James Marjoribanks

Sir James Marjoribanks KCMG
Marjoribanks in 1965
Personal details
Born	(1911-05-29)29 May 1911 Colinton, Scotland, United Kingdom
Died	29 January 2002(2002-01-29) (aged 90) Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom

Sir James Alexander Milne Marjoribanks KCMG (29 May 1911 – 29 January 2002) was a career diplomat in the British Foreign Service and became British ambassador to the European Economic Community. He presented Britain's application to join the European Community in 1967 and was instrumental in this application becoming successful.

James Marjoribanks was born in Colinton, near Edinburgh, Scotland, the third son of Thomas Marjoribanks, a minister in the (presbyterian) Church of Scotland, and Elizabeth Logan. James Marjoribanks’ father Thomas and his brother William were respectively heads of the lowland Marjoribanks family. James Marjoribanks attended two of Edinburgh’s famous public schools (i.e. private schools) – Merchiston Castle School and Edinburgh Academy.

In order to prepare for his entrance into Edinburgh University where he was to study modern languages, Marjoribanks spent 1927–28 in Paris and at the Convitto Maschile Valdese in Torre Pellice, Italy where he became fluent in Italian. This was to prove useful to him later. He graduated from Edinburgh University with a first class honoursMaster of Arts (Scotland) in 1932 and then studied German further in Bonn and Tübingen, Germany. He stayed for four months with a German newspaper proprietor’s family which coincided with the accession to power of Adolf Hitler in January 1933. Marjoribanks noted that the general attitude was “We’ve tried everything else, so we might as well try Adolf. If he’s no good we’ll get rid of him.” But, he also noted, it wasn’t as easy as that. After the war, Marjoribanks discovered that a bomb had destroyed both the house and the parents. Two of the three sons had died on the Eastern Front.