OBITUARY -  John Clapham  
John Clapham former  BengaIi programme organiser  died in Bristol on 28 June aged  82.
John joined the BBC in 1972, shortly  after  the war between India and Pakistan which had brought the independent state of Bangladesh into existence.  The run up to the war, - with major political events in Pakistan following the devastating cyclone of November 1970 in East Bengal, - had seen the Bengali service transformed and its audience massively increased.  Until a couple of years before there had been two Bengali language sections one for India and one for East  Pakistan.  John was the first programme organiser of the stand-alone Bengali section, which had previously been managed with the Hindi service by David Barlow, Mark Tully who had then swapped jobs with Evan Charlton and became a writer. All the managers in the BBC Eastern Service at that time were white Brits.  They had all had experience in different fields of working in south Asia though they were not for the most part expert in Indian languages. John Clapham was in a similar mould, but he knew Bengali and had spent years both in rural Bengal and as minister at the prestigious Methodist Church in Sudder Street Calcutta before coming to Bush House. Hugh Closs recalls a connection with his own family going even further back. John’s father was also a Methodist minister, the Rev W.D.Clapham, who spent some time at Goodmayes Methodist Church in Ilford, where Hugh grew up. His memory was much revered in the Closs household. In Calcutta John’s family had suffered a great personal tragedy when his first wife was killed when rescuing a child  from in  front of a Calcutta tram, leaving John to bring up their three small children without their mother.
John knew and loved the Bengali culture and language, and he had first hand experience of humanitarian work. Raziul Hasan then a student and part time broadcaster in the Bengali service, who later had a career as Bangladeshi diplomat, recalls that John had written a letter to one of the English papers highlighting from his  personal experience the plight of refugees from Bangladesh.  He remembers John coming to a Bush House studio on 16 Dec 1971 to listen to the surrender ceremony of the Pakistani troops in  Dhaka.
That was before John joined the BBC. When he did join a few weeks later it was by no means an easy assignment. There was always a tough but friendly competition for  the ownership and direction of programme-making in the unified section, which left some producers disappointed. He and his Bengali colleagues were committed to the principle, established during Mark Dodd’s headship of the Eastern Service, that they were broadcasting not to separate communities or countries, but to speakers of the Bengali language. As Dipankar Ghosh, who joined the BBC at about the same time as John told an Open University seminar earlier this year ‘… we participated effectively in creating an atmosphere of mutual acceptance, bridging the gulf between Bangladesh, East and West Bengal, areas where Bengali as a language was spoken and heard and where radio had a significant role to play’.
Outside the BBC the traditional West Bengali perception of Calcutta being the cultural and spiritual home of the Bengali language was being challenged by those who argued that as Bangladesh was now an independent state, and its people formed the majority of Bengali speakers, Dhaka was ready to take over from Calcutta as the capital of Bengali culture. It would have been difficult for anyone, especially a non-native Bengali-speaker, to arbitrate on these cultural wars. John did his best.
Serajur Rahman  worked closely with John in the Bengali section and  admits that he on occasion had his differences with him.  Seraj recalls that David Stride, then assistant head of the Eastern Service, who had himself worked for many years in Calcutta but in a very different milieu to John’s,  had told his Bengali colleagues (perhaps slightly subversively) that their new boss was a ‘strict Methodist disciplinarian’. It is difficult to reconcile this image with the one that most of us had of him, that he was extremely courteous considerate and gentlemanly - a really nice man. He certainly had strong convictions. On a personal note, when I argued with him about small things - like whether the BBC should  change the English usage and spelling of the Bangladesh capital city ‘Dacca’ to the Bengali ‘Dhaka’, or whether to call the language ‘Bangla’ rather than ‘Bengali’ - John  was usually right,  or at least saw correctly the way things were moving. And he had a wry sense of humour. He used to recall with relish how he told his personnel officer that he was getting married again. ‘Congratulations, I am delighted ’ came the response,  ‘I must tell you about the BBC’s widow’s pension scheme.’
Gwyn Jones has written in Bushlog,-   ‘Those of us in the newsroom who go back to the 80s and 90s will remember John Clapham as a pleasant colleague. When we made mistakes -- probably all too frequently -- the regional duty editor could usually expect a roasting at one of the morning meetings from the language section concerned, with occasionally as many as twenty faces viewing one's squirming. John believed in a personal approach: he would quite often phone the desk before the meeting. "one of your colleagues,"he would say," had a slight oversight with the Bengalis last night. Perhaps I could point out..etc ." We had broad shoulders, but such an approach on occasion was appreciated. ’

Other younger colleagues enormously appreciated the advice he gave them, helping them in a quiet way to develop their careers in a direction they wanted. John himself showed great personal integrity in choosing to go back to the Methodist ministry after 11 years rather than seeking to develop his own career further in the BBC. That was not always easy for him either. I remember him grumbling about being required to attend a mandatory but intellectually puerile ‘race awareness course’ at the Methodist church in Hackney where he was working. We had similar courses inflicted on us at the BBC at the time.
John Renner succeeded him  as Bengali programme organiser.in 1983  and his assessment is very much on the mark. ‘I quickly learnt to respect what John had achieved in terms of knitting together a very diverse group of people who were individually enormously talented in their different ways.  John had kept them together by, I think, the sheer authority of his gentle but firm personality, his transparent integrity and his deep knowledge of the culture and the region. The service I inherited from John was one which was indisputably the most trusted source of impartial news of the region and the world for Bengali-speakers. He played a central part in building the Bengali Service into such a position of eminence and respect.’

At the thanksgiving service for him in Bristol on 8 July there were tributes from people who knew him both as a friend and at different stages of his career, as a Methodist minister and missionary in India, at the BBC, as a minister again in Hackney and after his retirement to Bristol where he continued to preach, to write on the history of his church, to reflect and to share his wisdom within a community where he was much respected. He leaves his widow Meg, his three children by his first marriage, Jonathan Justin and Beth and their children.  

William Crawley
9 July 2010