’s 1981 publication, A Collector's Dictionary, is available to view at Google Books: