Lord Terrington

Biographical Information
Christopher Montague Woodhouse, THE 5th LORD TERRINGTON (1917-2001) powerbase

"His grandfather sat as Liberal MP for Huddersfield and was created a peer as Lord Terrington in 1918. His father, the 3rd Lord Terrington, a solicitor, civil servant and industrial negotiator, would serve as chairman of the Industrial Arbitration Tribunal set up in the Second World War at the instigation of the TUC and the British Employers' Federation.

"From Winchester, Woodhouse went up as a scholar to New College, Oxford, where one of his tutors was Isaiah Berlin - "the only man in Oxford," he recalled, "who could pronounce 'epistemological' as one syllable"... He decided to try the Diplomatic Service, and in 1946 he joined the British Embassy in Athens, becoming secretary-general of the Allied mission of observers for the Greek elections.

"Subsequently, after spending two years in industry and another two at the Nuffield Foundation, in 1951 he served as a diplomat again in Teheran, planning the clandestine Anglo-American Operation Boot to overthrow the intensely nationalist, anglophobic and unstable Iranian Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossadeq.

"Just as the operation was in full swing, Woodhouse was posted to South Korea. There he followed events in Teheran on a wireless set belonging to the British Ambassador who resented being deprived of the Test Match commentary... In 1955 he left the Service to become director-general of the Royal Institute for International Affairs at Chatham House. He also worked for a time as chief editor of Penguin books.

"During the 1950s and 1960s he wrote many books, mostly about Greek history and British foreign policy. These included The Greek War of Independence (1952), Britain and the Middle East (1959), British Foreign Policy since the Second World War (1961) and the magisterial The Story of Modern Greece (1968)... Besides writing, in 1959 Woodhouse entered Parliament as Tory MP for Oxford, becoming Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Aviation in 1961 and then Joint Under-secretary at the Home Office. After losing his seat in 1966, he became director of education and training at the CBI.

"He returned to Parliament at the general election of 1970, but was kept firmly on the backbenches by Edward Heath. On losing his seat again in October 1974, he retired from politics - having, he felt, achieved "virtually nothing" during his years at Westminster. Woodhouse had spoken out strongly against the Greek military junta and when it was overthrown in 1974, he was invited to write an official biography of the new president, Constantine Karamanlis. In 1980 he was elected to the Academy of Athens, a rare honour for a non-Greek. In The Rise and Fall of the Greek Colonels (1985), Woodhouse gave a scrupulously fair-minded account which showed how the use ..."


 * Founding Member, Institute for Strategic Studies

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