United Nations: Collections held in Bodleian relating to UN

Sidney Dell (1918-90) was an economist who spent more than 40 years involved in the United Nations (UN). Beginning in 1947, when appointed Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Affairs, New York, he rose to become the Secretary of the Berlin Currency and Trade Committee of the Security Council in 1948. He was then involved in the formulation of the World Economic Survey in the 1950s, first at the Division of Economic Stability and Improvement, where he was Chief of the World Trade Analysis Section, 1951-5, then at the Bureau of General Economic Research and Policies, 1955-64 (with breaks in Santiago working for the UN Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) in 1958 and as Ford Foundation Fellow at King's College, Cambridge, 1960-1). This was followed by a period at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), where, during 1965-72, he was Director of the New York Office and Division for Financing relating to Trade. Following a spell in the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and a secondment as Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary-General in a UN Emergency Operation, 1974-5, Dell joined the United Nations Centre for Transnational Corporations (UNCTC) in 1977, becoming its Executive Director in 1983. Upon retirement in 1985 he entered the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) as Senior Fellow, where he set about the task of writing a history of the economic work of the UN. His death in 1990 left the project unfinished, save for the first of a planned series of books, The United Nations and International Business (London, 1990).

In 1949 he moved to a more political role when he came to Britain as first director of the London United Nations Information Centre, remaining there until 1958. He began to act frequently as spokesman for Dag Hammarskjold, who had become Secretary-General in 1953, and accompanied him on many missions, including his visit to the Middle East following the Suez crisis. He was in charge of press liaison at the Four Powers' summit conference and foreign ministers' meeting in Geneva in 1955. In 1958 Smith returned to New York, firstly as Director of the External Relations Division of the UN Office of Public Information and later as Director of Press and Publications. In 1968 Smith was again appointed director of the London Information Centre where he remained until his retirement from the United Nations in 1975.