HIGH COMMISSIONER FOR BRITAIN

Southland Times, Issue 25642, 9 April 1945, Page 4

HIGH COMMISSIONER FOR BRITAIN

Sir Harry Batterbee’s

Successor

(N.Z.E.F. Correspondent) ROME, April 7.

The New Zealand Division and its supporting services were visited last week by Sir Patrick Duff, who will succeed Sir Harry Batterbee in July as High Commissioner for the United Kingdom in New Zealand.

This is the first announcement that Sir Patrick Duff is to succeed Sir Harry Batterbee. Since 1941 Sir Patrick has been Deputy High Commissioner for the United Kingdom in Canada. He was born in 1889 and educated at Blundell’s'School, Tiverton, and Balliol College, Oxford. Passing into the civil service in the first class in 1912, he received an appointment in the Board of Trade, but had held it barely two years when the war began. He joined the Army and served throughout the campaign in France. Gallipoli and Mesopotamia, being wounded and mentioned in dispatches twice. On returning to the Board of Trade in 1919 he was made private secretary to the President of that department. So efficiently and tactfully did he perform his duties under successive chiefs that when in 1923 a vacancy occurred for a private secretary to the Prime Minister, Sir Patrick Duff was appointed to it and awarded the C.V.O. Five years later he was made principal secretary and received the C.B. At 10 Downing Street he gained the esteem of politicians of all parties and of many distinguished visitors from abroad. Hard-working, always alert, a master of detail and forgetting nothing, he was an ideal aid to the men on whom the responsibility of government fell in the next four years—Baldwin (Conservative) and MacDonald (Labour) for two periods each. He was knighted (K.C.8.) in 1932. In January 1933 it was announced that he had been appointed Permanent Secretary to the Office of Works. In that important Government post he became responsible for the upkeep of official buildings, including embassies arid legations abroad, the maintenance of London Royal parks, the conservation of ancient castles and other historic monuments owned by the Crown and the care of the nation's works of art. Fortunately versatility is one of Sir Patrick Duff’s natural gifts.