His greatest achievement, he said, was keeping the Concorde project alive in the face of opposition from the Treasury and the DTI
Sir James Mellon, who has died aged 94, was an imaginative, unstuffy Glaswegian who was Britain’s High Commissioner to Ghana, Ambassador to Denmark – a country in which he took a lifelong interest – and Consul-General in New York.
A distant cousin of the Mellons of Pittsburgh, he spent much of his career promoting British business. He reckoned his greatest achievement was keeping Concorde alive, when heading the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s scientific and technology department, so that London, not Frankfurt, became Europe’s financial centre, as the flying time for Americans was shorter.
Mellon wrote a (largely complimentary) book about the Danes, Og Gamle Danmark (1992), which made No 4 in their bestseller list. He developed a particular affection for the country’s churches, with their pre-Reformation wall paintings chronicling the life of Christ; his visits, creating a bond with local people, gave rise to a further book, Jesu Liv i Kalkmalerier.
Despite his lifelong interest in Denmark, Mellon did not particularly like its people. He found them especially difficult in Nato, but said they had been “trained to be nice in English”. He found them not a nation in the normal sense, but a tribe whose dynamics reminded him of the Ashanti in Ghana.