Thomas Hildebrand Preston

He was a posthumous recipient of the British Hero of the Holocaust award for saving Jewish lives in Lithuania in 1940 by issuing documents that permitted them to travel.

He emigrated to New Zealand with his father who started farming at Timaru, but was educated in England at Westminster School and at Trinity Hall, Cambridge where he studied Russian.

[2] At a telegraph office on 18 July, he attempted to send the message "The Tsar Nicholas the Second was shot last night" to the Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour; the Bolshevik military commissar Filipp Goloshchyokin struck out Preston's text, rewriting "The hangman Tsar Nicholas was shot last night – a fate he richly deserved.

Following the temporary severance of the United Kingdom's diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in 1927, he left on 3 June 1927, being transferred to the post of consul in Turin, which he held from 23 September 1927 to 3 July 1929.

In this position, he provided 800 Jews with legal travel certificates, a few hundred of which were able to cross the Baltic Sea to neutral Sweden.

[7] Other diplomats in Kaunas that issued documents that permitted Jews to travel included Chiune Sugihara of Japan and Jan Zwartendijk, honorary consul of the Netherlands.

In September 1940, he was transferred to Istanbul on the dissolution of his previous post following the Soviet occupation of Lithuania and de facto loss of Lithuanian independence.

In 1958, Preston composed a ceremonial march intended to accompany visitors to NATO headquarters at the Palais de Chaillot, Paris.

[11][6] Preston's efforts were recognised in 2018 in the exhibition "Building Bridges" at the Embassy of the United Kingdom, Vilnius,[6] and in 2022 at the Kaunas Holocaust Memorial Day.