The Richmond and Twickenham Times Archives - Richard Dimbleby: Broadcaster

Resignation

When Dimbleby returned from the Middle East in 1942 he unsuccessfully applied to he sent as a war correspondent to Russia. Even in the middle of the war the BBC was already planning its post-war news coverage of foreign affairs. The small pre-war team of news observers, now developed into a great war reporting unit, was to be supplemented by BBC correspondents in the main foreign capitals. The reliance on news agency reports was to be finally broken. An announcement on the BBC’s notice boards invited applications for possible post-war correspondents’ posts. Dimbleby suggested that in addition to the coverage of diplomatic exchanges and international affairs as such there should be two BBC general reporters in Europe, who could fly at a moment’s notice to cover straight news events, much in the way he and Charles Gardner had done in Britain before the war.

He suggested that one should be based in Berlin to cover Northern, Central and Eastern Europe, the other in Switzerland to cover the countries bordering the Mediterranean. He proposed himself for the second post. Unlike 1936, this time his proposal was turned down. The then Foreign News Editor feared that ‘it would cut the ground from under the resident BBC correspondent’s feet if Dimbleby or anyone else were given a roving commission in their territories for descriptive reporting’.

F. J. G. Dimbleby, Richard’s father, had died at the end of 1943, after a long and successful career in journalism. Richard himself was then living with his wife and two children in the little village of Cuddington on the borders of Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. His uncle, Percy Dimbleby, who was the Managing Director of ‘The Richmond and Twickenham Times’ and the other newspapers and the printing works, invited Richard to join the Board. The invitation remained open.

When Richard returned from the war he was not wanting further work abroad and did not join those of us who were establishing the first corps of BBC foreign correspondents. He was however hoping for interesting work in the BBC at the microphone. He later revealed, in answer to a question from Daniel Farson in ‘Frankly Speaking’ in 1961, why he resigned from the BBC at the end of the war:

Farson: You had established yourself as a most successful war correspondent. Was it ambition that led you to resign from the BBC?

Dimbleby: No, no. It was the fact that I had to become a director of the family newspapers, coupled with – let me be quite honest – coupled with something else.

The then Controller of Programmes of the BBC sent for me and said, ‘What are you proposing to do, now that the war is over?’ And I said, ‘I don’t quite know’. I had hoped – because I was reasonably well known by then, to put it pretty bluntly – I had hoped they would offer me something which was interesting. He said, ‘Well, I’m afraid we have got nothing to offer you. But we can offer you a place in the pool of home reporters’ – which was twenty-five people who were doing the three-minute pieces all around with everybody. And I just thought to hell with that, and said, ‘No, nothing doing’.

Now simultaneously with this, at the very same time, the family newspaper situation had developed and I had to go and become a director of that.

The BBC had very strong views about people being actual directors of things like newspaper companies while on the permanent staff. So it all fitted together very well. And I was able to say to him: ‘I can’t accept that. I’ll resign,’ knowing that I had the directorship to fall back on when I went out.

I remember pacing along a corridor in Broadcasting House with Richard Dimbleby in the summer of 1945. I had just returned from reporting the immediate post-war situation in Czechoslovakia and was waiting to go out to Washington. Richard was just back from Berlin. He was then earning £1,000 a year and was determined to get £1,100. The administrative people in the News Division had refused to upgrade him as a reporter. If he left the microphone and took an editorial job his ceiling could be raised. Richard was adamant that he was not leaving the microphone, and told me that with the family newspapers behind him he was going to chance his arm as a freelance. For the News Division it was shortsighted parsimony. As a part-time freelance Richard at the microphone was going to earn far more than £1,100 from the BBC every year for the rest of his life.

A Freelance Broadcaster and his Wife

Under his uncle, Richard Dimbleby became the editorial director of the family newspapers. Eventually, with his mother’s co-operation, he bought out Percy Dimbleby’s interest and acquired the sole control of them. Besides the family papers, as a freelance he had the additional cushion of a three-year contract from Sir Alexander Korda to write films, though no film scripts were in fact asked for. But in the first instance his resignation from the BBC staff was a gamble. Television, closed for the duration of the war, had not yet reopened. Dimbleby’s freelance broadcasting life started modestly with some schools book programmes and a regular newsletter to North America, but very soon developed.

He was greatly sustained then, as ever, by his most fortunate marriage. Dilys Dimbleby, as a journalist herself, understood the demands of his career, and from the day of their wedding in 1937 was a constant source of professional help and advice. She was also the only critic he trusted. She took over the management of all his professional affairs. She arranged his contracts, organised his diary, and negotiated his fees. On many occasions she also accompanied him on work both in England and abroad, not only acting as a hostess for him, but sitting beside him during commentaries, organising his notes, passing him messages. In the early days of State commentaries Richard used to get letters from women viewers grumbling that his descriptions of the Queen’s clothes were hopelessly inadequate. From then on, whenever possible, Dilys was there to jot down accurately – ‘pale blue tulle’ instead of ‘a sort of light blue cotton’.

They had in all four children, David (1938), Jonathan (1944), Nicholas (1946) and Sally (1947), and their family life was singularly happy. His secretarial work was done by his sister Patricia (Mrs John Haines) who spent two days a week at his house acting as his personal assistant. As Richard prospered he added to his roles of broadcaster, writer and newspaper proprietor those of chairman of Puritan Films and Film Partnerships, chairman of the Commonwealth Group of Unit Trusts, and farmer. In all these enterprises Dilys was his active partner. She appeared with him, and the rest of the family, in films they made to demonstrate the merits of different holiday places at home and abroad, and she sometimes appeared in the television studio herself.

In July 1996 Panorama included a discussion based on the book ‘Getting Married’ published by the British Medical Association. In the studio Richard interviewed a doctor, and then an engaged couple. Finally he interviewed an anonymous witness:

Dimbleby: Now, one more opinion before we finish, that of a woman who has been happily married for nineteen years and has four children. You may perhaps some of you know her. I’d like to ask you if you’d give us your opinion now whether you think anything has been left out that should have gone in.

Married Woman: Well, I think the only thing that has been left out is something that really couldn’t go in any book, and that’s the question of the heart; I mean what is in your own heart really governs the whole of marriage, and I think that that you couldn’t put in. But I think where the book fails, and fails dismally, is that it doesn’t make a reality of marriage. It’s rather suggested that if you follow the rules laid down, and if you follow the pattern set by the writers, all will go well and everything will be blissful. I think that’s nonsense and I think it would be awfully dull if marriage was like that.

He then revealed the identity of his guest:

Dimbleby: Well, thank you very much. May I say that the last witness and I have been very happily married for nineteen years.

It was in the last five years of Richard’s life, when he was suffering from cancer, that Dilys played her noblest role. During that time she was a constant support and encouragement to him and her determination and sagacity played an immeasurable part in his insistence in carrying on his broadcasting work as though nothing had happened. Throughout those five years she alone knew of all the pain and the depression that he suffered. She bore the burden of his illness with him and shared his public cheerfulness. In the last three months of his life Dilys was constantly with him, often staying the night at the hospital and always there eighteen hours a day, helping to nurse him, encouraging him, and talking to him about plans for the future. She was a wife he deserved.

The Dimbleby family at a horse paddock — At Danley farm, Lynchmere, Surrey, with Nicholas, Jonathan, Sally, David

A Truly Human Employer

As managing director of the ‘Richmond and Twickenham Times’ group of newspapers Richard Dimbleby was a model employer. The General Secretary of the Printing and Kindred Trades Federation recalls:

From the start he took a practical interest in the welfare of his employees. When they were ill, he wrote to them personally, sent them fruit and flowers, and on appropriate occasions made specialist treatment available. In a score of ways he showed that he cared. For instance, he arranged for the Italian-born wife of one of his employees who was seriously ill to visit her homeland along with her four children, and after she died he continued to take a helpful interest in the family.

When, very soon after he took control of the paper, Mr Dimbleby learned that a retiring employee – to whom he was making a presentation – would not be receiving a pension from the firm, he not only put the matter right but instituted a contributory pension scheme. Later he subsidised a fund so that employees did not lose financially when away sick. Shocked when two of his men died suddenly, he organised free life insurance so that the widows of those with three or more years service would receive £1,000.

My first meeting with Mr Dimbleby was in 1959 when I appeared on Panorama in a programme dealing with a national printing and newspaper dispute involving a claim for a forty-hour week. He made very clear to me in conversation his sympathy with our unions’ struggle for better conditions and he introduced the shorter working week into his firm in advance of the conclusion of negotiations. Later, when a national agreement for a third week’s holiday was reached, Mr Dimbleby not only most readily operated the terms of the settlement but gave even longer holidays to his employees.

In these and many other ways, Mr Dimbleby made sure that a share of the results of the success of his newspapers was passed on to his employees. The printing trade unions will always remember with gratitude the example he set as an employer and the lead he gave to the industry. I am sure that, so far as his newspaper activities are concerned, Mr Dimbleby would ask for no better tribute than that just paid to him by his staff who have described him as ‘a friend and truly human employer’.

Another example of his personal kindness was recalled in a letter to the ‘Daily Mirror’ dictated by Una Byfields:

Few people may know personally how kind Richard Dimbleby was, but I do. I have been a patient in hospital since I was ten – I am now forty-three – and I am disabled.

For the past three or four years Mr Dimbleby has sent money so that I could have a lovely holiday at a Caister-on-Sea holiday camp. He came down and made us happy and took me out in the car and he wrote to me in hospital.

All the patients who go to the camp will miss him very much indeed. He was a grand gentleman.