Noel Gilroy Annan, Baron Annan, OBE (25 December 1916 – 21 February 2000) was a British military intelligence officer, author, and academic. During his military career, he rose to the rank of Colonel and was appointed OBE. He was Provost of King's College, Cambridge, Provost of University College, London, Vice-Chancellor of the University of London, and a member of the House of Lords.
Annan's publications include Leslie Stephen (1951 - awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize), Roxburgh of Stowe (1965), Our Age (1990), described by Professor John Gray in the New Statesman as a "marvellous compendium of the higher gossip,"[1] Changing Enemies (1995), and The Dons (1999). His best-known essay is "The Intellectual Aristocracy," which illustrates, according to Robert Fulford in the National Post, the "web of kinship that united British intellectuals (the Darwins, Huxleys, Macaulays, etc.) in the 19th and early 20th centuries."[2]
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He was born in Gloucester Terrace, London, attending St. Winnifred's School, Seaford, and Stowe, Buckinghamshire, a well-known fee-paying school. At Stowe, he was head of Temple House, and editor of the school newspaper The Stoic.
He went up to King's College, Cambridge in 1935, where he read History, then continued for a fourth year to read Law. While at King's, he was recruited into the Cambridge Apostles, a secret debating society whose members included Guy Burgess, and Michael Straight, who became spies for the Soviet Union (see Cambridge Five).
In October 1940, he entered officer cadet training, and in January 1941 was commissioned in the Intelligence Corps and posted to MI14, a department of the War Office. In 1942, he was posted to the Joint Intelligence Staff in the War Cabinet Office, which was located with Winston Churchill in his bunker. [3] In 1944, he was transferred to Paris to become the French liaison officer with British military intelligence, later becoming a senior officer in the political division of the British Control Commission in Germany.
Annan returned to King's in 1946, where he had been elected to a fellowship in absentia in 1944. He joined the economics faculty and lectured in politics.
In June 1950, he married Gabriele Ullstein, a marriage that produced two daughters, Lucy in 1952, and Juliet in 1955.
He was elected Provost of King's in 1956. In 1966, he took up the post of Provost of University College, London, then from 1978 until 1981, was Vice-Chancellor of the University of London. He was created a Life Peer in 1965 as Baron Annan, of the Royal Burgh of Annan in the County of Dumfries. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1974.[1]. Essex University awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1967. He was also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
He acted as a Trustee of the British Museum 1963-1980, and of the National Gallery 1978-85. He also chaired the Royal Commission on Broadcasting, which concluded in 1977 (see Annan Committee). He was the first chairman of the Trustee's education committee at Churchill College, Cambridge.
Noel Annan was also a signatory to the famous letter published in The Times in 1958 which saw the establishment of the Homosexual Law Reform Society, a group who fought for homosexual law reform.[1]
| Academic offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Stephen Ranulph Kingdon Glanville |
Provost of King's College, Cambridge 1956-1966 |
Succeeded by Edmund Leach |
| Preceded by Benjamin Ifor Evans |
Provost of University College London 1966–1978 |
Succeeded by James Lighthill |
| Preceded by Sir Frank Hartley CBE |
Vice-Chancellor of University of London 1978-1981 |
Succeeded by Lord Quirk |