Gordon Vereker

Sir George Gordon Medlicott Vereker (11 December 1889 – 14 March 1976) was a British diplomat. Roving diplomat Vereker was born in County Galway, Ireland to a prominent and wealthy Protestant "Ascendancy" family, the son of Sir George Medlicott Vereker and Frances Gore Vereker (nee Manders). He was usually known as Gordon instead of George. Vereker was educated at Eton and at Trinity College, Cambridge. Vereker won the Épée title at the 1913 British Fencing Championships. Vereker served in the British Army in World War One where he awarded the Military Cross and was mentioned in dispatches for heroism under fire. In 1919, he joined the Foreign Office to begin his career as a diplomat. From 1919 to 1923, he was stationed at the British high commission in Cairo, Egypt. From 1923 to 1927, he was stationed at the British legation in Beijing, China and in 1925 was involved in an international incident when he visited with the American explorer Roy Chapman Andrews Urga (modern Ulaanbaatar), the capital of Outer Mongolia. The Communist government of Mongolia accused him of being a spy and expelled him. From 1927 to 1930, he was stationed at the British legation in Budapest, Hungary. On 27 March 1928, he married Marjorie Mulliner in London. After serving at the Foreign Office's headquarters in London in 1930-1932, Vereker served at the British embassies in Warsaw, Poland in 1932-1934 and in Stockholm, Sweden in 1934-1938. The journalist George Bilainkin who visited Vereker's home in Warsaw in 1934 described it as decorated with Hungarian and Chinese art, giving it a very "Oriental" feel. He served as the charge d'affairs at the British Embassy in Moscow in 1938-39 where he was noted for his hostile views of the Soviet Union. On 16 May 1936, the French ambassador to the Soviet Union, Robert Coulondre met Vereker to talk to him about settling up an Anglo-Franco-Soviet alliance to contain Nazi Germany. Vereker wrote he was "mystified as to the motives of M. Coulondre's invitation, for I have always understood that he is usually reserved and uncommunicative". Vereker told Colondre that his view was that the "Russians were Asiatics...and that with present Byzantine regime in the Kremlin anything might happen", concluding that the Red Army would be no match for the Wehrmacht and there was no point in trying to have the Soviet Union as a counterweight to Germany for that reason.