Bartlett, Vernon, 1894-1983

Charles Vernon Oldfield Bartlett was born on April 30 1894 at Westbury, Wiltshire and educated at Blundell's School, Tiverton. After being invalided out of the army during the First World War, he began his career as a journalist, joining the Daily Mail as a general reporter. In 1917 he joined the staff of Reuters, which later sent him to cover the Paris peace conference. Subsequently he became a foreign correspondent for The Times, and it was his experiences in reporting from post-war Europe which led him to become the director of the London office of the League of Nations in 1922, a post which he held for a decade. During this period he began to broadcast for the BBC on foreign affairs, including from 1928 the weekly series The Way of the World .

His broadcasting career suffered a setback in 1933, when comments that he made about Germany's withdrawal from the Geneva disarmament conference were misinterpreted as pro-Nazi. Despite many letters in his support, the BBC decided that it would be best if he were not a member of their staff, and Bartlett therefore resigned, joining the News Chronicle, for whom he was to serve as a diplomatic correspondent for twenty years.

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