Ralph Murray Archives - Richard Dimbleby: Broadcaster

The Start of a Broadcasting Career

One evening, early in May 1936, a 22-year-old journalist sat in his Bloomsbury bed-sittingroom listening to the wireless. The announcer gave the familiar introduction: ‘Here is the news, copyright by Reuter, Press Association, Exchange Telegraph and Central News.’ The news bulletin itself was authoritative, impersonal, and rather dull. It was all culled from agency messages. There were no BBC reporters, and the unseen announcer wore a dinner jacket.

The young journalist decided to write to the Chief News Editor of the BBC, John Coatman. He made detailed proposals for a livelier method of presenting BBC news and suggested a career for himself:

45 Torrington Square, W.C.1
[undated]

Dear Mr Coatman,

You may remember that a few weeks ago you were good enough to give me an interview at Broadcasting House when I enquired about possible vacancies on your staff.

Since then I have been hoping to hear from you, but I quite understand that the possible opening you mentioned may not occur for some time.

Meanwhile I am daring to make a suggestion concerning the news bulletins which you may care to consider. Naturally, I should very much like to assist with it myself, but that is not the only reason for which I make it.

It is my impression, and I find that it is shared by many others, that it would be possible to enliven the news to some extent without spoiling the authoritative tone for which it is famed. As a journalist, I think that I know something of the demand which the public makes for a ‘news angle’, and how it can be provided. I suggest that a member or members of your staff – they could be called ‘BBC reporters, or BBC correspondents’ – should be held in readiness, just as are the evening paper men, to cover unexpected news for that day. (Some suggestion of this sort is, I believe, contained in the Ullswater report.) In the event of a big fire, strikes, civil commotion, railway accidents, pit accidents, or any other of the major catastrophes in which the public, I fear, is deeply interested, a reporter could be sent out from Broadcasting House to cover the event for the bulletin.

At the scene, it would be his job, in addition to writing his own account of the event, to secure an eye-witness (the man or woman who saw it start, one of the survivors, a girl ‘rescued from the building’) to give a short eye-witness account of the part he or she played that day. In this way, I really believe that news could be presented in a gripping manner, and, at the same time, remain authentic.

Everyone, I think finds the agency reports a trifle flat after a time – as, indeed, they are bound to be. It is for that reason, I take it, that you keep an observer at Geneva, and incorporate a short talk in the bulletins on some topic of the day. But these talks are always academic – they come from an authority on the subject. There can be no vital authority on a sudden news event, unless it be the man in the street who was on the spot.

Technically, the scheme should present no difficulties. Through the Saturday Magazine and In Town Tonight, you already know that the rather uncouth voices of Londoners and countrymen can be recorded or transmitted satisfactorily, and you are used to last minute arrangements. The description of the event, in addition to the story written by the reporter and any agency matter which you may care to use, could be transmitted from the studio, to which your representative could bring the eye-witness.

Alternatively, if that person should be unable to come, it should be possible to record his or her brief description in the mobile van which you keep for actuality programmes. Such a news bulletin would itself be a type of actuality programme. I do submit, however, that a journalist should be given the job of assisting with its presentation, rather than a BBC producer.

I do not propose that the whole of the news should be treated in this way, although a staff man at the regional centres could cover you in the same way, and big events of the type could be relayed for the news from these places. The usual foreign, political, and personal news would still be supplied by the agencies or by your own representatives direct.

This principle of enlivening news by the infusion of the human element is being followed in other spheres, as you know. The newspapers, of course, have demanded interviews for their big stories for many years, and I myself have had to obtain eye-witness accounts and personal interviews for hundreds of stories of all types.

A man in headphones in front of a panel with dials and gauges — ‘Professor’ Stanley Unwin operating pre-war recording van

The newsreels are following suit, The March of Time being an example. In this, as you may have seen, the method followed is that of not only showing the news, but telling why, and how, it happened. That is what I suggest the BBC could do with great success, not only with sudden events or catastrophes, but with all types of news which at present come to the listener from the pen of a Press Association or Exchange Telegraph man who gives the same story to hundreds of provincial evening papers and London dailies.

If the news service of the Corporation is to be extended, both for home programmes and those to the Empire, would this not be a valuable part of the programme? It does seem to me that in the future and particularly in the event of national emergency, the BBC will play a vital part. Recorded news bulletins of the type I suggest would also prove valuable libraries of this century, for the next.

If you put this scheme into operation, or even included part of it in your future scheme, I should be happy if I were able to play a part.

I have had the type of experience needed, both among country people in the provinces and in the suburbs. Now I am in Fleet Street, and it may possibly interest you to know that I have been appointed news editor of the Advertiser’s Weekly – I now have, I believe, the doubtful honour of being Fleet Street’s youngest editor, a position which my father enjoyed thirty-five years ago at the same age.

But I have detained you far too long already. I hope that you have found time to read this long letter, and that it may be of some use. I do hope that there may be some opportunity for me in your department in the not too distant future, for I really am interested and confident that I should be of use to you.

Yours very truly,
Richard Dimbleby

The BBC News Department happened to have a vacancy for a subeditor at the time and Dimbleby was urged to apply formally for that post. In May 1936 he was not quite twenty-three, but had been working in printing and newspapers for nearly five years.

‘… I am a member of an old journalistic family – my father has been in Fleet Street and Whitehall for nearly forty years – and I have had hard experience in many branches of daily and weekly newspaper work.

‘After preparatory education at “Glengorse”, Eastbourne, I went to Mill Hill School. I was afterwards prevented from going to University, but obtained London University matriculation. Almost immediately after leaving school, I went into my family’s newspaper and printing business at Richmond, Surrey, started at the bottom, and worked my way through printing, paper, and advertising departments before joining the reporting and sub-editorial staffs of the three weekly papers.

‘I remained at Richmond, carrying out all types of local news work and sub-editing until the Spring of 1934, when I joined the staff of Southern Newspapers, Ltd, Southampton. Here I was on the editorial staffs of the Southern Echo and Bournemouth Daily Echo, and was local correspondent in the New Forest area for the leading London dailies and news agencies. I represented both of these evening papers at the same time over an area of a hundred square miles, sending each separate stories of all news events, principally from the New Forest area. As a district representative and during Head Office work, I carried out a great deal of sub-editing as well as general and descriptive reporting. I became used to all forms of rapid news work, at any hour of the day or night.

‘In December last year, I resigned and joined the staff of the Advertiser’s Weekly, Fleet Street, for the sake of coming back to London. After working for three months on the editorial staff, I have been appointed News Editor; and rank, I believe, as the youngest news editor in Fleet Street. Naturally, I am having hard experience here, as this paper has a reputation for weekly exclusive stories, and is regarded as one of the boldest and most go-ahead trade or news papers in the country.

‘I write shorthand, have a fairly fluent command of French and a smattering of German. I also have a car, and live alone within a mile of Broadcasting House. I am single….’

References were taken up. Dimbleby’s former Headmaster at Mill Hill, the great M. L. Jacks, wrote:

‘I knew him well when he was a boy at this school a few years ago, and I formed a high opinion of his character and ability. His conduct, industry, and progress were always good, and he did well all round. He had the faculty of getting on with other people, and was universally liked. I have no hesitation in recommending him for an appointment on your staff; you would, I am sure, find him trustworthy, reliable, and always anxious to do his best; I think his best will be very good.’

In the event, Charles Gardner, rather than Dimbleby, was appointed to the sub-editor post, but soon there was a more suitable vacancy and Dimbleby was engaged to start work as a Topical Talks Assistant in the News Department on Monday 14 September 1936. Ralph Murray, his immediate boss, was however due to leave on 16 September for Geneva to report from the League of Nations. Dimbleby arranged with Murray to arrive on Friday 11 September and work over the weekend to familiarise himself with the new job.

It was typical of Dimbleby to arrive early and do the maximum preparation. In the Staff Record ledger kept by Sir John Reith in the Director-General’s office his starting date had to be adjusted. His salary was £350 a year.

Two grown-ups and a small boy — Aged 5, with mother Gwen and father Lt F. J. G. Dimbleby

Frederick Richard Dimbleby was born on 23 May 1913 into a journalistic family. His grandfather, F. W. Dimbleby, had acquired a group of local newspapers at Richmond, Surrey, towards the end of the last century. His father, Frederick J. G. Dimbleby, had worked in Fleet Street for much of his life. He had served Lloyd George, and had been press officer at the Ministry of Labour. For many years he was the political correspondent of the ‘Daily Mail’, but he fell out with his employers over pre-war attitudes to fascism and withdrew to the less lucrative field of the family local papers.

This change in the Dimbleby fortunes put an end to Richard’s hopes of going on from his public school to Oxford or Edinburgh and eventually becoming a surgeon. Instead he put on an apron and was set to work at F. W. Dimbleby and Sons Ltd to learn all about printing and the newspaper business. He was taught to set type and to write copy. He covered police court cases and organised advertising.

His mother, née Gwendoline Bolwell, had a pleasant contralto voice. She used to sing to young Richard and his sister Patricia. She also used to sing for the Richmond Operatic Society, in musicals such as ‘Rose Marie’, ‘The Desert Song’ and ‘The Vagabond King’. Indeed the Dimbleby background held elements of show business as well as journalism. Richard’s father was on the business-management side of the Richmond Operatic Society, and Richard himself loved the weeks when at the age of twelve he acted as call boy. At Mill Hill he played Ralph Rackstraw in the school production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘H.M.S. Pinafore’, and throughout his broadcasting career he relished being produced as an actor enjoys good direction.

Richard Dimbleby was also a talented pianist and organist. Later, on countless occasions in all parts of the world he was to entertain friends with improvisations at the piano. He was the first to play publicly on the new organ at the Festival Hall, and once the London air rang out with ‘Oranges and Lemons’ when Richard played the bells at All Hallows Church at the Tower. Music and messing about in boats were always his main sources of relaxation.

By twenty-three he had had a thorough grounding in journalism, and plenty of energy, enthusiasm and self-confidence. But he had no experience at all of broadcasting.

L. F. Lewis, now the Engineer in charge of Sound Outside Broadcasts, was told to take the BBC’s only mobile recording van to the model engineering exhibition at the Royal Horticultural Hall in London, and look out for a rosy-faced young man outside the entrance. ‘For goodness sake help me,’ Richard said. ‘This is my very first BBC job.’ Twenty-four hours later he told Lewis, ‘It’s all right, I’m in.’ He was, but only just.

A boy, a woman and a girl — Aged 10, with mother Gwen and sister Pat

Tony Wigan, BBC United Nations Correspondent, was then chief sub-editor. He recalls:

‘He very nearly didn’t make it. His very first broadcast in the nine-thirty News was heard by the Director-General, then Sir John Reith, to us both a deeply respected and rather frightening man. The Newsroom phone rang three times, the signal that the D.G. was on the line. He enquired the name of the reporter in the News and on being told said only that he never wanted to hear him again. But Dimbleby was given another chance and matters arranged themselves.’

Arthur Phillips, a Programme Assistant with the mobile recording van, went with him on his first actuality news broadcast which came from a cowshed near Amesbury, hardly an auspicious beginning for a great broadcasting career.

‘Cherry, a champion cow, had broken the milking record and Richard Dimbleby was sent down to cover this great event. We went down together with the recording van and by the light of a hurricane lamp – and with Cherry breathing steamily over his shoulder – Richard made his first radio interview. He put up the microphone and said “Moo” – and she mooed. But this was only half the job; the recordings which were required for the ten o’clock News had to be edited and transmitted from the Bournemouth studio, a very primitive lash-up of a place over a cycle shop. Just before transmission the only gramophone turntable in the place completely gave up the ghost and nothing would make it rotate.

‘Writing of this some years later, Richard said, “As the ten o’clock News approached I was in despair. To tell the truth, I had an unpleasant feeling that if my first effort at broadcasting was a failure I might lose my nerve and never be able to do the job at all.” But his anxiety was never apparent to me as I turned the record with my finger for the duration of the broadcast. As he said later, “The whole thing went off like a dream, and no one in the world was happier than I, though the memory of it made me tremble.”

A play in progress — ‘H.M.S. Pinafore’ at Mill Hill School, 1928

‘He tackled his news reporting with zest and tireless enthusiasm; floods in the fens, gales on the Welsh coast, an interview with William Morris, the motor magnate, a shipwreck, a stranded Cornish lighthouse keeper, were some of his early assignments, and recording engineers L. F. Lewis, Harvey Sarney and myself spent many hours in his ancient Morris Oxford being driven at breakneck speed about the countryside. We were always reluctant to sit in the front seat with Richard, for when it got dark and the engine warmed up you could see the exhaust manifold glowing white hot through a hole in the floorboards, and when you complained the answer you got was – “Nothing to be afraid of, it’s done thousands of miles like that”. It had, too.

‘Dimbleby was not yet a household word. There were inevitably times when it was either mispronounced or misspelled. Before the war he was to report on some fleet exercises off Gibraltar, and in the harbour a destroyer steamed alongside the P & O liner that had taken him out from England and a voice called over the loud hailer, “Have you a Mr Soapleby aboard?” He was Mr Soapleby for the rest of the exercise, preferring the Ward Room’s mild amusement at this rather odd name to the mirth he thought there would have been had he told them of their mistake.’

Dogsbody in the Newsroom

Ralph Murray, now the British Ambassador in Athens, was then in charge of the News Talks Section and was Dimbleby’s first mentor in the BBC.

Richard was, or seemed, a mere boy when he joined us in 1936. He was twenty-three. We were all pretty young, and he was five years younger than us all. We were blundering about among the problems and experiments of expanding the News Service. It had been a very modest affair of sub-edited agency news. Our ideas of expansion involved re-negotiation of contracts with the agencies to give us greater freedom of action, expansion of bulletins both in length and frequency, and the introduction into them of our own reports or illustrations or contributions on outstanding events both at home and abroad. Kenneth Adam’s restless spirit, untamed by two years on the Manchester Guardian, was stirring this pot; Tony Wigan had come from Belfast to apply his severe subediting standards; Angus Mackay from Edinburgh was licking the sports news into shape; Charles Gardner was a sub-editor then, too; others played their parts. I was in charge, on a shoe-string budget, of the beginnings of the reporting expansion, and to me Richard Dimbleby was assigned.

He was allotted of course the role of stooge, junior reporter, dogsbody, help. We were experimenting with our techniques, for which there was no precedent. We were not only young, we were mostly a graduate lot with some serious thoughts and criteria between us, most of us had more or less newspaper or news agency experience, a fair aggregate of intelligence and large areas of ignorance. We thought however we knew most of the answers. Richard was not only five years younger than the bulk of us – the exception was our dear, infuriating, experienced, scholarly, unreasonable and highly skilled old Scots news editor, the late R. T. Clark – he was not a graduate.

Richard brought to our team a tradition of newspaper ownership and management, which he had learned in his family newspapers, and a personal enthusiasm for reporting – but not the severe training of subediting. Mentally, he was the antithesis of all of us, whether of the slightly conceited, sceptical young graduates or of the disciplined, self-critical professional sub-editors. He was enthusiastic, uncritical, unintellectual. He not only knew none of the answers, he never even bothered about the questions. We nicknamed him, affectionately and artlessly, Bumble, because he was fat and buzzed: he was never either clumsy or pompous. But he had charm and immense self-confidence.

Now self-confidence in a journalist is vital. His profession constantly requires him to describe, judge, criticise or examine matters on which he necessarily cannot possibly possess much if any expertise, and in relation to which not only his judgment but even his description must rest on incomplete information. He must have the confidence, perhaps one should say the blind confidence, constantly to pronounce his judgment or publish his findings on this inadequate foundation, or he will break his heart and certainly will be a bad journalist. Plenty have it, and become in various degrees perspicacious, opinionated, analytical, waspish or portentous as their natures and professional opportunities allow. Perhaps fewer have it combined with charm; not merely charm of manner, but charm of nature such as Richard had.

Three men prepare a recording — With Arthur Phillips (left) and Charles Gardner editing news recordings

The role of stooge did not suit him. Very quickly he was popping up with ideas, suggestions, contributions. Very soon he had worked his fat, quick, bouncing personality into a partnership in our team. But he was never arrogant, never impertinent, always loyal – though I think he muttered behind his hand at some of the Reithian restraints I imposed upon him. Quite soon he was constantly out on reporting assignments – not all of which were broadcast – and I began a private struggle with him over his use of language. He had then a positive enthusiasm for the cliché.

He seldom wrote what he was reporting, but rather recorded or transmitted it straight off his tongue: he had a rolling fluency in delivering it, but at a terrible stylistic price. I cursed him and slashed his copy and blue-pencilled his adjectives and cursed again and called upon him to think what language meant. In my pernickety sub-conscious mind I was demanding the astringency of a future John Freeman combined with the vocabulary of a James Morris. Richard went on rolling out his clichés with a relish and conviction that robbed them of their banality and positively gave them life. But, impervious to his real potentialities, I continued to try to shape him to impossible and inapplicable ideals.

Of course, the extreme condensation and economy of style required in contributions to those news bulletins were not his proper medium. I think he knew this at the time and was already working out how to transfer his resources of fluency to Outside Broadcast commentaries where they could find full scope: but he was feeling his way in the BBC and anyway was loyal to his team. Meanwhile he was most resourceful, as reporters must be, and reported all sorts of things. He sploshed about for days over-reporting some Fen floods. We went together on a rather stunty outing when a Dutch firm diverted a tin-dredger to have an unavailing go at the wreck of the Lutine off the Dutch island of Terschelling: Richard drove his car, which had cost him £3 and made awful clanking noises; we suffered a good deal of rough water and someone fell in; but in terms of news broadcasting the expedition was a failure.

He reported formal occasions with perhaps a whiff of his future carefully-judged style, aspects of the abdication crisis, of King George VI’s Coronation, occasionally sports events, accidents, anything that fitted in to our requirements – and then, as my work took me more and more abroad and the cloud of war became even in England bigger than a man’s hand, he reported military preparations, the end of the Spanish Civil War and Neville Chamberlain’s return from Munich; and I think at this stage his style tightened and he set himself the standards of thought and behaviour which underlay the sincerity in his war reporting and his carefully developed technique of extensive descriptive broadcasting and television commentary. I do not think my curses had helped much. If he was tolerable, acceptable or a delight to later millions of listeners and viewers, it was rather because his charm of nature gave him a modesty which not only communicated itself to his public but furnished a self-discipline far more effective than the astringent requirements of his News Service days.

Enterprise but No Faking

In June 1937 Richard Dimblehy married a girl he had met as a fellow reporter on the family newspapers at Richmond, Dilys Thomas, third daughter of a London barrister. The BBC gave him a wedding present of £5. Had he been with the staff a whole year it would have been £10. The Dimblebys were poor and happy.

Charles Gardner soon moved over from sub-editing to join Richard Dimbleby as the second BBC news observer, and between them they covered all the home news stories, while Ralph Murray continued to report the League of Nations.

A bride and groom — Copthorne, Sussex, 26 June 1937

Richard was fascinated by the technique of the use of recordings. He was always experimenting with sound effects and with microphone placings. Here both he and I had to observe one very clear rule of the News Talks section – there must be no faking. To fake was the unforgivable sin. The bark of the dog that roused the household against a burglar had to be the bark of the dog and not just the bark of any other dog of the same species. We were rather proud of this integrity, and when it was suggested to us, as it so often was, that rather than put all concerned to a great deal of trouble to produce some sound effect or other, we could more easily and more convincingly fake it, we used to reply with great dignity ‘News Talks never fakes’. I have some recollection of Dimbleby and Arthur Phillips spending all of some railway journey behind a new record-breaking engine recording the real sound of the train’s wheels by dangling the microphone down a lavatory pan.

About this time there was the affair of the telephone boxes. This arose after a series of headline news stories had annoyingly occurred in the remoteness of East Anglia. Probably the Fen floods was one of these stories. East Anglia was a ‘Here do dwell savages’ area on our map, because there was nowhere nearer than London we could use to play back discs for that night’s news. So, after a series of problems about getting discs back from East Anglia, and losing a high proportion of them as Railway Press Packages, Richard had his telephone box idea. What was wrong with hitching an amplifier and a BBC microphone on to a GPO box and making any telephone kiosk an impromptu Outside Broadcast point? What indeed? So Richard and, I think, David Howarth of Recorded Programmes wandered around putting in calls to Broadcasting House from telephone kiosks and getting them recorded. In the end the GPO said the whole proposal was illegal and that was that. So East Anglia remained the great broadcasting waste unless, of course, one ignored the law and used a telephone hitched up to a recording channel at Broadcasting House and then remembered to remove from the disc the ‘thrrreee minutes’ interruptions from the trunk operators (before the pips were invented). Richard did this several times for straight eyewitness pieces, and so did I. We were never prosecuted.

Richard Dimbleby in those pioneering days of BBC reporting was cheerful, good natured, intensely hard-working and bubbling with enthusiasm for each and every story. Together we made youthful common cause against the hated ‘admin’ – the administrative people in the BBC – seen by us in simple black and white terms as the ‘baddies’. ‘They’ couldn’t properly organise the instant availability of a recording car; ‘they’ would hardly sanction the spending of a halfpenny on the news service; ‘they’ challenged the need to buy a pint of beer for someone who had helped us. Fighting ‘them’ became the joy of our lives.

With hindsight and the maturity of extreme age, I can imagine that ‘they’ were really scared stiff at the possible Trojan Horse they had invited inside the walls of Broadcasting House. The BBC putting out safe bulletins ‘copyright by Reuter, Press Association, etc.’ was one thing. Any allegation of error or bias could be neatly blamed on the agencies. BBC staff reporters were different. Might they not start to editorialise – to use the great power and prestige of the BBC to shape public opinion this way or that way – even by an inflection of voice? Outside experts might just land the BBC in trouble on this score, but at least they were not BBC staff. Dimbleby and Murray and I were staff and could not be disowned or explained away.

Two people in a classic car — With his wife in the London to Brighton Veteran Car Rally, 1948

Richard and I were then perhaps too raw, too young, or too inexperienced to give these matters of high policy a thought. We never dreamed of editorialising. We were professionally-trained reporters, interested only in conveying undisputed facts and not concerned to hold inquests. Richard spent a great deal of quiet and careful time in ascertaining, checking and cross-checking the facts. If there was a discrepancy either he left it out or used the ‘some say this – others say that’ technique without advancing his own views. But – and this is my point – we did this by instinct not by command. Of course we had views, but we never dreamt of inflicting those views on the public. Both of us had been brought up in the old-fashioned Scott school which said that facts were sacred – and the free comment was not our affair.

In the News bulletins time was strictly limited. It was common to be told ‘You have 45 seconds in the nine o’clock and you can have 2 minutes 15 seconds at ten’. Richard’s great and enduring strength, the ability to tell any story with a beginning, a middle, and an end in any stated time-scale from 30 seconds to a lavish 3½ minutes derived, I am certain, from those early days.

The News Department was impecunious – and we ourselves were perpetually broke. I remember the night in 1937 when it became clear to Richard and me that there was potentially big news in the fact that Tommy Sopwith’s America’s Cup challenger Endeavour on her return journey across the Atlantic had broken her tow and was facing full gale conditions.

We decided to cover two key places: Southampton where Sopwith’s motor yacht had now fetched up, without Endeavour hitched on behind; and Plymouth near to which Endeavour must sail if she ever regained our waters.

Richard and I tossed up for destinations. He won and chose Southampton. Then came the little matter of getting railway tickets. An office ‘float’ cash box existed for such emergencies. It was scheduled to contain £20 – the system being to extract some cash and leave a signed IOU in its place. We opened the box, and found a shower of IOUs – all of them signed by the news editor ‘R. T. Clark’. So Richard and I turned out our pockets and dunned our colleagues – but the collection fell short of £3. Our next move was to go to the Queen’s Hall opposite, where the BBC was staging the Proms. There we persuaded the cashier to give us £10 each from the till, on note of hand alone. Thus did Richard get to Southampton and I to Plymouth that night.

It was while on this story, and as a guest on Sopwith’s luxury motor yacht, that Richard, replete with champagne and feeling thirsty in the night, drank some doubtful water, contracted paratyphoid, and was seriously ill in hospital. He was away for two months. The expense involved nearly broke him and he pleaded with ‘Admin’ to get them to pay his hospital bills on the grounds that he contracted his paratyphoid on Corporation duty. The story became involved because there was a simultaneous typhoid outbreak at Croydon at the time, plus a counter allegation that Richard had been negligent in using a wrong tap to get his water. Finally the BBC split the bill down the middle, but even so Richard’s half of it was a serious problem for him. While Richard was getting paratyphoid at Southampton, I was getting seasick at Plymouth. I managed, however, via friendly pilots at the airfield, to find Endeavour and go alongside in a small hired boat to interview the Skipper – while Fleet Street was still arguing the toss in pubs ashore. I returned to start my own anti-‘Admin’ file on the matter of 3s. 6d. expended for a bottle of sea-sick remedy. We cleaned up completely in the Endeavour story for a cost of about £20. The newspapers spent hundreds – and missed out.

At this time neither Richard nor I could afford a personal motor-car. We did, however, finally set ourselves up with a jointly owned Swift purchased for £10 with capital borrowed from Ralph Murray and repaid to him out of the 3d. a mile BBC car allowance for duty journeys. Richard and Dilys had the private use of the car one weekend, and my wife Eve and I had it for the other. I have now completely forgotten what happened to the Swift, but I remember Richard coming to me very excited to say that MGs would give us a new car each (to be changed every year) if we would put ‘BBC News’ on it somewhere. Imagine the temptation – but after a mournful drink, we decided that we daren’t. My memories of Richard’s financial troubles at this time are varied, but they had one central theme, ‘Dilys has rung to say she is going to sell the piano’ – but I don’t think she ever did.

In December 1936, just before the Abdication, Richard and I were parties to one of the BBC’s best kept skeletons – the day the BBC News Department threatened to strike. The newspapers, after Bishop Blunt’s sermon, were now full of the Simpson divorce but the BBC didn’t carry a word. Eventually this became, in our view, stupid and the staff of BBC News issued an ultimatum: either that night’s bulletins made some reference to the main topic of the day – or there would be no News Bulletin at all. Richard and I weren’t directly involved, but gave our general agreement. Fortunately the matter wasn’t put to the test because that afternoon Stanley Baldwin made mention of the matter in the House of Commons and our local crisis was averted. Would there have actually been a strike of BBC News? I don’t know. The key mover, Alan Wells, who was killed by a bomb in the war, felt very strongly indeed on the subject and he had much support.

Early in 1939 the Spanish Civil War (a very difficult subject from a BBC impartiality viewpoint) was delicately covered by Richard interviewing refugees at Perpignan. Later both of us went to Yarmouth to interview all concerned in an action off the East Coast in which a Spanish warship had fired on and sunk a Spanish merchantman and alleged blockade runner. I, and half of Fleet Street, caught a train to Yarmouth. Richard said if I would get the story he would liberate the recording car and join me. I telegraphed ahead and booked the only two station taxis in the majestic name of the BBC, and thus was able to isolate Fleet Street for long enough to sign up an exclusive interview with the Spanish captain for £5. I knew that, back at the station, O’Dowd Gallagher of the Daily Express was willing to offer £100. I waited ages with my story and the interviewee for Richard to arrive with the recording car, mounting guard on the hotel stairs and concealing from our Fleet Street colleagues who had now arrived that the principal actors in the drama were upstairs in the same building. Had O’Dowd found out he would certainly have outbid me. Richard eventually showed up (the recording car had been locked up and no one had the key, so he had had to break in the garage door) and we all repaired by a back exit to the Post Office where we used our car amplifier to transmit the story and the exclusive interviews. When we finished I saw a movement behind a pillar in the GPO – it was O’Dowd, notebook in hand, taking down our stuff. His office could, of course, have got it direct in London by listening to the radio – and probably did.

We enjoyed our battles with Fleet Street. We were handicapped by having no money to bribe or buy or to hire aircraft or boats, so we used the magic of the BBC name instead. For some reason people were very willing to talk to us for nothing when they were not so forthcoming to other reporters.

I have little recollection of Richard’s coverage of the Royal Tour of Canada in 1939 save a picture of him gloomily telling me that even he who had a certain genius with BBC expense sheets was unable to account for some £96 spent on the Canadian trip and he didn’t know what was going to happen. He was very low about it for days, until suddenly he showed me a memo he’d composed which said, ‘You can’t expect me to account for every halfpenny when I am with my King’. Apparently that memo did the trick and Richard brightened up again.

Indeed, when on a job involving good hotels and a chance of a grander life than either he or I could normally afford (I think we both got under £600 a year) Richard set about making the most of it. I remember him ringing all the bells in sight in one splendid hotel and ordering a manicure, drinks in the room, and expensive sandwiches – mainly I think to enjoy seeing the shock on my face. On jobs which permitted it, the best was only just good enough for Richard, and I envied the grand manner he assumed to match his temporary opulence. I suspect that this lay at the heart of many minor clashes with the ‘Admin’. I hasten to add that these little assumptions of grandeur were done as a piece of gamesmanship against the BBC administration and always ended in a giggle of anticipation at the reception of the expense sheet.

War was drawing near. Richard was to go to France with the Army and I, as a qualified pilot, with the RAF. The fun days were over; but for both of us our attitude to broadcasting, to integrity, to non-editorialisation and to careful reporting, whether we knew it or not, was shaped for all time.

If I had to name those who contributed to the shaping in those prewar days, I would say S. J. de Lotbinière of Outside Broadcasts, whose demand for professionalism and integrity extended its influence well beyond his own department, R. T. Clark with his casual but shrewd light handling of reins, Michael Balkwill for his sense of fairness and balance, and Ralph Murray’s morning criticism of what we had perpetrated the night before. But none of this would have counted if Richard himself had not been the right selection from the start. I suppose he could have set radio reporting back for five years; instead he advanced it by a decade.

A man on a deck of a ship — On the ‘Duchess of York’, 1939

I first met Richard Dimbleby in the spring of 1939. I had been brought into the BBC to run the News Talks in German, which Ralph Murray had started a month or two before. Dimbleby was about to leave for Canada and the United States to cover the tour of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. It was the first time that a Royal Tour had included a BBC correspondent.

Equipped with a new morning suit and evening tails, Dimbleby sailed on the ‘Duchess of York’ on the first of many visits to the New World. He shared a cabin with his father’s old friend Edward Gilling, for long the Court correspondent of ‘Exchange Telegraph’ who gave him many useful tips on how to deal with the elaborate retinue surrounding the Monarch.

On this journey Dimbleby substantially increased his stature as a correspondent. In addition to being a broadcaster of enterprise he became one of distinction. Handling Richard’s scripts daily, as I did at the time, one could watch his style mature and his national reputation grow during that Royal Tour. The Board of Governors recorded their appreciation of his exceptionally good work in Canada.

It was also significant that the King and Queen got to know, to like and to trust Richard Dimbleby. As they neared the American stage of their journey he posted a note (signed ‘Bumble’) from the Royal Train to his friend Muriel Howlett in News Talks.

The US looks like being pretty frantic. … We’ve also been invited to the Roosevelts’ picnic and I have fixed up to say ‘how-do’ to the gentleman himself, which will be interesting. …

I took part in an amazing broadcast at Moose Jaw the other day, for the local station, and was announced with a terrific fanfare of trumpets as the star of the evening. They brought the mike right up to the train as it arrived, and all would have been well if the bastard (beg your pardon) hadn’t got my name wrong. Very undignified having to correct him and say your name isn’t Dunglehop. I suppose he must have seen my signature somewhere.

After that he had numerous letters from Moose Jaw, one addressed to Dangleberry. ‘I think that’s the worst.’