George Clerk

Sir George Russell Clerk (29 November 1874 – 18 June 1951) was a British diplomat and Privy Counsellor who ended his career as Ambassador to France from 1934 to 1937, after seven years as Ambassador to Turkey, one as Ambassador to Belgium and seven as Ambassador to The Czechoslovak Republic. His name is pronounced as if spelt Clark. Early life The son of General Sir Godfrey Clerk (1835–1908), a Groom in Waiting to Edward VII, Clerk was the grandson and namesake of Sir George Russell Clerk, a civil servant in British India who became Lieutenant-Governor of the North-Western Provinces, Governor of Bombay, and Under-Secretary of State for India. Clerk was educated at Eton and New College, Oxford. At Eton he was a contemporary of Prince Alexander of Teck, later Governor-General of South Africa and of Canada, Geoffrey Dawson, later editor of The Times, and the author Maurice Baring. Career Clerk was appointed a clerk in the Foreign Office in 1899. In early 1901 was appointed an acting Third Secretary to accompany a special diplomatic mission to announce King Edward's accession, to the governments of Denmark, Sweden and Norway, Russia, Germany, and Saxony. He went to Addis Ababa in 1903 as Assistant in HM Agency, where he became Acting Agent and Consul-General from 1903 to 1904 and Chargé d'Affaires at the British Legation in Abyssinia, 1906–07. While in Abyssinia, Clerk worked to curb the excesses of the slave trade in the border regions of Sudan and Uganda and gained the nickname of 'the Buffalo'. In 1907 he was recalled to London as an Assistant Clerk in the Foreign Office, and in 1910 went to Constantinople as First Secretary in HM Embassy to the Ottoman Empire, becoming Senior Clerk in 1913 and Acting Counsellor in 1917, when he was knighted.