Leonard Miall, a long serving BBC journalist and executive, died in February, 2005.  After his long career he became a historian of the BBC and the author of many newspaper obituaries of former colleagues.  This is taken from The Times, February 26, 2005:

Leonard Miall

BBC broadcaster whose report from Washington helped to ensure the success of the Marshall Plan

JOURNALISTS often report the making of history but only rarely do they influence it. As the BBC’s chief correspondent in Washington after the Second World War Leonard Miall did both. In June 1947, while accepting an honorary degree at Harvard, George Marshall, the American Secretary of State, made an offer of economic help to the war-ravaged countries of Europe.

The speech was largely ignored by the American press and most international correspondents. Even the British Embassy in Washington gave it low priority, sending the text to the Foreign Office by diplomatic bag rather than the more immediate telegraph. Miall, however, who had previously been briefed by Dean Acheson, the Under-Secretary of State, immediately grasped the significance of Marshall’s offer.

In a broadcast that evening, Miall described Marshall’s statement as “an exceptionally important speech” which “propounded a totally new, continental approach to the problem of Europe’s economic crisis”. Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary, happened to listen to Miall’s broadcast and decided there and then to persuade his European colleagues to accept what became the Marshall Plan. Years later Acheson declared: “It was a good thing Leonard did not lose his voice that night”.

Miall’s involvement in the Marshall Plan was one episode of a distinguished BBC career, which saw him as an influential figure in radio and television. After a baptism of fire in wartime propaganda, and eight years in Washington, he played a creative managerial role in the development of television in the 1950s and 1960s. In retirement he helped to preserve the memory of the BBC’s growth as its most knowledgeable in-house historian.

Born in London in 1914, Rowland Leonard Miall was educated at Bootham School in York, the University of Freiburg, where he gained a knowledge of German which later helped to launch his BBC career, and St John’s College, Cambridge. He was president of the Cambridge Union in 1936 and while still an undergraduate gained an early taste for broadcasting in a transatlantic debate with students from Harvard. A profile of Miall in The Granta described him as “a supreme jack of all trades” and predicted he would end up in the BBC.

After leaving Cambridge he lectured in the United States for a while but already had his eye on a job in broadcasting. As one of 3,000 applicants for a vacancy in the BBC press office he made the shortlist of two but lost to his rival. Early in 1939, however, the BBC offered him the chance to join its European Service to organise news talks in German.

On the night war was declared, he was embroiled in a row between his BBC superiors and the Government’s new enemy propaganda unit over what to broadcast to Germany. It was a row which was to continue throughout the war years, as the tensions between editorial independence and patriotic duty were constantly debated, and the Government’s black propagandists sought to wrest control of broadcasting from the BBC professionals.

Miall’s diplomatic skills were also tested by the demands of exiled broadcasters such as General de Gaulle, who sought to project their leadership to their downtrodden compatriots from the cramped studios of Bush House, and rarely appreciated young producers’ advice on microphone technique.

Miall worked in the European Service until 1942 when he was seconded to the Political Warfare Executive, a government body set up to co-ordinate broadcasting to enemy countries and occupied territories. Miall was a member of the British Political Warfare Mission to the United States where he was director of news in San Francisco and head of the New York office. He stayed in propaganda broadcasting until the end of the war.

In 1945 he rejoined the BBC and after short spells as a correspondent in Czechoslovakia and acting diplomatic correspondent he was appointed to the Washington job. His distinctive baritone voice soon became familiar to radio listeners in Britain as he interpreted the US scene with sympathy, humour and, above all, authority.

Returning to Britain in the 1950s he worked in television for the first time as head of Talks and Documentaries. A dry title embraced a wide range of responsibilities. Miall was in charge of not only the corporation’s current affairs output, to which he brought a much tougher journalistic approach, but also areas such as science and the arts.

Panorama was one programme which developed under Miall’s leadership — a frequently stressful responsibility at a time of much live broadcasting, encompassing everything from tricky last-minute editorial decisions to the drunkenness of interviewees such as Brendan Behan. He also oversaw the launching of Tonight, the mould-breaking early-evening magazine, Huw Wheldon’s Monitor and John Freeman’s Face to Face.

Miall used his American contacts to bring in new kinds of documentary style from the USA, while attempting to hold the line against too much blurring of fact and creative reconstruction. Other factual programming, including The Sky at Night and The Glory that was Greece, flourished in his department. Later, he took a leading part in the planning of BBC2, which came on air in 1964.

He retained, too, a close interest in the BBC’s international role. After Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin he had travelled to Moscow in an attempt to exploit the Cold War thaw. No concessions were made on the jamming of BBC external broadcasts, but tentative contacts were made with Soviet broadcasters, enabling the BBC to work towards shedding a little more direct light on events inside the Soviet Union. In 1966 he returned to the US as the corporation’s representative and ended his BBC career in charge of overseas and foreign relations.

Miall was a popular figure within the BBC. People sought his advice because he knew better than most how the corporation worked. In appearance, he resembled Alastair Sim: slightly balding, slightly stooped. With a gentle smile, he was a good raconteur: his years in the United States were the source of many stories.

After his retirement from the staff in 1974 Miall was employed part time by the BBC as its research historian. He prepared material for three of Asa Briggs’s books on the history of the corporation and carried out interviews for a BBC oral history project. In 1994 he published Inside the BBC, a book of short profiles of 25 personalities from John Reith to Robin Day. He had known them all and worked closely with many.

Miall was always keen to keep in touch with news of the latest BBC internal convulsions, while urging the fast-changing BBC of later years not to forget his and his colleagues’ part in a uniquely exciting and creative period in postwar British and international broadcasting.

Miall’s first marriage, to Lorna Rackham, which produced three sons and a daughter, ended with her death in 1974. In the following year he married Sally Bicknell. He was appointed OBE in 1961.

Leonard Miall, OBE, broadcaster, television executive and BBC historian, was born on November 6, 1914. He died on February 24, 2005, aged 90.

This is taken from The Telegraph, February 25, 2005:

Leonard Miall

Leonard Miall, who died yesterday aged 90, was a BBC broadcaster and executive responsible, over more than 40 years, for helping to shape the development of television current affairs.
     
As the BBC's first Washington correspondent between 1945 and 1953, he played a significant role in promoting the Marshall Plan for American aid to Europe.

Other Washington journalists, and even the British Embassy, were slow to recognise the significance of General Marshall's Harvard speech, tentatively floating the idea, in June 1947.

But Miall, who had been briefed by Dean Acheson, spelt out its implications. When the Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, heard Miall's American Commentary, he responded immediately; and Marshall Aid became a reality.

Miall's days in front of the microphone ended when he was called home to take charge of what was quaintly known as the Television Talks Department. He found himself in charge of a formidable stable of talent, including Alasdair Milne, Donald Baverstock, Huw Wheldon, Cliff Michelmore, Geoffrey Johnson Smith, and Paul Fox.

He inherited an approach to political programming which was shackled by "the 14-day rule" (which meant that no reference was made to topical issues within a fortnight of their being debated in Parliament) and also a cringing deference to politicians.

As late as 1958 Selwyn Lloyd was insisting on prior notice in writing of questions to be asked in a party conference interview. By the time Miall moved on to become Assistant Controller, Programme Services, with special responsibility for the planning of BBC2, most of these ancient cobwebs had been blown away.

Tall, urbane and possessed of much charm and tact as well as administrative ability, Miall worked at close quarters with nearly all the great BBC names of the post-war years, including four Directors-General. Twenty years after formal retirement he put his recollections and assessments of them in a book, Inside The BBC.

This revealed a special regard for Sir Hugh (Carleton) Green, Director-General from 1960 to 1969, and Sir Huw Wheldon, first managing director of BBC Television. Miall believed that the latter had been cheated of the highest office because the incoming chairman, Lord Hill, wanted a yes-man.

Rowland Leonard Miall was born on November 6 1914 and educated at Bootham School, York. He read German at Freiburg University and then at St John's College, Cambridge, where he was President of the Union. In 1939, together with 3,000 other applicants, he answered a BBC advert for a press officer.

He failed to get the job, but was almost immediately recruited (at twice the press officer's salary) to head the expanding European service.

This vital wartime responsibility gave young Miall an early taste of dealing with the great and the famous. In June 1940 General de Gaulle arrived out of the blue at Broadcasting House to make his stirring first broadcast to the French people. Over drinks in the Director-General's office, he asked Miall whether his talk had been recorded. Miall tried to explain that the lack of notice and the shortage of technical equipment meant that it had not.

He described the sequel: "In full military uniform, this imposing figure glared down at me from his enormous height and castigated the BBC in general, and me in particular, for failing to appreciate the historical significance of his broadcast." De Gaulle was placated with a promise of regular broadcasting spots, and a re-run of the first talk in order that it could be recorded.

Miall's capacity for tact was never more in demand than when Grace Wyndham Goldie was appointed Assistant Head of Television Talks.

She had already won a reputation for formidable creative drive combined with ruthless egotism. "It was contrary to Grace's nature," Miall wrote in his memoirs, "to be assistant head of anything."

He countered her authoritarian tendencies by constantly moving her to new projects, where her flair and energy could expend themselves before they exhausted those under her.

Between 1942 and 1945 he was seconded to the Politicial Warfare Executive, serving in London, San Francisco, and New York, and then with SHAEF in Luxembourg.

Miall then returned to the BBC, where his official career ended in 1974 as the Corporation's New York representative, with a brief to promote the sale of BBC programmes, and later as Controller of Foreign Relations.

After formally retiring, he was kept in active employment for a further nine years as principal researcher for Asa Briggs's History of Broadcasting.

Leonard Miall, who was appointed OBE in 1961, married Lorna Rackham, who died in 1974. He is survived by his second wife, Sally Bicknell, together with three sons and a daughter by his first marriage.