BRIAN HITCH was a man of many talents. He was a skilled diplomat, a brilliant musician and a formidable linguist. He was also a connoisseur of modern pottery. He pursued all these interests through 35 years in the Diplomatic Service, which dispatched him to posts in four continents.
He ended his career as High Commissioner in Malta and went on to hold the post of director of the diploma in European studies at the University of Oxford for five years, and became a fellow of Rewley House there. His life in retirement, as in harness, was a full and rich one.
Yet those who had gone in awe of his abilities in his youth remained puzzled that he had been unable to achieve (or perhaps had been uninterested in achieving) a more manifest worldly success.
Brian Hitch was born in 1932. He never made any secret of his parents’ modest circumstances and used to say almost defiantly that his father was a cobbler. At Wisbech Grammar School he shone in his studies and as a musician. At 17 he became a Fellow of the Royal College of Organists and a licentiate of the Royal College of Music.
After his national service, spent as an RAF radar operator, he won a place at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he gathered friends and won golden opinions. In 1954 he married Margot Wooller, whom he had met on a school trip, and a year later he passed the exam for entry to the senior branch of the Foreign Service.
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The Foreign Office dispatched him at once to Tokyo, and there he spent the next two years learning the language. He developed a great empathy for all things Japanese (he and his wife first discovered the artistry and craftsmanship of modern pottery in Tokyo and she developed her life-long interest in potting and Japanese painting there). In his five years in Japan he had established the foundations for a career that might in time have taken him all the way to the ambassador’s chair. But the Foreign Office wanted its bright young men to have second and third strings to their bows. It recalled Hitch to London, and then sent him to Havana and Athens in turn.
At the early age of 36 he was sent back to Tokyo as head of chancery. With Japan’s astonishing economic and social advance, the work of the Tokyo embassy was fast expanding, and his task in co-ordinating it on behalf of the ambassador was not easy. Hitch may have lacked a certain robustness to match his manifest ability, and after four years he left Tokyo without having made the mark his earlier record had seemed to predict.
Nevertheless, he came back to spend the next three years in responsible jobs in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London, in the course of which he was promoted at the age of 42 to the rank of counsellor. Then, in 1975, he was sent to the embassy in Bonn. It gave Hitch an opportunity to explore the wealth of Germany’s musical and cultural life, but the embassy itself was an even harder-driving place than Tokyo, and again friends felt that in some sense he had lost his way. From Bonn he moved to the embassy in Algiers, and in 1980 back to Germany as Consul-General in Munich.
In Munich, Hitch had for the first time a command of his own, and for four years he much enjoyed it. He worked hard at the political, social and commercial responsibilities of a post which covered all of Bavaria, and travelled widely on business and for pleasure. He and his wife made friends with people who appreciated music and art as much as they did.
In their time in Munich the Hitches created a strong position for themselves in a city which, under the German federal system, had many of the characteristics of a capital.
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By 1984 Hitch was more than due for promotion, at the age of 52, and he was posted to Tokyo for a third time, this time as minister, the ambassador’s deputy. He was not the first man, nor the last, to find the No 2 position frustrating, but in a country he knew so well there were many consolations. He spoke perfect Japanese and had many Japanese friends. Spared the daily grind of activity that no ambassador in a major country can avoid, he had rather more leisure to round out his acquaintance with the country.
In 1988 Hitch moved to his last official appointment, Malta, and stayed there for three years. Something of a Service backwater, it was certainly an anti-climax after Tokyo. Yet it was a mission of his own, and the politics of the place, however diminutive, threw up intriguing problems.
He then took a plunge into academic life, without hesitation, after a colleague from Japan, Sir Sydney Giffard, had told him of a job vacancy at Rewley House (now Kellogg College) at Oxford University. Hitch was happy for the chance to make a permanent home in England.
Directing the diploma in European studies involved him with young people interested in many of the issues with which he had been engaged during his career. Rewley House repeatedly sent him back to Japan to recruit young students.
He had more time now for his music: he sang in the Bach choir and provided the piano accompaniment for distinguished singers at the Oxford Music Festival. He travelled widely in Europe to play, and in the last months of his life he had the satisfaction of playing the new organ in Kingston Parish Church.
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At the same time he kept in touch with the world of diplomacy, and he was proud to sign the 50 retired diplomats’ letter of protest at British and American policy in Iraq and the Middle East. To his friends his years in Oxford seemed among his happiest. He faced sudden terminal illness with courage and dignity.
Hitch was appointed CVO in 1980 and CMG in 1985. His wife and two daughters survive him.
Brian Hitch, CMG, CVO, diplomat, was born on June 2, 1932. He died on August 3, 2004, aged 72.