Sir Paul Wright

Festival of Britain promoter and diplomat

Paul Wright's early years, as he said himself, were "almost startlingly abnormal" for one destined to reach the upper ranks of the Foreign Office. He didn't go to university, had no degree, and had left his school, Westminster, without any clear idea of what to do next. Neither was he a career diplomat - he was recruited from the field of public relations, having been Director of PR for the Festival of Britain in 1951.

It was Westminster that formed him. By the time he left, he could declaim Latin epigrams of his own creation, and write English verse. A good pianist, he could both play and compose music. He had studied the organ at Westminster with the abbey's organist, Osborne Peasgood, who was given to shouting orders from the organ loft like the captain of a ship in a storm, and whose playing of Purcell's trumpet voluntary was banned by the Headmaster because he believed it overexcited the boys. An essay once set by the classics master was, "Write a short critical biography of one of the following, Jesus Christ, Hitler, or the Headmaster". Wright found the atmosphere exhilarating.

He was at a loss what to do, until the head of the John Lewis Partnership, who had also been to Westminster, gave him a job at 15s 6d a week as a trainee executive. He confessed he led a somewhat Jekyll-and-Hyde existence between debutante balls in the evening and the drapery counter in the morning.

On the outbreak of war he had enlisted in the King's Royal Rifle Corps, ending up with an unspectacular but essential and exhausting post on Field Marshal Montgomery's staff in Hammersmith, doing something for which his John Lewis training seemed fitting. It lay in helping to organise the supply lines of everything the Army needed for Overlord, the invasion of Europe.

In 1942 he had married a formidable Bostonian, Beatrice ("Babs") Rathbone - the second American-born woman, after Nancy Astor, to become a British MP. Her first husband, John Rathbone, the Conservative MP for Bodmin, had been killed in action with Bomber Command over Europe in 1940.

At the end of the Second World War, after himself standing unsuccessfully as a Liberal candidate for Bethnal Green - "Good enough for Monty, good enough for us" was his campaign slogan - Wright had entered the Whitehall maze, joining the Directorate of Public Relations at the National Coal Board. Britain was afflicted by crippling shortages and major fuel crises. His primary task was to recruit miners, a job for which there were few volunteers. He formed an idealistic attachment to the miners' cause, and deployed all known techniques, including massed colliery brass bands in Hyde Park conducted by Sir Adrian Boult, to try and portray the miners as a fourth service whose duties could be as arduous and essential as Navy, Army and Air Force.

But he still felt he had not found his place. It was at this time, in 1951, that Wright caught the public eye when he became director of public relations in promoting the Festival of Britain. While it didn't usher in the Brave New World he and his fellow enthusiasts had hoped for, it was a great success, and won him a job in the Foreign Office. The view of the post-war Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, had been that British diplomacy moved in too narrow a circle. It needed an infusion, as he liked to put it, of people who came from the " 'edgerows of experience". Wright met Bevin's stipulation that modern diplomats should be picked for their ability to mix with all forms and conditions of people.

Wright found himself giving daily briefings on British foreign policy to the world's diplomatic correspondents. There followed postings in Paris, New York and Washington at the height of the Cold War, where he was intimately involved in the great combats of ideological warfare between Stalin's Russia and the West at the United Nations. He would become head of the Foreign Office's important information policy department, then ambassador to the Congo and Lebanon - where he gave public concerts with the Beirut amateur choir, including works for chorus and orchestra he composed and conducted himself, to thunderous applause.

Paul Wright had a wonderful sense of humour. Stage-struck all his life, he was a born entertainer. His party turn was to sit at the piano and set the Personal column in The Times to music in the form of a psalm.

In his sixties he converted to the Roman Catholic Church. He celebrated his 90th birthday in the throne room of the Cardinal's palace at Westminster.

Michael Charlton

As Director of Public Relations for the 1951 Festival of Britain, Paul Wright was faced with capturing public support for a major celebration at a time when Britain was still heavily in debt to America, at war in Korea, and still under rationing, writes Harriet Atkinson. Over 16 million people were to visit the nationwide events, and the reception was to be almost universally enthusiastic.

In 1948, having resigned on a matter of principle from his job at the National Coal Board, Wright was casting around for his next move. The year before, his friend and Sussex neighbour Gerald Barry, previously Editor of the News Chronicle, had been appointed Director-General of the Festival of Britain. In 1948 he invited Wright to join his team.

It was the consensual nature of the festival's organisation that was key to its success. The main ideas behind the celebrations - that they would cheer people up after the war while telling a detailed story about Britain's achievements and potential - were agreed following extensive discussion. He and the other organisers made important decisions, Wright later told me, over "pints of beer and pipes", during congenial country weekends away. To Wright, it was the calibre of those who contributed that also made it work. On the main committee he sat alongside Hugh Casson, Director of Architecture, Gordon Russell, the Director of the Council of Industrial Design, and Huw Wheldon as Director of the Arts Council, all of whose contributions beyond the festival were significant.

It is difficult to assess the specific contribution of Wright's PR campaign to the overall success of the festival. Pre-festival polls show that the British public was well disposed, being in need of a morale boost after years of privations. The BBC had signed up enthusiastically to the project, seeing in it a wealth of opportunities for radio broadcasts from festival sites around the country. But the fact that public spending on these events was greeted with almost unanimous approval by the press - despite other arguably worthier causes such as new housing - can certainly be linked to Wright and Gerald Barry's experience in this area.

Wright took risks in his publicity campaign that paid off. He decided to spend the whole of his $100,000 budget for North America on a four-page full-colour advertisement in Life magazine. The copy was circulated to around 25 million people and as the first-ever advertisement of its size attracted much additional attention.

That the Festival of Britain is now remembered only as an exhibition at the South Bank in London was, Wright admitted later, one of their failures. Key to the original conception of putting the whole country on display in 1951 were the eight major exhibitions and 2,000 or so local events held around Britain. But the central exhibition at the South Bank overshadowed the others by virtue of its scale and striking visual impact.

The events were to be the springboard for many distinguished careers, including Wright's own. Through contact with Herbert Morrison ("Lord Festival"), the cabinet member responsible for the events, Wright was offered a job in the Foreign Office. In 1952, newly appointed as temporary officer in the British UN delegation, he was appointed OBE in recognition of his work on the festival. He recalled one of his Foreign Office colleagues remarking: "Don't worry, people never remember what you got it for."