| Admin History | Sir John Christopher Blake John Richmond was the son of Ernest Tatham Richmond (1874-1955) and his wife Margaret (nee Lubbock), who married in 1906 and initially settled at Zeinin, Egypt. E.T. Richmond was son of the artist Sir William Blake Richmond, and was an architect, as well as being a colonial officer and Director of the Palestine Museum. Ernest and Margaret had two other children.
John Richmond was born in England in 1909, spending much of his childhood in Palestine and Jordan. He worked on archaeological sites in the Middle East between the wars, serving in military intelligence in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq during the Second World War. He married Diana Galbraith in 1939. In 1946 he became Conservator of Monuments in the Mandatory Government of Palestine. When this Government collapsed in 1947, he entered the Diplomatic Service, and served in Iraq, Amman and Egypt as well as at the Foreign Office, London. He was British Ambassador in Kuwait between 1961-1963, and in Sudan from 1965-1966. He also spent a year as a supernumerary Fellow of St. Anthony's College, Oxford. On his retirement in 1966, he returned to England, taking up a post in modern Near Eastern history at the Islamic Studies department at the University of Durham in 1966, which he held until 1974.
Publications include: 'The Arabs of Palestine' (1972); 'Bahrain social and political change since the First World War' (ed. with William Hale)(1976); 'A commentary by Sir John Richmond on 'The Palestinians and the PLO'', Bernard Lewis (197-); 'Egypt, 1798-1952: her advance towards a modern identity' (1977).
Lady Diana Richmond attended Downe House between 1929-1931, and lived and worked in Baghdad, Amman, Cairo, Kuwait and Khartoum. She had strong interests in the Middle East, and continued to visit the region with her husband after their departure. She is the author of ''Antar and 'Abla: A Bedouin Romance' (1978). |