Sir Harold Nicolson
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Sir Harold Nicolson KCVO CMG |
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Member of Parliament for Leicester West |
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In office 14 November 1935 – 5 July 1945 |
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| Preceded by | Ernest Harold Pickering |
| Succeeded by | Barnett Janner |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
Harold George Nicolson 21 November 1886 Tehran, Persian Empire |
| Died | 1 May 1968 (aged 81) Sissinghurst Castle, Kent |
| Nationality | British |
| Political party | National Labour and Labour Party |
| Spouse(s) | Vita Sackville-West |
| Children |
Benedict Nicolson Nigel Nicolson |
| Parents |
Arthur Nicolson, 1st Baron Carnock Mary Hamilton |
| Alma mater | Balliol College, Oxford |
| Occupation | British diplomat, author, diarist and politician |
Sir Harold George Nicolson KCVO CMG (21 November 1886 – 1 May 1968) was a British diplomat, author, diarist and politician. He was the husband of writer Vita Sackville-West.
Nicolson was born in Tehran, Persia, the youngest son of diplomat Arthur Nicolson, 1st Baron Carnock. He was educated at Wellington College and Balliol College, Oxford.
In 1909 Nicolson joined HM Diplomatic Service. He served as attaché at Madrid from February to September 1911, and then Third Secretary at Constantinople from January 1912 to October 1914. In 1913, Nicolson married the novelist Vita Sackville-West. Nicolson and his wife practised what today would be called an open marriage with both having affairs, often with people of the same sex. A diplomatic career was an honorable and prestigious one in Edwardian Britain, but Sackville-West's parents were aristocrats who wanted their daughter to marry a fellow aristocrat from an old noble family; they gave a reluctant approval to their marriage.
During the First World War, he served at the Foreign Office in London, during which time he was promoted to Second Secretary. As the Foreign Office's most junior employee at this rank, it fell to him on 4 August 1914 to hand Britain's revised declaration of war to Prince Max von Lichnowsky the German ambassador in London. An Anglophile who had been privately opposed to his country's foreign policy, the British declaration of war was a bitter blow to Lichnowsky. In December 1917, Nicolson had to explain to Sackville-West that he had contracted a venereal disease as a result of an anonymous homosexual encounter, and he had probably passed it to her. As it turned out, he hadn't. He served in a junior capacity in the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, for which he was appointed Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) in the 1920 New Year Honours.
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