Noel Annan

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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), Roxburgh of Stowe (1965), Our Age (1990), described by Professor John Gray in the New Statesman as a "marvellous compendium of the higher gossip," [link] Changing Enemies (1995), and The Dons (1992). 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.' [link]

Contents

1 Early life
2 Military career
3 Academic career
4 Committees
5 References
6 Further reading

Early life

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 Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, and Michael Straight, who became spies for the Soviet Union (see Cambridge Five).

Military career

In October 1940, he entered officer cadet training, and in January 1941 was sent to 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. [link] 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.

Academic career

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 Gabrielle 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.

Committees

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.

References