Sir George Robert Laking KCMG: 1912-2008.

• Author: Brown, Bruce
• Position: Obituary

Sir George Laking, who died in Wellington on 10 January, at the age of 95, was one of New Zealand's outstanding public servants.

He was born in Auckland in 1912 and educated at Auckland Grammar School, Auckland University College and later Victoria University College, where he graduated LLB and was later awarded by Victoria an Honorary LLD. In the course of his long life he served first in the Customs Department (1929-40), in the Prime Minister's Department (1940-43) and in the Department of External Affairs (later Ministry of Foreign Affairs) from 1943-72. He was Secretary of Foreign Affairs and Permanent Head of the Prime Minister's Department from 1966 to 1972. After his retirement from those positions, he was (eventually) appointed Ombudsman (1975-77) and then Chief Ombudsman (1977-84).

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He was a man of powerful intellect and a courteous but formidable personality, leavened by a sardonic sense of humour. He had begun his long public service career as a Customs Department cadet at the ripe old age of seventeen. I well recollect an official dinner when he was Secretary of Foreign Affairs at which he amused the company by remarking that a senior minister of the Crown, on learning that he had begun his career at seventeen, wondered aloud how he could possibly have exercised any public responsibility at such a tender age. He had responded that he sometimes wondered whether he was not able to exercise more individual responsibility then than he could now, 'protected as I am from my folly by numerous Ministers of the Crown, the State Services Commission, The Treasury and many other well wishers.'

Following the outbreak of the Second World War, George Laking was transferred to the Prime Minister's Department in Wellington in 1940, and then to the newly-formed Department of External Affairs in 1943. He held many important diplomatic posts over the following years, notably three terms in Washington, first as Counsellor, then as Minister and finally as Ambassador (1961-67). In the intervening years he served as Acting High Commissioner in London and concurrently as New Zealand's first ambassador to the newly formed European Economic Community from 1958 to 1961. In both these appointments he was an Acting not a permanent appointee. This was because the then Prime Minister, Walter Nash, declined to make a permanent appointment to the London post. My understanding (gained while serving as a private secretary in his office) was...