The Daily Novel

Oven three hundred ex-students of City University’s Department of Journalism now work for the BBC. Although many of them don’t know it, they all have a debt to three BBC veterans, who in their retirement years gave unstintingly of their time for not very much money in the 1980s when the teaching of broadcast journalism was being established on a very limited budget. The first was the late Eric Stadlen, who brought his vast radio journalism experience to the course; Eric was the first producer of the World at One and with William Hardcastle as the main presenter, made it the hallmark of serious political journalism in the middle of the day. Before it started many BBC nobs had said you would only get housewives listening at that time and they would not be interested in politics. Hardcastle and Stadlen proved them wrong and the programme still rates highly under their successors.

The third ex-BBC man was John Dekker who had similar high quality experience in BBC television journalism and ran the first City courses in television journalism.

The second was in some ways the most crucial. He was Arthur Westwood, who I have just learnt died in February. Arthur was a technician and you cannot teach broadcast journalism unless you have the right equipment, and someone to maintain it and teach the students how to use it. Arthur did all those things well but he was also willing to use his skills to do anything that needed doing, liking putting up some shelves in my office. I remember him fondly.

John Dekker writes a more comprehensive appreciation below.

Arthur Westwood was everyone’s idea of a technician, a man of few words who quietly exuded an air of confidence in his ability to fix everything – or nearly everything – for the Broadcast Journalism course at City University, where I first encountered him. A wartime sailor – radar mechanic – who probably kept the Fleet together with the same detached efficiency, Arthur had brought his skills and his dry humour to the BBC, where his capacity for understatement and his genuine modesty undoubtedly deserved greater pecuniary rewards, until his retirement, when he entered a different world and a new challenge..

Like all technicians, Arthur preferred always to determine his own priorities for maintenance of the ageing equipment which he took delight in continually dissecting and reassembling. Soon after my arrival as a Visiting Lecturer Arthur introduced me to a part of the BBC I had never set eyes on, a sort of electronic graveyard in a West London back street some sick humorist had name Power Road. The place resembled the set for Steptoe and Son and the custodian greeted Arthur as a fellow beachcomber might, for he was clearly one of their oldest and most valued customers, but Arthur possessed a discriminating eye for a bargain. Poking about in an untidy pile of junk, he would drag out not one, but a dozen battered old tape recorders of a type known as the ‘Midget’, designed in the Middle Ages by BBC technicians (like Arthur) and described as ‘portable’ in the sense that they were very heavy, but reporters (like me) had grown to love them (and grown long arms).

I can’t remember if in our scavenging we were paid to take away all this rubbish, but Arthur showed every sign of satisfaction, like a dog with a large bone, so we lugged it all back to St John Street, where it was carefully deposited in a small cupboard that some wag had designated as his workshop. Arthur would immure himself therein for several days like some anchorite, emerging at last with quiet satisfaction, bearing the one machine he had cannibalised out of twelve wrecks. An impoverished Third World country would have cherished such skill quite as much as did his penny-pinching employers whose often ill-informed complaints he bore with dignity .

With much ingenuity, patience and self control, he managed to hold the fabric together for successive ‘generations’ of postgraduate broadcast students who have good cause to remember him with affection him even if sometimes their plaintive cry ‘where’s Arthur?’ could be heard almost all the way to the Red Lion, where he liked to show his congenial side. In his private life he experienced tragedy, enduring misfortune with courage, and it is characteristic of him that after his many years of service to broadcast journalism, he devoted himself to charitable activities in his neighbourhood. Arthur died in February, aged eighty-one, after a long illness. We salute him.