This is taken from The Times, June 18, 2008:

John Whale: broadcaster, journalist and editor of the Church Times

John Whale’s professional life was built on the truthful and elegant use of language. His delight in words and grammar emerged when he was a boy at Winchester, to which he won a scholarship. His facility with language extended to the spoken as well as the written word: he was one of those few people who could speak extempore in perfectly balanced paragraphs.

John Hilary Whale was the eldest son of the Rev Dr John Seldon Whale, a serious-minded Congregationalist minister and theologian, who had high expectations of his son. John reflected his father’s outlook and high principles; at Corpus Christi, Oxford, where he read Greats, he was studious rather than exuberant. His sense of fun developed as he matured. He owed this in part to his wife, Judy, whom he met while they were at Oxford, where they shared an interest in acting. He left Oxford intending to be an actor, and for a couple of years played in rep (juvenile leads in Farnham; on tour in Kenya), taught, and wrote plays. It was while he and Judy were in Paris, teaching at the Berlitz School and working as translators, that Whale began his career as a broadcaster, with the Section Anglaise on French radio. In London, in 1960, he joined ITN as a reporter.

Looking back decades later, he said that he had learnt his craft from the “hard-bitten, hard-working and endlessly whingeing cameramen” whose professionalism was his inspiration. In those early days of television news-gathering, there was no enabling technology: reporting Parliament, for example, he would take notes in the Press Gallery until about 5.25pm, then race through the private tunnel to Westminster Tube station, take the Circle Line for a couple of stops, and run up Kingsway to the ITN studios, to appear on the 6 o’clock news.

After four years as ITN’s political correspondent, he went to the US as its first Washington correspondent. The BBC had greater resources and an experienced team (Gerald Priestland and Charles Wheeler), and Whale had to work hard to keep up. His command of language was a great asset: he was never lost for words on camera, and he never wasted them.

A row followed a crisp, off-the-cuff comment he made during a live voice-over commentary to ITN news film of the flotilla arriving in Anguilla to reassert British sovereignty there, a ludicrous episode during Harold Wilson’s premiership. Watching the ships advance towards shore, Whale pointed out to the viewers the BBC’s camera crew in the third boat, adding: “And there you have the full measure of the bloodiness of this invasion”.

Though he enjoyed working in television, he always felt that it struggled to deal with complex social and political issues. In the US, while working on his first book, The Half-Shut Eve, which dealt with TV journalism, he realised that the written, not the spoken, word was his true medium. On his return to London in 1969 he joined The Sunday Times, of which Harold Evans was then Editor.

His 15 years there were probably the happiest time of his working life. He had colleagues he valued, and the freedom, as he once said, to “pursue truth through the carefully composed and printed word”.

He covered the conflict in Northern Ireland for years for the paper; it was he who first exposed British torture of IRA prisoners. He was one of the paper’s regular leader writers; and from 1979 he became its religious-affairs correspondent. He also appointed himself the guardian of the paper’s literary standards, and spent Saturdays on the stone correcting grammar and punctuation. It was said on the sports desk that he inserted into the football-league results the first correctly positioned semi-colon in their history. This concern for standards of literacy led him to produce a short weekly column on the techniques of good writing; he later expanded these into a book called Put it in Writing.

He had intended to spend the rest of his working life on the Sunday Times, but when, in 1984, Alasdair Milne, then Director-General of the BBC, offered him the job of Head of Religious Programmes on BBC television, he took it.

It was a job he did not greatly enjoy. Some of his BBC colleagues resented the fact that his appointment seemed to owe more to his lifelong friendship with Milne (who had played Kent to his Lear at Winchester) than to the formal procedures of application; and he did not enjoy running a department of more than 50 people. He was there for five years.

The job that was the apex of his career was the editorship of the Church Times, an independent weekly that reports the doings of the Anglican Communion. For years he had wanted the job, to which he was perfectly suited. Since his schooldays at Winchester, when he had fallen in love with the language of the Book of Common Prayer, he had been an Anglican; he once referred to it as “the most grown-up expression of Christianity”. He took over as Editor in 1989, bringing his own liberal intelligence, and his high notions of what journalism should be about, to bear on what had been a cosy publication with a High Church bias. He made it the kind of paper he himself wanted to read: sober, unpartisan, literate, and dedicated (in his phrase) to serving truth. To his deep disappointment, this did not result in a rise in the Church Times’s readership. His elegant, concise and beautifully handwritten postcards thanking contributors and replying to readers became a trademark. Though courteous and often generous with praise, they could also contain sharp rebuke.

Whale was always deeply solicitous for his friends when they were in difficulties, but some of them occasionally feared failing to meet his standards. These, and an absolute sense of duty, he rigorously applied to himself, often at the cost of anxious heart-searching. In Barnes, where he lived for many years, he was a churchwarden of the parish church, St Mary’s (in 1979 he wrote a history of it, One Church, One Lord). When it was partly burnt out, the parish split into two factions: those who wanted the church rebuilt as it had been, and those who, like Whale, approved Edward Cullinan’s modern design. The battle that followed so wounded Whale that he and Judy left Barnes for Clerkenwell in 1982, before the matter was resolved. (Cullinan’s design was eventually successfully built.)

After a diagnosis of prostate cancer, he retired from the Church Times in 1995 to devote himself to Judy and to reading (among much else, Homer in the original). Though the initial prognosis was gloomy, the treatment for the cancer gave him a dozen more years of active life.

He and Judy spent the six summer months each year at their house in Villers-sur-Mer on the coast of Normandy, where, every day that the weather allowed, he would swim (not bathe) in the sea. Swimming in the Thames was another pleasure, and so was walking — alone or with others he walked the Thames Path, the London Loop and other long routes in stages. He also reviewed books for the Church Times and The Times Literary Supplement.

Whale’s wife and his son survive him.

John Whale, broadcaster and journalist, was born on December 19, 1931. He died of a brain tumour on June 17, 2008, aged 76