One product of his encounter with the recently decolonised countries was his book The British and their Successors 1966

One product of his encounter with the recently decolonised countries was his book The British and their Successors (1966). It deserves more attention.On his return to academia, Symonds continued to be productive. His work on the population problem, The United Nations and the Population Question (co-written with Michael Carder, 1973), is a major contribution to the subject. Symonds commented, “Thus an intelligent graduate of Oxford caused more harm than an unintelligent graduate of Cambridge.” An intelligent man himself, Symonds I think shared the strong-minded Englishman’s suspicion of unnecessary cleverness.Another nugget from his experiences, this time in Africa: the French had left behind so much champagne in one Francophone country that the UN delegation had to clean their teeth with the stuff. His two volumes on the “worthies and noteworthies” of his Oxford college, The Fox, the Bees and the Pelican (2002) and Daring to be Wise (2004), have the same stamp of bemused elegance.His understanding of Oxford’s relationship to the Empire is structured around a number of themes – industry and commerce, race, critics of empire, women and the impact of public schools. Perhaps he is at his best in his monograph Oxford and Empire: the last lost cause? (1986), remarkable for its unobtrusive literary quality. Bandaranaike, opted for a more popular Sinhalised regime but in the process started the lethal ethnic conflict.

The new dominion’s first President was Sir John Kotelawala, who ruled effectively, if somewhat unintelligently, with the help of the old anglicised ?te His successor, S.W.R.D. His first appointment was as Resident Representative, Untab, to Ceylon. His recruitment, he explained, was facilitated by the ignorance of his American selectors, who set great store by his Oxford MA (bought, in those days, for £5: a mere BA would not have done the trick). His unpublished memoirs, submitted for the UN Career Records Project of which he was the Honorary Director, contain amusing insights into the absurdities of international diplomacy.

But he was also curious about the utility of stout, which had been recommended by his landlady in London. Symonds sums up as follows his impression of his days with Gandhi:Having shared even briefly his way of life, I was never able afterwards to take the protocol and the trappings of diplomatic life quite seriously.Next Symonds appears as an employee of the newly established UN. Symonds records without comment the Mahatma’s quaint ideas on medicine. Severely opposed to drinking in any form, the saint had some use for brandy because he had once used it successfully in a case of snakebite. His account of the massacres at Poonch which partly explain the tenacity of the Azad Kashmir movement has the tone of authenticity not matched by any other material known to me. Written without sentimentality and accessible to the lay reader, his description of the fate of the refugees is chilling in its restrained understatement.Symonds’s Indian experience included a fascinating interlude when he contacted typhoid and Gandhi nursed him to health at his Delhi residence in Birla House. They worked closely with Lady Mountbatten, who was the head of the Red Cross in India.His monograph based on these experiences, In the Margins of Independence: a relief worker in India and Pakistan (1942-1949) (2001), and his The Making of Pakistan (1950) are classic contributions to the literature on Partition.

But, at this point, he had a pioneering role in something which was to have worldwide importance later. In the post-war plans under discussion, his contribution was the emphasis on family planning. The suggestion was treated with disfavour because the mandarins thought that interference in social matters might lead to another Indian Mutiny.Introduced to Gandhi by Horace Alexander, he now got to know Nehru and the Mountbattens as well. When the Partition riots in the Punjab and the tribal invasion in Jammu-Kashmir created an unprecedented number of refugees, Alexander and Symonds, at their own suggestion , were appointed observers in both Pakistan and India to report on the condition of the minorities sheltering in camps. Inter-departmental correspondence “dealing with life and death” took six weeks to six months to reach its destination in the next room.Symonds unhappily concedes that his role in the rehabilitation directorate was not a success.