John Redcliffe-Maud, Baron Redcliffe-Maud

John Primatt Redcliffe Maud, Baron Redcliffe-Maud (February 3, 1906 – November 20, 1982) was a British civil servant and diplomat.

John Maud was educated at Eton College and New College, Oxford. At Oxford he was a member of the Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS). In 1928, he gained a one-year scholarship to Harvard University.

During World War II he was Master of Birkbeck College and was also based at Reading Gaol, working for the Ministry of Food. After the war, he worked at the Ministry of Education (1945–1952), rising to Permanent Secretary and then the Ministry of Fuel and Power until 1958. Inter alia, Maud appeared on the BBC programme The Brains Trust in 1958. He was High Commissioner in South Africa from 1959 to 1963, when he became Master of University College, Oxford, where he had been a Fellow before the war. He was made a life peer as Baron Redcliffe-Maud, of the City and County of Bristol in 1967.

Lord Redcliffe-Maud is best known for the Redcliffe-Maud Report published in the late 1960s by a Royal Commission that he chaired, on the future of English Local Government, including county boundary changes; the report was effectively ignored by the Local Government Act 1972.

He retired as Master of University College in 1976, to be succeeded by the leading lawyer Lord Goodman. His 1973 portrait by Ruskin Spear can be seen in the National Portrait Gallery, London. Another portrait hangs in the Hall at University College in Oxford.

Redcliffe-Maud was married to Jean Hamilton, who was educated at Somerville College, Oxford. His son, Humphrey Maud, was one of Benjamin Britten's favourite boys while he was at Eton. Sir John intervened to curtail Humphrey's frequent visits to stay with Britten on his own. The incident is described in John Bridcut's Britten's Children. He is buried in Holywell Cemetery, Oxford.