Forum for former BBC staff

Forum for former BBC staff
http://www.ex-bbc.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl >> Notices, obituaries and tributes >> Graham Herkes http://www.ex-bbc.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?num=1458204381 Message started by Administrator on Mar 17^th, 2016, 8:47am

Title: Graham Herkes
Post by Administrator on Mar 17^th, 2016, 8:47am

Graham Herkes, who worked in the sports room and the newsroom at Bush House, has died of cancer. The funeral will be held at the Islington Crematorium Chapel at 11 am on Wednesday 23 March. The crematorium is in Finchley High Road, N2 9AG.

Title: Re: Graham Herkes
Post by Administrator on Mar 19^th, 2016, 3:54am

This tribute to Graham was written by his friend, Alex Wynter:

Graham Herkes, who was a subeditor in the Bush House newsroom from 1981 to 1987, has died of cancer at the age of 62 in St Joseph’s Hospice, Hackney, not far from where he lived. He was taken seriously ill at the end of 2015 and treated first at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel.  

Like many journalists of the era, Graham arrived at World Service radio straight from newspapers: he served before the mast on the Kentish Independent and later on papers in Birmingham and, as it was, Fleet Street.
 Graham’s first shifts as a casual at Bush House were in the Sports Unit under its editor at the time, Bob Trevor, who became a friend.

He was an extremely well-liked and highly regarded subeditor who frequently acted in senior chief-sub roles such as ‘News About Britain’ and ‘World Service’; but to the best of anyone’s knowledge he never applied for formal promotion.   This undoubtedly said something about his modest nature and character in general. But if he was also a rebel he was the quietest and gentlest of rebels.

On one occasion Graham’s confidence was momentarily dented when a minor geographical error he had made in a Far East regional story was picked up by a correspondent of The Straits Times and traced back to him via the newsroom’s paper archive. He wisely took it as a sign that at Bush House, the world was not only listening but ‘watching’ too.

Like some other subs, one of Graham’s favourite jobs was the overnight press review, which straddled ‘late’ and ‘dawn’ shifts and provided the frisson – in the days of hot metal when stories still broke on front pages – of sighting the national newspapers before anyone else bar those who worked on them.

Graham was a lifelong Spurs supporter, a dedicated member of the National Union of Journalists who went on to be Father of the Chapel at his next company, Worldwide Television News (WTN), and at heart always a newspaperman.

He was a cultured, open-minded journalist who took as much pleasure in books, concerts and photography as he did in football; he would also on occasion deploy a famously laconic sense of humour to great effect, and was known among friends at WTN as ‘King of the One-Liners’.

Universally regarded as a very special person, quite incapable of malice (beyond perhaps adding the words “m’lud” to a point of information about a sports story), Graham will be hugely missed by the many people who worked with him and loved him.