Alyson Bailes

She was in China during the Tiananmen Square protests. She survived an attack by Irish terrorists in the Netherlands that killed the British ambassador right next to her. She became ambassador to Finland and an expert in security, arms control and Nordic affairs.

An indomitable figure, Bailes was a polymath who spoke eight languages — although she kept exactly the same hairstyle for much of her life, there was nothing staid or conventional about her.

As a woman raised in a socialist northern family, Bailes was an unusual recruit to the male and public school-dominated Foreign Office of the late 1960s, and something of a trail blazer. After leaving the FCO she spent five years as director of a left-leaning think tank, followed by eight more teaching in Iceland, where her love of classical music expanded to include Icelandic and Faroese heavy metal. She horrified visiting friends by playing the latter on her car radio. She could also whip up excellent Hungarian food including goulash.

Bailes, who never married, had one other unusual passion. She was an active member of the Dorothy Dunnett Society — a small, select literary society formed to celebrate that highly intellectual and esoteric Scottish historical novelist. She also applied her precise, thorough mind to producing needlepoint cushions and quilts.

Alyson Judith Kirtley Bailes was born in 1949, the daughter of two teachers, and raised in Liverpool, where she attended the Belvedere School. A two-week trip to Sweden one summer inspired a lifelong love of the Nordic countries.

She won a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford, and graduated with a first in modern history after participating in a student campaign to modernise the syllabus. At 20 she joined the FCO, and was one of just four women among that year’s intake of 24. She was identified as the FCO’s “youngest and newest woman diplomat” in a Sunday Times article that asked when Britain would appoint its first woman ambassador.

Her first job was as a desk officer in the West European Department. “It was considered a sign of unusual keenness to arrive in the office before ten,” she later wrote. Apart from keeping the fire supplied with coal, she had to deal with legacies from the Second World War including the recognition of East Germany and a campaign to secure the release of Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, on humanitarian grounds.

Her first posting was to Budapest, where she kept track of the Hungarian opposition despite constant surveillance by the Communist authorities. From there she joined the British delegation to Nato in Brussels, where she developed her interests in arms control, before returning to the European Community Department in London.

In March 1979 Bailes went to the Hague for an EC meeting and stayed with Sir Richard Sykes, the British ambassador. As they left the residence two IRA gunmen approached the ambassador’s Rolls-Royce and opened fire, killing a footman and mortally wounding Sir Richard. Bailes, who was sitting next to the ambassador in the back seat, was hit by glass but otherwise unhurt. She had to comfort her dying colleague as the driver sped to the nearest hospital, but had the sangfroid to address a press conference that afternoon.

Thereafter she was loaned to the Ministry of Defence for two years, and served three years at the British embassy in Bonn, before returning to London as deputy head of the FCO’s policy planning staff under Pauline Neville-Jones, later chairwoman of the British Joint Intelligence Committee. Her duties included writing speeches for Sir Geoffrey Howe, then foreign secretary, and Margaret Thatcher. The pair were at odds over Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars programme, which the FCO regarded as destabilising. Bailes was rather proud of having inserted into one of the prime minister’s speeches the line: “We can’t allow space to be turned into a new and terrible theatre of war.”

In 1987, she was posted to Beijing as deputy head of mission. Two years later she was enjoying a weekend break in Tokyo when the military began the crackdown on student-led protests that became known as the Tiananmen Square massacre. She took the first flight back, was met at the airport by the embassy’s armoured car and whisked through streets full of troops and checkpoints and the remains of barricades. She spent the next week gathering intelligence on the People’s Liberation Army, liaising with other European embassies, dealing with the media and evacuating British citizens before being evacuated herself.

Over the next 12 years Bailes served as deputy head of mission in Oslo where — as in Beijing and Bonn — she ran a diplomatic choir in her free time; as the FCO’s head of security policy where she helped lay the groundwork for Nato enlargement; as political director of the Western European Union and, finally, as ambassador to Finland. She was in Helsinki on the day of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. Those attacks helped to persuade her to leave the FCO the next year when she was invited to head the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, an organisation dedicated to promoting peace and security.

In that job she opposed the invasion of Iraq, pointing out all the things that could go wrong. “They all did,” she said afterwards. She also organised secret talks between Iranian, Russian and US representatives, which explored ways of defusing the confrontation over Iran’s nuclear programme that foreshadowed the eventual agreement of 2015.

In 2006, Bailes had kidney cancer diagnosed. After having her right kidney removed she decided to do something fun and less demanding. She accepted a teaching post at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik — Iceland being a country where she had taken holidays for years and teaching being the family profession. She also lectured at the College of Europe in Bruges, the University of Greenland and the University of the Faroes and became an expert in Nordic and Arctic Affairs.

Having hosted friends around the world, she acquired a home in Selkirk, in the Scottish borders, in 2014. She backed the “Yes” camp during that year’s independence referendum campaign, and advised the Scottish government on how Scotland could survive as a small state. Bailes herself survived more than 30 years in the predominantly male world of diplomacy. She had worked hard to redress the balance as a trade union representative at the FCO and as a member of professional women’s groups — but most of all as a role model.

Alyson Bailes, diplomat, was born on April 6, 1949. She died on April 29, 2016, aged 67