It was his quiet rational advocacy rather than my more intuitive approach that

It was his quiet, rational advocacy rather than my more intuitive approach that convinced a non-pacifist majority of the moral and political case against nuclear weapons. This was long- term diplomacy preparing for the day after tomorrow.I served with Sydney Bailey on the Church of England working party that wrote The Church and the Bomb (1982). Rhetorical condemnation was never part of his armoury.Perhaps Bailey's most creative initiative was the convening from 1952 to 1976 of 10-day conferences of diplomats from most of the nations of the world, but particularly bringing together in a confidential setting senior representatives of nations that were not on talking terms; Arabs and Israelis, for instance, long before the present thaw. His apparent closeness to those in power and even those with military responsibility was not always understood by his fellow pacifists. He had a deep understanding of the problems and limitations of power. He never sought it for himself but empathised with those who did, even when, more often than not, he disagreed with them.

Whitehall - and political leaders elsewhere - valued his advice even when they did not take it. Despite his physical disability he did not shun strenuous travel.He played a characteristically unobtrusive part in the establishment of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the Conference on Christian Approaches to Defence and Disarmament and the establishment at King's College London of a lectureship on the ethical problems of war. Supported after 1960 by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, he was actively involved in peace negotiations in the Middle East, in Ireland and many other places. I came to know him as a patient but demanding mentor and colleague in the International Affairs Division of the British Council of Churches, which he chaired with an unusual mixture of modesty and authority. To some who did not know him well, his sharp mind could seem intimidating.From 1954 to 1958 Bailey had served with his wife as full-time staff members of the Quaker United Nations Office in New York.

He became a very personal diplomat, a consultant to people in positions of responsibility at home and abroad, a self-effacing mediator in places of conflict and an exacting member of numerous non-governmental organisations. He published 17 books in all.Bailey's disciplined intellectual passion was matched by his determination to turn his scholarship to practical use. He wrote definitive texts on the General Assembly, the Security Council and the Secretariat There followed his two-volume How Wars Ended (1982). However, his principal work was centred on the United Nations and disarmament. On his return from China he married Brenda Friedrich, Quaker daughter of an English mother and a German father who had been imprisoned in Buchenwald for helping persecuted Jews. So began a lifelong and highly productive partnership.It did not take long for Bailey to become a competent self-taught political scientist, beginning with authoritative work on the constitutions and parliamentary systems of Britain and the Commonwealth. His uncompromising intellectual honesty gave to all he did a quality of critical and self- critical analysis that was always in solidarity with the whole human family in its predicament.