Charles Webster

Sir Charles Kingsley Webster (1886-1961)

Webster was born on 25 April 1886. He became Professor of International Relations in Aberystwyth (University of Wales) in 1922. While there he wrote his two major books on the foreign policy of Lord Castlereagh, the first (published in 1925) covering the period 1815–22, the second (1931) that from 1812 to 1815.

In 1932 Webster moved to the newly established Stevenson chair of international relations at the London School of Economics (LSE).

During the war, he worked extensively in the Foreign Office, especially in the United States, and was a leading supporter of the new United Nations, as he had been of the League of Nations. He attended the first meetings of both the general assembly and the Security Council in January 1946 and the final meeting of the League of Nations in April. He was made KCMG in the new year's honours list in 1946.

In 1947 Webster gave the Ford lectures in the University of Oxford. In 1951, his biography of Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston was finally published.

He was President of the British Academy in 1950. He was awarded honorary degrees from Oxford, Wales, Rome, and Williams College, as well as an honorary fellowship at King's College, Cambridge. He retired from his chair at the LSE in 1953.

See P. A. Reynolds and E. J. Hughes, The historian as diplomat: Charles Kingsley Webster and the United Nations, 1939–1946 (1976)