Harold Caccia, Baron Caccia

Harold Anthony Caccia, Baron Caccia GCMG GCVO GCStJ (21 December 1905 Pachmarhi, India - 31 October 1990 Builth Wells, Wales) was a British diplomat.

He was educated at Eton College and Trinity College, Oxford and won a Blue at rugby union, playing at centre for Oxford in The Varsity Match in 1926. He played cricket for Oxfordshire in the Minor Counties Championship between 1928 and 1938. In 1932 he married Anne Catherine Barstow, daughter of George Lewis Barstow and Enid Lillian Lawrence.

Caccia entered the diplomatic service in 1929 and was posted to Peking (Beijing) and then to Athens and London where, in 1936, he became assistant private secretary to Anthony Eden. He was back in Athens early in World War II, but was then attached to the staff of Harold Macmillan, Britain's representative at Allied headquarters in North Africa. The Greek civil war once again saw him in that country, and by 1945 his services earned him recognition on the Birthday Honours List.

Caccia was Ambassador to Austria from 1951 to 1954, and from 1956 to 1961 Ambassador to the USA. He was sent to Washington to repair relations badly damaged by the Suez crisis of 1956. The breakdown in mutual confidence arose when Britain and France joined an Israeli invasion of Egypt and sent military forces to capture the Suez Canal, which had been nationalized by President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. In the years that followed, he was instrumental in restoring and nurturing the "special relationship" between London and Washington.

In 1961, he became Permanent Under-Secretary of State, an office he held until 1965. He was Provost of Eton 1965-78 and President of MCC in 1973-74.

He was knighted in 1950, and was created a life peer with the title Baron Caccia, of Abernant in the County of Breconshire, on 11 May 1965. Caccia was appointed a Bailiff Grand Cross of the Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem, a Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order and a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George.

References

Diplomatic posts
Preceded by Bertram Jerram	British Ambassador to Austria 1951–1954	Succeeded by Geoffrey Wallinger
Preceded by Roger Makins	British Ambassador to the United States 1956–1961	Succeeded by David Ormsby-Gore
Government offices
Preceded by Sir Frederick Hoyer Millar	Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs 1962–1965	Succeeded by Sir Paul Gore-Booth
Academic offices
Preceded by Claude Aurelius Elliott	Provost of Eton 1965–1978	Succeeded by Martin Charteris