A short history, originally drawn up by Peter Rennie, 1st Secretary (Chancery) from 1971-1974.

 

 

The construction of the present building began in June 1927 on a site, which was purchased in 1925 for £11,661 by the then HM Office of Works, from a General Belimarković. It was designed by an Office of Works architect whose work was probably influenced by the well-known architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, famous for his neo-Georgian style buildings. Erected at a cost of £40,129, the building was occupied in August 1928 by the then Minister, Sir H W Kennard, who said of it in Annual Review that it “greatly enhanced the dignity and efficiency of British representation here”. The building, furnished for £ 1,777, served as both residence and embassy until the erection of today’s residence in 1959.  Prior to 1928, the residence and embassy offices were located in a building at the corner of Gračanička Street and Topličin Venac.  This location later became the Yugoslav Jockey Club, then the Kulturbund Centre during the German occupation of World War II, and after the war, a branch office of the State Printing Works.

 

The land adjoining the Embassy, where the present garages and stores are, was originally two plots which were acquired in March 1951, by the then Ministry of Public Works from the local authority who had expropriated them on learning that the two previous owners, Milisav Bošković and a widow Cana Topuzović were intending to sell their land directly to the Embassy. Bošković was subsequently compensated with a house in Senjak, but the widow received nothing after she had refused to sell her land to the City Expropriation Commission.

 

In the garden at the back of the Embassy there is a small grave stone against the bottom wall with the inscription “In memory of Rufus. A golden Labrador, born Sedgwick 1926, died Belgrade April 1934”. A fair assumption can be made that the dog belonged to the then resident Minister, the late Sir Neville Henderson. It is said that the late Sir Dugald Stewart, Ambassador 1971-1977 proposed to Lady Stewart in the garden under the magnolia tree outside the windows of the Visa Section offices when he first served here from 1945-1948.

 

During the German occupation from April 1941 to October 1944 the Embassy was evacuated and the building closed. The Swiss looked after our interests and for a short while the late Toma Petrović, then the Minister’s driver and husband of Tončika, who was the Embassy Cook from 1934 and who until 1994 lived in the small flat above the workshop, acted as caretaker. In this capacity he found in the Embassy a quantity of arms and explosives which had been left on the premises, before the evacuation, by SOE representatives who had been engaged on a project for blocking the Iron Gates on the Danube. In an attempt to conceal them he buried the arms in the garden but was betrayed to the Gestapo who arrested and imprisoned him in the Banjica concentration camp. On liberation both he and his wife were among the first to present themselves to the British Mission under Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean and were immediately reemployed. Petrović was awarded the King’s Medal for bravery.

 

After the war, the street on which the embassy stands was named Generala Ždanova after the Soviet General Zhdanov (Ždanov in Serbian) who was in command of the Soviet forces which helped to liberate Belgrade in October 1944. It bore his name until the Cominform expulsion of Yugoslavia in 1948 when it was renamed Prvog Maja (1st of May). On Zhdanov’s death in an air crash at Avala on 19 October 1964 when he was flying in to Belgrade to participate in the 20th anniversary celebrations of the liberation (the monument can be seen to the left on the way up to the mausoleum at the top of Avala) the street was named after him again. Before the war it was called Frankopanova, after a medieval Croatian noble family, and before the First World War it was Resavska, named after the Serbian river Resava near the monastery of Manasija.  The street is now known again as Resavska.