Nemesis of Power

Abstract

Early in 1948 Archie Clark Kerr, Lord Inverchapel, retired as ambassador to Washington, and the British government decided to replace him by a non-career ambassador. Their choice was Sir Oliver Franks who, like many of the leading academic figures at Oxford where he had been Provost of The Queen’s College, had become a highly successful temporary civil servant during the war. At that time he became Director of Labour at the Ministry of Supply and in this capacity he came to know Ernest Bevin, then Minister of Labour. Indeed, he not infrequently exercised a balsamic influence on Bevin’s bitter confrontations with Lord Beaverbrook when the latter was the Minister of Production. It was natural, therefore, that when, later in 1947, Ernie Bevin, then Foreign Secretary, looked around for someone to make the Marshall Aid plan work administratively, he wisely turned to Oliver Franks, who again forsook The Queen’s College to tackle the far from easy task of setting up the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation.