 George Frederick Handel Gracey
1878 to 1958
The Times
To die on St.
Patrick's Day, as Captain Gracey did, may be counted an
interesting coincidence for an Irishman. Gracey was proud of
belonging to the Irish race (he was born in Belfast in 1878)
and never shed the brogue of the Emerald Isle. He was the son
of Belfast's City organist at that time and his Christian
names, George Frederick Handel, preserved his father's
veneration for the composer. Successively a carpenter in a
Belfast shipbuilding yard, an industrial missionary at Urfa for
the American Near East Relief Committee, prisoner of war in
Moscow and British representative to the Armenian Republic, he
was secretary of the Friends of Armenia, then of the Assyrian
Settlement National Appeal and finally held two posts, together
covering nearly twenty years, in the Save the Children Fund. He
was awarded the DSO in 1919, married a kinswoman of the late
Sir Henry Wood and had two sons and two daughters and several
grandchildren.
As the present writer said in The
Times the day following his death : Both as overseas
delegate from 1929 to 1937 and as general secretary from the
latter year until his retirement in 1948, Gracey infused an
almost evangelical fervour into the work of the Save the
Children Fund. During the war he led the Fund in setting up
residential and day-time nurseries in Great Britain and he was
tireless in attending committee and other meetings in this
cause. For it he won the support of the Save the Children Fund
throughout the Common-wealth and of the Save the Children
Federation in the United States, with the result that many of
the Fund's war-time nurseries in this country bore Commonwealth
or American names and from time to time were visited by
delegates from those lands.
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