Samuel Hoare , 1st Viscount Templewood Samuel John Gurney Hoare , 1st Viscount Templewood GCSI , GBE , CMG , PC , OWL ( 24 February 1880 – 7 May 1959 ) , more commonly known as Sir Samuel Hoare , was a senior British Conservative politician who served in various Cabinet posts in the Conservative and National governments of the 1920s and 1930s . He was Secretary of State for Air during most of the 1920s and briefly again in 1940 . He is perhaps most famous for serving as Foreign Secretary in 1935 , when he authored the Hoare – Laval Pact with French Prime Minister Pierre Laval . In 1936 he became First Lord of the Admiralty , then served as Home Secretary from 1937 to 1939 and was British ambassador to Spain from 1940 to 1944 . Youth . Hoare was born in London , an Anglican descendant of the Quaker Samuel Hoare and the son of Sir Samuel Hoare , 1st Baronet , to whose baronetcy he succeeded in 1915 . Hoare was educated at Harrow School and New College , Oxford , where he graduated B . A . in 1903 and Master in 1910 and later became Honorary Fellow . He married in 1909 Lady Maud Lygon , youngest daughter of Frederick Lygon , 6th Earl Beauchamp . Their marriage was childless . Entry into politics . Hoare , who had become a J . P . for the county of Norfolk in 1906 , and unsuccessfully stood in that year ' s General Election for Parliament at Ipswich , entered local politics in March 1907 , when he was elected to the London County Council as a member of the Municipal Reform Party representing Brixton . He served as Chairman of the London Fire Brigade Committee . He was first elected to the House of Commons at the January 1910 general election as Member of Parliament ( MP ) for Chelsea . In these early years he was a member of the Anti - Socialist Union . First World War . Aged 34 at the time , he began the First World War as a soldier , having been commissioned into the Norfolk Yeomanry but , due to illness , was unable to serve at the front . While acting as a recruiting officer , he learnt Russian and in 1916 was recruited by Mansfield Cumming to be the future MI6 ' s liaison officer with the Russian Intelligence service in Petrograd ( St Petersburg ) . In that post , he reported to the British Government the death of Rasputin and apologised , because of the sensational nature of the event , for having written it in the style of the " Daily Mail " . In Italy , he met and recruited the former socialist leader Benito Mussolini on behalf of the British overseas intelligence service , which was then known as MI1 ( c ) . Newly published documents show that Britain ’ s intelligence service helped Benito Mussolini to finance his first forays into Italian politics as a right - wing politician . Hoping to keep Italy on its side in 1917 , during the First World War , MI5 gave Mussolini , then aged 34 and editor of a right - wing newspaper , the equivalent of $ 9 , 500 a week at 2009 values to keep his propaganda flowing . Hoare was promoted Lieutenant - Colonel and for his services in the war was twice mentioned in despatches ; appointed Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George ( CMG ) in 1917 ; awarded the Orders of St Anne and St Stanislas of Russia , and of St Maurice and St Lazarus of Italy . Politics Inter - War . Hoare returned to Parliament and became one of the principal Conservatives who revolted against continued participation in the government of David Lloyd George in 1922 . He was rewarded with the position of Secretary of State for Air , which he held in all the various Conservative governments of the 1920s . He maintained the Royal Air Force as an independent armed service , presided over the creation of the university air squadrons at Oxford and Cambridge , re - established on permanent basis the air cadet college at Cranwell , and championed civil aviation . In 1927 he was appointed Knight Grand Cross of the British Empire ( GBE ) . He followed his interest in aviation affairs as Honorary Air Commodore of No 601 ( County of London ) ( 1930 – 32 ) and No 604 ( County of Middlesex ) ( 1932 – 57 ) Bomber Squadrons of the Auxiliary Air Force . When the Conservatives joined the National Government in 1931 , Hoare became Secretary of State for India in which capacity he negotiated , with great difficulty , the passage of the landmark Government of India Act 1935 . He was appointed Knight Grand Cross of the Star of India ( GCSI ) in 1934 . He was , however , most famous for his activities as Foreign Secretary beginning in 1935 . In 1938 , Hoare was instrumental in obtaining approval for the British rescue effort on behalf of endangered Jewish children in Europe known as the Kindertransport . In the same year , Hoare dealt with the Italian invasion of Ethiopia . Together with French Prime Minister Pierre Laval , he developed the so - called Hoare – Laval Pact , which would have granted Italy considerable territorial concessions in Ethiopia , and put the rump of Ethiopia under Italian hegemony . In his memoirs Hoare claimed that his intentions were twofold : to appease Italy to keep Mussolini away from a German alliance , and to find a compromise which preserved elements of the Ethiopian state from Mussolini . He admitted that his negotiations in Paris with Laval had caught him at a disadvantage . He noted that in the absence of the Hoare – Laval Pact the Italians seized all of Ethiopia , and drew closer to Germany leading eventually to the destabilisation of Austria and the indefensibility of Czechoslovakia . The public uproar against this apparent sell - out of the Ethiopians led to Hoare ' s resignation as Foreign Secretary at the end of the year . His successor was Anthony Eden . When Eden had his first audience with King George V , the King is said to have remarked humorously , " No more coals to Newcastle , no more Hoares to Paris . " At least in retrospect Hoare stressed that he shared with Chamberlain ' s close allies a realist position - conscious of the need to prevent a military conjunction of Germany , Italy and Japan which would be too great for Britain ' s naval power unless France were to prove robust and the Americans would abandon their isolationism . The minority alternative which emerged , led in particular by Eden , would have confronted Italy without regard to the German threat . Hoare quickly returned to important posts in government , at Baldwin ' s invitation . This was too quickly , thought Halifax , who criticised Baldwin for giving in to Hoare ' s importunity . Appointed First Lord of the Admiralty in 1936 , Hoare vigorously endorsed Britain ' s naval rearmament , including ordering the first three " King George V " - class battleship s , and worked to reverse the subordination of the British naval aviation to the Royal Air Force . Hoare was consistently close to Chamberlain , on whose taking over from Baldwin , Hoare was moved to the Home Office . The descendant of Quaker prison reformers ( Elizabeth Fry was his great - great - aunt ) , he oversaw significant judicial reforms but these were largely held up by the advent of war in 1939 : he had intended to abolish corporal punishment in prisons and had been keen to work towards the abolition of the death penalty , of whose risks he was very aware . Along with Halifax and Simon he was a key member of Chamberlain ' s inner ministerial circle and his account of Munich is anguished . Hoare had close links to the Czech government . In retirement he stood strongly by Chamberlain ' s essential judgements , but regretted Chamberlain ' s lack of sensitivity in foreign affairs , and his tendency for personal intervention which not only led to his failure to retain Eden , but overrode his Foreign Office advisers . But as Hoare repeatedly points out , public opinion was vociferously pacifist and Chamberlain ' s actions were widely endorsed , not least by Roosevelt . The Labour opposition strongly opposed rearmament and the introduction of conscription , even after Munich . But in spring 1939 Hoare aligned himself very firmly with Chamberlain ' s upbeat belief that war was now unlikely , rather than with Halifax ' s increasing focus on shoring up alliances and rearming for a conflict that to the Foreign Secretary seemed imminent . Hoare after the outbreak of the Second World War . On the outbreak of war , Hoare became Lord Privy Seal in the War Cabinet , with a wide - ranging brief , until the downfall of the Neville Chamberlain regime . Hoare was one of the foremost Chamberlain loyalists , and was shocked at the apparent disloyalty of others such as Halifax . In May 1940 , the resignations of Hoare , Sir John Simon , and Kingsley Wood were essential conditions for the broadening of the Chamberlain government . On Winston Churchill ' s appointment as Prime Minister in 1940 , Hoare lost his Cabinet position , and was , after some months of unemployment , sent as Ambassador to Spain , with his wife Lady Maud Hoare . In this demanding and critical role he sought to encourage Francisco Franco , whom he loathed and found a puzzling and obtuse interlocutor , to keep Spain out of the war , in which he was successful . His fluent memoir of this period " Ambassador on Special Mission " is an excellent insight into the day to day life of a demanding diplomatic position ; his primary challenge was to dissuade Franco from his preferred drift to the Axis powers , while preventing the Allies from reacting with undue haste to repeated Spanish provocations . Hoare ' s memoir however is not completely frank about his deployment of an array of bluff , leaks , bribery and subterfuge to disrupt unfriendly elements in Franco ' s regime , and the operations of the German Embassy ; but they were remembered fondly by his team . He remained Ambassador until 1944 when , with the issue of Spanish entry into the war no longer in doubt , he returned to Britain and was raised to the peerage as Viscount Templewood , of Chelsea in the County of Middlesex . In the House of Lords he served on the Political Honours Scrutiny Committee from 1950 , chairing it from from 1954 . He was also President of the Howard League for Penal Reform from 1947 and of the Air League of the British Empire from 1953 . From 1937 to 1959 he served as Chancellor of the University of Reading . In addition to those awarded for his services in the First World War , Viscount Templewood held the following foreign honours : Viscount Templewood died of a heart attack , at his home , 12a Eaton Mansions , Chelsea , London , in 1959 aged 79 . He was buried at Sidestrand parish churchyard in Norfolk . As his marriage was childless and he left no surviving brother , the baronetcy and peerage became extinct upon his death . Viscountess Templewood died in 1962 . Legacy . Hoare was literate and widely read in several languages , especially French , but appears also to have picked up a command of the Spanish language and its literature during his embassy there . He was a keen tennis player , and served as national president of the Lawn Tennis Association from 1932 to 1957 . On his resignation from office in 1935 he convalesced in Switzerland by practising for a skating contest , and later became president of the British National Skating Association in 1946 . His career included demanding work in Russia and Italy during the First World War , followed by the good fortune to be part of the wave of young Conservatives propelled into the 1922 government , which ensured he spent most of the next 18 years in increasingly senior Cabinet positions , followed by four years in the embassy in Fascist Spain .