In many fields Richard Dimbleby was our first as well as our foremost broadcaster. He was the first BBC news observer, the first man to take a microphone to a civil war, the first to report a Royal Tour by radio, the first BBC war correspondent, the first witness to reveal the horrors of Belsen concentration camp. He was one of the first from the West, and certainly the first war correspondent, to enter defeated Berlin.
He was the commentator for the first time television cameras were allowed at a Coronation, and at a State Opening of Parliament. He was the anchorman for our first weekly television current affairs programme.
He was there on each occasion when television pushed forward its physical frontiers: the first live relay across the Channel in 1950; through the Iron Curtain in 1961; over the Atlantic via Telstar in 1962; and round the world from Japan in 1964.
He held first place in persuading viewers to give, and give quickly, to relieve some natural disaster (his two appeals for the victims of earthquakes in Persia and Yugoslavia brought in over £800,000).
He was first in stamina in General Election Results programmes and perhaps his ‘finest hour’ was his description of the funeral of the man whose phrase that was.
But for us at the BBC he was above all a patient, gentle, courteous, confident, compassionate, loyal, and brave friend.
Richard was a great broadcaster; but great broadcasts are ephemeral. They are enjoyed and, sooner or later, forgotten. This book is offered to recall some of the thousands of broadcasts he made for the BBC and to show what it was like to work in broadcasting with him.
The Director-General of the BBC and the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Bernard Waley-Cohen, in the Panorama Studio
It was in the Blue Room at Bomber Command Officers’ Mess in 1943 that I first met Richard, very briefly. He was sitting alone waiting to lunch with one of our senior staff officers. One of my colleagues approached him and asked if he would care for a drink. ‘I don’t usually drink at lunchtime, but you are so kind, I will, thank you.’
Eight years later when I was working at the British Forces Network in Germany in Hamburg he came with the other members of the Twenty Questions team. We met again this time at the Garrison Theatre. ‘Hullo,’ he said, ‘I met you some years ago at Bomber Command Headquarters, didn’t I? What are you doing getting mixed up in the broadcasting business?’
I had always remembered the first meeting, but there was no reason at all for him to, except that he remembered almost everyone he met no matter how unimportant they were. Ask anyone with whom he worked, from the doorman to the cameraman, and they will tell you the same. They will also recall his immense good humour. One night on Panorama he was caught by the camera when he was combing his hair. In the next evening’s Tonight we gently ribbed him about it. On his way the following week to the Panorama studio he smiled at me and said: ‘Tonight, my boy, I’m doing a strip-tease. Follow that if you dare!’
One of the nicest things about Richard was that he was a great source of advice. There was never any sense of jealousy at the threat of challenge of the new boys; instead there was that constant stream of encouragement and, when asked for, help. In 1949, when I was fresh to the television world, he advised me to ‘do as much as you can, spread your net wide, go anywhere in order to get experience, any experience in writing, interviewing, producing, directing or commentating. Don’t specialise too early, otherwise you will find that you have put yourself in a limited position. The time to start saying no to certain kinds of jobs is later rather than sooner. Once you are in that position always take holidays, never feel yourself getting stale and remember there is more in life than just television. Sometimes I think that we are so concerned with television itself that we forget that we ought to be living and enjoying life just like other people.’
Wise words to a new boy and very welcome words. There were very few in those early days willing to let you take any share in their experience and none was more experienced than Richard. That he cared was a great encouragement.
When I returned from Washington to take over charge of the Television Talks Department at the beginning of 1954 I was intent on developing television journalism. My department had some lively young producers, one of whom was Michael Peacock:
Panorama from Bristol with Michael Peacock, 31 October 1960
It all began, for me at least, in May 1954. At that time I was 24 and had had only eighteen months’ experience of television. Richard Dimbleby was no more than a name to me. I admired his work, but had never met him. He worked on Outside Broadcasts and on About Britain, produced by the Documentary Department. I worked in Television Talks Department, which until then had never used Richard. Our paths had never crossed.
The Queen’s World Tour was due to finish on 15 May of that year. One afternoon ten days before, Cecil McGivern, our Controller of Television Programmes, was summoned from his Lime Grove office to Broadcasting House. A meeting had been called to co-ordinate radio and television plans for covering the Queen’s return to London. One by one the Outside Broadcasts for each stage of the Queen’s arrival were noted and checked. Richard Dimbleby, who was reporting the Mediterranean part of the tour for radio, would leave Britannia at Gibraltar and fly ahead to London, arriving the day before. He would then give the television commentary for what would be a great State occasion which our cameras would cover throughout from Britannia‘s arrival in the Pool of London to the Queen’s drive home to Buckingham Palace.
To Cecil’s surprise the meeting went on to consider the programmes arranged for the evening of 15 May in which the full story of this historic Royal Tour would be told. Those were days of a certain rivalry and jockeying for position between radio and television. The Television Service had in fact no plans for any programme beyond the Outside Broadcast of the Queen’s drive through London. Cecil McGivern heard the scale of radio’s plans for recapitulating the Queen’s journey. Undaunted he calmly announced that the Television Service would also be mounting an evening programme to celebrate the Queen’s return and asked how many of the BBC’s News Correspondents who had reported the tour could be made available.
The meeting was soon over, and Cecil leapt to a telephone. It was a Radio Times Press Day, but the page for 15 May was held in the nick of time. At about 5 p.m. that day I was summoned to Cecil’s office. With him I found Grace Wyndham Goldie, my immediate boss, and Joanna Spicer, his programme planner. The situation was explained to me. I was to produce ‘Postcript to the Journey’, as the programme had been christened, at 7.55 p.m. on 15 May. It would last forty minutes. The Archbishop of Canterbury had agreed to take part. Godfrey Talbot, Audrey Russell and Wynford Vaughan-Thomas would be available. Richard Dimbleby had agreed to be the anchorman. Television Newsreel had undertaken to provide film of the Queen’s tour, and there was the possibility of the Commonwealth High Commissioners in London each contributing a message for the programme. ‘This is a very important programme for the Television Service’, said Cecil meaningfully. I had my marching orders!
For me there followed nine days of gruelling and hectic work, at the end of which I had concocted a very complicated and elaborate programme involving live radio circuits to most of the countries visited by the Queen, a dozen or more film sequences which would have to be commentated ‘live’, reports from News correspondents who had little or no experience of television, the Archbishop and the High Commissioners, and edited telerecordings of the Outside Broadcasts earlier in the day.
The afternoon of the day before, the script was finished, and at 5 o’clock Richard Dimbleby, just back from Gibraltar, climbed for the first time the narrow stairs up to my office in what had been an attic bedroom in one of the houses adjoining the Lime Grove Studios. He was to climb those stairs countless times during the next ten years, for the Panorama office is there to this day.
He came into the room a little warily, his smile taking in the faces he didn’t know. We shook hands self-consciously, and after some small talk I gave him a copy of the script. He laughed at its weight and settled down to go through it with me. As the scope and complexity of the programme became apparent to him, he looked at me quizzically. ‘You’ve got yourself a handful here’, he said, obviously wondering whether this young man whom he had never met before was going to land him in a technical shambles the following evening.
For the next two hours we went through every detail of the programme. This was my first experience of Richard at work, and it was an eye-opener. Even now, I remember the quickness with which he took my points, and his uncanny ability to see where things might go wrong, and the painstaking way with which he noted down what he had to do or might have to do. At the end of our session his script was covered with notes, and he knew everything there was to know about the programme. I was exhausted, and perhaps he sensed this; for as he stood up to leave, he put his arm on my shoulder and grinned cheerfully. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘it will work all right on the night – provided we hit those telecine cues.’ ‘It should be a very good programme,’ he added kindly. ‘See you at about 5 o’clock tomorrow’. And off he went.
In the event, it was a very good programme – thanks to Richard. When radio circuits failed he switched faultlessly into the standby routines worked out the night before. He produced immaculate unscripted commentaries to the edited telerecordings he had not seen before. He hit cue after cue as he promised he would, and kept his head when a large and very heavy camera dolly ran over the foot of the unfortunate studio manager during an unrehearsed tracking shot at the end of the programme (the studio manager was an unsung hero – he didn’t even cry out despite a broken bone!).
After this programme it was inevitable that we should ask Richard to be anchorman for the 1955 General Election Results Programme. Then, he showed us all not only his unique skill, but also his extraordinary stamina. Despite a gruelling day of rehearsals while people were voting, he worked in front of the cameras until dawn. He had a couple of hours off to catch a moment of sleep, then opened the programme again well before breakfast with the words, ‘Short night, wasn’t it’, kept going non-stop throughout the following day, and then finished off his two-day stint with the big round-up programme on the Friday evening, which included a well-deserved bouquet from his old friend and wartime colleague Ed Murrow.
General Election 1959
Richard Dimbleby’s election marathons were to become world famous. The secret of his extraordinary command of the situation during these very complicated and exacting programmes lay in the card index of information about each constituency which was prepared for him beforehand. In 1959 the preparation of this index went badly wrong. On the Tuesday before Election Thursday it was not finished, and those cards which had been prepared were incorrect. Richard took off his coat and lived with the index from then on, going through each constituency card with Stanley Hyland who was drafted in to help. Together they worked right through the Wednesday night. So in 1959 he had no sleep the night before he began his marathon. An extraordinary man!
His last General Election marathon was in October 1964, by which time he had been suffering from cancer for four and a half years. And yet he would not even listen to a hint that he might have a rest in the early hours of the Friday morning. Not a bit of it! And never had I seen him more at ease, more on top of his job, more the life and soul of the programme than during the 1964 Election Results which began with an unexpected curtain raiser in the form of Khrushchev’s fall from power. Do you remember George Brown crossing swords with Robin Day in a memorable interview on the Friday afternoon when the tension was almost intolerable and tempers were getting frayed? ‘And a Merry Christmas to all our readers!’ said Richard as cameras switched back to him. The tension dropped and the programme rolled on.
It was after the 1955 Election Results programme that the idea of a weekly Panorama with Richard Dimbleby as anchorman was born. In September 1955, because of the illness of my co-producer, I found myself in sole charge of what was to become the BBC’s most important regular programme. With Richard Dimbleby and with Malcolm Muggeridge, Woodrow Wyatt, Max Robertson and, six months later, with Chris Chataway, we set out to explore the virgin lands of weekly television journalism.
General Election 1964
For Richard, the years of preparation were over. At last he had a weekly major current affairs programme of his own. At last his skills as a newsman, reporter, commentator, and television professional could come together and find expression in one programme.
I worked with Richard on Panorama for four years in all. Memory can be deceptive, but for me Panorama’s finest hour will always be the autumn of 1956. It was during those dark weeks of the Hungarian revolution and the Suez invasion that Panorama grew up. The programme with Richard became a national institution. Thinking back now, my memories of Panorama during that troubled time are blurred and confused. Nasser, the Suez Canal, Budapest, Refugees, Cyprus, Eden, Eisenhower and Stevenson, Khrushchev, the Gaza Strip, Port Said, the United Nations … our cameras rolled, our voices strained, our typewriters tore into paper, as each Monday Richard Dimbleby reported the continuing crisis in Panorama.
Inevitably, Richard wanted to report these great events at first hand. But an anchorman is an anchorman, and we needed him in the Panorama studio. However, he did get to Vienna during this period to report the plight of the thousands of Hungarian refugees who were pouring into the city. As fate would have it, we could not get our Eurovision pictures through from Vienna that Monday night, and for the first time Richard couldn’t introduce Panorama. Cliff Michelmore, who happened to be in the building, took his place. Half an hour later we had used up all our standby material, and Malcolm Muggeridge and some experts on Russia in the Lime Grove Studio were clearly reaching the end of what they could find to say about Khrushchev. It looked as if we might have to end the programme early without switching to Vienna at all.
We had an open control line to the Austrian Outside Broadcast Unit. Richard came on the line. ‘Mike,’ he said, ‘don’t give up. The pictures must come through soon. We must do this Outside Broadcast. It means so much to these people. For them to lose this chance to tell their story to the world would be a tragedy. Their story is all they have left.’
Two minutes later the Eurovision picture we had been waiting for flickered on to our monitors in the Lime Grove Studio. Within thirty seconds we had switched to Vienna and heard his familiar voice: “This is Richard Dimbleby reporting for Panorama from Vienna, where tonight….’ We’d made it, and for the next twenty minutes he helped those Hungarian refugees tell their story to the world.
That is how I shall always remember Richard. A born reporter: full of heart and compassion; moved to action by the plight of the refugees, the homeless, the hungry; determined that their story should be told.
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
By 30 September 1957 Richard Dimbleby had completed twenty-one years of broadcasting. In Panorama that evening he took stock of his career in a self-interview by asking questions of his image fed from another camera on to a television screen:
Question: Mr Dimbleby, you began broadcasting twenty-one years ago. How many broadcasts – radio or television, all put together – do you think you’ve done in that time?
Answer: Well, I’ve tried to add it up – I think it must be in the region of – it’s approaching three thousand.
Question: Well, out of those three thousand are there any particular ones that you remember more than any other?
Answer: Yes, I think there are – I think there are five. The first one was 1938 – these are all occasions on which I was commentator or present – 1938 when Chamberlain came back to Heston Airport, the height of the Munich crisis, waving in his hand a little bit of paper and saying ‘This means peace in our time’, if you remember; and then the first report from the Western Front in the Second World War, that the BEF had gone into action against the German Army, I happened to give that one myself. And later on in the war the discovery of the Belsen concentration camp, I was among the first three people who went in through the gates of that camp, something so horrible I’ll never forget it. Much later on the Coronation of our Queen, because I think that was a great occasion, for television, apart from all its other implications. And more recently, a couple of years ago, the marathon general election television broadcast when we seemed to go on for about twenty-one hours on end without stopping.
Question: Now if I may ask you just one or two pointed questions about yourself and hope for a frank answer. It has been said by people that you’re only really happy in what you’re doing and only really successful in what you’re doing when you’re mixing with dukes and you’re messing about in stately homes. What have you got to say to that?
Answer: Well, it’s absolute nonsense to start with. I have had to do quite a lot of these ‘At Home’ programmes for the BBC, which does involve going into stately homes, and in stately homes you are apt to find dukes, you can’t help that. You find lots of other people too, commoners as well. If the Duke is lively and the stately home’s a beautiful one, I’m perfectly happy, but I’m no more at home there than I am anywhere else. In the course of my twenty-one years I’ve been all over the country, I’ve interviewed everybody under the sun, I’ve always felt welcome and I’ve always felt perfectly at home. Duke or dustman or anyone else, I don’t mind who it is.
At Woburn Abbey with the Duke of Bedford
Question: Well, would you answer this – the critics frequently say that you are pompous. What about that?
Answer: Now that’s something that makes me livid. Look, I don’t think that they know, half of ’em, the difference between pomp and weight. In all the years that I worked in radio and wasn’t seen, nobody ever said I was pompous. The moment I appear on a television screen, they say – He’s pompous. I know what it is, they see I’m enormous – I can’t help that, I am – and because I’m heavy and large they think that heavy and large people are pompous. If I may say so, it’s exactly the same thing as when they say that I’m talking in reverential hushed whispers – I daresay you’ve read that quite often. The reason very often being that on a State occasion or a big occasion, a lot of which I’ve had the good fortune to do for the BBC as a commentator, on those occasions if you’re in a large hushed hall during a solemn ceremony you can’t exactly shout in a Light Programme type of voice, or you’d drown the ceremony and bring it to a standstill. That’s the only reason why I ever whisper anywhere – it’s not reverence, it’s pure necessity.
Question: Well, what about the critics – have you any views on them?
Answer: That’s a temptation. Critics – in my opinion there are only four real television critics in Great Britain. The rest are newspaper reporters who’ve turned to television as a change from crime.
Question: Well, now I’ll ask you, if I may, the sixty-four thousand dollar question – the last one – and it’s this – I’m sorry, you can’t do that, time’s up.
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.’
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.’
Again the response was immediate and overwhelming. The original target was £100,000. Within a week it had passed £230,000. The total was again over £400,000. The BBC had used its own prestige and that of Richard Dimbleby to challenge the public to respond in a time limit and the response had been magnificent. Dimbleby was convinced that the viewers were owed a report on the use to which the money had been put. With David J. Webster as producer, and a camera team, he went to see Skopje for himself and for Panorama’s viewers:
‘The real tragedy of Skopje hits you and hits you very hard when you come to this cemetery on the side of the hill just outside the city. Particularly when you come on a day like this with low cloud in the sky and driving rain blowing across everything. Because this is where they brought eleven hundred men, women and children and a lot of tiny babies and buried them all in these trenches, giving each one a simple spade-shaped red headboard.’
It was with these words that Richard opened the film that we made together in the aftermath of the Skopje earthquake of August 1963 as he walked slowly through the fresh graves on the side of a Macedonian hill. This was a very different Richard from the urbane figure to whom we had become accustomed as he presided over State occasions. At Skopje he found again his old role as a brilliant reporter covering a story of misery and suffering with distinction and with feeling.
With David J. Webster at Skopje
In Skopje more than eleven hundred people had died and 80 per cent of the city had been destroyed. Those who were left were threatened with floods. The four members of the Panorama team were sharing a tent provided by one of the relief organisations. There was a lot of water in it and like the rest of the town we were in danger of being swept away. Richard slept at the end nearest the swollen river and it was agreed that if he sailed past us during the night we would all take it as a signal to leave.
He was not well, his back troubled him, but he remained totally professional and unflustered. He was the only one of the team who had enough common sense to bring not only brandy and instant coffee but a tiny stove on which throughout our stay he brewed the mixture and provided us all with our breakfast.
To many people Richard Dimbleby seemed to represent authority and officialdom. They would not have got that impression in Skopje. His overwhelming feeling was to break through the bureaucracy and the petty barriers which stood between the Macedonians and the relief of their suffering.
Richard did his best reporting when he was dealing with ordinary people. The solidity of his personality and his authority were an effective counterpoint to the sad and chaotic. He mediated between the suffering of this remote land and the concern of a more comfortable Britain. One of his strongest characteristics was that of reassurance. There are many stories in which you just don’t want reassurance, but at Skopje it was this which gave his work a special quality. Standing in ruin he seemed an emissary from a more ordered and rational world who would see that something was done to help, and done soon.
Barto Stuart was in charge of the young British volunteer engineers and specialists who were helping rehouse the thousands of Skopje’s homeless. He recalls:
When I brought Richard and his Panorama team from the wrecked railway station to my Headquarters tent we found the entire humble establishment awash after heavy rainstorms. There was Richard in gum-boots and candlelight, wading in water almost up to his knees, with spanner and screwdriver cheerfully engaged in making up his ex-Army bunk for the night. His arrival in the midst of a terrible human tragedy brought a ray of sorely lacking common sense and sanity. I still see him, cigar in mouth, and feet in water, brewing coffee on his tiny camping stove, one cup at a time, for everyone present. His terrific humour and charm made us all forget – for a few hours at least – the tragedy outside, our own anxieties and the chilly damp cold everywhere around us. He was not an awe-inspiring figure but a dear friend and father, and a very accessible giant among men.
When he left after an all too short five-day stay he managed to secure a compartment for his team and equipment. He placed himself at the carriage window which happened to be shaped like a TV screen. Quickly realising its potential, he began an unforgettable 10-minute miming act. As the train finally departed Richard still stood framed in his screen, making the craziest faces, and his newly made friends and admirers had tears of non-stop laughter and affection running down their cheeks. We had witnessed a performance which I still consider on a par with the best mimes of Charlie Chaplin or Norman Wisdom.
Immediately on return he spent a whole day telephoning wives and mothers of all my volunteers at Skopje giving messages and telling them of the work we were doing. What he did not add was that without himself and his appeal there would never have been any British relief work at Skopje.
That broadcast was recalled a year later in the television column of ‘New Christian’:
You don’t love a man because he’s a professional: you tend, rather, to distrust him, particularly if his professional expertise is directed towards the projection of an image which sometimes seems too gentle to be true.
But people did love Richard Dimbleby and I for one am not ashamed to acknowledge that I was, and remain, one of them. And since I think the roots of my affection for him have a general significance in terms of the whole medium of television I have decided to explain why.
I think it was because he was a person. Television is a medium which eats people. It builds a man into an image: instant soft and desirable female or instant rugged masculinity, always there for screening and plugging and satisfying the aching unconscious needs of the viewer. And if the image goes wrong or the glitter wears a bit thin then the tele-magnates smash the image, drop the idol and start all over again with somebody else. Television is no respecter of persons: it has become, rather, a machine to destroy the person in place of the transient image.
But Richard Dimbleby lasted. I think this was because he was one of those people in whom the public image was the private, interior truth. He really believed what he said on Panorama. He was unbearably open at moments when lesser men, image-mongers, dissolved into fantasy or fiction. And because he brought only himself to the screen, never a self tarted up to represent the kind of person which viewers or listeners might find desirable, it was because he was himself that you trusted him.
I know he had a lot of qualities which some people found rather plummy, his occasional tendency to cross the boundary from the factual to the magisterial, his incredible unflappability, his open devotion to Queen and Country: but these qualities were aspects of a composite person. They were never caricatures, designed cunningly for effect or viewer appeal. They were part of him. And they were complementary to other qualities which are, perhaps, even less fashionable in modern society – gentleness, patience, respect and charity.
There have been moments in all our lives which have been appreciated and savoured and made history by Dimbleby. I think his great occasion for me will always be his commentary on the funeral of Sir Winston. Here was a figure out of history, an old lonely man going to his long home and taking with him something of the glory of England. You might say that in his death England saw a final end to the dangerous myth of her superior moral authority in a wicked world. Dimbleby did not show it to us like that: he reminded us Churchill was a man, and when, in the closing minutes of that January afternoon, he talked of Bladon and the old men and maidens, young men and children, among whom in English soil Winston would soon be laid to rest, you could hear that Dimbleby himself was openly crying.
He must have known he himself was dying then. In losing him at the end of a year of national bereavement we lost a friend whose wisdom and quietness will linger with us as a reminder that we each have it in us to be a person and that the person, not the image, is holy.
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!
To Richard’s deep disappointment his doctors told him he was too ill to fly to Japan in August with other members of the team for Panorama’s 430th edition. Most of the programme came from Nagasaki, just twenty years after the atomic bomb explosion which had ended World War II. Richard had to stay in the studio. He announced the date of Panorama’s return after the summer break under its new editor Jeremy Isaacs and added, as some thought modestly, ‘I hope to be in attendance’. He was expressing a real and far from certain hope. Meanwhile it had been announced that Pope Paul VI would visit the United Nations on Monday 4 October 1965. The first visit of a Pope to American shores was a great television occasion, both for Eurovision and for Panorama that Monday evening. Richard Dimbleby undertook what turned out to be his last journey abroad, and his last great broadcasting event. Again Richard Francis was the Panorama producer with him:
Richard arrived in the BBC New York office late on Friday 1 October. Although it was after 11 p.m. on his time-scale he immediately set about the task of gathering information. Which were the best books on this and that, who was the best man to talk to about the Catholic hierarchy in the States, how accurately was the Pope’s schedule known?
Next day, the Saturday, he attended the briefings held by the UN television unit and CBS. They, with Italian Television, were co-ordinating the programme for all the European networks. Eurovision of course took a common picture sent over the Early Bird satellite. On this occasion the rival American networks also took a common picture. They forsook competition in favour of pooling their resources to get the best coverage of the event. Significantly, at these briefings, the American producers could never quite place Richard among the other commentators. One felt perhaps they would have been happier if he had chaired the meeting. Their solution was to refer all conclusions to him before finalising, ‘How d’you reckon that’s gonna make out, Dick?’
Richard had not been feeling well since his arrival. ‘Something I’ve eaten’ he dismissed it, although he was running a high temperature. Nevertheless, on the Saturday evening he went to two parties. The first was with Peter Woods, former BBC colleague and now ITN’s correspondent in New York. He was doing Independent Television’s commentary on the Monday. Then on to Eddi Ploman, who was running the United Nations coverage. By now he could not eat a thing, but he was still very much the life and centre of the party.
At 10 o’clock on Sunday morning a large black open car drew up outside the Algonquin Hotel in West 44th Street. It was a sunny, though fresh, autumn morning, but Richard insisted that the hood remain down for the drive round the Pope’s route. He wanted to see as much detail as possible.
Ed Stutley, the 20-stone coloured driver, made his living by driving and showing people round Manhattan. Up the long Third Avenue into Harlem he was pointing out the very blocks occupied by Italians, Puerto Ricans, Spanish and Negroes in the polyglot community. Richard made careful notes. But later on, coming back through Central Park, Richard took up the story. ‘That’s the open-air restaurant where… ‘on the next corner is Carnegie Hall…’, ‘there’s Tiffany’s, where His Holiness is not expected for breakfast…’. It was an entertainment in itself.
The Pope in New York
The great day was not without incident. After the 25-mile drive to St Patrick’s Cathedral in Fifth Avenue, the Pope retired to Cardinal Spellman’s residence to rest before meeting President Johnson. Meanwhile BBC-1 slipped in the transmission of Blue Peter. On returning to New York viewers were just in time to see the Pope emerge from the residence. The timing was perfect, it seemed as if he had been cued.
Now Richard began the build-up to the historic moment. ‘This will be the first time a Pope has met a President in the United States…’ ‘All over Europe and particularly in Italy millions of people are watching and waiting for this, one of the highlights of the day….’ The Pope entered the lift at the Waldorf Astoria; on the top floor President Johnson was known to be waiting. Imagine the let-down when there appeared on the screen not the President but an American television commentator. Quickly Richard explained, ‘that is of course our NBC colleague, Ray Scherer…’. Thinking it was a temporary switching error, he flannelled. Not at all. Unknown to us, there had been a last-minute change of plan. The President would see the Pope in private first, the cameras would be let in later. It took some time to establish even that. The Eurovision control room was bedlam. Limply the several European commentators had to round off their commentaries and return viewers to their studios. One of the Italian producers turned to us, ‘Richard was able to make it sound like nothing happened, yes?’
The Pope at the United Nations
Half an hour before he was due to introduce Panorama from the UN, Richard was already cooped up in the interpreter’s box he was using for his commentary. Scarcely larger than a telephone kiosk, it overlooked not the General Assembly but the Trusteeship Council Chamber. So for the Pope’s Address he would have to rely on his monitor. He was checking over his homework when the British party, Lord Caradon, Lord Chalfont and the Foreign Secretary, Michael Stewart, passed by. Lord Caradon stopped, ‘Richard, how nice to see you. What are you doing here? Wouldn’t you rather come and work in our room nearby?’ Richard declined, he wouldn’t leave his post at that stage.
By the time the Pope had finished speaking, and we were off the air, it was late evening in London. But to us it was still only afternoon. Richard felt flat. ‘What about a really good dinner tonight, Sardi’s or somewhere?’ we suggested. No, he couldn’t face it, he was still off his food. ‘What I’d really like to do,’ he confessed, ‘is to see Hello Dolly. It’s the one show I’ve missed.’
Although it had been running on Broadway for nearly two years, ‘Dolly’ was still sold out for months ahead. At two hours’ notice it looked impossible. Sue Goldman of the BBC New York office rang the theatre. ‘Any chance of two really good seats for tonight?’ ‘For tonight! You’re kidding…. Anyway, who are they for?’ ‘Richard Dimbleby.’ ‘Mr Dimbleby? Well now, Mr Dimbleby we can accommodate.’ For a couple of hours he really enjoyed himself.
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.
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.
The Dimbleby family received several thousand letters. Many wished to give practical expression to their affection and admiration for Richard. The Richard Dimbleby Cancer Fund was quickly established, to which the profits of this book and of the companion long-playing record will go. The public response was immediate and strong.
Richard Dimbleby sometimes called Westminster Abbey his ‘workshop’. On the morrow of his death the Dean of Westminster straightway suggested that a Memorial Service should be held in the great cathedral church where England honours those who have done outstanding service. Moreover the Dean and Chapter decided that none of the substantial expense of holding an Abbey Memorial Service should fall upon either the Dimbleby family or the BBC.
The service on 4 January 1966 was a fitting farewell to the man who had so often been the spokesman of the BBC, and of the nation, at Westminster Abbey’s great occasions. The Abbey was freshly adorned and floodlit in celebration of its 900 years. Close to the High Altar a Christmas Tree still stood, with golden bows and bells the only decoration to its dark green branches. Television lighting enhanced the brilliant colouring of the choir stalls and the vestments. For hours beforehand patient queues had formed behind unopened doors.
After every seat was taken, hundreds crowded into the cloister to watch the Memorial Service on television. Others outside the West Door listened to the Sound broadcast on loudspeakers. Five million viewers at home saw the service at 4 p.m., and another six and a half million watched a recording at the end of the evening. Dr Eric Abbott, the Dean of Westminster, conducted the service and read a prayer for broadcasters. The address was given by Dr George Reindorp, Bishop of Guildford:
‘Praise my soul the King of Heaven, to His feet thy tribute bring.’ And the tribute we now bring is the life, work, art, friendship and love of Richard Dimbleby.
The very mention of his name conjures up in the minds of millions a person, someone they felt they knew. Many here in the Abbey did know him personally – those who shaped and shared with him the priceless treasure of a happy home – to whom today our hearts go out in loving sympathy. You in the BBC were his colleagues. So were you in his newspaper for which he cared so much. You all pay tribute here to a man, a friend, a colleague whose work inspired your admiration, marred by never a hint of jealousy.
The measure of his contribution to our English way of life is the fact that almost everyone in England would wish, if they were able at this moment, to give their own picture of what Richard Dimbleby meant to them.
Why is this? Was it because he was a prodigious worker, covering an immense amount of ground in an all too short life? Not entirely, though he was certainly that. Was it because he was a superb professional, demanding the highest standards from himself and inspiring all around him to attain them also? Not entirely, though he was a master at his art. Was it because, although broadcasting cannot speak to the individual, broadcasters of genius can nearly seem to do so? Not entirely, though he was certainly one such.
It was because there was something in him which responded to people as people. Queens and cameramen, bishops and bakers, politicians and printers, homes and husbands, craftsmen and children – these were of the stuff of England’s green and pleasant land which Richard loved. To describe them to others, to hear their point of view, to admire their craft, to listen to their hopes and fears, to help their fellows to assess their value in the moving line between past and present which we call history – this for Richard made sense to his integrity of soul which was his supreme possession.
And it was just because he knew these people, because something in him responded to the majesty and meaning of what was happening that, in the words of Garter King of Arms, he ‘originated and established the new profession and art of commentator on the great occasions and ceremonies of state’. For though he walked with kings and queens, he did not lose the common touch; and knew how by word and by silence to interpret to us ordinary English people throughout the land the outward expression of our heritage and history.
The broadcast Memorial Service, with the Dean of Westminster, mourners in the Abbey, Bishop of Guildford, and Archbishop Lord Fisher
But his unique contribution to our state occasions must not cloud our gratitude for much, much more. A brilliant war reporter, sharing the experiences of fear and danger, his visit to Belsen, one of the first people to go there after the war, left an indelible mark on him. From then on he was never without the knowledge of what can happen to an individual in horrible cruelty, or in squalor; what can happen to those who are unloved or uncared for. And just because of this, the English scene, the English people, their moments grave and gay, gave to him a security which he in turn gave back to them in admiration and service. Richard really cared.
When in those marathon broadcasts about the General Elections Richard Dimbleby announced the results from here or there and added some homely comment about this place or that, you always felt that he was recalling this individual or that whom he had met there. Perhaps it was you in the Abbey, or you in the crowd overflowing the Abbey in the cloister outside, or you viewing, or you listening, or you, or me. And it usually was. For remember that long before Panorama became part of the English scene, for five and a half years, for two days a week, Richard was Down Your Way touring these islands among the people whom he loved, mindful, as Milton taught him, that ‘where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, many opinions: for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making’.
Memorial Service: the empty commentary box, Sir Adrian Boult, the family
And it was to avoid embarrassment to these English people he knew so well that without any fuss or heroics he allowed the secret of his cancer, shared by his family and friends for five years, to be made known to the public who would miss his part in their daily life. And by his action he gave courage and hope to many in the knowledge that if he could face this scourge squarely, so could they. And his example shone bright in a dark day.
Who shall pay the last tribute? Shall it be a Surrey housewife who said: ‘He made many things real to me. In an age of shams he was a man of integrity’, or shall it be the anonymous writer of perhaps one of the most human of the thousands of letters that poured in to him in hospital:
Dear Mr Dimbleby,
My wife and children asked me to write to you and say how sorry we are that you are ill, and how much we miss you on Panorama.
Who am I? Just an ordinary roadman from Berkshire.
See you down my road one of these days.
Yours faithfully,
The Roadman.
Now Richard has left us. Sometimes as we stand on the shore waving goodbye to a ship – as she fades hull-down on the horizon, lost to our sight, we say ‘There she goes’, and turn away heavy-hearted. But we forget that there on the further shore eager eyes are watching for her and eager hands stretch out in greeting.
So, too, with Richard. With quiet confidence and deep gratitude and love, we commend him to the King of Heaven, firm in the knowledge that death cannot kill the bond of love which lifts us all above time and space into the heart of God Himself.
Archbishop Lord Fisher spoke the Commendation of the Departed. It referred to Richard Dimbleby’s gifts of mind and heart and spirit which ‘he improved by care and diligence so great that he established a new art and a new profession of communicating to the people by a commentary the outward forms and the inward meaning of great occasions both in Church and State’.
