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.
In June 1937 Richard Dimblehy married a girl he had met as a fellow reporter on the family newspapers at Richmond, Dilys Thomas, third daughter of a London barrister. The BBC gave him a wedding present of £5. Had he been with the staff a whole year it would have been £10. The Dimblebys were poor and happy.
Charles Gardner soon moved over from sub-editing to join Richard Dimbleby as the second BBC news observer, and between them they covered all the home news stories, while Ralph Murray continued to report the League of Nations.
Copthorne, Sussex, 26 June 1937
Richard was fascinated by the technique of the use of recordings. He was always experimenting with sound effects and with microphone placings. Here both he and I had to observe one very clear rule of the News Talks section – there must be no faking. To fake was the unforgivable sin. The bark of the dog that roused the household against a burglar had to be the bark of the dog and not just the bark of any other dog of the same species. We were rather proud of this integrity, and when it was suggested to us, as it so often was, that rather than put all concerned to a great deal of trouble to produce some sound effect or other, we could more easily and more convincingly fake it, we used to reply with great dignity ‘News Talks never fakes’. I have some recollection of Dimbleby and Arthur Phillips spending all of some railway journey behind a new record-breaking engine recording the real sound of the train’s wheels by dangling the microphone down a lavatory pan.
About this time there was the affair of the telephone boxes. This arose after a series of headline news stories had annoyingly occurred in the remoteness of East Anglia. Probably the Fen floods was one of these stories. East Anglia was a ‘Here do dwell savages’ area on our map, because there was nowhere nearer than London we could use to play back discs for that night’s news. So, after a series of problems about getting discs back from East Anglia, and losing a high proportion of them as Railway Press Packages, Richard had his telephone box idea. What was wrong with hitching an amplifier and a BBC microphone on to a GPO box and making any telephone kiosk an impromptu Outside Broadcast point? What indeed? So Richard and, I think, David Howarth of Recorded Programmes wandered around putting in calls to Broadcasting House from telephone kiosks and getting them recorded. In the end the GPO said the whole proposal was illegal and that was that. So East Anglia remained the great broadcasting waste unless, of course, one ignored the law and used a telephone hitched up to a recording channel at Broadcasting House and then remembered to remove from the disc the ‘thrrreee minutes’ interruptions from the trunk operators (before the pips were invented). Richard did this several times for straight eyewitness pieces, and so did I. We were never prosecuted.
Richard Dimbleby in those pioneering days of BBC reporting was cheerful, good natured, intensely hard-working and bubbling with enthusiasm for each and every story. Together we made youthful common cause against the hated ‘admin’ – the administrative people in the BBC – seen by us in simple black and white terms as the ‘baddies’. ‘They’ couldn’t properly organise the instant availability of a recording car; ‘they’ would hardly sanction the spending of a halfpenny on the news service; ‘they’ challenged the need to buy a pint of beer for someone who had helped us. Fighting ‘them’ became the joy of our lives.
With hindsight and the maturity of extreme age, I can imagine that ‘they’ were really scared stiff at the possible Trojan Horse they had invited inside the walls of Broadcasting House. The BBC putting out safe bulletins ‘copyright by Reuter, Press Association, etc.’ was one thing. Any allegation of error or bias could be neatly blamed on the agencies. BBC staff reporters were different. Might they not start to editorialise – to use the great power and prestige of the BBC to shape public opinion this way or that way – even by an inflection of voice? Outside experts might just land the BBC in trouble on this score, but at least they were not BBC staff. Dimbleby and Murray and I were staff and could not be disowned or explained away.
With his wife in the London to Brighton Veteran Car Rally, 1948
Richard and I were then perhaps too raw, too young, or too inexperienced to give these matters of high policy a thought. We never dreamed of editorialising. We were professionally-trained reporters, interested only in conveying undisputed facts and not concerned to hold inquests. Richard spent a great deal of quiet and careful time in ascertaining, checking and cross-checking the facts. If there was a discrepancy either he left it out or used the ‘some say this – others say that’ technique without advancing his own views. But – and this is my point – we did this by instinct not by command. Of course we had views, but we never dreamt of inflicting those views on the public. Both of us had been brought up in the old-fashioned Scott school which said that facts were sacred – and the free comment was not our affair.
In the News bulletins time was strictly limited. It was common to be told ‘You have 45 seconds in the nine o’clock and you can have 2 minutes 15 seconds at ten’. Richard’s great and enduring strength, the ability to tell any story with a beginning, a middle, and an end in any stated time-scale from 30 seconds to a lavish 3½ minutes derived, I am certain, from those early days.
The News Department was impecunious – and we ourselves were perpetually broke. I remember the night in 1937 when it became clear to Richard and me that there was potentially big news in the fact that Tommy Sopwith’s America’s Cup challenger Endeavour on her return journey across the Atlantic had broken her tow and was facing full gale conditions.
We decided to cover two key places: Southampton where Sopwith’s motor yacht had now fetched up, without Endeavour hitched on behind; and Plymouth near to which Endeavour must sail if she ever regained our waters.
Richard and I tossed up for destinations. He won and chose Southampton. Then came the little matter of getting railway tickets. An office ‘float’ cash box existed for such emergencies. It was scheduled to contain £20 – the system being to extract some cash and leave a signed IOU in its place. We opened the box, and found a shower of IOUs – all of them signed by the news editor ‘R. T. Clark’. So Richard and I turned out our pockets and dunned our colleagues – but the collection fell short of £3. Our next move was to go to the Queen’s Hall opposite, where the BBC was staging the Proms. There we persuaded the cashier to give us £10 each from the till, on note of hand alone. Thus did Richard get to Southampton and I to Plymouth that night.
It was while on this story, and as a guest on Sopwith’s luxury motor yacht, that Richard, replete with champagne and feeling thirsty in the night, drank some doubtful water, contracted paratyphoid, and was seriously ill in hospital. He was away for two months. The expense involved nearly broke him and he pleaded with ‘Admin’ to get them to pay his hospital bills on the grounds that he contracted his paratyphoid on Corporation duty. The story became involved because there was a simultaneous typhoid outbreak at Croydon at the time, plus a counter allegation that Richard had been negligent in using a wrong tap to get his water. Finally the BBC split the bill down the middle, but even so Richard’s half of it was a serious problem for him. While Richard was getting paratyphoid at Southampton, I was getting seasick at Plymouth. I managed, however, via friendly pilots at the airfield, to find Endeavour and go alongside in a small hired boat to interview the Skipper – while Fleet Street was still arguing the toss in pubs ashore. I returned to start my own anti-‘Admin’ file on the matter of 3s. 6d. expended for a bottle of sea-sick remedy. We cleaned up completely in the Endeavour story for a cost of about £20. The newspapers spent hundreds – and missed out.
At this time neither Richard nor I could afford a personal motor-car. We did, however, finally set ourselves up with a jointly owned Swift purchased for £10 with capital borrowed from Ralph Murray and repaid to him out of the 3d. a mile BBC car allowance for duty journeys. Richard and Dilys had the private use of the car one weekend, and my wife Eve and I had it for the other. I have now completely forgotten what happened to the Swift, but I remember Richard coming to me very excited to say that MGs would give us a new car each (to be changed every year) if we would put ‘BBC News’ on it somewhere. Imagine the temptation – but after a mournful drink, we decided that we daren’t. My memories of Richard’s financial troubles at this time are varied, but they had one central theme, ‘Dilys has rung to say she is going to sell the piano’ – but I don’t think she ever did.
In December 1936, just before the Abdication, Richard and I were parties to one of the BBC’s best kept skeletons – the day the BBC News Department threatened to strike. The newspapers, after Bishop Blunt’s sermon, were now full of the Simpson divorce but the BBC didn’t carry a word. Eventually this became, in our view, stupid and the staff of BBC News issued an ultimatum: either that night’s bulletins made some reference to the main topic of the day – or there would be no News Bulletin at all. Richard and I weren’t directly involved, but gave our general agreement. Fortunately the matter wasn’t put to the test because that afternoon Stanley Baldwin made mention of the matter in the House of Commons and our local crisis was averted. Would there have actually been a strike of BBC News? I don’t know. The key mover, Alan Wells, who was killed by a bomb in the war, felt very strongly indeed on the subject and he had much support.
Early in 1939 the Spanish Civil War (a very difficult subject from a BBC impartiality viewpoint) was delicately covered by Richard interviewing refugees at Perpignan. Later both of us went to Yarmouth to interview all concerned in an action off the East Coast in which a Spanish warship had fired on and sunk a Spanish merchantman and alleged blockade runner. I, and half of Fleet Street, caught a train to Yarmouth. Richard said if I would get the story he would liberate the recording car and join me. I telegraphed ahead and booked the only two station taxis in the majestic name of the BBC, and thus was able to isolate Fleet Street for long enough to sign up an exclusive interview with the Spanish captain for £5. I knew that, back at the station, O’Dowd Gallagher of the Daily Express was willing to offer £100. I waited ages with my story and the interviewee for Richard to arrive with the recording car, mounting guard on the hotel stairs and concealing from our Fleet Street colleagues who had now arrived that the principal actors in the drama were upstairs in the same building. Had O’Dowd found out he would certainly have outbid me. Richard eventually showed up (the recording car had been locked up and no one had the key, so he had had to break in the garage door) and we all repaired by a back exit to the Post Office where we used our car amplifier to transmit the story and the exclusive interviews. When we finished I saw a movement behind a pillar in the GPO – it was O’Dowd, notebook in hand, taking down our stuff. His office could, of course, have got it direct in London by listening to the radio – and probably did.
We enjoyed our battles with Fleet Street. We were handicapped by having no money to bribe or buy or to hire aircraft or boats, so we used the magic of the BBC name instead. For some reason people were very willing to talk to us for nothing when they were not so forthcoming to other reporters.
I have little recollection of Richard’s coverage of the Royal Tour of Canada in 1939 save a picture of him gloomily telling me that even he who had a certain genius with BBC expense sheets was unable to account for some £96 spent on the Canadian trip and he didn’t know what was going to happen. He was very low about it for days, until suddenly he showed me a memo he’d composed which said, ‘You can’t expect me to account for every halfpenny when I am with my King’. Apparently that memo did the trick and Richard brightened up again.
Indeed, when on a job involving good hotels and a chance of a grander life than either he or I could normally afford (I think we both got under £600 a year) Richard set about making the most of it. I remember him ringing all the bells in sight in one splendid hotel and ordering a manicure, drinks in the room, and expensive sandwiches – mainly I think to enjoy seeing the shock on my face. On jobs which permitted it, the best was only just good enough for Richard, and I envied the grand manner he assumed to match his temporary opulence. I suspect that this lay at the heart of many minor clashes with the ‘Admin’. I hasten to add that these little assumptions of grandeur were done as a piece of gamesmanship against the BBC administration and always ended in a giggle of anticipation at the reception of the expense sheet.
War was drawing near. Richard was to go to France with the Army and I, as a qualified pilot, with the RAF. The fun days were over; but for both of us our attitude to broadcasting, to integrity, to non-editorialisation and to careful reporting, whether we knew it or not, was shaped for all time.
If I had to name those who contributed to the shaping in those prewar days, I would say S. J. de Lotbinière of Outside Broadcasts, whose demand for professionalism and integrity extended its influence well beyond his own department, R. T. Clark with his casual but shrewd light handling of reins, Michael Balkwill for his sense of fairness and balance, and Ralph Murray’s morning criticism of what we had perpetrated the night before. But none of this would have counted if Richard himself had not been the right selection from the start. I suppose he could have set radio reporting back for five years; instead he advanced it by a decade.
On the ‘Duchess of York’, 1939
I first met Richard Dimbleby in the spring of 1939. I had been brought into the BBC to run the News Talks in German, which Ralph Murray had started a month or two before. Dimbleby was about to leave for Canada and the United States to cover the tour of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. It was the first time that a Royal Tour had included a BBC correspondent.
Equipped with a new morning suit and evening tails, Dimbleby sailed on the ‘Duchess of York’ on the first of many visits to the New World. He shared a cabin with his father’s old friend Edward Gilling, for long the Court correspondent of ‘Exchange Telegraph’ who gave him many useful tips on how to deal with the elaborate retinue surrounding the Monarch.
On this journey Dimbleby substantially increased his stature as a correspondent. In addition to being a broadcaster of enterprise he became one of distinction. Handling Richard’s scripts daily, as I did at the time, one could watch his style mature and his national reputation grow during that Royal Tour. The Board of Governors recorded their appreciation of his exceptionally good work in Canada.
It was also significant that the King and Queen got to know, to like and to trust Richard Dimbleby. As they neared the American stage of their journey he posted a note (signed ‘Bumble’) from the Royal Train to his friend Muriel Howlett in News Talks.
The US looks like being pretty frantic. … We’ve also been invited to the Roosevelts’ picnic and I have fixed up to say ‘how-do’ to the gentleman himself, which will be interesting. …
I took part in an amazing broadcast at Moose Jaw the other day, for the local station, and was announced with a terrific fanfare of trumpets as the star of the evening. They brought the mike right up to the train as it arrived, and all would have been well if the bastard (beg your pardon) hadn’t got my name wrong. Very undignified having to correct him and say your name isn’t Dunglehop. I suppose he must have seen my signature somewhere.
After that he had numerous letters from Moose Jaw, one addressed to Dangleberry. ‘I think that’s the worst.’
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
Dimbleby perfected his interviewing skill, and also his abiding knowledge of his own country, through his appearances on the radio programme Down Your Way which he made every week until 1953. He was prepared to go anywhere and do anything. John Shuter was his producer:
With Dr Robert Stopford, Bishop of London
The time was two o’clock in the morning. Richard Dimbleby was seated comfortably on what he had just described as the ‘hot seat’. In fact this was the live rail in one of the London Underground Railway tunnels hundreds of feet below Regent’s Park. Although the current was of course turned off, Richard insisted on exciting my imagination with delightful little word pictures conjuring up visions of a man at the substation miles away with his hand on the circuit breaker unwittingly about to switch on! We were recording a programme about the night workers of London. One of them described herself as a ‘fluffer’. In simple language this meant that her job was to clean the tunnels through which the trains thundered all day. Richard was so amused by this title that he asked me to try to include someone with an unusually titled job in each week’s programme.
This was a somewhat tall order, though we did eventually assemble quite an assortment from the lady ‘fluffer’ to a lady ‘white hot rivet catcher’ in a Newcastle shipyard, and including a Bradford family whose window sign advertised their occupation as ‘family rat catchers authorised by the Ministry of Food’. Throughout this recording the entire family each held one of the ferrets they used for their job. Richard Dimbleby’s one request was ‘Please don’t ask me to hold them’.
Down Your Way: Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway
A weekly feature of Down Your Way was the interview with a local family. Often we would arrive at someone’s home to find the children, freshly washed and dressed in their best, naturally a trifle nervous at the arrival of such a well-known broadcasting personality. Within minutes and with a ‘I’ve got some like you lot at home’, Richard would have broken the ice, and there he would be down on the floor playing with trains, aeroplanes, animals, and any other toys which happened to be handy. The larger the family the better he liked it. I cannot remember exactly what the record was, but I know it was in excess of fifteen children in one mammoth interview.
Once we took Down Your Way under the sea in H.M. Submarine Alaric. Richard, nervous lest he be incapacitated by sea sickness – he was not a good sailor – crammed himself and me too with anti-seasickness pills before entering the submarine. Some of these remedies were based, in those days, on a drug with rather difficult side effects, which blurred the taker’s vision for a while. We both experienced some difficulty in negotiating the narrow gang plank leading from the depot ship Maidstone, much to the amusement of the submarine crews, who clearly thought ‘Here come the BBC, drunk again, and at 8 o’clock in the morning too’.
Down a Fireman’s Way
Richard’s sense of fun could often be employed to good advantage in finding original material for the programme. Whilst doing the research work for a programme from Bond Street, London, I thought it might be amusing to have an interview with someone very well known to Richard, but who was seated in the chair of a beauty parlour, and whose face was entirely obscured by a face-pack beauty preparation. I had of course to tell Richard enough about this person, without giving the game away, to enable him to conduct the interview. He readily agreed, but his one worry was that when the well-known person’s face was revealed he might not recognise her. However, in the end he accepted my assurances. There was no doubt about his recognition, amidst shouts of surprise and a gale of laughter, of his own wife Dilys. In order to arrange this little bit of fun an enormous amount of cloak and dagger work had to be carried out. Since Richard was such an astute man I feared he would guess the secret well in advance if any hint of what was afoot was allowed to leak out. I had to meet Dilys beforehand in the strictest secrecy, and on the day of recording my wife conducted her to the beauty salon, whilst I kept Richard busy recording at the other end of Bond Street. In fact, he did not even know she was in London on that particular day.
After the war, whilst lunching with Tom Chalmers, then Head of the Light Programme, Richard Dimbleby is reported to have remarked ‘Down Your Way is the world’s easiest programme. It’s money for jam.’ ‘Well, if you think that, you can have it’, replied Chalmers. Some three years and 150 programmes later Richard had changed his mind. For him the routine went on week after week without a break, involving perhaps an all-night journey by sleeping car to some distant town, a long day’s work there, and an all-night journey back again. As with Aberdeen for example – 1,200 miles and a full day’s work in thirty-six hours. Alternatively, he might have to journey down from London on a Tuesday evening, record all day Wednesday, and journey back on Thursday simply because there was no other convenient train.
Down Your Way: At Brighton Works with Arthur Phillips
Being an old newspaperman himself, Richard always went out of his way to help the local press, who showed an intense interest in Down Your Way. This was particularly so if there was a young or inexperienced reporter present, when Richard would deliberately throw out a gag line at his own expense. Arriving in Bognor Regis dressed in one of his favourite suits of herringbone tweed, a herringbone wool waistcoat, and a tie of obscure tartan, Richard was full of beans. ‘Ah, I see they have featured my arrival’ he remarked, drawing attention to a wrestling poster. ‘Abdul the terrible Turk – that’s me.’
There was the picture which appeared on the front cover of Radio Times of Richard Dimbleby riding on the back of a Hereford bull at Wantage. We had just finished recording at a local farm, when a freelance photographer, who happened to be driving by, asked Dimbleby to pose with the bull. The farmer suggested that he should climb up on its back as it was quite used to that sort of thing. Despite a tight recording schedule Richard obliged, and the photographer went happily away with his scoop.
Another photographer, John McNulty, followed the BBC tour of Wisbech with an enormous reflex camera. At one stop when the party was posed for photographs, Richard commented on the size of the camera. ‘You haven’t seen half,’ said John. ‘It plays records too.’ ‘And I suppose you keep your lunch in a spare corner of it,’ Richard retorted.
At the next stop John was missing, but rushed in breathlessly as the party were preparing to move. ‘A moment, Mr Dimbleby,’ he said, flourishing his camera, ‘just one more picture.’
Dimbleby posed again. John hesitated. Something was wrong with the camera. He fiddled with the back – and produced a large paper bag full of sandwiches.
Charles Freer adds this footnote on one of the many occasions when ‘Down Your Way’ visited Ireland. They had gone to a tourist hotel for a meal at about 8 o’clock in the evening:
Having sat in the dining room for a full twenty minutes, Richard beckoned to a waitress and enquired if we were going to get any service. She disappeared into the kitchens and in about five minutes she came back and said, ‘I’m sorry you’ve been kept waiting, but I’m afraid you’ll have to wait a while longer for the Head Waiter’s having his dinner.’ I remember Richard’s reply: ‘Well, who am I to interfere with a waiter’s meal break. Ask him to leave some dinner for the guests.’
Only once did Dimbleby fail to go Down Your Way. A riding accident forced him to do the programme from his house, by remote control.
In 1953 he handed over the programme to Franklin Engelmann, who has written this:
I ought to tell you that until 1965 listeners still wrote to Richard as the interviewer on Down Your Way twelve years after he relinquished it. Of course, a proportion had stopped listening to it at that time and so were unaware of the change, but the rest must have genuinely thought his was the voice of the programme, so great was his impact. Local journalists have said to my face: ‘And what time does Mr Dimbleby arrive?’
The letters Richard passed on to me with a wryly amused ‘Yours, I think, Jingle’ written on the corner.
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.
