Philip Brooke Barnes

Philip Brooke Barnes (15 June 1926 – 27 July 2009) was a pioneer of cultural travel who did much to foster understanding of different cultures amongst the more than 80,000 participants who signed up for his tours and the hundreds of scholars and projects he supported over five decades. In 1958 he founded the Association for Cultural Exchange (ACE Foundation), an innovative educational trust which promoted in-depth learning about different cultures. Barnes believed that deeper understanding of cultures and societies was essential for improved international relations. A view that was informed in part from his experience in World War II and the early post-war environment.

Barnes's father, George Brooke Barnes, died when he was 4, and young Philip, an only child, moved with his mother to Clacton-on-Sea, Essex. In 1939 they were instructed to move to Chelmsford due to the fear of invasion after the outbreak of the Second World War. He began work as a junior clerk, aged 16, in a firm of chartered accountants and started an economics degree at Birkbeck College, University of London, while still working. In 1945 he was called up and served in military intelligence for more than three years, working in the Middle East and in India, where he first developed his great love of the sub-continent's culture. On his return, Barnes finished his economics degree at the London School of Economics, then read philosophy at Jesus College, Cambridge. The environs of Cambridge and trips to Scandinavia were very influential not only on his personal life but also for the shaping of the ACE. His determination brooked few obstacles, including those to travel in remote places in the 1950s and 1960s, when few of the comforts that tourists now take for granted were available.

He was already committed to worldwide horizons; unusually in the late 1940s he worked as a waiter in the US, and for a water company in Norway, long before the gap year had been invented. His first professional job after graduating was as a reporter for Reuters, posted to Denmark, where he was able to pursue what would become a lifelong interest in the Nordic countries.

He immersed himself in Scandinavian culture well beyond the then popular understanding of its leadership in modern design and innovations in public welfare. He became a keen student of its medieval and renaissance history, which remained an abiding interest. His understanding of Denmark's adult education movement inspired him to devise courses in England for Scandinavian teachers to study English life, culture and language. On one of these he was to meet Inger Kragh: they married in 1962.

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