William Erskine, second son of
Walter Erskine, 11th Earl of Mar, was educated at
Eton College and
Magdalen College, Oxford. He joined the
Foreign Office in 1894 and served at Buenos Aires, Tehran, Rome and Stockholm where he was
chargé d'affaires in 1913. He was posted to Athens with the rank of
Counsellor of Embassy 1913–17 where he was British delegate to the international financial commission which had been established following the
Greco-Turkish War (1897) to oversee the public finances of Greece. He was Counsellor at Rome 1917–19,
Minister to Cuba 1919–21 (and
concurrently to Haiti and the Dominican Republic), Minister to Bulgaria 1921–27, and Minister to Poland 1928–29, continuing there as
Ambassador 1929–34 after the post was raised from
legation to
embassy. He was the first ambassador to Poland since the time of King
Jan III Sobieski in the seventeenth century. ==Honours==