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.

I shall be singing and dancing in the rain later today, not on the streets of Paris, but on the terrace of my house on Lyme Bay. The rain, forecast by the weather men for the last two days will be here shortly. I can see it advancing across the sea from Chesil Beach.

The Texan dancer, Cyd Charisse, who has just died aged 87, is remembered by some for her million dollar legs. But I remember her for the zest and fun she showed in her dance with Gene Kelly in the 1952 movie, Singin’in the Rain.

The memory of it still cheers me when the rain comes down when I am walking the coastal path. Me, and probably millions of others.

Thank you Cyd and Gene.

The picture is from AP.

This photograph of Humphrey Lyttelton, who died today, aged 86, is nicked from The Guardian web site, who in turn,  nicked it from the BBC, with attribution, of course. The photograph shows Humph exactly as he was when I last met him, just under a year ago, at a charity jazz concert, which he has given for the last several years at the Royal Free Hospital in London.

If you look at it, you can see, behind the glasses the twinkle in his eye. And as I gazed at it, I was conscious of my debt to him. I first ‘met’ him in 1955 when, aged 21, I had moved to London in the hope of finding a life, which was more interesting and inspiring than what I had so far experienced in Wolverhampton and Birmingham.

In those years, I did not really ‘meet’ him. I was sweating on the dance floor at 100 Oxford Street, being liberated by the music of the band, led by Humph on the trumpet. As you will read in the honest obituaries, including that by George Melly, his fellow British jazz musician, and his dear friend, Humph does not quite rank in the world jazz greats, although he was extremely professional and more than competant on the trumpet and the clarinet, as well as in band leading.

But, for me, Humph was my first experience of high quality jazz live. Which is as different an experience as jazz listened to on the radio or the record player, as is watching Match of the Day on the television, compared with being at ‘the match’. But as I got to know him, through chatting to him, after the annual charity concerts he did for the Royal Free Hospital, I realised that my greatest debt to him, is that he helped to form my political opinions. Because he knew that jazz was the music of the oppressed classes in the United States, part of the long struggle of America’s blacks to free themselves from slavery. Not surprising that so many jazz musicians died early of drug over-doses. But Humph, although he identified with their cry for freedom, was protected from self-destruction, by his own very priveldged background. About which more later.

But as I gaze at his photograph, I realise that my debt to more than I have said.  Because, although I am an enthusiastic listener, I have no musical abilities. But I do have a sense of humour, which is, as I now realise, is in part unconsciously modelled, on his example. It is laconic and ironic, with not a small element of self-deprecation. Quite often, his jokes were delivered in a dead pan style, so that you were not sure whether he was joking or being entirely serious. Unless, you noticed the twinkle in his eye. But, since he was so successful in radio comedy programmes, he must also have developed the ability, to speak with a twinkle in his voice.

In this obituary I want to pay tribute to his qualities as a human being. His contributions to jazz and broadcast comedy will be covered in other obituaries by people better qualified to speak on such subjects.

He came from a highly priviledged family.To find out just how priviledged that family was you will you have to go to the Wikepedia biog of his cousin, Oliver Lyttelton, who I also encountered on my voyage through life. There  you will find that his ancestors include the Grenvilles, who helped to save Britain from the Spandiards with their tiny ship, the Revenge. And also the Spencers, who gave us Winston Spencer Churchill, as well as Princess Di, who became the People’s Princess, but who actually came from a family far more distinguished in British history, than the upstart Germans, of whom our dear Queen is a descendant.

(Far from being a commoner, Princess Di, was upper drawer. Although quite as mixed up in her own personal identity as Charles, the older man who fell in love with her, she provided Brits and the world with the fairy story of a dream wedding, that excelled Hollywood as a propaganda message for the the triumpth of romantic love, regularised by Holy Matrimony. That marriage went wrong, and even this year, the father of her last lover, Mohammed al Fayed, has been trying to persuade an inquest jury, that she was murdered by the British establishment, who were not prepared to stomach her marriage to a Muslim. In fact, the British establishment did not care two hoots about whom Princess Di married. Although, they might have had some strong views, if Prince Charles, had decided to marry a Musilm for his second marriage, instead of his chosen stalwart of the county classes, Camilla Parker Bowles.)

Humph, I think, would not mind me including these digressions in his obituary.

Because in our conversations I challenged what he said to me. Including his oft repeated comment to gentlemen of the press, that he was a ‘romantic socialist’, a typical example of his self deprecation. He was in fact a serious practical socialist, who stuck with the beliefs that he had adopted, despite his highly Conserative family. His dad was a master at Eton. But Humph did not fill his band, with old Etonians, he filled his band with the best musicians.

Quite unlike that other Old Etonian, David Cameron, who is filling his shadow cabinet with fellow old Etonians, in the belief that these are the best people to govern England in the twenty-first century.

Humph, by contrast,  was still doing developing talent irrespective of class background,  in the years I knew him at his charity Royal Free Concerts. Bringing on good young musicians, because they were good musicians.

I also talked with Humph about his cousin, Oliver, who was a close friend of Winston Churchill, and one of the last British ‘colonial secretaries’, and went on after politics to become a business tycoon, as head of one of Britain’s then biggest electrical companies. In that job he was a disaster, and his reign opened the way for Lord Weinstock to grab AEI and most of the electrical industry in the interests of profit, but aided by the Wilson Labour government.

Oliver Lyttelton, by then enobled as Lord Chandos, went on from that commercial disaster to bring the arts to the South Bank of the Thames, so that all Londoners could go to high quality theatre, and in theaters whose acoustics were so much better than those in the West End, that you can actually hear what the actors say.

Humph, when he found himself performing jazz in the Lyttelton theatre on the South Bank, made one of his characteristic jokes, by saying it was his first appearance in the theatre which had been named after him. Quite how many of his audience saw the real joke I don’t know. But they all laughed, as audiences were prone to do at Humph’s jokes.

But that joke says a lot about Humph and about the British establishment and British elites. Humph came from the old British elite. He had the same education as his older cousin, Oliver, who went on from Eton to Cambridge, but unlike him, he went to work after school in the steel works in Port Talbot in South Wales. That experience led him, working cheek to cheek with the lower classes, to become a socialist.

Later, when the Second World War broke out, he followed the family tradition and like his cousin Oliver, served in the Grenadier Guards and saw serious action. But when he came out of the war he was still a socialist, despite his communion in the mess with the officers of one of Britain’s most elite regiments. And unlike many other socialists, he turned down the offer of a knighthood.

Humph is being written about widely today because he was a very good jazz musician. But also because he understood, and adopted the political message of jazz. Which in my view led him to socialism. He also was a very successful comedy broadcaster, but his jests also conveyed the views he held.

The news of his death came to me while I was doing battle with the present ruling elite of Britain, the US and other parts of the world. The likes of Rupert Murdoch and Vint Cerf, who according to Google is ‘the founding father of the internet’. Has Google not heard of Tim Berners Lee?

The difference between Humph and young James Murdoch, is that young James does not seem to realise that he is a fully paid up member of the present British elite. Young James is still fighting his father’s battles. And Rupert, when he tried to buy British newspapers, did get short shift from the then ruling British newspaper elites.

Which hurt him. But it is so long ago, that it might as well have been in the Stone Age. Today’s powerful elites are the Rupert Murdochs and the new immensely rich Google type internet entrepreneurs.

This obituary is a faithful reflection of the man Hunphrey Lyttelton, whom I met and talked with. But it must end, with that part of his legacy which will go on forever. His music. My computer nouse is so inadequate that I cannot put some of his music on my blog.

But I can conclude with a picture, nicked from Wikipedia, which shows his total professional absorption in playing the trumpet.

Which he did rather well.

While I have been complaining of feeling like death’s door, laid low by the very trivial bug that is doing the rounds, two of my contemporaries have actually died. Within a couple of days of each other. And co-incidentally of the same final illness, kidney failure.  Both were swashbuckling risk-takers who might easily have managed to kill themselves years ago. In fact, they died quickly and relatively peacefully in bed.

Norman Mailer managed to make it to 84 despite his many excesses. And was writing prolifically up until the end. In 1960, when I was living in New York, he was challenging death by walking the parapet of his high rise Manhattan apartment while half pissed and by swapping punches in late night brawls with men bigger them him. He was pushing the boundaries in all sorts of directions, not all of them acts of high courage. He used a knife on one of his wives, nearly killing her, and beat up another so badly that she was lucky not be maimed.

Though there is universal agreement that The Naked and the Dead the war novel he wrote as a young man, is one of the best war novels of all time, there is less agreement about whether Mailer ranks with the greats of American literature. The long Guardian obituary by James Campbell makes the case for, demonstrating how in his fiction and in his outstanding journalism he was addressing the vital issues facing the Americans of his generation. The Guardian also carried the most pungent anti verdict, a short article by Joan Smith, who rates him as ‘a sexist, homophobic reactionary’. Her concluding sentence packs a punch which would have put Mohamed Ali out for the count:

More grand reactionary than great writer, Mailer was a faux-radical who used the taboo-breaking atmosphere of the 60s as cover for a career of lifelong self-promotion.

My own verdict is somewhere in the middle. Mailer’s political views were a mixture of reactionary and revolutionary. And as a writer he was deeply in the macho tradition of writers like Hemingway. But he was totally serious about pushing the boundaries of writing and experimenting. He pushed the notion of the stream of consciousness initiated by James Joyce and Henry Miller to further extremes. This involves temporarily suspending the critical faculty and allowing the pen to take dictation from the unconscious. This technique can produce a lot of rubbish but it led Mailer to new insights, and passages of beauty and wisdom. Some of the earliest efforts can be found in Cannibals and Christians.

John Gough, my cousin, who died on Monday aged 67, did not spend much time in his life reading books, let alone writing them. He was five years younger than me, the eldest child of my mother’s sister. He went to grammar school when I was at my most studious, discovering in the world of books, lives far more interesting than I could observe in Wolverhampton. John, by contrast, wanted to have a good time, to taste life, and in his own kind of way to push the boundaries. To be his own man and make his own mark.

He did OK, making himself a tidy sum as a speculative builder. Then came a recession and he promptly lost it all in one fell swoop. He went to Canada, made a fresh start and establishing a new life. Back in England some twenty years ago he was struck down by a massive heart attack. Which left him incapable of doing any more building work. But he never lost his zest for life and his ability to convey that zest to the people around him. Fortified from time to time by that glass of whisky, which he was not supposed to drink.  

Tonight, despite this dratted bug, I shall raise a glass of whisky myself and toast Norman Mailer and John Gough who both lived their lives to the full.

At first sight the changes at education should please the workers at the chalk face. Blair famously used all his rhetoric to proclaim his commitment to them; when asked what his priorities were he replied, ‘Education, education, education’. In practice his education secretaries reinforced the introduction of the new managerialism to the university sector started under the Thatcher government. Blair had his own backroom boy as a junior minister who thought he knew better what was good for education than the teachers.

Brown with his clunking fist has given education real clout at the cabinet table. In his reshuffle he has given education two cards in the pack. And Ed Balls who is to be responsible for the schools sector is the joker in the pack. He is one of the new Prime Minister’s oldest friends who is widely known and respected by the Treasury and in the City, and who is intelligent enough to realise that the new managerialism is mostly claptrap. Like twelve others amongst the twenty-two sitting around the cabinet table he is part of the Oxbridge elite. He went on from there to Harvard as a Kennedy scholar, one of the best places to make contacts with the American elite at the same time as getting a first class education. He began his work life on the Financial Times. As did Shirley Williams, one of old Labour’s best education ministers, nearly forty years earlier.

Brown intriguingly also tried to bring Shirley Williams, now a Liberal Democrat, into the government as part of his botched attempt to co-opt Britain’s third political party to the success of his administration. Apparently, the Baroness is still considering taking on a role as an adviser and giving him the benefit of her fine mind, vast experience, and, co-incidentally, her own Harvard connections.

What all this signals is that the Blair era of faith in faith schools is at an end. Though Brown is a son of the Manse and no less ardent in his private religious beliefs than Blair, he is not a closet catholic and is highly unlikely to fill the junior education posts with colleagues of that ilk.

John Denham is quite as much his own man as Ed Balls, though he comes into the cabinet with the delightful Blairite job title as Innovations, Universities and Skills Secretary. (Yes, just think about. You can as a cabinet minister realistically attempt to influence how universities are run. But what can you do about influencing the development of innovations and skills, apart from write articles for the newspapers and rabbit on about it on the television.) Denham is one of tiny minority of the new cabinet who went to a decent old fashioned metropolitan university and entered Parliament as the MP for his university town (Southampton). He was one of the very few junior ministers who actually resigned his job because of his opposition to the Iraq war. Subsequently he has used his role as chairman of the Home Affairs select committee, to challenge and constructively criticise the government.

That’s the good news.

The worrying aspect is that Brown reveals his Blairite tendencies by messing around with the structure of educational administration, which day to day is done by the Civil Service. He is splitting schools from the universities, despite the steadily growing realisation, that what is needed is closer co-operation between the two sectors. The wisest voices at the chalk face have realised this for many years. It took over ten years for the unions from the older universities and the former polytechnics to merge into the new University and College Union. It will probably take more than ten years for UCU to merge with the school teaching unions. Real change just not happen quickly when it involves institutions.

Just how much havoc is created by breaking up the department of education and skills remains to be seen. Much will depend on the how well the two education ministers co-operate with each other and how much attention they pay to the huge potential disruption involved in creating new administrative units of government.

All I can do is recommend some weekend reading. Co-incidentally Frank Heller, who died last week, wrote many things highly relevant to these issues. He worked for many years at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, who were and are one of the world leaders in promoting a multi-disciplinary approach to achieving institutional change. I first met him when I was at London Business School in the mid 1970s working on a project called The Quality of Working Life. He was the director of the Tavistock centre for decision making studies for thirty years until he retired in 1999. This quote from The Guardian obituary sums up what he was about.

Frank’s abiding interest lay in the exercise of power and the consequences of sharing power, mainly in work settings. Concerned about the use of appropriate and ideally longitudinal research methods, where data is collected over time, and recognising that much could be learnt from exploring the exercise of power in different institutional contexts, he engaged in a series of comparative projects that helped to establish his reputation.

Frank did his Ph D at LSE in occupational psychology. This discipline, unlike most of the psychology taught at Oxbridge, concerns itself with how academic theory can be used to effect changes in the workplace. Inevitably that leads to a multi-disciplinary approach because as soon as you begin to study why human beings behave as they do at work, you realise that as well as internal psychological imperatives you have to look at sociological and economic influences.

The Tavistock ethos, which is also influenced by neo-Freudian thinking, is based on getting people to talk to each other at a deeper level and confronting, rather than avoiding, the conflicts that arise when human beings try and work together with other human beings. Maybe if Frank Heller had been at the Granita restaurant table in Islington, when Tony Blair and Gordon Brown allegedly made their pact to resolve the conflict that arose because of their mutual wish to succeed John Smith as leader of the Labour Party, he would have been able to help them resolve their deep-seated antipathies which led to some of the nastiest feuds between Blairites and Brownites when they actually achieved power.

I like to think so. As well as an impressive intellect Frank had a keen sense of humour, which he used to change the course of a conversation. And he retained until well into his eighties a zest for life, continuing with his regular visits to the ski slopes until shortly before he died.

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.

To the parish church of St Marylebone, a vast building with gilt figures around the dome, right turn from the Outer Circle of Regent’s Park, and over the ever busy Marylebone Road. I am there to go to a memorial service for William Ian McDonald, described by the obituary in The Independent as ‘Ambassador for British neurology’. Maybe the headline writer had a weakness for irony, because Ian was actually a New Zealander, born in Wellington, schooled in Dunedin by the legendary Archie McIntyre. But he spent the biggest part of his life in London, and there did most of his important work as a doctor at the hospital in Queen Square and as a professor of London University.

His particular specialty became the treatment of multiple sclerosis. He devised what became known as the McDonald rules for the treatment of sufferers from that illness in hospices. But the several learned professors who spoke at the service paid tribute to his personal qualities, and particularly his capacity for friendship. This was quite as important to them as his many academic achievements. Unlike many university professors who work for hours on their research, he always found time for his students and his colleagues. He was a true pro at what the current academic jargon calls mentoring.

I can vouch for that because he was one of those rare human beings who actually listened to what I said, even when it was the late evening and I had had rather more drink than the doctors think is good for me. Much of what was said at the memorial service and much of what is written in The Independent was news to me because Ian was a modest man, who did not trumpet his own achievements. And I met him, not as part of my professional duties, but because he was a friend of a close friend of ours.

He was also quite a private man, so that it was something of a shock when I arrived at the church to find it full with several hundred people, who knew him. They were nearly all those, whom from my Stafford Road, Wolverhampton perspective, I consider posh. They wore suits and ties and talked proper English, although some of them, like Ian, were New Zealanders.

The Independent obituary will tell you of his professional achievements. But the speaker who most caught my attention was the last Professor to mount the pulpit. He told an anecdote of how Ian, after dinner with a glass of whisky in his hand, had fallen asleep in the middle of a good story. He woke up a few minutes later and picked up the story at precisely the same point.

Not a standard conformist human being.

The St Marylebone vicar, in his bidding prayer, urged us all to join with Almighty God and ‘rejoice in a live lived abundantly; in a life, like Ian’s, lived to the full. Amen.’

This is Church of England speak for saying he enjoyed sex. ‘And with his partner, Stanley’. Because Ian had realised, as one of the earlier speakers said, that his sexual orientation was different from most of the people in the agrarian town of Dunedin. When he was studying there in the 1950s homosexuality was not only not talked about in Dunedin society but it was illegal. So one of Ian’s heroes was Wolfenden of the Wolfenden report. And it took ten years, as one speaker reminded us, for the Wolfenden report to reach the British statute book.

There were no readings from Wolfenden at the service, but there were two from Proust, whose writings helped Ian to understand himself. The final one I will quote in full.

We may, indeed, say that the hour of death is uncertain, but when we say this we think of that hour as situated in a vague and remote expanse of time; it does not occur to us that it can have any connection with the day that has already dawned and can mean that death may occur this very afternoon, so far from uncertain, this afternoon whose timetable, hour by hour, has been settled in advance. One insists on one’s daily outing, so that in a month’s time one will have had the necessary ration of fresh air; one has hesitated over which coat to take, which cabman to call; one is in the cab, the whole day lies before one, short because one must be back home early, as a friend is come to see one; one hopes it will be as fine again tomorrow; and has no suspicion that death, which has been advancing within one on another plane, has chosen precisely this particular day to make its appearance in a few minutes’ time…

Ian would have enjoyed that.

Lena Jeger, passionate and principled former Labour MP for St Pancras, has just died aged 91. She was a leading Bevanite and like Nye himself, fought for the national health service throughout her career. She also championed the cause of the Greek Cypriots in the late 1950s, when Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was in favour of giving Turkey more influence on the small island’s affairs. She outlived both of her Guardian obituarists. Both of them died five years ago.

Like Lena, Barbara Castle and Mary Stott, fought for giving women more influential roles in public life. Barbara Castle rose to become one of the most powerful cabinet ministers in Harold Wilson’s government. Mary Stott pioneered a distinctive style of women’s journalism in The Guardian. A style carried on by Jill Tweedie, also alas dead. But the torch is still carried today by Polly Toynbee, who regularly slaughters opponents with her trenchant analyses of sloppy political thinking.

I have always enjoyed writing obituaries. It gives me a chance to indulge simultaneously my passion for both journalism and contemporary history. And as a child I always enoyed talking to old people. When I was a boy there were still plenty of people around who remembered what it was like before the age of the motor car. When the roads were polluted with horse muck, not oil patches. When men commonly walked eight or nine miles to work every day. When you went to bed early because there was no electric light, and who could tell me of their excitement when they first got gas lighting, which came a few years before electric lighting. And, then of course, there were people like my ‘Uncle Bill’, who had actually been in the trenches in France in the First World War.

You get a different kind of evidence from such personal reminisces than you get from reading books. You get the full emotional reality of how it was then. You get it as much from what they don’t say, as from what they do say. With my Uncle Bill, usually quite talkative, it came from his silences, when I pressed him to tell me more. The remember pain was still there, in his eyes, some forty years later. Writing this reminds me of another younger man who used to talk endlessly about his experience fighting along side the Gurkhas in World War Two. Unlike my Uncle Bill he enjoyed all the killing, and particularly when it was face to face.

So I was delighted when in Wednesday morning when I discovered when I was looking for something else via Google, that Lord Catto had died. He was a much more important man than most people realised. And when I read the long obituary in The Independent that I had happened upon, I realised that I had something to say about him, that was not in this obituary.

I did a lot of work on my story. Although I knew him quite well, I got down the Shawcross biography of Rupert Murdoch and checked the references. I would find Bruce Page’s book on Murdoch, so I rang a friend who had it, and got him to read me the references over the phone. I was not satisfied with my first headline, ‘The man who brought Murdoch to Britain‘, so I cogitated and came up with ‘Catto the king maker’ instead.

The minute before I posted I needed to do a last check on something, so I went back to The Independent obituary. To my horror I realised that the date I had focussed on was the date of my search. In much fainter type at the head below the article headline was the date of the death. 2001. Egg all over my face. What a total waste of time.

Until this morning, when I realised, that my story is not totally without interest. So I have decided to post it below.

The only thing I had to change was to report that Lord Catto died aged 78, not aged 84.

Catto the king maker

Lord Catto, who died aged 78, has a lot to answer for. For it was he who befriended a brash young Australian, called Rupert Murdoch, who was beginning to transform his father’s string of Australian newspapers, into a force which was challenging the Australian press establishment. In Britain, 1968, he was virtually unknown, except to a select few, like Professor Asa Briggs, his tutor at Oxford University, and Edward Pickering, who had helped him learn journalism working at the Daily Express, which in those days sold over four million copies a day. No-one at all knew him in the United States, and all parts east, where today his television channels broadcast to millions of sitting rooms.

Murdoch came to London in the autumn of 1968 with the intention of buying the Daily Mirror, a pretty cheeky move, since the Mirror was the Britain’s best selling newspaper, selling over five million copies a day. Catto gently told him that his idea was a non-starter, because the Mirror was owned by International Publishing Corporation, then the most powerful British media group. So the young Rupert decided to buy that instead providing £2 million, so that Catto’s bank could start buying the shares on his behalf.

Had Murdoch pursued that objective he would have almost certainly fallen flat on his face. IPC was simply far too rich and powerful. Had Murdoch met anyone else that year, he would never have ended up owning Britain’s best selling popular daily and Sunday newspapers (The Sun and the News of the World) as well as the still influential Times and Sunday Times), let alone the string of foreign newspapers and the television channels (Sky, Fox, Star), book publishing companies, etc which now constitute the much loved and much hated Murdoch empire.

Catto was uniquely qualified to help the young Australian. He had recently launched an equally abrasive and ambitious young man, Arnold Weinstock, on to the national stage. In the space of a few years Weinstock, a poor Jew from the East End, had risen to control all three giant British electrical companies. With Catto’s help he had taken over AEI in 1967 and in September 1968, he grabbed English Electric too. He became the most talked about English businessman of the time, the man whom the Wilson government thought was going to modernise British industry.

Only a few people knew just how influential Catto was. He was never a self publicist. He was a young Turk in gent’s clothing. Moving easily amongst the elite with great personal charm, able to talk eloquently over a wide range of subjects, so that many did not notice the shrewd business mind. He steered Murdoch away from the Mirror to the much more achievable target of the News of the World, which he knew was up for sale. The ruling family, the Carrs, wanted to sell out. To win his prize Murdoch had to fight one of the nastiest takeover battles in British history. Because, a rising young Labour MP and scientific publisher, Robert Maxwell, was equally determined to get his hands on a national newspaper.

If Catto has a lot to answer for, then so do I. In 1968, I was just as impressed as Catto had been, with the qualities of the youthful Murdoch, whom I thought had the courage and the skill to shake up the managements of Fleet Street newspapers. And I was thrust into this battle on the Murdoch side, because I had been probing Maxwell’s business affairs, since the time I had first visited him at his combined headquarters/country house on the outskirts of Oxford in 1964.

To be fair, neither Catto, nor myself in 1968, could possibly have forecast that we were helping to Murdoch to acquire far greater power than that held by the legendary press barons of the 1930s. The outgoing Prime Minister, Tony Blair, is going to rewrite history on the back of a rumoured £4 million advance from Murdoch. The Prime Minister in waiting, Gordon Brown, is courting him assiduously, worried that Murdoch might switch his allegiance to the new Conservative leader, David Cameron.

If you want to read more about his rise to power, Murdoch by William Shawcross (Chatto & Windus. 1992) is the best source. If you want to know more about Catto and Weinstock’s rise read Anatomy of a Merger by Robert Jones and Oliver Marriott (Cape 1970, Pan 1972). If you want to know more about the many other things Catto did read the obituary in The Independent written by Nicholas Faith. It combines a lot of facts with a penetrating character study of this complex man.

But even Faith does not quite over the whole man. Catto had a gift for personal friendship, which he bestowed not only on potential rich clients for Morgan Grenfell. He gave unstinting help to Marriott and myself in unearthing the untold story of the attempt by GE of America to grab control of the British electrical industry in the late 1920s. Without his help we might never have got enough documentary evidence to write one of the most interesting chapters of Anatomy of a Merger.

My first crush, Yvonne de Carlo, has just died aged 84. I can still remember the day, when, with sweaty hands, I cut her picture out of a magazine and stuffed it in my wallet. I was probably about 12 at the time. It was a pin-up picture of the kind that British tommies put up their in their dugouts during the war to take their mind off the brutal realities they were facing as the bombs fell all around.

Astonishing The Guardian gave her an obituary filling most of a page. The editor who made the decision must have been nearly as old as me. Because her period of film fame stretched from 1940 to 1967. She was most famous in the early part of that period, not as a great actress, but as a starlet of B movies. She first attracted attention for a small part in Harvard, Here I come (1942) when she played a bathing beauty. Which of course gave her an opportunity to display the maximum allowable legal percentage of her body, for the soldiers and me to ogle.

In 1945 she became a star when she played Salome in an awful film. But it confirmed her talent for playing the seductress, and led to a succession of similar roles. The only firm from that era I clearly remember was The Captain’s Paradise which I saw when it came out in 1953. By that time I was at university. I watched Alec Guinness playing a bigamist. One of his wives was Celia Johnson, who was playing a character very like the English middle class young women in my class. The other was Yvonne de Carlo, the passionate volatile ‘foreigner’ skilled in the bedroom arts.

What The Guardian does not tell us is that she also exercised her talents in real life. The CBS obituary reveals that her 22 lovers included Howard Hughes (the secretive businessman), Burt Lancaster, Robert Stack, Robert Taylor, Billy Wilder, Aly Khan and an Iranian prince. That obituary also reveals that she had two husbands. And that she spent a year out of films caring for her first husband, a stuntman, Bob Morgan, who had a nasty accident which kept him in bed for a year. Not just a pretty face.

She was actually a Canadian born plain Peggy Middleton. Her father abandoned the family when Peggy was three. She was brought up by her mother on a waitress’s earnings. And took her mother’s maiden name, which the Hollywood moguls recognised was much better box office for a vamp than Middleton, and coupled it with own middle name, Yvonne.

Yvonne de Carlo had a later brief success in the Munsters on television. But I prefer to remember her as the vamp of my dreams. So below is a picture from her web site, which is the nearest to the pin up I used to have in my wallet.