Dunstan Curtis – DSC, VC, CdeG, CBE – fought during the War to destroy Fascism and preserve freedom, and has spent 25 years working for the unity of Europe. English in manner, European in experience, he is perpetually interested in learning “what makes each nationality tick.”
When a strictly traditional British fly fisherman puts grasshoppers on a pin to catch trout à la française, there is more at stake than a compromise over warring conceptions of sport. Here is evidence of a development in homo sapiens – the new European.
If any one man has the right to be called a progenitor of the British European, it is Dunstan Curtis. Not only for his adaptability as a fisherman, but because he has put in more time as a European civil servant since the war than any other Englishman. When he was awarded the CBE on his resignation as deputy Secretary General of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, a national newspaper described him then as “one man who has kept a toehold for Britain in Europe”.
Continue reading BookBlast® Archive | What Makes a European? Jane McLoughlin | The Observer, 1971
