Donald St Clair Gainer was educated at
Charterhouse and then in Germany and France. He joined the British Consular Service in 1915 and was vice-consul successively in several towns in Norway (
Narvik,
Vardø,
Christianssand,
Tromsø,
Bergen), then in
Havana where he was
chargé d'affaires between ambassadors. After serving at
Rotterdam and
Munich he was sent in 1929 to set up a new consular post at Breslau (now Wrocław, western Poland). He was
Consul-General in Mexico 1931–32, then at Munich 1932–38 and Vienna 1938–39. The German government (which annexed Austria in 1938) expelled Gainer in 1939 in a
tit-for-tat reprisal for the expulsion of the German consul at Liverpool. Gainer was appointed
Minister to Venezuela in 1939 and promoted to
Ambassador in 1944. A few weeks later he was appointed ambassador to Brazil. He left Brazil in 1947 to a complimentary column from
The Times correspondent in Rio de Janeiro and transferred to be ambassador to Poland. His final post was
Permanent Under-Secretary (PUS) in charge of the German section at the
Foreign Office 1950–51 (normally the PUS is the civil servant in charge of the Foreign Office, but at this time the German section was so important that its head had PUS rank). Gainer retired from the Foreign Office in 1951 and was chief executive of the International Road Federation 1951–57. He was chairman of the
Anglo-Brazilian Society 1955–64. Sir D.St.Clair Gainer is finely drawn by Patrick-Leigh Fermor as the British consul in Munich who bailed him out with a new passport - to replace the one which was stolen - and a five-pound note, returned a year later by Leigh-Fermor from Constantinople. ==Honours==