Concept

Alister McIntosh

Summary
Sir Alister Donald Miles McIntosh (29 November 1906 – 30 November 1978) was a New Zealand diplomat. McIntosh was New Zealand's first secretary of foreign affairs serving as the principal foreign policy adviser to Prime Ministers Peter Fraser, Sidney Holland, Keith Holyoake, and Walter Nash. He is widely considered to be the father of New Zealand's independent foreign policy and architect of the former Department of External Affairs, now the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in New Zealand. McIntosh was born in Picton, the eldest of four children of Caroline Margaret Cowles (née Miles) and Henry Hobson McIntosh, a telegraphist. He was educated at Marlborough College from 1920 to 1924, where he undertook the first section of a BA degree. He then continued his education part-time while a civil servant at Victoria College, where after preparing a thesis on Marlborough's political history, he earned an MA in History in 1930. McIntosh joined the New Zealand the public service as a cadet in the Department of Labour's head office in March 1925, where he was employed in the library. In July 1926 he transferred to the Legislative Department after taking a position as an assistant librarian in the General Assembly Library. After being awarded a Carnegie Fellowship and he was granted in 1932 a year's leave of absence to study library development and archive procedure in the United States and Canada. During his way home he spent several months in the United Kingdom visiting libraries and archives. Following his return to New Zealand in July 1933, he wrote a farsighted report on library requirements in New Zealand, in which he proposed establishing a national bibliographical centre, a rural library service, introducing inter-library lending. He also proposed amalgamating the Alexander Turnbull Library, the General Assembly Library, the national archives and the New Zealand Institute Library into a national library. While his proposals were not implemented at the time many were later to come into fruition.
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.