Patrick Reilly, 1965–68

Abstract

Sir D’Arcy Patrick Reilly’s tenure at the British embassy was dominated from mid-1966 by Britain’s second application for membership of the European Economic Community (EEC) and, unfortunately for the Ambassador, by his relationship with Britain’s then-Foreign Secretary, George Brown. It was a difficult time. Britain’s effort to get into the EEC taxed Anglo-French relations. France’s President, Charles de Gaulle, had vetoed accession in 1963 and was unwelcoming towards a second effort, but Brown did not want to hear reports that Britain might not be able to secure membership. He insulted Reilly, and Reilly’s wife, Lady Rachel (née Sykes), in a serious personal clash that was sorely wounding to the Ambassador. Brown’s personal attack on him was, Reilly recorded, aside from his wife’s death, the ‘worst thing that has ever happened to me’.¹ His relations with the Foreign Secretary, and the strained atmosphere of the application, led to the circumstances in which he was controversially retired early in 1968. In the 1990s, Reilly wrote an unpublished memoir, now stored at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. It is a remarkably detailed document, thousands of pages long. Reilly based it partly on his recollections, but also on written evidence, such as the weekly letters that he wrote to his mother until her death in 1963 and other personal correspondence.