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Obituary Alan Edwin Robert Hadden

Alan Edwin Robert Hadden

Alan Edwin Robert Hadden, MIPR, FIP, who died in his 86th year on February 4th, 2003 at his home in Erts.  He was the only son of Captain Archibald and Evelyn (née Tunnicliffe) Hadden. He was educated at St. Nicholas Lodge and Heddon Court preparatory school at Westminster, and at The Law Society’s School of Law. He was articled to his cousin, Gerald England Tunnicliffe, senior partner in Maude & Tunnicliffe, but abandoned the law work with Arland Freke in his Novel Book Exchange venture and with Justing Vulliamy on the launch of “London Week”.

Subsequently he joined the Mayfair Press as sub-editor on “Decoration” before volunteering as an ambulance driver with the Spanish Medical Aid Committee on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.

Invalided home, he devoted 1938 to fund raising for the Committee, and in 1939 took out the last convoy of civilian relief to reach Catalunia, crossing back into France two days before Franco reached the frontier.

Thereafter he sailed for Argentina and worked for six months on a Luke estancia in Corrientes Province before accepting an offer to join the staff of “The Standard”, one of the two English-language dailies then published in Buenos Aires.

Hadden was a member of the Army Officers Emergency Reserve (and subsequently of R.A.R.O.) and on the outbreak of war reported, as required, to the military attaché at the embassy in Buenos Aires. In due course Hadden was ordered to report to the embassy in Santiago de Cille, and serve there, in the Legation in La Paz, in Buenos Aires, and in Bogotá until he was demobilised  inLondon 1946.

Early in 1947 Hadden was engaged by Asiatic Petroleum, a Royal Dutch/Shell company, and was dispatched at once on a two-year training course in the Maracaibo lake basin oilfields. He remained with Shell companies in Venezuela, the United Kingdom, and the Untited States of America for the next thirty-odd years, concerned principally with Industrial Relations, Employee Communications, and Public Affairs.

On Retirement he and his wife, Karen, decided to make their home in the Principality of Andorra. Hadden was thrice married; first to Renée (née Dickinson), who died within a year of marriage; then to Carmen (née Masters); and finally to Karen (née Bush) who survives him, as do his son by his second marriage, Abel, his grandchildren Leo and Camilla, and Alexander, his son by his third marriage.

May he Rest in Peace.