Baron Strang, of Stonesfield in the County of Oxford, is a title in the Peerage of the United Kingdom. It was created on 16 January 1954 for the prominent British diplomat William Strang (2 January 1893 – 27 May 1978).
William Strang, 1st Baron Strang, served as a leading adviser to the British Government from the 1930s to the 1950s and as Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office from 1949 to 1953. He was the first career civil servant (rather than an ambassador) to attain that position. During his Foreign Office career, he was involved in the Munich Agreement, the Moscow Conference of 1939, the European Advisory Commission, the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty, and the post-war occupation of Germany.
Educated at Palmer's School, University College London, and the Sorbonne, Strang served in the First World War as a captain in the Worcestershire Regiment. He joined the Diplomatic Service in 1919 and held postings in Belgrade, Moscow, and various roles at the Foreign Office. He was present at major Allied conferences during the Second World War and later served as political adviser to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery in Germany.
He was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 1918, and was later made a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG, 1932), a Companion of the Order of the Bath (CB, 1939), a Knight Commander of St Michael and St George (KCMG, 1943), a Knight Grand Cross of St Michael and St George (GCMG, 1950), and a Knight Commander of the Bath (KCB, 1953). He was raised to the peerage in 1954.
Lord Strang married Elsie Wynne Jones in 1920, with whom he had one son (Colin, who succeeded him as 2nd Baron Strang) and one daughter. He died in 1978 at the age of 85.
The title is not to be confused with the much older title Baron Strange (with an "e"), which is a separate peerage in the Peerage of England dating back to 1299.
