James Marjoribanks

Sir James Alexander Milne Marjoribanks (29 May 1911 – 29 January 2002) was a Scottish career diplomat in the British Foreign Service and became British ambassador to the European Economic Community. He presented Britain's application to join the European Community in 1967 and was instrumental in this application becoming successful.

Background and family life James Marjoribanks was born in Colinton manse, in south-west Edinburgh on 29 May 1911, the third son of Elizabeth Logan and Rev Dr Thomas Marjoribanks, a minister in the (presbyterian) Church of Scotland. His father and his brother William were respectively heads of the lowland Marjoribanks family. He was schooled at Merchiston Castle School and Edinburgh Academy. where he became fluent in Italian. This was to prove useful to him later. He graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a first class honours in 1932, and then studied German further in Bonn and Tübingen, Germany. He stayed for four months with a German newspaper proprietor's family which coincided with the accession to power of Adolf Hitler in January 1933. Marjoribanks noted that the general attitude was "We’ve tried everything else, so we might as well try Adolf. If he’s no good we’ll get rid of him". But, he also noted, it wasn't as easy as that. After the war, Marjoribanks discovered that a bomb had destroyed both the house and the parents. Two of the three sons had died on the Eastern Front.

Marjoribanks passed the British Foreign Service (later called the Foreign and Commonwealth Office) exams in 1933 and was posted to China in 1934.

Diplomatic life

China (1934–1938) Marjoribanks was first appointed probationary Vice-Consul in the British Chinese Consular Service in Peking and took up his post on 12 January 1935. He spent much of his first two years in China learning Mandarin, which he quickly spoke fluently, much to the admiration of his colleagues.

He had become engaged to Sonya Stanley Alder (sister of the portrait painter and author Vera Stanley Alder) in the UK and was allowed to send for her at the end of his two years probationary period. Sonya and James were married in the embassy chapel on 29 December 1936. The British ambassador, Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen (who later, as ambassador to Turkey, was notorious because of the German spy "Cicero" Elyesa Bazna) gave the bride away. They were married until Sonya's death in 1981.

Marjoribanks helped several vulnerable Chinese friends escape but the cruelty of the Japanese occupation of Hankou left an indelible memory with him for the rest of his life. where he emphasised Britain's determination to fight on and encouraged the Americans to become more active in the war. His personal experience of Japanese and German aggression was very valuable to him when arguing the case for Britain. He came to know the Duke of Windsor who was governor of the Bahamas at that time. On 13 October 1942 and Moscow in 1945 and in Paris in 1946 but difficulties in negotiating with the Russians became apparent. Marjoribanks was as a member of a four-man international team that obtained agreement on redrawing the Franco-Italian border. The negotiations became particularly difficult when Russia started the Berlin Blockade which lead to the Berlin Airlift and the Partition of Germany. When the German peace talks at the Council foundered due to Soviet intransigence in 1947, Marjoribanks and his colleagues requested that the Austrian treaty negotiators be allowed to continue which was accepted. To the credit of these negotiators, the talks continued until, after Stalin's death, the Russians signed the Austrian State Treaty, withdrew from the country and Austria remained outside the Iron Curtain. Marjoribanks became convinced here that the future for Europe was in closer integration but the political will did not exist in London.

Weir and Marjoribanks posed the following question in one of their first messages to London in 1952: "…whether we have determined in our own minds that we want the [European] integration movement to succeed... If we do want it to succeed, we should surely put behind it the full force of our influence. If we want to cut it short and prevent its development to a political authority which might eventually become a federal state, it would surely be better for us not to wish it success". With his fluent German, Marjoribanks developed many personal contacts in the business community in Germany – including Ludwig Erhard, the author of the German economic miracle. that was long remembered after he left Germany. Most of the time, he worked for either the Labour Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart or George Brown (both of whom regarded him as suitable for this critical post). and resumed climbing Scottish mountains as he had done in his youth. He was an expert croquet player, and, with his keen sense of humour, devised and illustrated various books containing caricatures. He served as a director of the Distillers Company from 1971 to 1975 He was also a director of Inveresk Research International, In 1975, Marjoribanks joined the Court of the University of Edinburgh as a General Council Assessor. From 1979 to 1990 he was chairman of a successful pro-European pressure group called 'Scotland in Europe'. He had grown up in Colinton manse, where Robert Louis Stevenson composed his book A Child's Garden of Verses.

Shortly before he died in Edinburgh, his daughter Patricia showed him Euro coins and bank notes.