Ivan "Vane" Stefan Ivanović (9 June 1913 – 4 April 1999) was a Yugoslav-British athlete, shipowner, political activist, diplomat, writer and philanthropist.
His father, Ivan Rikard Ivanović, was originally born with the surname Kraus but like so many Jewish families feeling persecuted by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, they changed their name and converted to Catholicism.
Whereas his family background clearly contributed to the development of Ivanović's strong Yugoslav identity, his life in Britain and the education he received there at Westminster School and at Peterhouse, Cambridge (where he read economics) made him a staunch Anglophile.
A well-known athlete, Ivanović was a member of the Yugoslav team at the 1936 Summer Olympics held in Berlin, running the 110-metre and 400-metre hurdles.
[5][6] Even though most of the fleet of Yugoslav Lloyd had either been sunk or captured by this point, there were still enough independently owned Yugoslavian ships participating in the Allied effort under flags of convenience.
In his memoirs, Ivanović explained why he did not return to his occupied country to join Josip Broz Tito's or Draža Mihailović's resistance movements: "I had no desire to forget the enemy and engage in a fratricidal war among my fellow countrymen, especially as I did not wholly agree with either side."
After the war, and despite the fact that most of his pre-war fleet had been either destroyed or nationalized by the new Yugoslav authorities, Ivanović resumed a successful career in shipping.
Through this organization and as a private individual he helped innumerable refugees, students, artists and political dissidents escape Tito's dictatorship.
[7] During the Cold War years, along with other like-minded Yugoslavs, Ivanović organized many discussions about the fate of his homeland, which led to the two-volume collection "A Democratic Alternative", published in 1963, which warned that the establishment of independent states in the Balkans would spawn 'fatal conflicts'.
[8] Ivanović would continue to help his fellow countrymen right up until his death, sponsoring a number of postgraduate students who fled the 1990s conflict in Yugoslavia, and was also one of the founders of Jean Monnet's European Movement, heading the Yugoslav Committee for more than three decades.
In October 1939[11] Ivanović married June Fisher with whom he had two sons, Ivan Božidar ("Božo") and Andrija; and one daughter, Minja.