The Daily Novel

Sir Charles Wheeler, who died yesterday aged 85, was frequently described as ‘the journalists’ journalist. Understandedly because, although he made his reputation and spent most of his working life with the BBC, he learnt his journalism, not on the BBC training scheme, but on the job. He joined the Daily Sketch as a copy boy in 1940, and like James Cameron, with whom he shared many characteristics, spent part of the second world war doing a desk job in Fleet Street.

But above all he was one of those journalists who was a human being first, and within the heavy constraints of BBC journalism strove to report honestly what he saw and how it made him feel, not in an emotional way, but coolly and without fear of the consequences when he tackled people in power. In his reporting he drew on his experience of life as much as from what he learnt in Fleet Street and the BBC.

As a youth he experienced at first hand the realities of how Nazism took power in Germany, living in Hamburg where his father was working. In 1942 he joined the Royal Marines. He was a combat engineer in the Normandy landings. He made his mark in the intelligence unit run by Ian Fleming, thanks in part to his fluent German. Like many journalists I have known, his work for the intelligence services provided an excellent training for the work of serious journalism.

But Wheeler, again like James Cameron, was a late developer. When he joined the BBC World Service in 1947 it was as a sub-editor, correcting the copy of other journalists doing the reporting. He did not begin his reporting career until 1950 when he was already 27. He was posted to Germany in the dying years of the Adenhauer government, which did not give him many opportunities for exciting news. It was not until he was posted to New Delhi in 1958 that he began to cover major stories, like
the flight of the Dalai Lama from Tibet. He first made the headlines on a trip from there to Ceylon, as noted by Harold Jackson in his Guardian obituary:

‘The greatest furore came after a trip to Ceylon (which became Sri Lanka in 1972), where the government threatened to leave the Commonwealth after Wheeler had called its prime minister “an inexperienced eccentric at the head of a cabinet of mediocrities”. The British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, was forced to issue a public apology to defuse the crisis.’

I first became aware of him when he moved to the BBC’s Washington bureau in 1965, and turned himself in to the most perceptive British reporter covering US politics. He arrived there when Lyndon Johnson was President in the aftermath of the assassination of John F Kennedy. He covered the hectic years of the Civil Rights movement and the Watergate scandal. He listened to everyone, Presidents, congressmen and the people he met out and about in America. But he made up his own mind about how to angle the story, never trying to curry favour with whose who held the most power.

John Tusa, a former head of the World Service, in his tribute in The Guardian summed up his qualities thus:

‘I think he was the audience’s journalist, because he put them at the head of his priorities……Why should any journalist try to follow Charles’s example? Because he put fact before effect, thought before impact, intelligence before emotion; because he put us, his audience, before himself, the intermediary. His reward: to be admired, listened to, trusted and loved.’
He went on working regularly long after retirement age, particularly for Newsnight. He was still working a few weeks ago on a television programme while suffering from lung cancer. He was born the year before the BBC was founded. He earned his spurs in radio but he was equally successful on television and was one of the band of BBC people, who fought to bring serious journalism, rather than sound bites, to the television screen.
From his UK base in London he lived through the rise of the LCC to the much bigger GLC and noted the consequences of its abolition. He witnessed the first rise and fall of Ken Livingstone when Margaret Thatcher abolished the GLC. And he lived just long enough to see the second fall of Livingstone, when his son-in-law, Boris Johnson, beat him to become the new Mayor of London.