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continued to use Moor Park Golf Club as his local to meet up with his many friends.’ Michael was unmarried, and is survived by his brother David and nephew Gareth. Major Peter Clarence Bird (NH, 1940) Peter Bird, son of Lt-Gen. Clarence Bird RE (S, 1902), died on the 30th December 2013, aged 90. He was born in India and went to Fonthill Preparatory School in East Grinstead before coming to College. He was always destined for a military career in the Royal Engineers. He served in the Army until 1973, in India and elsewhere, rising to the rank of Major. After that he worked in London as a Training Officer with Edward Nuttall Ltd, civil engineering contractors. One of his great interests was in environmental design, construction and management, and he was Chief Executive of the Landscape Institute from 1976-1987. He also had a great interest in politics and public affairs and during his retirement in Sevenoaks he worked for the Democracy Movement. He greatly enjoyed music, especially singing, and was a member of a choir almost everywhere he lived and latterly a member of the Sevenoaks Philharmonic Chorus. He was also a strong supporter of the Stage Community Arts Centre Theatre in Sevenoaks. Throughout his life he was committed to the principle of service. He is survived by his wife Mollie and their sons Christopher (NH, 1987), Philip (NH, 1968) and daughter Alison and their families. Michael Templeton Brett (NH & DB, 1941) Michael Brett, son of Cyril Brett (NH, 1905), brother of Brig. John Brett (NH, 1936), uncle of Adrian Brett (NH, 1965) and Christopher Brett (NH, 1967), died on the 22nd March 2014, aged 89. Sir Nicholas Walker Browne KBE CMG (H, 1965) Sir Nicholas Browne, son of E.G.W. Browne CBE (H, 1934), brother of R.E.B.W. Browne (H, 1958), G.R.W. Browne (H, 1961), and J.W. Browne (H, 1970), died on the 13th January 2014, aged 66. Bill Simpson (College staff 1965 - 92) reports that: “As a newly appointed Head of History in September 1965, it was my good fortune to have Nicholas in the Oxbridge Upper Sixth. He was a delightful, hardworking and friendly pupil who helped me through my first term and showed all the qualities that made him such a successful diplomat.” Nicholas won an open scholarship to University College, Oxford, where he read History and captained the College rugby team (he played in the 1965 College 2nd XV) - despite being 6ft 2in tall, he proved a deft hooker, able to get the ball back from seemingly impossible positions. He joined the Foreign Office immediately after graduating. Nicholas made his mark as a diplomat in the difficult arena of Iran, where he served twice as Chargé d’affaires, then as Ambassador (from 1999 to 2002); he was also the author of a highly influential internal report investigating why Britain had failed to anticipate the fall of the Shah in 1979. When the Shah was toppled by supporters of the 77-year-old Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in January 1979, Western governments were taken by surprise, and the then Foreign Secretary, David Owen, commissioned a Foreign and Commonwealth Office report on British policy towards Iran in the years leading up to the revolution. How, he wanted to know, had
Britain failed to predict the event; and might a different policy have saved the regime? The task was given to the then 33-year-old Nicholas, who had served in the Tehran embassy for four years in the early 1970s and was now on loan to the Cabinet Office. He spent the next year preparing his 90-page report, which was labelled “secret and confidential” and only released 30 years later. Nicholas did not pull his punches as he described the “failure” of the British embassy in Tehran: “The conclusion that the embassy drew from their analysis [of the Shah’s position] consistently proved to be too optimistic.” It had “overstated the personal popularity of the Shah... knew too little about the activities of Khomeini’s followers... saw no need to report on the financial activities of leading Iranians... [and] failed to foresee that the pace of events would become so fast”. He also singled out for criticism Sir Anthony Parsons, Ambassador to Iran from 1974 to 1979, saying that he had been woefully uninformed: he did not know that the Shah was terminally ill with cancer, and had not sufficiently pursued contacts with opposition groups (in particular, supporters of Khomeini). Consequently he had “underestimated the attractions of [Khomeini’s] simple and consistent message that the Shah must be overthrown”. Parsons later accepted that he had been at fault. It is possible that the embassy had been inhibited by Britain’s reputation for interference in Iranian affairs - a reputation which Nicholas acknowledged in his report. It dated back to at least 1953, when Iran’s elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh was overthrown in a coup in which many Iranians suspected the American and British intelligence services of having been involved. In the course of his work, Nicholas trawled through thousands of diplomatic cables, and concluded that British policy in Iran had been anything but sophisticated - according to one diplomat who read the report: “More often than not, the sense you get is that it was the Shah who was running rings round the British, not the other way round.” More to the point, however, was Nicholas’ suggestion that British policy in the 1970s had been driven by economic problems which encouraged export sales – particularly arms – to the Iranians. So anxious was London to court the Shah that diplomats showed him the draft of a ministerial answer in the House of Commons on torture in Iran “in case he should object to it”. It was, Nicholas said, only four months before the Shah fell and fled into exile that Parsons spoke to him frankly about the political dangers he faced. Nicholas observed: “By then, most of the damage had been done.” His report has proved highly influential, and has been studied by a generation of diplomats posted to the Middle East. They are now expected to extend their contacts beyond the elites to include both the wider society and opposition movements, and to be aware of the dangers in allowing potential arms exports to drive policy at the expense of crucial political judgements. Nicholas’ experience of Iran had begun with his posting as Third Secretary in Tehran from 1971 to 1974. He would return there in 1989, nearly a decade after submitting his report. His arrival, however, coincided with the furore over Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses (1988), which provoked angry protests across the Islamic world. Ayatollah Khomeini was quoted as offering a $1 million reward to anyone who killed Rushdie - the reward to be tripled if the killer was Iranian - and in February 1989 thousands of demonstrators gathered to throw stones at the British Embassy. Nicholas was in place for only five weeks before Tehran broke off diplomatic relations, and ties between the two countries were restored only in October the following year, by which time Nicholas was beginning a four-year posting as Counsellor (Press and Public Affairs) in Washington, and head of British Information Services in New York. Nicholas was appointed Chargé d’affaires in Tehran in 1997, after 2.