Charles Collingwood, now Chief European Correspondent of the Columbia Broadcasting System, was a fellow war correspondent with Richard Dimbleby throughout World War II. He knows at first hand the problems of the television performer.
I remember running into Richard Dimbleby at the front in France in 1944. He was carrying with him a new and highly ingenious portable disc recording device which the BBC engineers had just developed. It was the latest thing and he demonstrated it to me with the greatest enthusiasm, tilting it alarmingly on one side as he talked into the microphone, bouncing it up and down as he recorded, and then playing it back triumphantly. He showed me the tiny motor, the miniature gears that kept the speed constant in every position, the way the recording head was cushioned against shock. He knew all about it and exactly how it worked. My own more primitive American instrument remained a complete mystery to me and I had to be accompanied by an expert to operate it. Richard handled his himself.
As we advanced into the increasing complications of television, Dimbleby remained abreast of the developing technology. He knew what every lens could do, the limitations of the image orthicon tube, the importance of lighting. Because of this, he knew what was likely to go wrong. This is an inestimable advantage to a broadcaster who stands there in his pool of light, with all the public responsibility for the programme on his shoulders, yet as isolated from the technical infrastructure which keeps him on the air as if he were in a diving bell. When something goes wrong, unless he knows what must have happened, he is lost, pitifully burbling and complaining in public view until it is put right. But Dimbleby could always guess what had happened and his rescues of broadcasts from technical difficulties became legendary. His famous aplomb was solidly based on professional understanding of the medium.
All this made him a joy to work with. Technical crews in America as well as in the BBC always liked to be assigned to a Dimbleby programme, and his obvious expertise was a great comfort to those who found themselves being interviewed by him on his programmes. A television interview can be a frightening experience, but Dimbleby was so obviously in command that his presence was very reassuring to the fellow in the other chair. He wasn’t particularly famous for it, but I always thought Dimbleby was a superb interviewer. His style of courteous persistence and the rapport he established with his guests often brought out a truer picture of his subjects than the more abrasive and challenging style of other interviewers which, by putting the subject on the defensive, tends to elicit only defensive reactions.
As it happened, we did a good many transatlantic broadcasts together when Telstar and Early Bird appeared in the heavens. He understood all about them, too. It was a great relief to know that he would be on the other end of these celestial communications, for if anything went wrong you could be sure that with Dimbleby there it would not be irretrievable. These broadcasts brought him more regularly before American audiences. He was the only British broadcaster who was immediately identifiable to large numbers of Americans. This is not surprising; Americans pride themselves on their ability to recognise the real thing.
Richard Dimbleby was the real thing, all right – both as a person and broadcaster. His influence upon the techniques of broadcasting was very great. Because he knew his job so well, he forced others to learn theirs. I’m sorry he won’t be around to see all the new developments in television. He would have been able to understand them completely and perhaps, thereby, make some of the rest of us understand them a little.
Telstar Programme from CBS, New York, with Walter Cronkite
Through the eight years I was in charge of current affairs and talks programmes on BBC Television I spent most Monday evenings at Lime Grove. That reconstructed old film studio seemed to acquire a special air of magical excitement on Panorama nights. There was always a knot of schoolboys with autograph books in the darkness outside the main door on the look-out for visitors whose names were in that day’s headlines, or would be in the morrow’s. Sometimes a senior Minister, sometimes an anonymous group would come – for instance, women who were seen knitting throughout one Panorama and then questioned on how much of the programme content they had absorbed. One day in came a box filled with ice, into which a man was locked, and he freed himself during transmission. Mrs Barbara Woodhouse offered to give away to a good home a calf named Conquest, which we watched snuggling down in a pen in the studio with her enormous and beautifully trained Great Dane Juno. The Watford telephone exchange was swamped with eager calls at the rate of 6,000 an hour.
You never knew what to expect. One day it was a French girl of nine who was set the task of writing a poem on London at the beginning of the programme. She was seen writing hard for a while, got up and bounced a ball once or twice, went on writing, and Dimbleby finally put his excellent French to use by translating the charming verse Minou Drouet had composed. Another day there was a full-grown elephant in the fourth-floor studio, carrying a man gently across the floor with its trunk.
With Minou Drouet
When we decided to make Panorama a weekly programme in 1955 I asked my deputy, Grace Wyndham Goldie, to supervise its new look. She immediately set on it that stamp of quality which marked all her television enterprises. It was she who first demanded that Richard Dimbleby should be the new anchorman, and before soon moving off to energise in turn the start of Tonight and then of Monitor she had firmly settled the guiding lines for Panorama: integrity in its coverage of current affairs, showmanship in its intelligent exploitation of the television medium.
The changing team of Panorama reporters have contributed a wide selection of talents. Most have had to be ready (as Dimbleby forecast even during the war for his two roving European reporters) to fly off at a moment’s notice to where news was about to break. All have been interested in politics, some with one foot in it. Some left Panorama for the House of Commons, like Christopher Chataway and Woodrow Wyatt. Some came to Panorama after failing to be elected, like Robin Day and Ludovic Kennedy. Some combined journalism with a political past, like John Freeman and Angus Maude. There were ex-editors from Fleet Street, Malcolm Muggeridge and Francis Williams, and others whose background was essentially in broadcast journalism, Max Robertson, James Mossman, Michael Charlton, John Morgan, Michael Barratt, Ian Trethowan and Leonard Parkin. Others came and went. They were a talented and restless group, with a tendency to wish to leave after a few years, perhaps later to return again. Panorama reporters were welcomed by such world figures as President Kennedy, Pandit Nehru and the Shah of Persia. They were frequently involved themselves in controversy, for Panorama had to be involved in controversy, and they had to prise out cats which various vested interests preferred to keep in the bag.
Panorama: clockwise, Rex Moorfoot (Editor), Dimbleby, Christopher Chataway, John Freeman, David Wheeler (Assistant Editor), Woodrow Wyatt, Christopher Burstall (Production Assistant), Margaret Douglas (Production Secretary)
In Panorama’s whirlpool, as Grace Wyndham Goldie has pointed out, Richard Dimbleby himself always managed to remain at the serene centre, not at the tumultuous edge. He did not want the reputation of a Robin Day or a Malcolm Muggeridge, and so, as she put it, he became on television a kind of living embodiment of stability, a reassuring symbol that somewhere at the heart of disturbance lies a basic kindliness and an enduring common sense’.
The production teams were constantly turning over, as inventive production assistants and producers, trained in the hard school of Panorama, went off to produce new programmes of their own.
Michael Peacock was the first of several editors, each of whom brought some special attribute to Panorama: Rex Moorfoot, Michael Peacock again, after a spell with Outside Broadcasts, Paul Fox, David Wheeler and now Jeremy Isaacs.
Richard Dimbleby remained the one constant factor. He would arrive on Monday mornings and go very carefully through the elaborate studio moves, which were never the same from one programme to the next. A length of film needs to run for eight seconds on a television projector (telecine) before it reaches full speed. An anchorman has to be able to cue the start of the telecine machine and then speak for exactly eight seconds. Dimbleby was impeccable. He would finger his spectacles, indicating the start of the eight seconds, and finish his sentence invariably just as the first frame came up – or if it was late in coming he would spin out his words until out of the corner of his eye he saw the picture arrive on his monitor. He enjoyed demonstrating maps and summarising complicated situations. ‘Let me see if I can simplify it’ he would say, and one felt he was a teacher manqué as well as a surgeon manqué.
His long apprenticeship in radio had made him a master at reading a prepared commentary to a film sequence, and he could get through a last-minute session in the Lime Grove dubbing theatre much faster than most, for his readings were always right first time.
With King Hussein of Jordan
After a day of very careful preparation he changed his clothes and ate a light supper. He would then greet, and set at ease, the important, and the unimportant, and the often temperamental protagonists we had invited to the studio. Dimbleby was invariably an excellent host, and Panorama’s guests were always anxious to meet him. So too were many distinguished visitors to London such as King Hussein of Jordan, who dined with us one night because he wished to see television in action. We took him on a tour of the studios, and finally ended up in Panorama, where a memorable interview took place with the King and Dimbleby, like Johnson and Boswell, each calling the other ‘Sir’ in every sentence.
H.R.H. the Duke of Edinburgh had introduced the International Geophysical Year on television, and reported on his travels in a children’s programme. The first time that he, or any other of the Queen’s immediate family, decided to allow himself to be questioned on a regular current affairs programme was at the hands of Richard Dimbleby.
There were occasions when Dimbleby almost acted as a national Ombudsman, or a restorer of national confidence. When the world was on the brink of nuclear war over Cuba, and Panorama was mounting a special programme, a woman telephoned to say she would send her children to school only if Richard Dimbleby said it was safe. He made a point of saying to an authority in the studio, ‘I am aware that a great many people today are extremely worried and frightened by what has happened, and have some awful feeling that something dreadful may happen quite quickly, suddenly. Do you think there is reason at all for short-term immediate nerves on this?’
There were several occasions when he was game to subject himself to any kind of treatment in the studio, be it an ice-cream tasting contest with Francis Williams to guess which was made with real cream, or being flung around the studio in an aircraft seat on wheels to test the shock of sudden braking, or swallowing a tiny transmitter and picking up the signals from inside his massive frame, or being spun round in a space simulator at the RAF Medical Centre. For the last programme before Panorama’s much needed annual summer break in 1959, he demonstrated the new American craze for balloon jumping from an airfield at Weston-on-the-Green. It was fascinating to watch his considerable mass reduced to nothing as his weight was counterbalanced by a balloon on his shoulders, and Dimbleby leapt ten to fifteen feet in the air and covered the same distance between strides along the ground.
He had his little vanities. One was getting the make-up assistant to black the balding patch on the back of his head, until it could no longer be disguised. In the studio there was always fun with the technical crew. During a programme which demonstrated the gimmicks of the 1964 American Election campaign, Dimbleby opened a bottle of Barry Goldwater Cologne for Men. An electrician chargehand next to him commented on the pungent aroma, and asked if it was coming from him. Dimbleby put the neck of the bottle against the chargehand’s arm meaning to ‘spot’ him, but accidentally poured a large quantity on to him. The electrician washed it off but the smell remained strong. After the programme he declared that when he got home his wife would ask searching questions as to the origin of the perfume. Dimbleby immediately wrote a note on a page of his script:
‘Dear Jackie,
This is to certify that I, Richard Dimbleby, have soaked your husband in Barry Goldwater Cologne. He is concerned in case you suspect him of wrong doings.
Personally I think it improves the brute.
Regards,
RICHARD.’
Dimbleby used to keep the studio crews in fits of laughter with earthy stories, mostly unprintable. There was wonderful teamwork, and constant banter, between him and Joan Marsden, Panorama’s regular floor manager. The floor manager wears a receiver on the belt with headphones to pick up the director’s instructions and pass them on to the studio performers. During an edition of Panorama from Sotheby’s sale room which was beamed to America by Early Bird, Joan raised her finger to give Richard the customary ‘one minute’ cue. As soon as he had finished that particular link and a piece of film was running he beckoned her over and said, ‘For Heaven’s sake don’t do that or you will find yourself having bought a picture for £10,000 – “Sold to the lady with the double deaf aid!”.’
She is one of many people for whom Monday nights at Lime Grove have lost something of their magic.
Inaugural programme, Early Bird, with Joan Marsden
On human stories Richard was Panorama‘s best reporter. His interest in people and places was such that he was seldom bored. Years and years of travel, often tedious and uncomfortable, had not blunted his enthusiasm for an interesting journey. He was the romantic Englishman, to whom a journey on the pre-war Orient Express would have been the highest heaven.
With David Wheeler
One of the pleasures of far-away places was the thought that very few people there would know him. There would be the rare pleasure of walking about the streets and not being recognised. The penalties of having the best-known face and figure in the country were very great. Autograph hunters lurked round every corner. Strangers came up in restaurants when you were having a quiet dinner after a tiring day. They made you stand up and shake their hand. People in cars did double-takes, then leaned out of windows and waved. Coach-loads of holidaymakers shouted ‘Yoo-hoo – good old Richard!’ It was tedious when it happened but, he would ruefully admit, worrying if it didn’t.
Thus in Paris, but never in London, he could occasionally indulge in a visit to the night clubs. But he was always faintly apprehensive of being spotted by some English tourist who would raise a loud, shocked cry of ‘Good heavens – it’s Dimbleby – here!’
The places where he could escape the consequences of fame grew steadily fewer. In the fifties he could go to New York and not be recognised. By 1965, the anonymity had been partly torn aside, thanks to Telstar and Early Bird. His face was familiar to millions of Americans. In Montreal, not a city where you would have expected him to be widely known, I walked with him along the main shopping street to murmurs of ‘Isn’t that Richard Dimbleby?’
Of course, it was his shape that made him instantly identifiable – the familiar rotundity of a man who was yet surprisingly light and nippy on his feet. His feelings about his shape were ambivalent. He accepted it as part of his public personality – ‘my trade-mark’ – but from time to time made strenuous efforts to diminish it. These were not completely successful. Away from home, in restaurants in Europe and North America, one watched the complex and losing inner struggle that took place whenever the waiter offered a particularly delicious (but definitely non-slimming) gateau or creamy concoction.
As a thorough-going romantic, he had a passion for casinos. I don’t believe he ever won or lost what real gamblers would call real money. It was the atmosphere that drew him. Any itinerary which took him to the Mediterranean would be carefully examined to see if it offered the possibility of a quick diversion to Monte Carlo. Frequently it did.
One recent New Year’s Eve found us in Beirut. The Lebanese capital now has a splendid casino, some way out of town. After dinner I was persuaded to take a taxi out with him, sit through a glittering cabaret and then accompany him to the business end of the casino. After a losing streak, he won enough to pay for the entire evening’s entertainment and still show a pleasant profit. It was a proud moment. We got back to our hotel at 3 a.m., two hours before an early call to fly to Jordan for the Pope’s visit to Jerusalem.
King Hussein visits Panorama: Sir Ian Jacob (Director-General), Leonard Miall (Head of Television Talks), King Hussein, Abdul Monen Rifai (Jordanian Chief of National Guidance), [now Sir] Gerald Beadle (Director of Television), 20 April 1959
In Jerusalem we met an old friend of his and the programme, King Hussein. The King has appeared many times on Panorama. Once, at the height of a Middle East crisis, he was telephoned in Amman by the Panorama studio in London. The King himself came on the line with a ringing, ‘Hullo, Richard!’ Now, in Jerusalem, he shouted, ‘Richard! How wonderful to see you here!’ and escorted us to a superb lunch of Arab food.
It was inevitably ‘Richard’ wherever he went, to kings and commoners. In New York, a couple of tough Manhattan cops, driving us around town for a film story on crime, may have started out wondering if the plump Englishman on the back seat of their squad car wasn’t some kind of stuffed-shirt and so moderated their language accordingly. Within an hour or so, ‘Dicks’ and ‘Daves’ were flowing freely and the air inside the car was blue with the sort of story television vigilantes have nightmares about. U.S. and U.K. had formed a special relationship.
He had many stories to tell, as befitted a man to whom so much had happened. There was the bizarre experience of the servant at his house who one evening went berserk and chased him with a carving knife. Richard finally knocked the man out, with a straight right to the chin. ‘Of course, he had to go. I saw him again months later. My car was stopped in a traffic jam, not far from Whitehall, and I caught sight of him, on foot. He saw me and came across. He seemed in good form and quite well turned out. I asked him what he was doing now and he said, “I’ve got quite a good job, sir. I’m a messenger with the War Office.” I looked down at his briefcase and there it was, OHMS. He was carrying official secrets all over London.’
Unnerving experiences on the air figured largely. There was the outside broadcast from the shopping streets of Paris with a French television unit. In the full flow of a live commentary, he realised the point had been reached where he should be seen in vision, walking up the street. But there was no camera for him to talk to.
‘There wasn’t a single camera in sight – until suddenly one shot round the corner. It was being pushed along by a horde of shouting, gesticulating Frenchmen. It went right past me at a rate of knots and disappeared into the distance. As it went by the cameraman screamed at me, “Ils sont fous, monsieur! Complètement fous!”’
With King Paul and Queen Frederika of Greece, Corfu, July 1963
He hated incompetent and amateurish producers but remembered with affection another outside broadcast. This came from a London food factory. During rehearsal, the producer had got himself into a complicated tangle with his cameras. To resolve it, he created an artificial corridor by draping a long curtain behind the area where most of the action in the programme was to take place. This, he hoped, would enable him to move his cameras up and down, from one end of the factory to the other, without being seen in vision.
‘All went well on the air, until I heard him say, “Camera One, move across now.” A second or so later, “Camera Two, on your way now.”
‘Unfortunately he’d forgotten they were moving from opposite directions. They tore along behind the drape. They met head-on. The most almighty crash you ever heard!’
The commentator carried on. He always did. His massive reassurance communicated itself off the screen almost as much as on. During a flight to Athens, on his way to interview the Greek King and Queen in Corfu, his aircraft ran into tremendous turbulence. There was a crack that sounded rather like the end of the world. The plane began to heave all over the sky. After a little while the captain said they would be turning back to London.
Among the passengers was a group of Greek Orthodox priests. They looked, according to another member of the Panorama party, very anxious indeed. The men of God sweated for some minutes. Then one of them, recognising him, said, ‘Ah, Meester Deemblebee! Please tell us it will be all right.’
By the spring of 1965 the growth of Dimbleby’s cancer was accelerating. He was ill at ease in April when he introduced a television programme commemorating some of the great broadcasts made by his American colleague of nearly thirty years’ standing, Edward R. Murrow, who had died of lung cancer.
Edward R. Murrow
‘Jesus wept’ – two words of exasperation from a Dimbleby racked with pain, which reverberated round the world from the Royal Tour of Germany in May 1965. To most people, but not to some clergymen, Dimbleby had made an appalling irreverent blunder. Richard Francis was his Panorama producer during the Royal Tour of Germany:
It happened at the end of a tough day, Thursday 27 May. For hours the commentators of a dozen or more television networks had been doing their separate commentaries from Berlin on the Queen’s crowded progress round the city. Several times there had been technical breakdowns on the links between Berlin and West Germany. And Richard had to fit his commentary spells in with coverage of the First Test from Edgbaston.
Now, at 8.50 p.m., we were due to transmit from Berlin to Great Britain the edited highlights of the day, with a description, live on the circuit, by Richard. But to our horror all communication with London was lost just as the programme was about to go on the air. Six minutes late one vision line and one sound one were reopened and off we went. Richard was in good form and the delay soon seemed unimportant. But after two minutes, on another line, back came a message: London was not receiving us. We checked back, they were getting neither sound nor vision. Reluctantly we stopped the videotape. ‘Richard’, I said aloud, ‘hold everything. We’re not on the air. London isn’t getting us.’
‘Jesus wept.’
Which would have passed unnoticed, if London was not in fact receiving us perfectly! After a furious control-line conversation we started up again, still under the impression London hadn’t heard a word. What we did was to repeat the first couple of minutes. Richard’s professionalism made it worse; his introduction was word for word the same!
The supreme irony was yet to come. Despite losing the first ten minutes we were now ordered to end on schedule, at 9.15. And that meant fading the recording just as the Queen was approaching the Berlin wall. What an anti-climax.
Richard for once was silent at the end of a programme. More precisely he was speechless – with anger. Anger not for himself, but because he hated any BBC programme to fail, particularly one like this. There was no getting away from it, it had been a shambles. Glumly we thanked our hosts, ZDF; it was not their fault. The tension was only broken when one of the German engineers approached Richard and clicked his heels. ‘Mr Dimbleby I thank you very much. I am tonight very honoured. I always wanted to work with your BBC.’
Berlin Wall, 27 May 1965
Of course Richard knew Berlin well. Before and at the end of the war, and later with the building of the Wall, he had made many broadcasts from there. The day before the Queen arrived, as was his wont, he had driven round the route she was going to take. Typically when he got to the Potsdamerplatz he told of his previous broadcasts from the place. There was the time in 1939 when he had described a mass rally passing down the Potsdamerstrasse and through the Platz. In their day they were to Berlin what Regent Street and Piccadilly Circus are to London today. Now they are desolate and deserted, and divided by the Wall. And just on the Western side he found the nail-head in the cobbles driven in at the end of the war to mark the limits of the American, British and Russian sectors. It was from this point that he had introduced Panorama on the night of 31 July 1961. Two weeks later the Wall was built.
At the Brandenburger Tor he stopped the car and got out. He saw an opportunity to gather something of the real flavour of life at the Wall. Two British M.P.s were manning an observation box at the bottom of the Street of 17th June. Recognising Richard they welcomed him to their raised platform. Fifteen minutes and a few small but revealing observations later, Richard continued his tour. The next day, when the Queen arrived at the Wall, his commentary was that little bit richer.
Walter Cronkite and General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower in New York talking to Richard Dimbleby and Field-Marshal Viscount Montgomery in Churchill’s War Room in London
Richard spent most of the month of May 1965 either on or in the air. He started by flying the Atlantic three times in four days. After filming ‘New York’s Finest’, the police, he returned to introduce the Early Bird inaugural programme from London. The same night he flew out to introduce Panorama from Wall Street. Next day he rushed back to prepare for ‘VE+20’ with Monty and Ike taking part. That was the programme in which Richard took viewers round Churchill’s underground War Room, and proudly introduced David Dimbleby’s commentary from Belsen. After that a crowded fortnight following the Queen round Germany and continuing with Panorama each Monday. Seventeen transmissions and a dozen flights in one month.
It had been a tough ten days since Her Majesty started the tour. The night before she was due to arrive, Richard introduced Panorama from the Hotel Petersburg, at Königswinter. Two hours before we went on the air there was a terrible thunderstorm, and rain got into everything. When the programme started, we in the control van could not hear what Richard was saying. Never mind, we thought, he will follow the pictures. We didn’t know that his monitor had packed up just before transmission and he was commentating blind – imagining that our pictures were following his words. Fortunately he repeated almost exactly what he said in rehearsal, the pictures matched, and very few viewers would have noticed.
On the first evening of the Queen’s trip Richard was asked to comment on the arrival of Her Majesty for the banquet at Schloss Bruehl. This was due at 7.25 London time and so would fit in well with the end of Tonight. It would take about ten minutes.
Unfortunately the royal car was delayed nearly half an hour. Richard, as ever, continued implacably although the pictures offered little to talk about. Anxiously London demanded information about the Queen and why she was late. So too did Richard, with anguished facial expressions whilst he talked. The German police were approached; they knew she had left for the banquet but had no idea how far she had got. There were enormous crowds blocking the route. German Television were approached; they knew nothing. Then their producer had an idea: ‘Perhaps Herr Dimbleby knows?’
Richard was never the luckiest of people with his flights. Coming back from Hamburg at the end of the Royal Tour his Trident had to make an emergency landing. All three of the hydraulic systems failed in turn, and the plane was left without any brakes. It headed for Amsterdam, the nearest alternative airport, and Richard went back to exchange a jolly word with the rest of the BBC party. To his amazement he saw a block of seats occupied by London policemen in uniform. They had been in Hamburg to embellish the Queen’s visit. Jokingly Richard asked them if they were ready to die bravely. According to him, their reaction was to put their helmets on!
The next morning the BBC carried this radio tribute in Today:
When I first joined Panorama seven years ago, I remember Richard Dimbleby telling me on location in some flooded British town that it was all very well to have a good degree and be bright, but what was really needed in television was discipline. And he was, in fact, the most disciplined performer I’ve ever seen. He approached his job like an artist or an engineer, and to watch him linking a show or doing a commentary on a big public event was to see technical perfection. He loved his work, not only television but all work. He loved being busy and he loved the challenge of complicated situations in which he’d be obliged to follow one set of events from a monitor screen, for example, with one eye whilst keeping pace with another set of events with the other. He was the only man in British television who became well known in America, because of his work on Telstar and Early Bird, and whenever I’ve been in New York with him, New Yorkers and especially policemen (for whom he seemed to have a predilection) would salute him at crossroads and say ‘Hullo, Richard!’.
I’ve often talked to other people in the BBC about what the qualities were in Dimbleby that created such an impact on viewers, mostly favourable but not always. And I think the secret was that he reflected many of the key qualities of the English. He was simple, and had a very straightforward and concrete approach to things and situations. He had a strong sentiment and a strong loyalty and I’d say probably did more than anyone else to show the place of the Royal Family in the Sixties. But since the last years of his life were overshadowed by cancer, what I recall most clearly about him was his courage under the strain of it all. I remember coming back with him from a filming outing in New York one afternoon late in autumn. We were much later than we’d expected, and Dimbleby was tired and in quite evident pain, but never during the preceding, extremely tiresome hours had he been impatient or tried to cry off the story. This is professionalism of a very high order and it’s this which will be remembered.
Messages of condolence flowed into the BBC from all over the world, especially from the Commonwealth and from countries with particular debts of gratitude to Dimbleby: Yugoslavia, Persia and Greece. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation broadcast special tributes.
The European Broadcasting Union said: ‘His death brings a sense of personal loss as much to us in Europe and beyond as it does to you who live in England.’
North German Radio said: ‘He stood for all the qualities which have made BBC Television an example of fearless yet thoroughly honest journalistic work.’
From Moscow Boris Belitzky telegraphed: ‘A great voice has gone off the air.’
Fred Friendly cabled from CBS News in New York: ‘Richard Dimbleby – BBC – was a dateline all in his own right like Coventry, Parliament, Trafalgar and Dunkirk. His voice, the voice of Britain, and that of Ed Murrow CBS were stilled the same year. These men often meant as much to citizens in each other’s countries as they did in their own. We at CBS News are additionally saddened by the death of another friend and colleague whose voice and whose truth all of us can so ill afford to lose.’
But perhaps the message that said most came in halting English from an Italian worker living in Germany:
As foreigner friend and fans’s programs of B.B.C. specially in ‘panorama’ I am really shocked about Mr Dimbley’s death, former broadcast man and director of ‘panorama’. His face was so familiar and friendly speaking that I really enjoyed so many times watching your program on panorama, so beautifully runned by him. In the same time this hour of sorrow for everybody’s feeling will you so kind to have my personal feeling of regret for all family’s B.B.C. for such big loss. I am very sorry if I am ask you for a favour and to send my feelings as unknown friend, to Mr Dimbley’s wife and my warm cuddle for his sons david and jonathan in this hour of big sorrow for them.
