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.
When Dimbleby returned from the Middle East in 1942 he unsuccessfully applied to he sent as a war correspondent to Russia. Even in the middle of the war the BBC was already planning its post-war news coverage of foreign affairs. The small pre-war team of news observers, now developed into a great war reporting unit, was to be supplemented by BBC correspondents in the main foreign capitals. The reliance on news agency reports was to be finally broken. An announcement on the BBC’s notice boards invited applications for possible post-war correspondents’ posts. Dimbleby suggested that in addition to the coverage of diplomatic exchanges and international affairs as such there should be two BBC general reporters in Europe, who could fly at a moment’s notice to cover straight news events, much in the way he and Charles Gardner had done in Britain before the war.
He suggested that one should be based in Berlin to cover Northern, Central and Eastern Europe, the other in Switzerland to cover the countries bordering the Mediterranean. He proposed himself for the second post. Unlike 1936, this time his proposal was turned down. The then Foreign News Editor feared that ‘it would cut the ground from under the resident BBC correspondent’s feet if Dimbleby or anyone else were given a roving commission in their territories for descriptive reporting’.
F. J. G. Dimbleby, Richard’s father, had died at the end of 1943, after a long and successful career in journalism. Richard himself was then living with his wife and two children in the little village of Cuddington on the borders of Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. His uncle, Percy Dimbleby, who was the Managing Director of ‘The Richmond and Twickenham Times’ and the other newspapers and the printing works, invited Richard to join the Board. The invitation remained open.
When Richard returned from the war he was not wanting further work abroad and did not join those of us who were establishing the first corps of BBC foreign correspondents. He was however hoping for interesting work in the BBC at the microphone. He later revealed, in answer to a question from Daniel Farson in ‘Frankly Speaking’ in 1961, why he resigned from the BBC at the end of the war:
Farson: You had established yourself as a most successful war correspondent. Was it ambition that led you to resign from the BBC?
Dimbleby: No, no. It was the fact that I had to become a director of the family newspapers, coupled with – let me be quite honest – coupled with something else.
The then Controller of Programmes of the BBC sent for me and said, ‘What are you proposing to do, now that the war is over?’ And I said, ‘I don’t quite know’. I had hoped – because I was reasonably well known by then, to put it pretty bluntly – I had hoped they would offer me something which was interesting. He said, ‘Well, I’m afraid we have got nothing to offer you. But we can offer you a place in the pool of home reporters’ – which was twenty-five people who were doing the three-minute pieces all around with everybody. And I just thought to hell with that, and said, ‘No, nothing doing’.
Now simultaneously with this, at the very same time, the family newspaper situation had developed and I had to go and become a director of that.
The BBC had very strong views about people being actual directors of things like newspaper companies while on the permanent staff. So it all fitted together very well. And I was able to say to him: ‘I can’t accept that. I’ll resign,’ knowing that I had the directorship to fall back on when I went out.
I remember pacing along a corridor in Broadcasting House with Richard Dimbleby in the summer of 1945. I had just returned from reporting the immediate post-war situation in Czechoslovakia and was waiting to go out to Washington. Richard was just back from Berlin. He was then earning £1,000 a year and was determined to get £1,100. The administrative people in the News Division had refused to upgrade him as a reporter. If he left the microphone and took an editorial job his ceiling could be raised. Richard was adamant that he was not leaving the microphone, and told me that with the family newspapers behind him he was going to chance his arm as a freelance. For the News Division it was shortsighted parsimony. As a part-time freelance Richard at the microphone was going to earn far more than £1,100 from the BBC every year for the rest of his life.
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.’
