Sir David Victor Kelly GCMG MC (14 September 1891 – 27 March 1959) was a British diplomat who was Minister to Switzerland and Ambassador to Argentina, Turkey, and the Soviet Union.
Kelly was educated at St Paul's School, London, and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was a demy (scholar) and gained a first class degree in modern history in 1913.
Kelly passed the entrance examination for the Foreign Office in 1914 but on the outbreak of the First World War he volunteered for the army and was commissioned in the Leicestershire Regiment.
[1] After the war Kelly joined the Diplomatic Service[2] and served in Buenos Aires, Lisbon, Mexico, Brussels, Stockholm and Cairo.
In 1929 he married his second wife, Marie-Noële de Jourda de Vaux, who as Lady Kelly became "a diplomatic hostess, traveler and writer ... one of the grandes dames of British diplomacy ... [who] presided with great panache over embassies in Bern, Buenos Aires and Ankara"[10] As Marie Noele Kelly she wrote five books including her autobiography, Dawn to Dusk (Hutchinson, London, 1960) with a preface by Rebecca West, a close friend.