Martin Rickerd

UK consul general to Atlanta

Martin Rickerd has been Her Majesty's Consul-General at Atlanta since October, 2005. Martin was educated as a child at British Army schools in Malaysia and Germany before attending private schools in the UK. He joined Her Majesty's Diplomatic Service in 1972, serving at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) London before being assigned to the UK Delegation to NATO (Brussels, Belgium) in 1975. He was transferred to Wellington, New Zealand in 1978. In 1980 he returned to London to serve as Deputy Chief of Staff to a Minister in the FCO before being posted in 1982 to Barbados, where his duties took him to much of the Eastern Caribbean. From 1986 to 1990 he was responsible for press and political work at the British Consulate General in Milan, Italy. In the early 1990s he was head of the FCO's International Energy section and subsequently head of section in South East Asia Department. He was Head of Chancery [political section] at the British High Commission in Singapore from 1995 to 1998, when he returned to the UK to take up a secondment to Standard Chartered Bank at its London headquarters. From 2000 to 2003 he was Deputy Head of Mission and Consul at the British Embassy in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire (also working in Liberia, Burkina Faso and Niger). Returning to London, he was Head of the North America Team in the FCO, dealing with the USA and Canada, until July 2005. In this capacity he oversaw arrangements for President Bush's State Visit to the UK in 2003. He was appointed a Member of the Royal Victorian Order (MVO) in 1985 and an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2004.