NaWiPoMo: Quentin Ritchie

Quentin Ritchie was the British ambassador to the Confederation of North America at the time of the outbreak of the Global War in 1939. Unlike German Chancellor Karl Bruning, Prime Minister George Bolingbroke did not make a public appeal for support from the C.N.A. Instead he had Ambassador Ritchie meet in private with Governor-General Bruce Hogg, instructing Ritchie "to stress the implications of a German victory in the Atlantic ... have Mr. Hogg consider the nature of the German-Mexican pact ... a strong neighbor to the west is hardly in North America's interests ..." Hogg, an isolationist, was unmoved by the entreaties of both Bruning and Ritchie.

Ritchie is the only British ambassador to the C.N.A. mentioned by Sobel. Given that the C.N.A. was originally a British colony, it is significant that the two countries were exchanging diplomats by the 1930s. Sobel does not indicate at which point the C.N.A. had become sufficiently independent of Great Britain to require an ambassador; it may have been as early as the drafting of the Second Britannic Design in 1842, and almost certainly had happened by the founding of the United British Commonwealth in 1906.

Sobel's source for Quentin Ritchie's appeal to Bruce Hogg is James Radamaker's Secret Files of the Global War: Correspondences With North America, 1939-1941 (Melbourne, 1959).