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
Richard Dimbleby’s first year for BBC News hardly foreshadowed what he was to mean to broadcasting. But there were some signs of things to come that we in the newsroom could detect and appreciate in his early reports. On small as well as great occasions he already had a gift for finding the true keynote for each composition. He brought enthusiasm for the essence of each story and found words that blew a wind of change through BBC bulletin style. Perhaps there was still the odd newspaper cliché, but he was beginning to find how to convey grandeur without being emptily pompous; how to be vivid and colloquial without cheapness and without gimmicks.
Sometimes the signs of the future Dimbleby were particularly clear to see: in his reporting of the great Fenland floods of March 1937, for instance. Anyone expecting only another reporter on yet another flood story could soon see how significantly the dimensions were to be enlarged. For the first time – the first of so many times – he became part of the story himself. Knowing what we do of him some thirty years afterwards, we can read a good deal between the staid lines of a Times report soon after the floods had started: ‘Contact between the Great Ouse Catchment Board headquarters in Ely and workers at various points has been maintained by means of messages broadcast frequently by the BBC.’ Richard had, in fact, characteristically got himself to the heart of this network of control, communication and reporting. Here was the future ‘anchorman’ – a word oddly appropriate to what he was doing on board the barges in the floodwaters of the Fens.
There was something about his reporting of the scene that was also to become a hallmark of his work: the careful mastery of highly specialised facts. He did not deal in vague descriptions of ‘hundreds of acres inundated in the grim fight against the encroaching waters’; he found out and explained in his reports what the complex situation really was – and explained it in terms of exact locations, comparative water levels, pumping-stations and sluice-gates, with proper use of technical terms: ‘gault’ as the word for the local clay to plug cracks in the banks, ‘blow’ for a breach in them.
To get the words, the sounds of what was going on to the listeners, Richard and his recording team had to cut discs in their green van and entrust them to the guard of a London-bound train. But such mechanics of the assignment daunted him no more than the future mysteries of Telstar. They were good reports to get in the BBC newsroom of 1937: I still find them good to read again now, with Richardian sentences like ‘… down the stream the moving pinpricks of light that are the lanterns of men working to close the cracks in the bank. … Perhaps at this moment you can hear the wind as it roars round us.’
When the House of Commons debated the Fenland floods, Richard’s reports were quoted as an authoritative source for points under discussion. Another landmark for those days, but he was referred to anonymously as ‘the eye-witness of the British Broadcasting Corporation’. The name Dimbleby didn’t mean very much at Westminster – yet.
Charles Collingwood, now Chief European Correspondent of the Columbia Broadcasting System, was a fellow war correspondent with Richard Dimbleby throughout World War II. He knows at first hand the problems of the television performer.
I remember running into Richard Dimbleby at the front in France in 1944. He was carrying with him a new and highly ingenious portable disc recording device which the BBC engineers had just developed. It was the latest thing and he demonstrated it to me with the greatest enthusiasm, tilting it alarmingly on one side as he talked into the microphone, bouncing it up and down as he recorded, and then playing it back triumphantly. He showed me the tiny motor, the miniature gears that kept the speed constant in every position, the way the recording head was cushioned against shock. He knew all about it and exactly how it worked. My own more primitive American instrument remained a complete mystery to me and I had to be accompanied by an expert to operate it. Richard handled his himself.
As we advanced into the increasing complications of television, Dimbleby remained abreast of the developing technology. He knew what every lens could do, the limitations of the image orthicon tube, the importance of lighting. Because of this, he knew what was likely to go wrong. This is an inestimable advantage to a broadcaster who stands there in his pool of light, with all the public responsibility for the programme on his shoulders, yet as isolated from the technical infrastructure which keeps him on the air as if he were in a diving bell. When something goes wrong, unless he knows what must have happened, he is lost, pitifully burbling and complaining in public view until it is put right. But Dimbleby could always guess what had happened and his rescues of broadcasts from technical difficulties became legendary. His famous aplomb was solidly based on professional understanding of the medium.
All this made him a joy to work with. Technical crews in America as well as in the BBC always liked to be assigned to a Dimbleby programme, and his obvious expertise was a great comfort to those who found themselves being interviewed by him on his programmes. A television interview can be a frightening experience, but Dimbleby was so obviously in command that his presence was very reassuring to the fellow in the other chair. He wasn’t particularly famous for it, but I always thought Dimbleby was a superb interviewer. His style of courteous persistence and the rapport he established with his guests often brought out a truer picture of his subjects than the more abrasive and challenging style of other interviewers which, by putting the subject on the defensive, tends to elicit only defensive reactions.
As it happened, we did a good many transatlantic broadcasts together when Telstar and Early Bird appeared in the heavens. He understood all about them, too. It was a great relief to know that he would be on the other end of these celestial communications, for if anything went wrong you could be sure that with Dimbleby there it would not be irretrievable. These broadcasts brought him more regularly before American audiences. He was the only British broadcaster who was immediately identifiable to large numbers of Americans. This is not surprising; Americans pride themselves on their ability to recognise the real thing.
Richard Dimbleby was the real thing, all right – both as a person and broadcaster. His influence upon the techniques of broadcasting was very great. Because he knew his job so well, he forced others to learn theirs. I’m sorry he won’t be around to see all the new developments in television. He would have been able to understand them completely and perhaps, thereby, make some of the rest of us understand them a little.
Telstar Programme from CBS, New York, with Walter Cronkite
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.’
New York’s International Airport was its usual bustling self. As the lines of passengers shuffled past the shirtsleeved customs officers, one of the red-capped porters ambled across: ‘Aren’t you Mr Dimbleby?’
In London that question, usually preceded by a slow stare, would have been familiar enough. In Berlin, in Rome, even in Paris, it would not have been out of the ordinary. But this was New York – and when Richard Dimbleby arrived there one July evening in 1962, even Americans turned to stare.
Telstar, London
The reason for their new-found familiarity with the face known to all in Britain lay in a ball-shaped piece of metal hurtling through the sky: Telstar, the first communication satellite to provide a live television link between Europe and North America. The night before his arrival in New York, Richard had notched up another first: the first man to have televised live from Europe to America.
On 23 July 1962 Richard-spoke from Brussels on behalf of sixteen countries when he welcomed American audiences to their first live television view of Europe across 3,000 miles of Atlantic Ocean. Now he was back for the return half – and another first: the first Englishman to televise live from America to Britain. And to make him feel at home, the New York Times said of him on the morning of his arrival: ‘He dominates Britain’s television in a way that has no equivalent in the United States.’
That one historic broadcast from Europe – that cheerful ‘Hullo, New York’ from Brussels – made Richard Dimbleby’s friendly face and ample figure almost as familiar in the United States as in the United Kingdom. Within twenty-four hours of his arrival he had appeared on CBS with Walter Cronkite and also on NBC Television. New York’s press corps waited upon him. Variety – that bible of American show-business – spread his story across three columns. And as he stood on 53rd Street, in the shadow of Rockefeller Center, getting ready to televise live to London, many an American passer-by knew exactly who he was.
Preparing for the first Telstar programme, with, left to right, John Maddox (Science Correspondent, ‘The Guardian’), Dr W. F. Hilton, E. G. C. Burt (Head of Dynamics Division, Space Department, R.A.E., Farnborough), Aubrey Singer (Assistant Head of Outside Broadcasts, Television), Peter Dimmock (General Manager, Outside Broadcasts, Television); Gillian Savage (Secretary), Humphrey Fisher (Producer)
But they couldn’t have known that the first New York-based telecast was nearly swept off the screens. At the rehearsal, everything had gone smoothly. The cameras on the roof of the Rockefeller Center had pierced through the haze to give us perfect pictures of the towering Manhattan skyline. The camera in the Sixth Avenue drug store had just the right shot. A smooth and speedy commentary setting the scene was needed now; we only had ten minutes available; after that, we would lose the satellite. So there was a double nervous strain: the importance of the occasion with the twitching uncertainty whether the picture would successfully bounce off the moving satellite to England, and the urgent need to contain the programme within that limited span of time as soon as London signalled it was able to see New York.
With less than a minute to go, Richard’s monitor – the television set that would show him which picture was going out – collapsed. There he was, in mid-town Manhattan, the first Briton to televise live across the Atlantic, and he could not himself see any of the pictures that were being transmitted. Once again he was, for all practical purposes, blind. He could not see whether the pictures the American director was selecting were of the New York skyline or the cops or the drug store or the sidewalk. He had to guess and hope that the transmission would follow the rehearsal.
It did, fortunately. And after five hazardous minutes, the picture came back on Richard’s monitor. The trouble was over, though I doubt whether anyone at home ever noticed that something had gone very wrong, for Richard spoke as confidently as ever. But in those five minutes the American television crew learned and understood why he was the master of the craft of television reporting.
Half the Independent Television Programme Companies rebroadcast the BBC’s Tribute programme in its entirety. The other half broadcast a special tribute mounted by Granada Television. Later Michael Peacock, Richard’s first producer of Panorama and the General Election programmes, spoke in the BBC Television News:
At a moment like this when so many things could be said about Richard Dimbleby I only want to say three things. The first is that he really was the greatest professional broadcasting has ever known. No other man gave so much that was unique to both radio and television. He set standards of performance and conduct which will never be excelled. He truly was a master of his craft, head and shoulders above everyone else in skill, integrity and dedication. For broadcasting and especially for television his loss is a tragic one, there never will be another like him, and television will never be quite the same now that he’s gone.
Secondly I must underline the extraordinary courage that he showed during the past five and a half years. To this day, I don’t know how he managed to keep going, never missing a programme, always managing to summon up from some deep, apparently limitless reserve of willpower and courage the extra energy and stamina that he needed – not just for his job but to put upon his programmes the hallmark of quality. And to all of us who know what he must have endured during the election results marathon, Telstar spectaculars, royal weddings and so on, his is a quite incredible story of courage which will, I’m sure, be recalled with wonder and admiration for many, many years to come.
And lastly, it should be said that Richard was really a wonderful person to have known. Behind the dignity of his public image, with the almost automatic association of his name with Panorama and the coverage of great occasions, behind the face known to millions, was a warm and delightful man, intelligent, full of fun, kind-hearted, patient, courteous, above all devoted to his family, to his four children and to Dilys his wife who shared so bravely his long and private fight for life. For them, this is of course a time of intense and private grief, and for all of us who were lucky enough to have known him as a friend and colleague this is a moment of deep and lasting sorrow and a sad, sad ending to the year.
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.
