Joining the British Foreign Service after Oxford, John Julius Cooper served in Yugoslavia and Lebanon and as a member of the British delegation to the Disarmament Conference in Geneva. He completed his national service in the Royal Navy before taking a degree in French and Russian at New College, Oxford. After the war, he studied at the University of Strasbourg while his father was ambassador to France. In 1942 he returned to Britain, where he attended Eton College. He attended Upper Canada College, Toronto, Canada, while spending his holidays with the family of William S. Kennedy, offered to bring him to the United States with other evacuee children on board the SS Washington. In 1940 they decided to send him away after the US ambassador to Britain, Joseph P. Because his father as Minister of Information was high on the Nazi enemies list of British politicians, Norwich's parents feared for their son's safety in the event of a German invasion of Britain. He was educated at Egerton House School in Dorset Square, London, later becoming a boarder at the school when it was evacuated to Northamptonshire before the outbreak of the Second World War.
Through his father, he was descended from King William IV and his mistress Dorothea Jordan.
Such was his mother's fame as an actress and beauty that the birth attracted a crowd outside the nursing home and hundreds of letters of congratulations. He was given the name "Julius" in part because he was born by caesarean section. He was the son of the Conservative politician and diplomat Duff Cooper, later Viscount Norwich, and of Lady Diana Manners, a celebrated beauty and society figure. Norwich was born at the Alfred House Nursing Home on Portland Place in Marylebone, London, on 15 September 1929. John Julius Cooper, 2nd Viscount Norwich, CVO (15 September 1929 – 1 June 2018), known as John Julius Norwich, was an English popular historian, travel writer, and television personality.
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