The Political Context of John Mulgan's Greek Wartime life and Death

Abstract

In late March 1965, distinguished New Zealand diplomat Joseph (J.V.) Wilson offered Paul Day, who was then writing a biography of John Mulgan, some materials that needed ‘circumspect handling both because of their content and because of the circumstances in which they were written’. The items in question were letters sent to the Wellington-based diplomat Wilson in response to a request he had made to the soldier Mulgan in January 1945 for an assessment of the political situation in liberated Greece. The two had known each before the war, when they were part of the New Zealand delegation to the League of Nations. Mulgan’s letters were typed just a few days before his death during the night of 25/26 April in Cairo. Wilson’s caution – he wanted any extracts to be confined to those ‘for the purposes of your biography’ – shows his desire to avoid engaging with the political nature of the letters. He was also respecting Mulgan’s request to limit circulation because, as Mulgan wrote to Wilson in 1945, ‘as an army officer I’m not officially free to write or express my views without censorship’. Day, for his part, reversed an earlier request for making copies, in deference to Wilson’s ‘reservations about reproduction’. He also thought ‘it most unlikely that I shall wish to quote from these documents’, but would rely on other sources to build a picture of the ‘Greek political scene’. The biographer thought, ‘The account of the Greek political scene is interesting, though generalized.’  This short exchange provides a place of embarkation for this paper.