Gerard Thomas Corley Smith (30 July 1909 – 7 October 1997) is remembered chiefly for his work in protecting the unique environment of the Galápagos Islands and his support for the Charles Darwin Foundation, established in 1959. However, Corley Smith also had a long and distinguished career in Her Majesty's Diplomatic Service. Education The son of schoolmaster Thomas Smith of Bolton, Corley Smith was brought up in his native Lancashire. He was educated at Bolton School and attended Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a double first in modern languages. His younger brother was the author and journalist Denys Corley Smith. Diplomat Corley Smith joined the consular service in 1931 and was posted to Paris, Oran, Detroit, La Paz and Milan. During World War II he was in St Louis and New York, and was engaged in the effort to persuade Americans that Britain's lonely resistance to the Nazis was a grim battle for freedom that the United States should recognise to be in their interest to join. The possibility of a full diplomatic career only opened up to Corley Smith and to others with no private means after the Eden reforms of the 1940s. He was appointed as labour attaché in Brussels in 1945, and caught the attention of Ernest Bevin, foreign secretary in the post-war Labour government. Bevin, keen to encourage closer ties with European trade unions, saw Corley Smith as well suited to work in this new area. He was posted to UN headquarters in 1949 as counsellor at the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. As Britain's EcoSoc representative, Corley Smith was chosen to present the case against the Soviet forced labour camps, or gulags, the existence of which was only then beginning to be revealed to the world. It was a task that predictably earned him the anger and disapproval of the Eastern Bloc delegations and their press. Much of his time in New York was taken up in drafting the UN Charter on Employment following the adoption of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Art.23), which stated inter alia: "Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment." Member states were unable to agree on the wording or the substance of the draft charter, and it was not adopted by the UN. Corley Smith returned to