Two preoccupations were etched deep into Hugh Byatt’s DNA. He spent much of his working life as a diplomat disentangling the consequences of British and Portuguese colonialism, and a long and equally active retirement immersed in the responsibilities and satisfactions of life in Scotland and in particular Argyll.
Hugh Campbell Byatt was born in 1927, the son of Sir Horace Byatt, the man who took responsibility for the administration of Germany’s East African colonial empire after its conquest in the First World War. His parents died early, and he and his younger brothers were brought up by relatives.
They sent him to Gordonstoun, evacuated during the war to the wilds of Wales, and to New College, Oxford, where he read PPE. A three-year stint in the postwar Royal Navy, following modestly in the footsteps of his uncle, Admiral of the Fleet Lord Cunningham of Hyndhope, came between school and university. In 1952 he joined the Overseas Civil Service.
Byatt began his overseas service with a five-year stint in pre-independence Nigeria, went back to London for a shorter spell on a junior desk in the Commonwealth Relations Office, and was transferred to Bombay in the early 1960s. By 1964 he was back in London, working first in the Commonwealth Relations Office and later in the wider pastures of the Cabinet Secretariat.
In 1967 Byatt was posted to Lisbon, at the start of what was to be prolonged exposure to the Portuguese-speaking world. In Lisbon he perfected his Portuguese, and an appointment as consul-general in Portugal’s much-troubled colony, Mozambique, was a logical consequence.
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Byatt served two hard years in Mozambique. He saw there the decolonisation process in all its bloody reality, with the Mozambique and Rhodesian struggles and, therefore, British and Portuguese concerns becoming inextricably interlocked.
Two very different appointments followed, first to the Foreign Office Inspectorate, with its worldwide travel commitment, and then, on a sabbatical, to the Royal College of Defence Studies in London. But he was snatched away to go as a consular observer at the trial of British mercenaries in Angola. It was, he said later, the most difficult test of a testing career.
In 1978, after a short posting to Nairobi, Byatt returned to Angola in earnest, as ambassador to that tumultuously troubled country. It had won its independence from Portugal three years earlier, but civil war ensued. South Africa sent regular troops into the country. So did Cuba in support of a rival faction. Both the Soviet Union and the United States had proxy dogs of their own in the fight. The prospect of oil brought commercial considerations to supplement strategic and political antagonisms.
These were for Byatt three very hard years in primitive conditions — the parsimonious Foreign Office allowed embassy staff home leaves every six months — and in an almost unreadable political situation. No British diplomat ever earned his CMG, in 1979, as hard as he did.
Five years in Lisbon were Byatt’s reward. His pleasure there was only slightly marred by the knowledge that the IRA maintained a secret cell in the city, which would, if it could, visit on him the assassination that it had already inflicted on British ambassadors in Dublin and The Hague. He knew the Portuguese scene and its actors of old, his command of the language by now indistinguishable from that of a native speaker. He was able to help Britain’s oldest ally towards European Community membership.
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Byatt had the pleasure, too, of living in one of Britain’s most whimsically charming diplomatic residences. And in 1975 he had the honour of organising a state visit by the Queen. He was appointed KCVO in 1985 and at the same time Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Christ of Portugal, a distinction which goes back to the era of the Knights Templar.
In 1986 Byatt retired from the diplomatic service. He was 59, with energy still to spare. He was determined to spend his retirement in Argyll (he recorded “living in Argyll” as his sole recreation in Who’s Who) but he undertook several representational, business and charitable commitments. He was an adviser to Rio Tinto Zinc between 1986 and 1996. He became a member of the Scottish parole board and an honorary sheriff on the Campbeltown bench. He also chaired the Scottish Committee of the Malcolm Sargent Cancer Fund for Children, and a successful Edinburgh investment company.
But he found time to fish and to sail, taking his boat up and down the Scottish West Coast, and to enjoy everything his beloved Argyll had to offer.
In 1954, during his long period in Nigeria, Byatt married Fiona Coats, a neighbour in Argyll. She, two sons and a daughter survive him.
Sir Hugh Byatt, CMG, KCVO, diplomat, was born on August 27, 1927. He died on February 16, 2011, aged 83