Laurence Kelly, who has died aged 92, found time during a busy career in industry to become a leading authority on Russian history.
As the son of the British ambassador to the USSR, he had lived in Moscow as a teenager and become proficient in the language. In 1983 he served as the interpreter for Alexander Solzhenitsyn when the novelist came to Britain to receive the Templeton Prize.
“Solzhenitzyn told me he felt like ‘a duck in water’ with me, which I took as the greatest compliment I have ever received,” Kelly recalled. A photograph of them side by side delivering the acceptance speech took pride of place in his downstairs cloakroom.
Kelly was also tasked with escorting the Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin to Cambridge when he visited Britain in 1967. “I told the motorcade to take the route through Hampstead. I turned to Kosygin and told him these were the workers’ houses. He grunted that he didn’t believe me. After the trip to Cambridge he looked at me condescendingly and said, ‘You are dismissed.’ The British press called him ‘Cosy Grin’ [but] he wasn’t at all a grinning person.”
When Margaret Thatcher was preparing for what she described as her “historic mission” to the USSR in 1987, it was to Kelly that her foreign-policy guru Charles Powell turned for advice. Kelly provided the prime minister with a reading list on Russian history and suggested that she visit the ancient monastery at Zagorsk, the spiritual centre of the Russian Orthodox church, where she lit a candle for peace and drew a huge and appreciative crowd.
Kelly’s first book, Lermontov: Tragedy in the Caucasus (1978), was a biography of Mikhail Lermontov (1814-41), the writer, soldier and bête noire of Tsar Nicholas I. Sir Fitzroy Maclean commended Kelly’s “extremely well-written and readable” book in The New York Times for “giving us for the first time the carelessly uttered taunt that cost Lermontov his life”: it emerged that he had mocked an old schoolfriend’s taste for ostentatious Circassian dress, resulting in his death in a duel at the age of 26. The book was awarded the inaugural Cheltenham Literary Prize.
Kelly won further praise for Diplomacy and Murder in Tehran (2001), a study of the playwright Alexander Griboyedov (1795-1829), who was appointed attaché to the first permanent Russian mission in Tehran as a punishment for duelling (despite protesting that he would not survive without “enlightened people and sympathetic women”), and ended up negotiating the location of the official border between Russia and Persia. Philip Hensher, choosing it as his book of the year in The Independent, acclaimed it as both “genuinely important and exciting”.
Laurence Charles Kevin Kelly was born in Brussels on April 11 1933, the son of Sir David Kelly, MC, and his wife, Comtesse Marie-Noële de Jourda de Vaux, a Franco-Belgian aristocrat. Laurence’s older brother Bernard became an eminent merchant banker and married Lady Mirabel Fitzalan Howard, sister of the Duke of Norfolk.
The earliest years of Laurence’s peripatetic childhood were largely spent in Cairo, where his father was a senior diplomat. As a small child he nearly died of a virus; his mother consulted 12 doctors before he was cured by a Jewish physician who had fled Nazi Germany. As a reward, Laurence’s father helped the doctor to become a member of the Gezira Sporting Club, from which the largely British committee had excluded him through anti-Semitic prejudice.
From 1940 the family was billeted in Switzerland, where David Kelly worked alongside the loveable but erratic Sir Arthur “Boofy” Gore, later the Earl of Arran. When a gathering of Swiss dignitaries was shown a Ministry of Agriculture film on Hereford cows instead of the expected footage of the Battle of Britain, David Kelly was heard to declare loudly: “Boofy, you’ve bogged it again!” This became a family catchphrase.
In 1942 David Kelly was appointed British Ambassador to Argentina, and the family had to travel through Vichy France from Switzerland to set sail from Lisbon. Laurence recalled that although the family had diplomatic immunity, this did not apply to Whittington, their butler.
“At the Geneva railway station, the Gestapo – who, like in films, all wore felt hats and long raincoats – decided to humiliate Whittington, so they made him take his striped trousers off,” Laurence recalled. “Then the train started to move out of the station and all the Gestapo were standing roaring with laughter like the chorus in Un ballo in maschera, as the poor chap had to run to catch the train, his folded trousers on his arm.”
After Argentina, David Kelly served as Ambassador to Turkey from 1946, before being transferred to the USSR in 1949. The 16-year-old Laurence had a young tutor who agreed to teach him dirty jokes in Russian in exchange for tango records.
One day his mother suggested they visit the medieval city of Novgorod, and, at the suggestion of the military attaché at the embassy, Laurence photographed the Russian bridges and railway lines they passed on the train.
“Then we got to Novgorod, and I took a picture of a medieval gate at the Kremlin, of only tourist interest. A little boy rushed off to the police station, and then I was marched off [there]. The colonel put his arm around me and said, ‘Next time you want to take cultural pictures, come to me and ask me first.’ I realised that if they saw my railway pictures I would be in trouble, so I asked to go to the loo, and exposed the pictures.”
After Downside, Laurence did his National Service with the Life Guards before reading history with a scholarship at New College, Oxford, studying under Raymond Carr. He went on to take a business degree at Harvard.
In 1955 he joined the Foreign Office; one of his duties was to cycle to the Russian Embassy and deliver a note apologising for the activities of Commander “Buster” Crabb, who had disappeared after diving into Portsmouth Harbour to spy on the Soviet cruiser Ordzhonikidze. He remembered the Prime Minister Anthony Eden’s fury at having to apologise, as it seemed likely that the Soviets had murdered Crabb.
After a year, Kelly decided that his future lay in industry and joined the steelmakers Guest, Keen and Nettlefolds (now GKN). In 1972 he joined the steel reinforcement company Helical Bar and was a key figure in its evolution into a highly successful property and investment concern. He served as chairman from 1984 to 1988, group profits rising during his tenure from £488,000 to £6.67 million. He held a string of other directorships and was a member of the Monopolies and Mergers Commission.
In 1986 Kelly suffered a severe stroke that left his left arm and leg paralysed. He bore the remaining four decades of his life as a semi-invalid without complaint and, after several years of physiotherapy, recovered enough feeling in his leg to resume his hobby of ski-ing, with a helper to carry his skis and haul him up if he fell.
Another passion was music, and he was chair of the charity Opera da Camera from 1981 to 1987. He was also general editor of the Travellers’ Guide series of anthologies on various cities: his editors included Peter Ackroyd on London and Hugh Thomas on Madrid. He edited well-received volumes on St Petersburg, Moscow and Istanbul himself.
In 1963 Laurence Kelly married Linda McNair Scott, a granddaughter of the Daily Telegraph proprietor Lord Camrose. Linda Kelly gained a considerable reputation as a historian herself; in 2003 the Kellys were both elected Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature. Laurence was also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a senior associate member of St Antony’s College, Oxford.
For more than 60 years they lived in a large, rambling house in Notting Hill, entertaining an eclectic mixture of writers, artists and diplomats. On one occasion the entire Georgian State Ballet came to tea.
Linda died in 2019, and Laurence Kelly is survived by their son and two daughters.
Laurence Kelly, born April 11 1933, died July 23 2025
Comments