Richard Roy Maconachie

English naturalist and civil servant

Sir Richard Roy Maconachie, KBE, CIE (1885 - 18 January 1962) was an English civil servant in India, naturalist and BBC employee.

He studied at Tonbridge School in Kent, England and University College, Oxford before joining the Indian Civil Service. In 1923, he played billiards with Amanullah Khan, then the Emir of Afghanistan.^[1]

He was British Minister in Kabul, Afghanistan from 1929 to 1935. During his time in Afghanistan, Maconachie assembled a collection of native birds that he later presented to the Natural History Museum at Tring in Tring, England (BMNH 1935-12-28). These bird skins became the basis of ornithologist Hugh Whistler's paper on the birds of Afghanistan in the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society in 1944–45.

In 1936, he succeeded Charles Siepmann as head of Talks at the BBC. It was widely considered a "swing to the right".^[2]

Offices held

Diplomatic posts
Preceded by Sir Francis Humphrys	Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to His Majesty the Amir of Afghanistan 1929–1935	Succeeded by Sir William Fraser-Tytler

Literature

Warr, F. E.: Manuscripts and Drawings in the ornithology and Rothschild libraries of The Natural History Museum at Tring, BOC 1996.

References

^ Maximilian Drephal: Contesting Independence: Colonial Cultures of Sport and Diplomacy in Afghanistan, 1919–1949, in: J. Simon Rofe (ed.): Sport and Diplomacy – Games within Games, Manchester: Manchester University Press 2018, pp. 180–216 (here: p. 191).
^ Asa Briggs: The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom – Volume II: The Golden Age of Wireless, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1995, p. 138.