The Guardian, 03 July 2013
After three decades as a civil servant, Sir John Burgh, who has died aged 87 after suffering from pneumonia, finally achieved the happiness of becoming his own boss. From 1980 to 1987 he was director general of the British Council, and after that till his retirement in 1996 he was president of Trinity College, Oxford. Thus an Austrian-Jewish refugee who had arrived unable to speak English ended up leading the major body disseminating British culture around the world, and a boy who had left school at 15 ended up heading a college at the country's oldest university.
His appointment at the British Council was not greeted with universal acclaim by its staff. Margaret Thatcher was prime minister and the council faced significant cuts. However, by using his considerable skills and contacts John saw off threats to the budget and reasserted the council's cultural and bridge-building significance. In 1982 he was knighted.
In his early years in Britain, John was reluctant to talk about his origins or acknowledge his Jewish identity. It was not something that he had felt strongly in his native Vienna. His father, a barrister, who died suddenly from leukaemia when John was 11, had converted to Roman Catholicism, sent John to a Roman Catholic school and brought the children up to assimilate.
However, as he grew in confidence, he came to feel that "given the Holocaust, it is very difficult for me if somebody says to me, 'Are you a Jew?' to deny it, though in fact I don't feel it, and that has been a contradiction within me for a long time … My upbringing coupled with forced emigration from Austria meant I wanted to be secure as an Englishman."
When Germany annexed Austria in 1938, John's mother, a talented pianist, used her Quaker connections to get John and his sister, Lucy, to Britain, following them six months later. Relatives who were unable to leave perished in the death camps.
John picked up English quickly and passed his school certificate examinations at Sibford, a Quaker school in Oxfordshire. He then worked in munitions factories until the end of the war, when he resumed his studies, initially on correspondence courses, later as a part-time evening student and eventually, in 1947, as a full-time student at the LSE. There he studied government under Harold Laski, gained a BSc Econ honours degree and took a year out as president of the student union.
By the time he joined the administrative branch of the civil service in 1950, he was naturalised. He worked primarily in trade, economic affairs and employment departments, becoming private secretary and later principal private secretary to ministers including Derek Heathcote-Amory, George Brown, Barbara Castle, Robert Carr and Shirley Williams. All of them respected John's analytical mind and dependability and, as Williams put it, "unquestioned integrity".
His overriding passion was for music and he played the piano regularly, often accompanying friends. He served at various times as secretary to the opera committee at Covent Garden, chair of the exam-setting Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, and vice-chairman of the Yehudi Menuhin school. Having been pleasantly surprised to receive a reply from the conductor Sir John Barbirolli to an appreciative letter after a concert, he was himself indefatigable in his support of younger musicians. From 1993 onwards, he chaired the New Berlioz Edition trust.
His many friends miss his charm, insatiable curiosity and the twinkle in his eye. In 1957, he married Ann Sturge. She and their two daughters, Clare and Alison, survive him.
• John Charles Burgh, public servant, born 9 December 1925; died 12 April 2013