Brooks Richards

Sir Francis "Brooks" Richards, KCMG, DSO, DSC & Bar (18 July 1918 – 13 September 2002) was a British diplomat and, during the Second World War, a director of operations for the Special Operations Executive. He married Hazel Williams in 1941 — she was the daughter of Lt-Col. Stanley Price Williams, Indian Army, who was also an SOE officer. They had one son, Francis Richards, and Hazel died in 2000.

Life

Born in Southampton, Richards was educated at Stowe School and Magdalene College, Cambridge. In 1939 he volunteered for the Royal Navy, commanding a minesweeper and then a motor torpedo boat flotilla. At the outbreak of war, he organised secret service agents for secret Channel crossings to France and across the Mediterranean to land in Tunisia.

In 1940 he was put in command of HMS Sevra (sunk that November), and in 1941 he was taken on by SOE. At the end of 1942 he was in Algiers when Admiral Darlan was also there at the time of the Allied landings. He met Fernand Bonnier de La Chapelle several times before La Chapelle attempted to assassinate Darlan. Brooks Richards always denied that Bonnier de la Chapelle, who moved in Royalist circles, was working for SOE. In May 1943, after the liberation of Tunis, Commander Brooks Richards was head of F section in Algiers, directing SOE agents parachuted into enemy territory or landed at night on the beaches. In Algiers he also got to know Charles de Gaulle. He wrote an account of this period in his book Secret Flotillas.

In Autumn 1944 he served in the staff of Duff Cooper, minister-resident charged with re-opening the British embassy in Paris, and in 1945 he became a reservist in the Royal Naval Reserve (RNR). In 1944 to 1948 he was a press attaché in Paris, and in 1954 he began a diplomatic career, starting as first secretary and head of the administration in the Persian Gulf, a post he held until 1957. In 1958–59 he was Assistant Private Secretary to the Foreign Secretary, before returning to France during De Gaulle's presidency to work as intelligence advisor at the British embassy from 1959 to 1964.

In 1964–65 he was head of the Department of Information Policy and Guidance, Commonwealth Relations Office, and in 1965–1969 he was delegated from there to the Cabinet Office, where he was Secretary of the Joint Intelligence Committee, in which role he was succeeded by the intelligence officer Brian Stewart. From 1969 to 1971 he was in Bonn, before acting as British ambassador to South Vietnam (from 1972 to 1974, during the Vietnam War) then Greece (1974–78, after the military junta fell from power). He was deputy secretary to the Cabinet Office from 1978 to 1980, Security Adviser to the Northern Ireland Office in 1980–81 and finally president of CSM Parliamentary Consultants from 1984 until his retirement in 1996.

Aged 82, Richards died at Dorchester on 13 September 2002.

Works

Honours

External links

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