British high commissioner during the early years of an independent Nigeria
''I sometimes wonder whether I did the right thing in keeping Nigeria together." This remarkable statement was made in 2007 by Lord Thurlow, who has died aged 101. As Sir Francis Cumming-Bruce, he was British high commissioner in Nigeria during the worst crisis in the country's existence. This occurred at the end of July 1966, when the short-lived military government of General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi was overthrown in a bloody counter-coup that seriously imperilled the unity of Nigeria, with both northern and eastern regions threatening to secede.
The only hope for preserving Nigeria came from the apolitical and inexperienced Lieutenant Colonel Yakubu Gowon, who was the favoured candidate of the rank and file of the army, the majority of whom came from minority ethnic groups in the north. There was an important group of top Nigerian civil servants and lawyers who pressed strongly for preserving unity, and whose influence was paramount. Some accounts stress that the British and the Americans helped Gowon find the resolve to accept the duty of power being pressed upon him, but it would be presumptuous to attribute a country's salvation to one individual.
In the 2007 interview with myself and another writer, Michael Gould, Thurlow explained that he had written to northern emirs to stress how unwise it would be for the north to secede, but he also told of his own two-hour face-to-face discussion with Gowon that may have been decisive in ending the three-day power vacuum that July. There were many factors over the next four years that helped forge Nigerian unity, but those two hours were seminal in the country's history, a critical moment of high-octane turbulence in Cumming-Bruce's otherwise smoothly unremarkable career.
He was the second of four sons (and the elder of twins) of the sixth Baron Thurlow. Educated at Shrewsbury school and Trinity College, Cambridge, he obtained a first in classics. He and his twin brother, Roualeyn, like many others at the time, both became card-carrying communists in 1930s Cambridge, but it was only a fleeting incursion into political radicalism.
In 1935 he joined the Department of Agriculture for Scotland and two years later moved to the Dominions Office, the beginning of his long diplomatic itinerary. During the second world war, he served in the high commissions in both New Zealand and Canada, and was in the UK delegation at the Paris peace conference of 1946.
In 1949 Cumming-Bruce became head of the Political Division in India, at a critical time in Indo-British relations, which gave him rich and useful Commonwealth experience. Indeed, his next posting was in the Gold Coast, as adviser to the governor, in the years just before it became Ghana. After independence in 1957 he served as deputy high commissioner there. In 1959 he had his first ambassadorial post, as high commissioner to New Zealand, and after a spell as deputy undersecretary in the Foreign Office was posted to Nigeria with a KCMG (1961) and a bursting in-tray.
In 1963, Nigeria was already in crisis, with treason trials and disputed elections, and in January 1966 experienced its first coup, all of which Cumming-Bruce took in his stride with his customary sang-froid. But the July 1966 crisis demanded a measure of firm action, although in his diplomatic cables Cumming-Bruce expressed doubts about Gowon's ability to stay in power faced with a series of massacres in the north. It was left to his successor, Sir David Hunt, to handle the full tensions in Britain-Nigeria relations that came with the 1967 outbreak of civil war.
In 1967 Cumming-Bruce moved to the more placid waters of the Bahamas, as governor and commander-in-chief, succeeding his eldest brother Harry to the Thurlow peerage in 1971 and retiring in 1972. He was an active crossbench peer, speaking often on Commonwealth issues, and on education in developing countries, but he renounced membership of the Lords when the majority of hereditary peers were abolished in 1999.
In the 1990s I approached him for an interview on his period as high commissioner, but he declined, out of respect, he said, for "Jack" Gowon. He never wrote memoirs, he said, for the same reason. He was much more willing to talk a decade later, and at 95 was clear and lucid in his recollections.
In 1949 he married Yvonne Wilson, and they had two sons and two daughters. Their younger son, Peter, died in 1985 and Yvonne died in 1990. Thurlow is survived by his two daughters, Miranda and Aubyn, and his son Roualeyn, who succeeds as 9th Baron Thurlow.
• Francis Edward Hovell-Thurlow-Cumming-Bruce, 8th Baron Thurlow, diplomat, born 9 March 1912; died 24 March 2013