Hainworth, Henry Charles 1914-2005

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born September 12, 1914, in Tampico, Mexico; died January 28, 2005. Diplomat and author. Hainworth was a former British ambassador to Indonesia who had also served in Japan, India, Cyprus, and Switzerland. After attending Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, he entered the Consular Service in 1939. Assigned to the embassy in Tokyo, he was stationed there when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, setting off the war in the Pacific. Fortunately, he was able to leave Japan, and was next assigned to Delhi, India, where he worked on war propaganda. After World War II, Hainworth returned to Tokyo for a time before going back to London's Foreign Office in 1951. Two years spent in Bucharest, Romania, in the mid-1950s were followed by some harrowing experiences in Nicosia, Cyprus, in 1956 and 1957. The island at the time was torn by a Cypriot insurgency against the British, and Hainworth's office was in constant threat of attack. It was a period where his diplomatic skills served particularly well to keep the situation from worsening. Another important assignment came in 1958, when Hainworth was put in charge of the atomic energy and disarmament department at the Foreign Office; and from 1961 to 1963 he was at the Brussels Conference while negotiations were underway regarding England's possible membership in the European Community. Not long after the war between Indonesia and Malaysia had ended, Hainworth was named ambassador to Indonesia. At the time, the Indonesians were very hostile toward the British, who had defended Malaysia, and Hainworth's skills were once again called upon to smooth relations. Before retiring in 1974, Hainworth spent four years as ambassador and permanent United Kingdom delegate to the Disarmament Conference in Geneva, Switzerland. He spent the last three decades of his life in quiet retirement, spending the years 1992 through 1999 as chair of the Anglo-Indonesian Society and publishing a book, A Collector's Dictionary, in 1981.

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Times (London, England), March 8, 2005, p. 55.