[BITList] Voice of the BBC

[John Feltham]

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Dimbleby,  Richard Frederick  (1913-1965), radio and television broadcaster, was born on 25 May 1913 at Richmond, Surrey, the elder child and only son of Frederick Jabez George Dimbleby (1876-1943), journalist and local newspaper proprietor, and Gwendoline Bolwell (b. 1886), daughter of a Bath surveyor. The families of both parents were low-church, committed to temperance, and supporters of the Liberal Party. Dimbleby's mother-as a girl she had wanted to go on the stage-was a pillar of the Richmond Operatic and Dramatic societies. His father combined a succession of jobs in Fleet Street with editorial control of the family newspaper, the Richmond and Twickenham Times; during the First World War he worked in Whitehall as a government public relations officer. Dimbleby went to a preparatory school near Battle in Sussex and in 1927 to Mill Hill School, then on the northern outskirts of London. He was an amiable, idle boy; broad and heavy even in his teens, he disliked organized games and was happiest when messing about in boats. He excelled only at music; having passed matriculation at the third attempt he left school at eighteen and started work on the family paper.

After brief spells as a reporter in Hampshire and on the staff of the Advertiser's Weekly, Dimbleby was taken on by the BBC. In 1936 Britain's 'national instrument of broadcasting' relied for its news reports on the agencies. Dimbleby had suggested to the BBC's chief news editor that there were ways in which the News might be enlivened without robbing it of authority and boldly proposed recruiting to the staff a number of reporters or correspondents. This revolutionary idea was not immediately adopted, but Dimbleby soon attracted attention by his enthusiasm for eyewitness reports and authentic sound effects; when covering the story of a record-breaking new train, he spent much of the journey recording the sound of the wheels by dangling a microphone down a lavatory pan.

Dimbleby reported the royal tour of Canada in the spring of 1939-the first to include a BBC correspondent-and on the day war was declared he put on uniform as the BBC's first war correspondent (although he had been briefly in Spain as an 'observer' earlier in the year). He experienced the frustrations of the phoney war in France (and of explaining his expense claims to BBC administrators-after recording a Christmas programme in a casualty clearing station, he thought it fitting that the corporation should foot the bill for the turkey and plum pudding). Before disaster overtook the British expeditionary force he was sent to the Middle East, and over the next two years he witnessed the campaigns in Libya and Eritrea, saw fighting in Albania and Greece, and was ambushed by guerrillas in Iran.

In 1942 Dimbleby was recalled to London, a victim of the internecine warfare that was being waged between the war cabinet in Whitehall and Middle East command, and between a romantic and stubborn prime minister at home and his cool-headed but equally obdurate commander in the field. 'I found', General Wavell noted drily, 'that Winston's tactical ideas had to some extent crystallised at the South African war'  (Dimbleby, 106). Dimbleby, carefully briefed by Wavell's general headquarters, had been sending back dispatches which did nothing to ease the strained relations between the BBC and Whitehall. When he left Cairo, he was feted by ministers, ambassadors, and army commanders. Godfrey Talbot, the BBC colleague sent out to replace him, said: 'I was a journalist succeeding a personality'  (Dimbleby, 159).

Early in 1943 Dimbleby became the BBC's air correspondent; his first mission took him on a raid on Berlin in a Lancaster bomber. Shortly after D-day in 1944 he was appointed director of the war reporting unit. He himself reported the crossing of the Rhine. He was the first correspondent to enter Belsen, and he broadcast from there what his son Jonathan later described as 'an unforgettable, definitive statement about human atrocity'  (Dimbleby, 190). Shortly afterwards, he was in Berlin. 'As a clean, solid, efficient city, it has ceased to exist', he reported. He broadcast one of his dispatches from the filth and rubble that had been Hitler's study in the chancellery, sitting in the Fuhrer's chair.

When Dimbleby returned from Germany in the summer of 1945, his BBC salary was £1000. When the BBC refused to raise it by £100, he decided to resign and take his chance as a freelance. On 26 June 1937 he had married Dilys Violet Constance Thomas (b. 1913), who had been his father's personal assistant on the family paper. They already had two sons (both David and Jonathan were to follow their father into broadcasting), and they would later have a third son and a daughter.

Work came slowly, and Dimbleby was grateful when his uncle, none too willingly, offered him the editorship-in-chief of the family papers. (His father had died three years previously.) From television, which had been under wraps during the war, he earned less than £150 in his first two years as a freelance, but his versatility and professionalism soon attracted the attention of radio producers. He joined the new panel game Twenty Questions (the idea was imported from American radio). He also travelled the length and breadth of the country to interview people for Down your Way, a programme devised to get round the stringent restrictions imposed on the broadcasting of recorded music by the industrial muscle of the Musicians' Union.

By the early 1950s Dimbleby was in demand as a commentator for outside broadcasts. He described the lying-in-state of George VI, and at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953 it was Dimbleby's happy choice of words which added colour to the black and white images on the small screen. Dimbleby was also influential in the shaping of current affairs broadcasting-what he described as 'the big and vital field of topical but non-immediate news'  (Dimbleby, 267). By the time the Panorama programme was launched in 1955 he was seen as the only possible presenter, and he remained as its anchorman for the rest of his life. Leonard Miall, who worked closely with him in those years, wrote that he 'almost acted as a national Ombudsman'  (Miall, Inside the BBC 58). His bulk and his unflappability were hugely reassuring. During a programme on the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, a viewer telephoned to say she would send her children to school only if Richard Dimbleby said it was safe to do so.

Dimbleby's mastery of television techniques and the meticulous attention he paid to his 'homework' made him a natural choice for presenting the exhausting marathons screened at general election time. He also continued into the 1960s as the voice of the BBC on state and other important occasions-the first televised opening of parliament, Princess Margaret's wedding, the funeral of President Kennedy. To critics who complained that his tone was reverential, he would point out that a commentator at a solemn occasion who did not lower his voice to a hushed whisper might quickly be hustled off the premises.

The politics of broadcasting being what they are, Dimbleby had to contend with more than one attempt to dislodge him. As he moved into his fifties, however, he knew he was being stalked by an enemy more formidable than any of the BBC's young turks. By the time he delivered his moving commentary on the pageantry of Churchill's funeral in January 1965 Dimbleby had already been suffering from cancer for five years.

When he went into hospital and the nature of his illness was made known, he received 7000 letters. A woman travelled from the country to London with a basket of eggs; the queen sent six bottles of champagne to his bedside. He died on 22 December 1965, and his passing was marked by a memorial service in Westminster Abbey-the place he had sometimes called his 'workshop'. A quarter of a century later, a memorial plaque, sculpted by his third son, Nicholas, was unveiled in Poets' Corner, an honour never previously accorded to a broadcaster.

Dimbleby's family life was richly contented. It had been his ambition as a young man to escape from suburbia into the English countryside, a dream he realized in 1952 with the purchase of a farm with 25 acres of grassland in Sussex. In his later years he was the proud owner of a succession of Rolls-Royces; the honorary doctorate of laws conferred on him by the University of Sheffield was also a source of great pride. He was an enthusiastic pianist favouring, according to his son Jonathan, 'loud ringing chords and long ralentandos'  (Dimbleby, 294). He was never happier than when on the water; when he covered the coronation in 1953, he operated from his Dutch sailing barge, Vabel, which he brought round from Chichester and moored in the Thames.

Dimbleby's broadcasting career spanned almost thirty years. In the last ten years of his life he was widely regarded as 'the voice of the BBC'. His personal and professional qualities were well summed up in Westminster Abbey by his old friend and colleague Wynford Vaughan-Thomas: 'We knew him as a simple man, a good man, and in the end a very brave man. Richard brought a sense of permanence to our impermanent profession'  (Miall, 61).

Ian McIntyre 

Sources  J. Dimbleby, Richard Dimbleby: a biography (1975) + A. Briggs, The history of broadcasting in the United Kingdom, rev. edn, 5 vols. (1995), vols. 2-5 + P. Scannell and D. Cardiff, A social history of British broadcasting, [1] (1991) + L. Miall, 'Richard Dimbleby', Inside the BBC: British broadcasting characters (1994), 53-61 + L. Miall, ed., Richard Dimbleby, broadcaster (1966) + DNB + CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1966)
Archives BBC WAC FILM BBC WAC + BFINA, current affairs footage + BFINA, documentary footage + BFINA, performance footage + IWM FVA, Panorama, BBC2, 9 Jan 1995, 3023 + IWM FVA, performance footage SOUND BBC WAC + BL NSA, 'Richard Dimbleby - voice of a nation', BBC, 1991, V6 951/01 + BL NSA, oral history interview + IWM SA, 'British broadcaster struggles to remain objective as he describes the scenes on the liberation of Bergen Belsen', BBC, 19 April 1945, 17714 + IWM SA, oral history interview + IWM SA, performance recording
Likenesses  photographs, 1947-65, Hult. Arch. · J. Gay, photograph, 1949, NPG [see illus.] · photographs, repro. in Dimbleby, Richard Dimbleby, facing pp. 118, 246
Wealth at death  £21,982: probate, 18 March 1966, CGPLA Eng. & Wales




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