As managing director of the ‘Richmond and Twickenham Times’ group of newspapers Richard Dimbleby was a model employer. The General Secretary of the Printing and Kindred Trades Federation recalls:
From the start he took a practical interest in the welfare of his employees. When they were ill, he wrote to them personally, sent them fruit and flowers, and on appropriate occasions made specialist treatment available. In a score of ways he showed that he cared. For instance, he arranged for the Italian-born wife of one of his employees who was seriously ill to visit her homeland along with her four children, and after she died he continued to take a helpful interest in the family.
When, very soon after he took control of the paper, Mr Dimbleby learned that a retiring employee – to whom he was making a presentation – would not be receiving a pension from the firm, he not only put the matter right but instituted a contributory pension scheme. Later he subsidised a fund so that employees did not lose financially when away sick. Shocked when two of his men died suddenly, he organised free life insurance so that the widows of those with three or more years service would receive £1,000.
My first meeting with Mr Dimbleby was in 1959 when I appeared on Panorama in a programme dealing with a national printing and newspaper dispute involving a claim for a forty-hour week. He made very clear to me in conversation his sympathy with our unions’ struggle for better conditions and he introduced the shorter working week into his firm in advance of the conclusion of negotiations. Later, when a national agreement for a third week’s holiday was reached, Mr Dimbleby not only most readily operated the terms of the settlement but gave even longer holidays to his employees.
In these and many other ways, Mr Dimbleby made sure that a share of the results of the success of his newspapers was passed on to his employees. The printing trade unions will always remember with gratitude the example he set as an employer and the lead he gave to the industry. I am sure that, so far as his newspaper activities are concerned, Mr Dimbleby would ask for no better tribute than that just paid to him by his staff who have described him as ‘a friend and truly human employer’.
Another example of his personal kindness was recalled in a letter to the ‘Daily Mirror’ dictated by Una Byfields:
Few people may know personally how kind Richard Dimbleby was, but I do. I have been a patient in hospital since I was ten – I am now forty-three – and I am disabled.
For the past three or four years Mr Dimbleby has sent money so that I could have a lovely holiday at a Caister-on-Sea holiday camp. He came down and made us happy and took me out in the car and he wrote to me in hospital.
All the patients who go to the camp will miss him very much indeed. He was a grand gentleman.