William Tyrrell, 1st Baron Tyrrell

William George Tyrrell, 1st Baron Tyrrell GCB, GCMG, KCVO (1866 - 1947) was a British diplomat.

Tyrell, a grandson of an Indian princess, was educated in Germany (he spoke fluent German) and at Balliol College, Oxford and from 1889 to 1928 he was at the Foreign Office. He was private secretary to the Permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs Thomas Sanderson from 1896 to 1903 and then secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defence from 1903 to 1904 before being appointed as second secretary at the British embassy in Rome. He returned firstly as precis-writer from 1905 to 1907 and later, with Louis Mallet, as private secretary to Edward Grey from 1907 to 1915. He appears to have been one of Grey's few intimates but an inherent laziness and frustration with red tape make an assessment of his influence difficult. Certainly however Tyrrell played a more important role than his title might suggest and, for example, in the autumn of 1913 he was sent to Washington as a personal ambassador by Grey to discuss the situation in Mexico following the overthrow of Francesco Madero. In the Spring of 1915 Tyrrell appears to have suffered an almost total breakdown (perhaps precipitated by the death of his younger son that year) and he was moved to a less stressful job at the Home Office before being made head of the Political Intelligence Department from 1916 to 1919. He was Permanent Under-Secretary from 1925 to 1928 and from 1928 to 1934 he was British ambassador to Paris. In 1929 he was made a Peer as Baron Tyrrell of Avon in the County of Southampton. In 1935 he was appointed President of Board of Film Censors.

Tyrrell supported the "Entente Cordiale" with France and did not think a "rapprochement" with Imperial Germany was possible before 1914. As Permanent Under-Secretary he did not think there was a military threat from Japan and that Russia was the enemy and as Ambassador he worked for an Anglo-French agreement. He was also suspicious of Nazi Germany.

References

*John Ramsden, "The Oxford Companion to 20th Century British Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 654-55.
* [http://www.vho.org/tr/2003/4/Werner373-385.html Hundred Years of War against Germany]
*L.B. Namier, "Avenues of History" (London, 1952)
*Zara S. Steiner, "The Foreign Office and Foreign Policy 1989-1914" (Cambridge, 1969)
*F.H. Hinsley (ed.), "British Foreign Policy Under Sir Edward Grey" (Cambridge, 1977)