Lord Nicholas Gordon-Lennox

Lord Nicholas Charles "Nicky" Gordon-Lennox, KCMG, KCVO (31 January 1931 – 11 October 2004), the younger son of the 9th Duke of Richmond and his wife, Elizabeth, was a British diplomat.

He was raised at the family home of Goodwood House before being sent with his elder brother, Charles, to the United States at the outbreak of World War II. He returned to England in 1944 to join Eton and later won a scholarship to read History at Worcester College, Oxford.

After graduation and National Service with the King's Royal Rifle Corps, he joined HM Foreign Service in 1954 and became Private Secretary to the British Ambassador to the United States, Sir Harold Caccia in 1957, for which he was awarded the LVO. He transferred to Chile in 1961 as Second, then First Secretary at Santiago. In 1963, he returned to England again to become Private Secretary to Caccia again, in the latter's post as Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, before moving to Madrid as Head of the Chancery in 1966.

After a brief secondment at the Cabinet Office from 1971-73, he became Head of the News Department at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and then Head of the North American Department in 1974, before becoming a Counsellor at Paris in 1975 and was awarded the CMG in 1978.

In 1979 he became Assistant Under-Secretary at the Foreign Commonwealth Office and his final diplomatic post was as British Ambassador to Spain from 1984-89, for which he was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Isabella the Catholic in 1986. He was promoted to KCMG in 1986 and then KCVO in 1989. Gordon-Lennox was then a Governor of the BBC from 1990 and retired in 1998. He died in 2004, aged 73.

Family

Lord Nicholas married Mary Williamson in 1958 and had four children.

Sources

• Burke's Peerage & Gentry
• Obituary