Basil Cochrane Newton

Sir Basil Cochrane Newton (25 July 1889 – 15 May 1965) was a British diplomat who was ambassador to Czechoslovakia and Iraq. Early career Newton was the youngest son of George Onslow Newton and his third wife, Lady Alice Cochrane, daughter of the 11th Earl of Dundonald. He was educated at Wellington College and King's College, Cambridge. He joined the Foreign Office in 1912 and served in Peking 1925–29, then in Berlin 1930–37, for the last two years with the rank of Minister and chargé d'affaires in the absence of the ambassador, Sir Eric Phipps. Minister in Prague In 1937 Newton was appointed Minister (equivalent to ambassador) at Prague, where One of Newton's predecessors as minister to Prague, Sir Joseph Addison, had strong anti-Czech prejudices as the only local friends he made during his six years in Prague from 1930 to 1936 were members of the ethnic German nobility of Bohemia, who were adversely affected by the land reforms of the 1920s when the Czechoslovak government had broken up the estates of the nobility to give the ethnic Czech farmers who worked the estates ownership of the land. The aristocracy of Bohemia who were German-speaking, Roman Catholic and still loyal to the former Austrian empire disliked Czechoslovakia, a state that was republican, secular and dominated by ethnic Czechs, and Addison had largely adopted their prejudices as his own. Addison's dispatches to London, which had portrayed the ethnic Germans of the Sudetenland as being oppressed by boorish and crude Czechs, had largely convinced the Foreign Office that it was the Czechs who were causing all the problems in Czechoslovakia, and Newton had arrived in Prague in 1937 already convinced of the justice of the complaints of the Sudeten Germans. Furthermore, like most of the British elite during the interwar period, Newton believed that the Treaty of Versailles was too harsh on Germany and needed to be revised in favour of the Reich, which had made him very sympathetic towards Nazi Germany and hostile to Czechoslovakia. The only thing that Newton appeared to have taken away from his time as the chargé d'affaires at the British Embassy in Berlin in 1935-36 was that the Treaty of Versailles was intolerably harsh on Germany and needed to be revised if the peace of Europe was to be saved.