BRITAIN'S NEW AMBASSADOR

Reporting to Washington to replace Sir Roger Makins as British Ambassador to the U.S.:

Sir Harold Anthony Caccia, 50, who, thanks to Suez, walks into the tensest period of Anglo-American relations in a generation:

Family & Early Life: Greatgrandfather was a political emigre who fled Austrian rule in Italy after Napoleonic Wars, settled down in England in Lamb House, Rye (later the home of Novelist Henry James) with his bride, a cousin of Queen Victoria's first Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne. Young Harold Caccia (pronounced Catch-a) went to Eton, graduated from Trinity College, Oxford, in 1928.

Career: At 30, became assistant private secretary to Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. First foreign assignment: Peking. While charge d'affaires in Athens in 1941, he escaped the Nazis by sailing for Crete on a yacht, was rescued when the yacht was sunk by German planes. During assignment to Allied North African Headquarters, he worked with many Americans now in key spots in Washington, including Dwight Eisenhower. Later he became British head of the Anglo-American political section of Allied Control Commission in Italy, then, in 1944, troubleshooter in liberated Greece. After the war, he helped reorganize Britain's Foreign Service in line with "Eden Reforms," then got plenty of experience wrangling with the Russians when he was sent to Vienna, in 1949, first as minister, later as ambassador and high commissioner. Since 1954, he has been a Deputy Under Secretary of State in the Foreign Office, accompanying successive Foreign Secretaries and Prime Ministers to major conferences abroad, e.g., Geneva, Washington, Bangkok.

Honors: Knight Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George, bestowed for especially distinguished foreign service.

Personality: A passionate adherent to the Foreign Office's "cult of anonymity," bald, grey-eyed Careerman Caccia is a walking file on British policy problems, works quietly and effectively behind scenes, is quick and droll at the conference table. When the Russians accused the British of building a bomber base in postwar Vienna ("It was really only a flivver strip"), Caccia said that he would deliver a case of whisky if they could land a twin-engined plane there, added: "You pay the funeral expenses." The Russians dropped the complaint. Speaks French, German, Italian, Greek and a little Mandarin Chinese, likes shooting and tennis, sometimes takes a whack at cricket.

Married to Part-time Painter Anne Barstow, has three children: David, 20, of the Coldstream Guards; Clarissa, 17, student at the Sorbonne; Antonia, 9. No stuffed shirt, he has an impressive reputation for ability to short-circuit gobbledygook, is a good mixer, relishes a chance to live in Washington, where he feels the steamy summer climate will be no great bother because, as he hears it: "You go from one air-conditioned room to another." Said he on his arrival: "If the prospects of peace and justice are to be good, it will depend on the extent" to which the United States and Britain "harmonize" their policies.

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