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Oliver Whitley (Read 4143 times)
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Oliver Whitley
May 14th, 2005, 12:42pm
 
Oliver Whitley, who became head of External Services, died in March, 2005.  This is taken from The Times:

Oliver Whitley
Long-serving BBC administrator who impressed colleagues, including Lord Reith, with his readiness to stand by his principles


But for the interruption of wartime service in the Navy and a postwar secondment to the Colonial Service, Oliver Whitley devoted his career to the BBC where he rose to be chief assistant to the director-general and then the first managing director of the corporation’s external services.

John Oliver Whitley was born in 1912. His father, J. H. Whitley, was a Yorkshire cotton-spinner who, after many years as Liberal MP for Halifax, and serving as Speaker of the House of Commons, was a successful Chairman of the BBC during the director-generalship of Sir John Reith.

Whitley was educated at Clifton College and New College, Oxford, and had gone to the Bar, but he was persuaded by his father’s enthusiasm for what he saw as a great new medium of democratic culture, and he joined the BBC in 1935. In 1939 he was attached to the Monitoring Service which soon became a 24-hour operation monitoring 150 foreign news bulletins each day. Amid some controversy, the service moved to Caversham in 1941, and Whitley resigned to join up.

Whitley spent the rest of the war in the Navy. He enlisted as a rating and was commissioned a year later. He served in Combined Operations; shortly before D-Day, while trying to disentangle his landing craft from other vessels in Southampton Docks, he heard his name called, and far above him on the jetty made out the towering, gold-braided figure of Captain Lord Reith, RNVR.

After the Normandy operations he was transferred to the Far East, where he took part in the recapture of Singapore. He returned to the BBC in 1946, and was almost immediately seconded to the Colonial Office to advise on the developments of broadcasting in British territories overseas. He returned in 1949 as head of the General Overseas Service, and in 1955 he was appointed Assistant Controller Overseas Service.

In 1958, feeling that his prospects for promotion at Bush House were blocked, he moved into the corporation’s central administration, first as appointments officer and then as controller of staff training and appointments. The BBC at this time was keenly aware of the scrutiny of the Pilkington committee, and decided to dip its toe into the unfamiliar waters of management training. This was the beginning of the series of Uplands courses, so named after the house in Buckinghamshire where they were held for many years. Their success owed much to Whitley’s unobtrusive but principled direction — his concern for the BBC, like his father’s before him, had an almost pastoral quality.

He was also largely instrumental in effecting a period of reconciliation between Reith and the BBC (the first had been when Sir William Haley was Director-General).

Reith had looked on J. H. Whitley almost as a father and took a paternal interest in the career of his son, although he could be impatient at what he saw as Oliver’s reluctance to promote his own interests. He had been horrified in 1959 when Whitley told him he thought Hugh Greene was the best internal candidate to succeed Sir Ian Jacob as Director-General: “I wondered if there could be anyone better than himself,” Reith wrote in his diary, “and he would have his father to help him.”

Whitley persuaded Reith to visit Uplands several times and they remained on good terms for several years. Reith, however, soon reverted to the belief that the corporation had fallen away from his ideals, and when Whitley declined to assent to the proposition that /Juke Box Jury/ was “evil”, relations were broken off and never resumed.

Whitley had by this time become a member of the board of management as Hugh Greene’s chief assistant. In the turbulent days of the mid-to-late 1960s he was increasingly seen by his colleagues as the conscience of the BBC, and many would have liked to see him follow Greene in Reith’s old chair. But age, and perhaps a certain civilised lack of ambition, told against him, and he returned instead at the end of his career to Bush House as the first managing director of the External Services.

In retirement he and his Scots wife Elspeth moved from Surrey to live near Oban where he cultivated his garden and was active in the Liberal Party and in church work. In 1974 he received the Valiant for Truth Award of the Order of Christian Unity.

He is survived by his wife, and their daughter and four sons.

*Oliver Whitley, managing director of BBC External Broadcasting 1969-72, was born on February 12, 1912. He died on March 22, 2005, aged 93.*

This obituary, which appeared in The Independent on March 24, was written by Leonard Miall.  Miall pre-deceased Whitley by just a few weeks:

OLIVER WHITLEY --- KEEPER OF THE BBC'S CONSCIENCE WHO WAS SACKED BUT
CAME BACK TO BE ACTING DIRECTOR-GENERAL


Oliver Whitley, a former Managing Director of External Broadcasting and Chief Assistant to the Director-General, was regarded by many as the keeper of the BBC's conscience.

Oliver John Whitley, broadcasting administrator: born Halifax, Yorkshire 12 February 1912; Head of General Overseas Service, BBC 1950-54, Assistant Controller, Overseas Services 1955-57, Appointments Officer 1957-60, Controller, Staff Training and Appointments 1960-64, Chief Assistant to the Director-General 1964-68, Managing Director, External Broadcasting 1969-72; married 1939 Elspeth Forrester-Paton (four sons, one daughter); died Benderloch, Argyll 22 March 2005.

Oliver Whitley, a former Managing Director of External Broadcasting and Chief Assistant to the Director-General, was regarded by many as the keeper of the BBC's conscience.

His father, J.H. Whitley, after whom the joint industrial councils
were named, declined the customary viscountcy when he retired in 1928 after seven years as Speaker of the House of Commons. Nor would he accept the proffered knighthood (KCSI) for his chairmanship of the Royal Commission on Labour in India. Then, in 1930, he was appointed Chairman of the BBC and was among the best in the corporation's history, serving until his death in 1935. Oliver Whitley's mother, Marguerite, was the daughter of one of Garibaldi's officers, Giulio Marchetti.

Whitley inherited his grandfather's courage and his father's austere integrity. Despite outstanding service he steadily refused to allow his name to be submitted for inclusion in any honours list. Early in his career he resigned, and was then sacked from the BBC on an issue of principle in which he was in dispute with the Director-General. Yet five years later he was welcomed back and eventually rose to become the acting Director-General himself.

He was born in 1912 in Halifax, where his father was the Liberal MP, and educated at Clifton and New College, Oxford, and after qualifying as a barrister, and shortly after his father's death, in 1935 he joined the BBC.

At the outbreak of the Second World War the Monitoring Service was established at Wood Norton, near Evesham, with Richard Marriott as Director and Oliver Whitley as the Chief Monitoring Supervisor. Together they managed a well-knit polyglot team whose reporting and analysis of foreign broadcasts and the Nazis' internal communications were making an important contribution to the war effort.

In 1941 Marriott and Whitley, both dedicated and efficient men, considered that a plan to move the Monitoring Service from Wood Norton to Caversham Park near Reading would be unwise. Invaluable members of the specialised staff would be lost, thus breaking up the esprit de corps, and reception conditions would be technically worse. The Director-General, F.W. Ogilvie, Sir John Reith's sadly inadequate successor, was adamant that the move must take place, despite misgivings expressed by his deputy, Sir Cecil Graves, and other senior staff. Marriott and Whitley both felt the decision was insensitive, whatever reasons Ogilvie might have had for it, and decided to resign and enlist in the forces.

The situation was aggravated when Ogilvie went to Wood Norton to justify the decision and tell the monitoring staff they must obey orders, but excluded both Whitley and Marriott from the staff meeting. Moreover his address, according to the monitors (who were notably expert at accurate reporting), was such a travesty of the managers' reasons for resignation that Whitley, before departing, gave vent to his indignation in a confidential note to each of the Governors telling them what he thought of Ogilvie's conduct.

Oliver Whitley forgot that (under a system ironically devised by his father) the Director-General's secretary doubled as clerk to the Governors. She intercepted his complaints and passed them to Ogilvie. A dispatch rider straightway drove to Wood Norton with instructions to Whitley to return his pass and bicycle immediately, and to leave without working out his notice.

However the Governors were not prepared to support Ogilvie in the enforcement of his discipline and two of them - Lady Violet Bonham Carter and Harold Nicolson - wrote Whitley friendly letters hoping that he would return after the war. A few months later the Governors decided it was time for Ogilvie himself to resign.

In fairness to Ogilvie there were good but secret reasons for the decision to move to Caversham, though whether he was fully privy to them at the time is not clear. Winston Churchill had learnt through Otto John, later a notorious double agent, of the German manufacture of heavy water at Peenemunde, and was contemplating moving the Government to Evesham if London should be subjected to atomic bombardment. Accordingly the BBC had been warned it must be ready to vacate the area. In fact the Monitoring Service moved to Caversham, where it still is, in April 1943.

Whitley joined the RNVR, served first with the Coastal Forces in Scotland and later with Combined Operations in both Europe and the Far East. He had volunteered for one of the most hazardous roles - the command of a landing-craft rocket launcher. Marriott joined Fighter Command and won the DFC and Bar. After the war Whitley, like Marriott, had no trouble in rejoining the BBC, although the former Director-General had summarily dismissed him.

The BBC seconded Whitley to the Colonial Office Information Department to facilitate the establishment of radio in many colonies still awaiting independence. At that time the BBC had an unrivalled world reputation and the Government called on the corporation to lend staff to help set up broadcasting organisations modelled on BBC rather than on American commercial radio lines. The snag was that it was virtually impossible to collect licence fees in developing countries. The colonial administrators were unkeen to spend money on what some regarded as a frivolous optional extra, and in the event many colonial broadcasters had to depend on advertising for their revenue.

In 1949 Whitley returned to the BBC as Assistant Head of the Colonial Service and then rose steadily through a succession of posts in the External Services, as the World Service was then called. After nine years he moved to Broadcasting House to take charge of staff recruitment, training and promotion. His rectitude and fund of common sense helped to ensure that good people were appointed and promotions were fair.

He also established short residential courses for staff under consideration for senior management at a rural conference house near High Wycombe named Uplands. In addition to the BBC top brass he managed to attract outside speakers of great distinction to come to Uplands and lecture to those of us who were immersed in syndicate studies of complicated BBC problems in austere living conditions.

In 1964 Oliver Whitley became the Chief Assistant to the Director-General, Sir Hugh Greene. One of his duties was to handle the relations between the BBC and the political parties, never an easy operation, for each is inclined to believe the BBC is secretly in league with its opponents. He soon earned the respect of both the Government Chief Whip, John Silkin, and the Opposition Chief Whip, William Whitelaw. But not all political problems could be resolved by his tact and patent integrity. External events exacted their toll. "The nation divided always has the BBC on the rack" was a phrase coined by Whitley at this time and frequently quoted by others since.

Another duty was to put a brake on some of Greene's more impulsive actions. It was Whitley, for instance, who restrained Greene from his immediate instinct to resign when he learnt that Harold Wilson was switching Lord Hill of Luton overnight from the chairmanship of the Independent Television Authority to that of the BBC.

In 1969, when Greene felt that his pending second divorce did require his resignation as Director-General, Whitley was himself already within three years of the BBC retiring age. He was thus regarded as outside the running for the succession, although otherwise admirably qualified. Charles Curran was appointed DG, and Whitley returned to Bush House to the vacated position of Managing Director of the External Services. He was also appointed to act for the new Director-General whenever he was absent.

Whitley had long experience of Bush House problems, the main one of which is the recurring instinct of governments under economic pressure to slash the Grant-in-Aid that funds it, preferably with the support of an official review body. Such a one was the small committee headed by the financier Sir Val Duncan which reported in July 1969 with the élitist recommendation that the BBC's broadcasts abroad should be directed merely to English-speaking listeners of the educated and professional classes, in support of British diplomatic or commercial activities. Whitley's verdict on the Duncan Report in a note to the Foreign Office encapsulated both the Bush House ethos and his own philosophy:

The main value of the External Services is not that they may help to sell tractors or nuclear reactors, nor even that they may so influence people in other countries, nobs or mobs, as to be more amenable to British diplomacy or foreign policy. Their main value is that, because they effectively represent and communicate this British propensity to truthfulness or the adherence to individual right to the perception of reality, they help to increase the inherent instability of political systems based on a total inversion of morality and reality for ideological purposes.

The Duncan Report recommendation was quietly shelved.

In 1972 Oliver Whitley and his wife, Elspeth, retired to Oban, where he enjoyed gardening and wrote many perceptive reviews of books about broadcasting. His magisterial notice of Lord Hill's memoirs in The Listener in 1974 declared:

He describes the impressions made on himself and his fellow Governors by each of the members of the staff when they were interviewed for the post of Director-General in succession to Sir Hugh Greene.

Later, on another matter, he quotes from the minutes of the Board of Management, which are, of course, strictly confidential.

Whitley continued:

It is pertinent to ask by what logic it is reprehensible, as Lord Hill evidently regards it, for junior staff to "leak" BBC confidences to the press, but legitimate for the Chairman to publish BBC confidences as soon as possible after he has left.

From Whitley, father or son, such conduct would have been unthinkable.

Leonard Miall
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