ABSTRACT
On June 30, 1975, Heinz Koeppler had been sixty-three. Most Foreign Office officials would at that age have been retired for three years. Many academics, in Britain at least, would have only two more years to serve. Several of his friends had urged him to write his memoirs; but, as he told one of them, a professor at Heidelberg: ‘I am a slow writer’ and ‘to make such memoirs worth reading, I would have to breach the essential confidentiality of our work.’ Yet with his abundant energy, he was reluctant to contemplate an idle retirement. ‘I shall certainly not be sitting in the depths of Sussex in my cottage. I might keep it, but I am quite determined to move into the very centre of London, to profit from all that is going on there.’ In the event, he took a flat in Ashley Gardens, Westminster. Meanwhile, he was alert for a possible successor. As he wrote to Lord Gladwyn-a leading member of the Wilton Park Academic Council-on October 13, 1975:
Although I shall not disappear until the last day of June in 1977, what with finding the person, allowing him, or her, to give notice, and to have an overlap with me here, it will not be too soon to start moving early in the new year. My point now is to alert our friends, since people are apt to hear of possible candidates quite accidentally.
