Richard Roy Maconachie


Sir Richard Roy Maconachie, KBE, CIE was an English civil servant in India, naturalist and BBC employee.
Tanner studied at Tonbridge School in Kent, England and University College, Oxford before joining the Indian Civil Service. In 1923, he played billiard with Amanullah Khan, then the Emir of Afghanistan.
He was British Minister in Kabul, Afghanistan from 1929 to 1935.
In 1936, he was appointed as the Director of Talks at the BBC. It was widely considered a "swing to the right".
During his time in Afghanistan, Maconachie assembled a collection of native birds that he later presented to the Natural History Museum at Tring in Tring, England. These bird skins became the basis of ornithologist Hugh Whistler's paper on the birds of Afghanistan in the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society in 1944–45.

Literature