This book, like much in broadcasting, is the product of a team. Busy colleagues, some in the BBC and some now elsewhere, have gladly made time to search memories and record shared aspects of Richard Dimbleby’s versatile broadcasting career. Several of them are professional writers. All have refused payment, or directed that it should be made to the Richard Dimbleby Cancer Fund, King Street, Richmond, Surrey, to which all the proceeds of this book will be given.
I am indebted to the Editors of The Times, the Daily Mail, the Sunday Telegraph, the Spectator and New Christian for permission freely to reprint articles which appeared in their pages, to the Managing Directors of Associated Newspapers Ltd and Hodder & Stoughton Ltd for allowing me to reproduce writings by Richard Dimbleby originally published in the Sunday Dispatch and The Frontiers are Green, and to Avril Anderson, the author of the poem ‘Tribute’. They too have waived payment for their copyright.
Mrs Richard Dimbleby has kindly supplied many photographs. David Dimbleby has given wise guidance.
Jennifer Jeremy, Stephanie Johnson and Hugh Tosh have given splendid assistance in preparing illustrations and tracing broadcasts.
The manuscript of this book could not have been completed within seven weeks of Richard Dimbleby’s death without fast and accurate typing, which has been done by Gwen Willson.
To all of them and to my colleagues in BBC Publications I record my thanks.
David Dimbleby, who had been born in 1938, was named after his godfather, David Howarth. As a fellow rebel Haworth shared the first four years of Richard Dimbleby’s broadcasting career.
Richard set about reforming the presentation of the news by starting a kind of underground movement, infecting people here and there among the staff with his own excitement at his own idea of radio news reporting. I was drawn into it early because he discovered I was prone, like himself, to wild enthusiasm, and because I was in the sound recording section, which itself was new.
We had two mobile recording units, and Richard had his eye on them from the very beginning. Now, when one can almost put a tape recorder in one’s pocket, it is odd to remember that the first of these units – they both recorded on discs – was in a converted laundry van, and the second, the perfected BBC product, filled a seven-ton truck and had a crew of four. Programme departments, at reasonable notice on the proper form, could book these outfits from us. What Richard wanted was to be able to ring up, at any time of the day or night, and rush off with one of them, then and there, wherever there was news.
The BBC was then not organised for anything so brash and spontaneous. It was nobody’s job to go with him: so it had to start in an amateurish, unofficial way. There were six or eight of us in Administration and Engineering who had the kind of temperament it needed. ‘It’s no use asking anyone, they’ll all be warm in bed. Let’s get the story and argue afterwards’ – that was his attitude, so off we went, usually after a day’s work, wherever there was a shipwreck, a flood, a story of any kind that we could conceivably reach with the laundry van or the seven-tonner.
We drove like lunatics all night, recorded his descriptions and interviews, and drove again to the nearest regional studios in time for the next night’s bulletins. I had a sports car which was vintage even then, and Richard and I often went in that, with the recording truck lumbering along as best it could: I remember tearing up the Great North Road in the middle of the night while Richard contentedly slept with his head on my lap underneath the steering wheel. And he was right: when we got the story, nobody did complain – provided we also did the full-time jobs we were being paid for.
There was one period when, for fear we missed anything, he persuaded Reuters to telephone himself or me at home, on alternate nights, if anything reportable happened. But that did not last long. Reuters night men never quite got the idea that we were tied to a lorry, and after Richard had been woken up four or five times in a night with items like a serious drought in Siberia, he let the arrangement lapse.
The cumbrousness of the lorries and their administration was his millstone. To BBC engineers quality of reproduction was all-important then; to him the only thing that mattered was to get the story and put it quickly on the air, no matter how. He and I were both convinced that a simple recording apparatus, of adequate quality, could be fitted into an ordinary car which we could drive ourselves. Or to be precise, not an ordinary car: he dreamed of something fast and showy, say a Lagonda, with an illuminated sign bbc news on the front of it, something that people would remember and expect to see. We even plotted (he loved plots) to have the recording gear made in secret and put it in the back of my car and broadcast its discs without telling anyone how we had made them; but that fell through because neither of us could afford it. It sometimes seemed hopeless to move the BBC, and at one time we tried – or plotted – to sell ourselves and our ideas to Ed Murrow of CBS, whom Richard greatly admired.
Nevertheless, by some years of lost sleep we did manage to cover a strange variety of events with those two recording trucks, and Richard’s concept of ‘our observer’ slowly began to be established. I think what might now be called the break-through for this kind of radio reporting was the night the Crystal Palace caught fire. For us there could not have been a more glorious bit of news. It started just after the final editions of the evening papers: it was exclusively our own for the rest of the night. We rushed down to Sydenham in my car, the laundry van came in behind the fire engines. Richard with his journalist’s instinct found the chief of the London Fire Brigade himself (‘David, his name’s Firebrace, life is perfect’) and he vanished into the front entrance of the blazing building. I went in at the back, just in case he never came out again.
As the time for the News came on, we found we could not possibly get away with our records again through the crowds. There was only one thing – broadcast by telephone: it had never been done before. By luck, a BBC man much senior to ourselves had turned up from somewhere. He gave the authority. Our engineers disconnected the telephone in a café (I seem to remember that they wrenched it out by its roots) and tied our recording amplifiers to it. And Richard, hopping with excitement, black and wet and minus his eyebrows, was on the air direct, with the roar of the flames, the shouting and the bells. The broadcast brought out most of the population of South London to see the fun, and that displeased the fire brigade. The quality of the telephone line displeased the BBC engineering division. But Richard was ecstatic: the event had proved his point – that if we got the story, it didn’t matter how.
By 1938 his ideas were fairly well established among listeners and in the BBC itself. We were at Heston Airport when Chamberlain landed from Munich with his piece of paper, and we recorded ‘Peace in our time’ for television as well as for radio. And immediately after we made our first foray abroad. An international force was supposed to be going to the Sudetenland to supervise its absorption into Germany, and the Germans gave us permission to go there too. So did the BBC, which surprised us even more. Neither we nor the international force ever got there – we waited in Germany for a fortnight or so – but I specially recollect that journey because the pomposity and false dignity of Nazi officials set a spark to the boyish naughtiness in Richard’s character. We were met at the frontier by a delegation in vast Mercedes cars, led by a young Aryan from the Ministry of Propaganda. I see Richard being swept into Aachen in this equipage like a visiting potentate, dispensing Nazi salutes and Heil Hitlers, and then, alighting, clicking his heels and bowing to anyone who would take notice. Who else, at that moment in history – and with his physique – would have insisted that the man from the Propaganda Ministry should teach him to goose-step?
We went first to the Hotel Dreesen in Godesberg, where Hitler had stayed to meet Chamberlain. We thought Hitler was still there, but he had gone, and all we were shown was the Fuhrer’s truckle bed, and the new green water closet Herr Dreesen had installed for him: the Fuhrer, such a simple man at heart, had been angry at the expense. Richard wrote a broadcast, tongue in cheek, about the Fuhrer’s taste in plumbing, and we went on to Hamburg. Richard naturally asked to be shown the night spots of St Pauli.
At the Zillertal guests were invited to conduct the Bavarian band. The baton was handed to Richard. They agreed to try ‘A bicycle made for two’, and the band found that Richard knew how to conduct. Then (and remember this was a time of considerable tension between Germany and Britain) Richard made the Bavarian band play ‘Tipperary’. A Norwegian from the next table came over, bowed, shook Richard’s hand, and congratulated him on his courage in calling for that tune at such a time.
Radio Times for week commencing 28 January 1940
When war came, in September 1939, Richard was perfectly ready for it. He had won his way by then: we had an ordinary car, with recording gear on the back seat. A week before war was declared, he took the car to Paris, with two pots of camouflage paint, and left it there in what he thought was a bomb-proof garage. After the declaration, he and I, with Charles Gardner and an engineer named Harvey Sarney, went down Regent Street and bought ourselves uniforms at the BBC’s expense. It was both emotional and funny when we appeared in them at Broadcasting House. Uniform was still unfamiliar, and nobody could resist a laugh at Richard dressed up as a soldier; yet senior officials were dewy-eyed when they wished us God-speed. We had our picture on the cover of the Radio Times, looking (it seems to me now) absurdly young and shiny, and we quite expected to die for radio.
But when we reached France, of course, there was no war at all. The British army was starting to dig itself in on the Belgian frontier, miles from any Germans. Finding no battle there, we went right down the Maginot Line, into the wintry forests of Alsace and up the Rhine, begging the French to fire a gun so that we could record it; but they never would, in case the Germans fired one back at them. So we were driven to sending back strictly censored reports on obscure army units, broadcasting ENSA concerts, and arranging quizzes and spelling bees in which soldiers competed against their families at home.
We worked like demons at these rather uncongenial tasks. What drove us on, I think, was that we were on our own at last, with a vast field of broadcasting all to ourselves, and we were selfishly afraid that the BBC would send out a huge unwieldy staff and rob us of the shooting war when it really started. So we took on every job our head office suggested, and every one we could think of ourselves. The climax, as I remember it, was that Christmas Day when three of us – perhaps there was an extra engineer – did five major broadcasts, driving from one to the next on roads of black ice: a quiz, a church service, a piece in the traditional round-the-world programme, and two concerts, one English and one French. Nobody but Richard would have attempted anything so crazy, or been able to persuade his colleagues it was possible in one day; and I doubt if anyone else would have brought it off.
Again, it is the gaiety and the trivialities that I remember best in France, in spite of all the discomfort and the bitter cold that everyone in the Expeditionary Force remembers of that winter. There was a day in the city of Strasbourg, which had been evacuated in a panic months before. Richard had prepared a soulful piece about the deserted city, the dusty goods still displayed in the windows of the shops, the café tables still set out on the pavements, the abandoned homes. We set up our gear in a silent empty square, not a being in sight, and I gave the usual cue to Sarney: ‘We’ll start in ten seconds from now’. On the ninth second, a jaunty French soldier came marching round a corner and gave a garlicky belch which echoed round the square. The silence, the belch, and Richard’s helpless laughter were all on that record. I wonder if the Germans captured it: they got our car and all our equipment in the end.
And there were the horrors of phoney war broadcasting too, especially the quizzes, and most especially of all the one on Christmas Day. On those shows an army censor sat with us in case we revealed military secrets, of which the most carefully guarded was supposed to be the location of the British force. (Richard always longed to start ‘Well, here we are in Arras’, just to see what the censor’s orders were – to shoot him dead, or smash the microphone, or what?) We put the questions to the competitors at home in England, and the quiz-master at home put his to our team of soldiers, who that morning were in a merry and unmilitary mood. We had prepared a set of harmless questions, but we listened with horror as the alternate questions came from London. ‘What did Mary Tudor say would be found lying in her heart?’ Answer: the shockingly unmentionable name of Calais.
It went from bad to worse: I remember every mark of dismay on the censor’s face, and Richard’s lucid comments whenever our microphone was dead. And then I became aware that we had only nine competitors, instead of ten. The tenth had fallen under the table and was being sick. Instantly after that broadcast, while Richard rushed off somewhere else, I had to eject our derelict team, admit a sober congregation and introduce a church service in the same hall. It was a day of splendid confusion and delightfully near disasters, just the sort of day that Richard thrived on.
King George VI with General M. G. Gamelin
But what I remember most of all is his influence on other people, the particular kind of glow he radiated, the sense of an organism much more alive than most. Thousands of other men will remember it too from that winter in France, for by the spring there were very few army units so remote that he had not been to see them – and there was nobody in Britain, of course, who did not know his voice. I cannot describe that influence, but perhaps I can suggest it. I saw him at that period – he must have been twenty-six or twenty-seven – with every kind of person: King George VI, the C-in-C, the old French generals of Maginot Line mentality, everyone down to the dimmest of privates in the Pioneer Corps. He was always himself with them all. And I remember standing with a Brigadier, watching him interviewing some soldiers. I said something about his ability to get on with all kinds of people. ‘Of course,’ said the Brigadier, with a sudden astonishing intensity of feeling, ‘we all adore him.’ That was the secret, I think.
In France Dimbleby perfected his broadcasting technique and his French. But he chafed at the lack of military action and envied his colleague Edward Ward broadcasting from the Winter War in Finland. In April 1940 he left by flying boat for Cairo and the British Army in the Middle East.
From then on his chronicle of war despatches reads like a history of the war itself. He now saw plenty of action. He entered Bardia with the British troops and told how Italian officers and men offered to surrender to him. He went down to Khartoum, and was on his way to Abyssinia when he was struck down with diphtheria. He covered fighting in Greece and Albania, and a surrender in Syria. He lived cheek by jowl with German intelligence agents in Istanbul and was ambushed in Persia by guerillas. He travelled 100,000 miles in over a dozen countries, much of it in company with his recording engineer F. W. Chignall.
Once during the retreat back to the Alamein line their car stalled in deep sand. For twenty-four hours they had not seen another car. They took down the engine without success and Dimbleby decided one of them must start walking due north in search of a tow from some other British vehicle. He said, ‘Chig, we’ll toss up for it, and you throw the coin.’ It fell to Richard to go and many hours later he returned with a tow. Chignall recalls: ‘The real significance of this incident was that Richard, the army driver and I all knew that Tobruk had been retaken by the Germans, and that they had already put into use the transport they had captured from us. During the twenty-four hours we were broken down we were cut off from any contact with the British Army so anything Richard met could easily have been a probing force of Germans. I have always kept the coin I tossed that day.’
Under his uncle, Richard Dimbleby became the editorial director of the family newspapers. Eventually, with his mother’s co-operation, he bought out Percy Dimbleby’s interest and acquired the sole control of them. Besides the family papers, as a freelance he had the additional cushion of a three-year contract from Sir Alexander Korda to write films, though no film scripts were in fact asked for. But in the first instance his resignation from the BBC staff was a gamble. Television, closed for the duration of the war, had not yet reopened. Dimbleby’s freelance broadcasting life started modestly with some schools book programmes and a regular newsletter to North America, but very soon developed.
He was greatly sustained then, as ever, by his most fortunate marriage. Dilys Dimbleby, as a journalist herself, understood the demands of his career, and from the day of their wedding in 1937 was a constant source of professional help and advice. She was also the only critic he trusted. She took over the management of all his professional affairs. She arranged his contracts, organised his diary, and negotiated his fees. On many occasions she also accompanied him on work both in England and abroad, not only acting as a hostess for him, but sitting beside him during commentaries, organising his notes, passing him messages. In the early days of State commentaries Richard used to get letters from women viewers grumbling that his descriptions of the Queen’s clothes were hopelessly inadequate. From then on, whenever possible, Dilys was there to jot down accurately – ‘pale blue tulle’ instead of ‘a sort of light blue cotton’.
They had in all four children, David (1938), Jonathan (1944), Nicholas (1946) and Sally (1947), and their family life was singularly happy. His secretarial work was done by his sister Patricia (Mrs John Haines) who spent two days a week at his house acting as his personal assistant. As Richard prospered he added to his roles of broadcaster, writer and newspaper proprietor those of chairman of Puritan Films and Film Partnerships, chairman of the Commonwealth Group of Unit Trusts, and farmer. In all these enterprises Dilys was his active partner. She appeared with him, and the rest of the family, in films they made to demonstrate the merits of different holiday places at home and abroad, and she sometimes appeared in the television studio herself.
In July 1996 Panorama included a discussion based on the book ‘Getting Married’ published by the British Medical Association. In the studio Richard interviewed a doctor, and then an engaged couple. Finally he interviewed an anonymous witness:
Dimbleby: Now, one more opinion before we finish, that of a woman who has been happily married for nineteen years and has four children. You may perhaps some of you know her. I’d like to ask you if you’d give us your opinion now whether you think anything has been left out that should have gone in.
Married Woman: Well, I think the only thing that has been left out is something that really couldn’t go in any book, and that’s the question of the heart; I mean what is in your own heart really governs the whole of marriage, and I think that that you couldn’t put in. But I think where the book fails, and fails dismally, is that it doesn’t make a reality of marriage. It’s rather suggested that if you follow the rules laid down, and if you follow the pattern set by the writers, all will go well and everything will be blissful. I think that’s nonsense and I think it would be awfully dull if marriage was like that.
He then revealed the identity of his guest:
Dimbleby: Well, thank you very much. May I say that the last witness and I have been very happily married for nineteen years.
It was in the last five years of Richard’s life, when he was suffering from cancer, that Dilys played her noblest role. During that time she was a constant support and encouragement to him and her determination and sagacity played an immeasurable part in his insistence in carrying on his broadcasting work as though nothing had happened. Throughout those five years she alone knew of all the pain and the depression that he suffered. She bore the burden of his illness with him and shared his public cheerfulness. In the last three months of his life Dilys was constantly with him, often staying the night at the hospital and always there eighteen hours a day, helping to nurse him, encouraging him, and talking to him about plans for the future. She was a wife he deserved.
At Danley farm, Lynchmere, Surrey, with Nicholas, Jonathan, Sally, David
Unknown to viewers and to most of his colleagues, from 1960 for over five years Richard Dimbleby lived with cancer. His doctors and family helped the ‘Daily Mail’ to reconstruct those five years to show how living with cancer need not be impossible:
It was early in 1960 when Richard Dimbleby first noticed he had a swelling. It wasn’t much and it wasn’t painful and he was a busy man.
Monday was a fourteen-hour day working on Panorama. Tuesday was spent at Richmond with his newspapers until the evening, when he did a Twenty Questions broadcast. Wednesday was spent working at home. Thursday and Friday he was at Richmond again, working on his newspapers.
Often he was out all day Saturday on extra jobs. He ran two film companies producing industrial films.
Richard Dimbleby was a very busy man. He ignored the swelling.
But by August 1960 the swelling had increased considerably though it still gave no pain. Dimbleby thought it best to go to his local doctor.
His doctor examined him and was in no doubt what was wrong. As he looked out of the window, wondering how best to break the news, Dimbleby said to him: ‘You needn’t tell me what it is. I know.’
Richard Dimbleby’s family and his doctors have made available the history of his case to help combat the general fear and ignorance of the disease. Many doctors believe the fight against cancer is being frustrated by the public’s treatment of it as a ‘taboo’ subject.
This is the story of five salvaged years; of what a man can achieve despite the disease; of how fear, even in a very bad case, can be overcome.
Richard Dimbleby went into St Thomas’s Hospital, London, on 15 August 1960, and was operated on the following day. The chances in favour of a complete cure at that moment were four to one – provided the original growth had not started to spread.
After the surgeon had removed the lump Dimbleby was examined carefully. He was a big man – 18 st. 7 lb. at the time – and the urologist on the case, Mr Ronald Robinson, found it difficult to feel anything under the fat of the abdomen.
But, under an anaesthetic, a mass was felt to the right side of his abdomen. The original cancer had already spread along the lymphatic glands to a new site.
The doctors decided to tackle the secondary growth with a five-week course of radiotherapy. The course of treatment began on 1 September at St Thomas’s, under Dr Ian Churchill-Davidson. Massive destructive doses of X-rays were directed at Dimbleby’s abdomen five times a week.
Five days after the treatment began Richard Dimbleby was on television to introduce a new series of Panorama. The following day he was on the radio, chairing Twenty Questions.
The affected glands shrank. On 3 October Dimbleby went in for his last dose of radiotherapy treatment after appearing on that night’s edition of Panorama. The second round in the battle seemed to have been won.
Leaving hospital for Twenty Questions after first operation for cancer, 23 August 1960
By this time the disease had become Dimbleby’s special subject. He was learning all he could about it. He arranged to see demonstrations of the machines used in treatment. He listened to all the theories about what caused cancer and discussed cancer research in detail.
His interest was insatiable. After the final treatment Dimbleby went off for a drink with a few of the hospital staff – it had become a custom and they went either to the local pub or the staff canteen – to talk some more about cancer.
The next day he was back at work at the newspapers in Richmond and he remained well and fit in every respect for the next nineteen months.
From time to time Dimbleby revisited St Thomas’s for detailed examinations – all aimed at detecting the first signs of any new growths.
He was able to work at his normal pace. In early November 1960 he went to America for Panorama, came back in time for the Festival of Remembrance Service and the Cenotaph outside broadcast for television; in December he covered the royal wedding in Brussels; in April 1961 he went to Moscow; in May he went to Rome and Naples to cover the Queen’s visit.
It was on 2 May 1962 that Dimbleby complained of a dull ache in the upper reaches of the back. He went into St Thomas’s, where the radiographs revealed that the glands were enlarged alongside the vertebrae and in the structure that stands between the lungs.
Another course of radiotherapy began. On 2 May and 5 May both areas were given radiotherapy treatment. On 7 May Dimbleby was on television as usual introducing Panorama. On 9 May he was back for another dose of radiation.
Once again the glands that appeared to be affected by cancer reverted to their former size.
The pattern of Dimbleby’s life continued uninterrupted. Before the end of the month he was in Sweden for a special edition of Panorama. He covered the Trooping the Colour ceremony, the Middlesbrough byelection, the first Telstar broadcast, King Olav’s visit to Scotland and the funeral of Queen Wilhelmina. For nine whole months he remained free of trouble.
However, in March 1963 Dimbleby began to have pain in the lower portion of the back when he was standing a lot. X-rays showed growths in the second and third lumbar (loin) vertebrae, and a further abdominal examination under a general anaesthetic on 14 March showed a recurrence of the enlargement of the glands in the earlier site in the belly.
Between 15 March and 29 March the abdomen was treated with radiotherapy, though the treatment did not prevent Dimbleby appearing as usual in his chair in Panorama.
During this period of treatment Dimbleby was given a general anaesthetic each time to reduce the risk of radiation sickness which might have resulted from the concentrated dose of radiation.
It was usual for Dimbleby to have his radiotherapy treatment on Friday evenings whenever possible. This gave him the weekend to rest in – radiotherapy treatment may have a temporary weakening effect on some patients – before Monday’s exhausting day on Panorama.
He had by now become adept at his own diagnosis. When he felt a pain he was always able to work out how the cancer had travelled from the last known site to attack the new area. Each time the doctors only confirmed his own diagnosis.
In this way, by taking a deep interest in what was happening to him, Dimbleby was coming to terms with his illness.
Dimbleby had already undergone two of the main types of treatment for cancer – radiotherapy and surgery. The third main method – hormone treatment – is mostly used in treating cancer of the breast. All these forms of treatment have advanced substantially in the past decade.
Surgery: If the growth is visible, accessible and reasonably circumscribed, it can be cut out. The great forward strides in the techniques of surgery and the use of antibiotics, transfusions and better anaesthetics have made success possible in operations that could not be attempted ten years ago.
Radiation: Certain forms of radiation cause cancer, making groups of body cells behave in the erratic way that is the characteristic of cancer. But massive doses of radiation destroy the imbalanced cells, curing the cancerous growth.
Many of the enormous machines now used in radiography rotate about the patient so that the target is always being hit from a different angle, in order to spare the skin and healthy tissues in the track of the beam. The patient feels nothing during treatment, needs only to rest for a while afterwards.
By the time of the third spell of treatment Dimbleby had been living with a particularly virulent form of cancer for three years. According to the mythology of cancer he should have been dead long before or, at least, in great agony.
In fact, at this stage, it was still possible Dimbleby might be completely cured.
Radiation and surgery techniques have developed to the point where much pain can be relieved, even when growths are too widespread or advanced to be cured. When enlarged glands, for instance, start pressing on sensory nerves, they can be irradiated sufficiently to dispel pain if not to cure.
From March 1963 until January 1965 Dimbleby had no sign that he was not free of the disease.
He went about his business with great vigour. In that period he covered Princess Alexandra’s wedding, the State visit of the King of the Belgians, the lying-in-state of Pope John, President Kennedy’s visit to Germany, the Coronation of Pope Paul, the State visit of the King of Greece, the service at Westminster Abbey for the death of President Kennedy, the Pope’s visit to Israel, special editions of Panorama from Paris and Germany, from Canada and Luxembourg, the opening of the Forth Bridge, the American election.
But in January 1965 Dimbleby began to get pains in the lower part of his back and numbness in his right flank. Radiographs showed that the eleventh and twelfth dorsal vertebrae had collapsed through destruction by secondary growths.
Between 15 January and 9 February he was given three sessions of radiotherapy, which relieved the pain. Also between 15 January and 9 February he appeared each Monday on Panorama, covered Churchill’s lying-in-state and the State funeral, and appeared in a number of programmes of reminiscences about Churchill.
Despite Dimbleby’s refusal to give in or to ease the pressure of his work through the next six months, this period was in fact the beginning of the end. The occurrence of growths was beginning to accelerate. Further secondaries were found in his diaphragm, his back and ribs.
Yet, an incident in the summer of 1965 shows that even at that late stage Dimbleby found the disease neither physically intolerable nor nerve-racking. He went off on his summer holiday feeling, as he said, ‘as fit as a fiddle’.
The Dimbleby family together with Churchill-Davidson, now a close friend, went boating in Devon.
One day off Dartmouth they ran into a nasty storm. It was a fearful moment – for the doctor.
Churchill-Davidson had already warned Dimbleby to be careful of falling while his spine was still in a weak condition. A fall could have meant instant paralysis.
David Dimbleby turned the boat into the 8 ft waves to avoid being swamped, but it was lifting sickeningly over them, then slapping hard down into the troughs between them. Richard Dimbleby stood in the wheelhouse, holding the rail, riding the waves on his tiptoes. And behind him, Churchill-Davidson’s face turned white.
As the boat lifted up and down, Dimbleby nudged his son, indicated the anxious doctor and winked.
When they got into harbour Dimbleby apologised to Churchill-Davidson for the rough ride he’d been given and said he was sorry if he’d been made seasick.
‘I wasn’t sick,’ replied Churchill-Davidson, ‘I was just worried about you. But if your back can stand that it can stand anything. I shouldn’t worry about falling any more.’
Leaving New York Richard again had an unlucky flight. His aircraft could not get beyond Shannon. He sat on a bench at the airport until well after dawn, uncomplaining, but unusually quiet. He introduced two more Panoramas. But the New York illness and temperature persisted. It was thought that he had picked up gastro-enteritis in New York, or had reacted to a TAB injection, or perhaps there had been a resurgence of his 1937 paratyphoid. His doctors suspected a gall bladder infection and told him so. Richard said philosophically, ‘You’d have thought it enough to have cancer. Now I have to have a gall bladder as well.’
It was announced that he had entered St Thomas’s Hospital for observation of suspected gall bladder infection, and this is what both he and his doctors then genuinely believed was keeping him from his Panorama place.
But after an operation it was discovered that a secondary and widespread growth of cancer had given him the symptoms of a gall bladder infection. On 5 November Richard with characteristic courage and common sense told his son David to explain clearly why he was in hospital:
‘My father first contracted cancer over five years ago and has been undergoing treatment at various times since then. He asked me to explain this because he is very strongly opposed to the idea of cancer being an unmentionable disease. The reason he has not mentioned it is that in the last five years he has not lost a single day’s work because of it, but as he expects to be away for a few weeks he thought that people should know why.’
The news of Richard’s illness and the manner of its telling gave his friends, known and unknown, both sadness and enhanced respect. Over 7,000 wrote to him in the hospital. They included many ordinary people who suspected they had cancer and now were given the courage to consult their doctors. His announcement dramatically lifted a taboo. Large numbers of people found they could use a word they had always avoided before. The ‘Nursing Mirror’ was to write:
‘Any public figure has special opportunity for service denied to the man in the street, but does not always recognise it, or use it. In Mr Dimbleby’s case, the opportunity was seen, seized with both hands, and utilised to create an impact on this country which will surely never be forgotten, and which promises to be the forerunner of a change in attitude which will affect the lives of millions of people in the future.’
One day a uniformed guardsman arrived bearing champagne from the Queen. Other members of the Royal Family also asked to be kept informed of his progress. Both Lord Fisher of Lambeth and Cardinal Heenan sought to visit him, but few except his immediate family were allowed to his bedside. Dilys Dimbleby never left him.
On Sunday 19 December, Paul Fox went to the hospital:
‘He brushed aside all questions about himself. His interests even then centred on the people at Lime Grove; on the programmes; on the audiences. The past he had enshrined did not matter to him. His thoughts, as ever, were on the future.’
The next night, as Panorama ended, James Mossman spoke to camera:
‘There are many kinds of courage and it’s appropriate for me to refer to a particular example of it tonight. Richard Dimbleby, who has always been here to give an end-of-term flourish to the last Panorama of the year, is, as everyone knows, ill in hospital, and as everyone also knows, he was a very sick man long before he took time for hospital treatment, though he never during that time gave any intimation to colleagues, or viewers, of the strain he must have been feeling. That is what is known as professionalism, as well as courage. And what I would like to say, to Richard, because I hope he is watching, is that all of us here in Panorama, both on the screen and behind it, send you our very best wishes. I know all of you do also, judging from the seven thousand letters he has received. Yesterday he told a colleague of mine who visited him that he particularly wanted us to pass on his thanks tonight, and to wish all of you a Happy Christmas from him.’
Richard did see, and appreciated, that part of the programme. Two days later, on Wednesday 22 December 1965, he fell into a coma. Shortly after 9 p.m., with Dilys, David and Jonathan at his bedside, he died. He was 52.
