‘The English despot’: Francis Noel-Baker and his support for the Colonels’ regime

Abstract

Francis Noel-Baker (1920–2009) was an English Philhellene politician and self-proclaimed benevolent landowner in Euboea whose relationship in his later years with Greek governments and people descended into acrimony and litigation. This stemmed from the decision he took to effectively become an apologist for the military junta which seized power in Athens between 1967 and 1974. This was despite London being a centre for Greek resistance-in-exile, the opposition to the regime shown by many of his fellow MPs and Labour Party colleagues, and his own earlier left-wing sympathies, including his support for the communist-backed partisans in Greece during the Second World War. Noel-Baker's advocacy of the Colonels reflected not merely political reality and economic expediency, as with the similar stance of the British government, but stemmed from his outdated convictions that Greece required saving from international communism and internal weakness.