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Forum for former BBC staff
http://www.ex-bbc.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl >> Notices, obituaries and tributes >> George Balazs http://www.ex-bbc.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?num=1344875058 Message started by Administrator on Aug 13^th, 2012, 4:25pm

Title: George Balazs
Post by Administrator on Aug 13^th, 2012, 4:25pm

John Bamber writes:

George Balazs died within the past few days in a home for the elderly
in Dartford. He was 91. George had suffered a stroke when he was 63
from which he made a remarkable recovery. He had a fall in his flat
in Belsize Park several months ago, from where he was transferred to
the Royal Free hospital in Hampstead where his condition deteriorated.

George was born in Cluj in Transylvania, which in Hungarian was called
Kolozsvar. His mother tongue was Hungarian, but he spoke Romanian on
the street with other children. German was the language the family
used with the servants.

He joined the Monitoring Service at Evesham during the Second World
War and rose through the ranks to become at one stage Organiser, News
and Publications. He had a distinguished career at Bush House,
becoming a Duty Editor, and had a wonderful spell in Nairobi for about
a decade, where it was my privilege to work for him for four wonderful
years.

He was a magnificently witty and intelligent man, who was also one of
the most impatient and irascible people I´ve ever met. He was also
extremely kind to the local staff, who loved him, as we all did.

There are so many anecdotes to tell about George Balazs. I and
several others have given them to Tim Llewellyn, who was also a close
friend, and who will be writing an obituary for the Guardian.

Title: Re: George Balazs
Post by Administrator on Aug 15^th, 2012, 1:08pm

John Bamber has written the following, full obituary for George:

George Balazs, one of the surviving doyens of Monitoring, died on 13
August at a care home in Dartford. He was 92. He had a distinguished
career at Caversham and Bush House, but will perhaps be best
remembered as Head of Unit at Monitoring´s outpost at Karen in
Nairobi.

George (Gyorgy) was born in 1920 in Transylvania in what is now
Romania. As Klausenberg his home town Cluj was part of the
Austro-Hungarian empire until two years before George was born. In
Hungarian it is known as Kolozsvar. His family were from the Jewish
intellectual elite, and George's mother tongue was Hungarian. With
the children on the street he spoke Romanian and with the servants
German. French was also spoken in the house.

It was in the late 1930's that George came to Britain like so many
others fleeing the Nazis. In 1942 the Germans conscripted most of the
men of fighting age in Cluj and sent them to the eastern front in the
Soviet Union, where most of them perished. Two years later the rest
of the Jews and gypsies were taken to Auschwitz.

Other Monitoring Service luminaries who had fled central Europe at the
time included the publisher George Weidenfeld, the famous art
historian Ernst Gombrich and countless others. George started his
BBC career at Evesham monitoring wartime broadcasts.

He rapidly rose through the ranks, finally ending up as Organizer,
News and Publications. He also had a successful career in Bush
Newsroom, finally being promoted Duty Editor.

It was in the late sixties that George started his love affair with
Africa. The Monitoring outpost at Karen was made for him. Nestling
in the foothills of Ngong, it housed about forty Ethiopians, Somalis,
Kenyan Arabs and Mozambicans and monitored a whole host of interesting
developments ranging from the antics of the Ugandan Conqueror of the
British Empire, Idi Amin, to the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie
in Ethiopia to wars in the Ogaden desert between Ethiopia and Somalia
and in Zaire. All this was interspersed with regular assassinations
and coups d'etat.

Through all this George was looking after his charges as a kind of
benevolent dictator. He was highly impatient and one of the most
irascible men I´ve ever met. On one occasion he threw a barbecue
with much alcohol. Because I spoke Swahili I was deputed to supervise
the local staff including the cook Henry Omulema, who I unwisely put
in charge of the booze. When the drinks dried up I went into the
kitchen to see Henry spark out on the floor surrounded by empty beer
bottles. Challenged in the morning, he said: "All your fault.
Shouldn´t have put the chui pamoja na wambuzi ( leopard in with the
goats)".

George could never stay angry with the local staff for long. He was
much loved and was very kind to them. He often used to help them with
BBC loans to tide them over or to buy land.

George Balazs was just one of many Jewish intellectuals who enriched
the life of Monitoring at Caversham. Others included Vova Rubinstein
and the distinguished translator of poetry Ewald Osers. With his
Newsroom friends Martin Sullivan, Martin Heyman and Karl Lehmann,
George was always reading the Racing Post. Between them they could be
relied upon to come up with good each-way bets at long odds on the
Grand National. George owned one leg of a racehorse called Midnight
Ride which he used to race at the Ngong racecourse in Karen. His
heart went out of it and he sold his interest after his local jockey
was kicked in the head and killed on an early morning training run.

George never married, although it was not for want of offers. Despite
his diminutive stature George's good looks, charm and wit made him
very successful with the ladies, whom he tastefully categorized into
"horizontal" and "(strictly) vertical."

He could not be said to have wanted to waste excess joules. One of
his favourite sayings was "they´re using crampons to scale molehills."
His memos were a model of precision. Karl Lehmann, who is still
going strong in his nineties, writes, "George had an unusually tidy
mind. His memos as Organiser News and Publications in the Monitoring
Service were half the length of other incumbents’ and yet contained
all the necessary points with the utmost clarity." His passion for
summarising extended into his Bush House career to such an extent that
one evening when Duty Editor on an Asian desk he boiled a cricket
story and said that Australia won by four wickets against Pakistan,
and scored a total of 913 for 16!

George´s spell in Nairobi saw us cooperating with a number BBC
correspondents and stringers including the late Brian Barron, John
Osman, Charles Harrison and Tim Llewellyn. The correspondents were
rightly indignant at the Monitoring Service´s predilection for
jealously guarding stories until Caversham had broken them first. Tim
Llewellyn continued a lasting friendship and in recent years used to
take George for walks from his flat in Belsize Park to his beloved
Hampstead Heath.

George was a deeply cultured man and loved opera and classical music.
He used to come to dinner once a week when we were both in Karen in
his much-loved orange convertible until forced to give up because of
failing eyesight. We would play chess, drink gallons of ouzo and
Tusker export and in keeping with the norm of the time would repair to
the garden to relieve ourselves. On one occasion there was an agonized
scream from the sleeping Kipsigis night guard. George had given him
an impromptu watering!

George had no truck with corporate bollockspeak and would have roundly
condemned most of the present changes in the BBC being carried out by
people whom he would have dismissed as "comma pushers" and people "who
wouldn't know a flash from an airmail letter."

George Balazs was a remarkable man and very good and loyal friend. He
will be missed by all who knew him.

John Bamber,
Costa del Sol 14 August 2012

Title: Re: George Balazs
Post by Administrator on Aug 17^th, 2012, 11:57am

The cremation will be on 3.15 on August 30th (Thurs) at Eltham
Crematorium in SE London. It is a few minutes walk from Falconwood
BR Station. No flowers - the suggestion is to donate something
perhaps to a Kenya charity instead. Details later.

Title: Re: George Balazs
Post by Administrator on Aug 31^st, 2012, 1:44pm

An obituary by Tim Llewellyn in "The Guardian" is here.

"George was born in Transylvania. His family's language was Hungarian, but, due to the rearrangements made at Versailles in 1919, his homeland had been made part of Romania. George spoke Romanian in the street and German to the staff. The family was Jewish but George did not make a lot of it, though it must have been an early sniffing of the fascist winds in 1939 that encouraged him to head west.

As a very young man – only 21 – he arrived as a student lawyer in England. Because Hungary was not in the conflict at that time, he was not drafted, imprisoned, interned nor sent back, but recruited by the BBC Monitoring Enterprise in Evesham, Worcestershire.

He made the BBC his life."