This is the text of an email sent by Peter Horrocks to all World Service staff yesterday, December 2010:

"It is with sadness that I am writing to inform you that Gerry Mansell
died on Saturday 18 December. Gerry was the Managing Director of World
Service from 1972 to 1981, and the Deputy Director General of the BBC
from 1977 to 1981.

Gerry will be fondly remembered by many of you for his years of
outstanding leadership and service. His passion for World Service is
clearly demonstrated in his book: "Let Truth Be Told: 50 Years of BBC
External Broadcasting".

We have set up a condolence book in Bush House for colleagues to sign
with their memories of Gerry.

Gerry is survived by his wife and two sons.

Peter "

Thank you very much for remembering our father Gerry.
We look forward to hearing from and getting together with BBC staff,
to celebrate his life, contribution and continue his good work.
If you would like to do that, in a most direct way, the family would love you to visit the link below and leave a personal message.
James and Francis Mansell
http://www.justgiving.com/Gerard-Mansell-CBE

This is taken from the Guardian:

Appreciation: Gerard Mansell obituary
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 23 December 2010 17.40 GMT
John Tusa writes:

Gerry Mansell (obituary, 23 December) was more than a clearsighted BBC administrator. He had a penetrating editorial mind that left its mark on both the BBC World Service and on Radio 4. As assistant head of overseas talks and features in the late 1950s and early 60s, he insisted on openness, accuracy, clarity and detachment, coupled with acute awareness of the needs of the worldwide audience.

These editorial values laid down standards not only for the English-language BBC World Service, but ultimately for the whole of Bush House. Those attending his exhilarating morning editorial meeting had to have read the foreign pages of the Times, Guardian and Telegraph, only to find that his observations often trumped ours, because he read Le Monde as well.

From 1965, this calm, Gallic rationalist proved to be a broadcasting revolutionary in domestic radio. He and his equally radical comrades-in-arms, Andrew Boyle and William Hardcastle, totally recast the sound and substance of domestic radio's news and current affairs. Gerry loved it, often telling gleefully how he had cracked another bottle of champagne with Hardcastle as they plotted to dismantle the old stuffy traditions of the Home Service still further. Years later, he complained that the reform blueprint, Broadcasting in the Seventies, had not been itself renewed and challenged in the 90s.

Returning to Bush House as managing director, Gerry spent most of his time defending the BBC External Services from government spending predations. His greatest satisfaction came in outwitting the [Kenneth] Berrill inquiry team in 1977. Leading them round the newsroom, he observed – innocently – that the only road to big savings was to reduce round-the-clock working. To his delight, that idea became a Berrill report recommendation, which was of course ridiculed and rejected, since the audience existed in 24 different time zones.

Mansell ran the External Services openly, fairly and with humour. He loved working with his trusted lieutenants, Alexander Lieven, Austen Kark and Bob Gregson, a familiar gathering drinking coffee in the Bush House canteen at 8am every weekday.

Gerry took being passed over for the director generalship of the BBC with calm humour, observing once only that he thought he was seen as too much of a Gallic outsider.

He was a good cook, a talented painter of landscape oils and still lifes, and a deep lover of la France profonde. He was, however, never confused about his loyalties.

This is taken from the Daily Telegraph:

Gerard Mansell
6:46PM GMT 27 Dec 2010

Gerard Mansell, who died on December 18 aged 89, was the radical and imaginative BBC executive behind the launch of Radio 4 in 1967 and one of the most influential figures in the shaping of the modern radio network.

With the BBC’s director of sound broadcasting, Frank Gillard, Mansell, then controller of the Home Service, helped reorganise the BBC’s radio services in 1967 by transforming the old Light Programme, Third Programme and Home Service into Radios 2, 3 and 4 respectively. It was a radical reorganisation that stirred up internal controversy by abolishing the powerful and long-established Features Department and stripping Radio 3 of its main speech elements and transferring them to Radio 4.

Mansell admitted drawing “a lot of flak” for scrapping the old and much-loved Home Service, which had remained radio’s flagship network throughout the Second World War, as well as the Third Programme, the cultural network established in 1946 to broadcast serious music and highbrow talks.

But even before dissolving the Home Service, Mansell had effected far-reaching changes. In 1965, for example, he built on an expanded nightly news sequence by creating The World At One, the lunchtime current affairs programme. When Radio 4 launched two years later, the programme helped established a tenor that still largely obtains on the frequency today.

His opponents called him “the butcher of the BBC”, (not least on the ground that he had seriously considered winding up the hugely-popular daily serial, The Archers). But – half-French, short and dapper – the erudite Mansell in fact cut a modest figure amid the giant egos ranged around him.

In 1969 he and Gillard drew up what was almost a manifesto for their vision of radio. Published in July 1969, Broadcasting in the Seventies proposed a “more logical, more attractive and more solvent” pattern for radio, and set the template for much of what is still heard on the air today.

Cost-cutting was a major issue, and while the document proposed opening more local radio stations, it also suggested making savings by paring down BBC orchestras, prompting howls of outrage. It also spelled out the process of radio reorganisation that had begun two years earlier, clearly demarcating the respective territories of Radios 3 and 4.

“With hindsight, I think Broadcasting in the Seventies was a visionary document,” Jenny Abramsky, then BBC Director of Radio and Music, noted in 2002. “But in 1969 the report was seen as anything but visionary – both within the BBC and outside. Believe it or not, the Sun supported an increase in the radio licence fee with the headline: “BBC needs money, not an axe.”

Gerard Evelyn Herbert Mansell was born on February 16 1921 in Paris, where his father had helped establish the first French branch of Lloyds Bank before the First World War and had married a Frenchwoman. Gerry attended the Lycée Hoche at Versailles, the Lycée Buffon in Paris and the Ecole des Sciences Politiques.

In 1940, aged 19, he joined the Royal Norfolk regiment, serving in Army Intelligence in the Western Desert, Sicily and north-west Europe. He was mentioned in despatches, and awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1945.

After the war Mansell, an accomplished painter, spent four years at the Chelsea School of Art and exhibited at the Royal Academy. His artistic bent marked him as a man of parts; he wrote a short history of Algeria, delivered the occasional speech on foreign policy to the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House, and above all proudly clung to his Gallic heritage, immersing himself in French newspapers and tuning in to the France-Inter radio service from Paris.

In 1951 he joined the BBC’s foreign news department and advanced through the Overseas Service to become head of its features and talks section in 1961. His background, the ease with which he identified himself with a cultural elite, and an innate dislike of chasing ratings, seemed destined to anchor him firmly in the rarefied upper councils of Bush House. But in 1965 Frank Gillard picked him to succeed Ronald Lewin as controller of the Home Service, the mainly speech-based domestic network that had distinguished itself throughout the war as the successor to the old National Service.

Mansell’s mission was to give the network a more natural flow, to abandon its preoccupation with nostalgia and to instill in it a much sharper journalistic edge. But in fitting the long-established Home Service into the reorganisation of the entire radio network, Mansell fretted that the title Radio 4 (listed fourth in a field of four) “would to the average listener, however erroneously, imply demotion”. In the event, he and the BBC committee responsible were assured that the titles were a means of identification rather than a ranking.

When Mansell took over, the Home Service schedule was a moribund mish-mash and included several music programmes which he and later his successor, Tony Whitby, swiftly jettisoned in favour of more drama, discussions and documentaries. Mansell recognised that the listeners were more discerning than the mass audience for the booming medium of television. “At least half our audience in the evening are people who have television in their homes but who choose radio.”

To edit The World At One, Mansell installed the “maverick genius” Andrew Boyle. The appointment of William Hardcastle, a former editor of the Daily Mail, as the fast-talking, chain-smoking anchorman, further added to the breathless sense of urgency previously absent in BBC reportage.

Drawing on the informal presentation style of stations such as ORTF, broadcasting from his native France, Mansell relished the “raw stuff” of spontaneous talk, and ditched several long-standing scripted Home Service warhorses like The World of Books in favour of more informal, questioning and defiantly unscripted conversation programmes as exemplified by A Word in Edgeways, chaired by the young Manchester journalist Brian Redhead.

Programmes like this, and other innovations (such as greater informal spontaneity in current affairs sequences like the Today programme), were designed to be intelligent, lively and relaxed, without being deliberately populist: “serious stuff,” as Mansell himself put it, “and meant to be”.

In 1972 Mansell was promoted to be managing director of External Broadcasting, (renamed the World Service in 1988). Five years later he was a contender for the post of Director-General, but the BBC governors shrank from appointing a fourth successive D-G from the ranks of Bush House, and the job went to Ian Trethowan instead.

Mansell, who privately believed that he had been passed over for the BBC’s top job because he was regarded as a Gallic outsider, kept his existing post, and became deputy D-G.
In October 1979, with Trethowan recovering from a heart attack, Mansell found himself pitched into an angry confrontation between the BBC and the new Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher.

Mrs Thatcher was furious to learn that a television crew from Panorama had filmed the Provisional IRA manning an unofficial roadblock in the Northern Ireland border town of Carrickmore. When she complained to the BBC governors, they ordered Mansell to discipline the Panorama editor, Roger Bolton. Mansell went further, and dismissed him.

He soon changed his mind. Having satisfied himself that the roadblock was simply an IRA stunt, and that Panorama had no intention of using the footage, he reconvened the disciplinary inquiry and reinstated Bolton with a reprimand.

In the same year he was appointed CBE. He left the BBC in 1981 when he was 60.
In retirement Mansell produced a history of the World Service in Let Truth Be Told (1982) and continued to paint landscapes. He also served on many broadcasting and cultural committees, and in 1988 was the recipient of a Sony gold award for services to radio.

Gerard Mansell married, in 1956, Diana Sherar, who survives him with their two sons.

The Memorial Event for Gerard Mansell, former MDXB and Deputy Director-General, will be at the Council Chamber at BH at 12pm on 16 May.

Robert Seatter, Head of BBC History, is in charge of the arrangements.  He can be contacted at robert.seatter@bbc.co.uk

A memorial event for the life of Gerard Mansell was held at Broadcasting House on Monday,May 16.  John Tusa delivered this tribute:


It is an honour and a privilege to speak about Gerry Mansell on this occasion. Ann and I knew Gerry for fifty years and his loss is a sad and real one. He was broadcaster, administrator, innovator, politician and friend. He deserves to be honoured.

What I have is a series of snapshots of Gerry at different stages of his life and career.  There is Gerry in 1960, then an Assistant Head of Talks and Features at Bush House, but the editorial power behind the throne, presiding over the morning editorial meeting.  We all came fullybriefed, the papers fully read. The atmosphere was stimulating and competitive rather than combative. Every producer wanted their ideas of topics to prevail. Somehow Gerry always seemed know that bit more than the rest of us. How did he do it? We should have guessed. Gerry read “Le Monde” – we didn’t. He was always ahead of us.

Gerry as Managing Director of the External Services – as they then were. I saw him frequently in the Bush House canteen, that great melting pot of cultures and ideas, around eight in the morning drinking coffee with his senior colleagues – Alexander Lieven, Head of the European Services, Austen Kark, Head of South European, BobGregson, Head of the English World Service.

They were wholly approachable.  They laughed a lot. What united them? Well, Mansell was half French, Lieven was Russian and Kark was of colonial stock. They all had an international perspective, background and outlook that steered them through the thickets of international radio. Above all, they knew why the worldwide audience listened and why they needed to hear what we said.

Then Gerry at Broadcasting House as Controller of the Home Service, later the new Radio Four. Here he was the radical who co-created “Broadcasting in the Seventies” the blue print for domestic radio for a generation. His partner in irreverence was Bill Hardcastle. Many a time Gerry would recall with relish how he and Bill cracked a bottle of champagne after Hardcastle came off the air after “PM” and plotted new broadcasting subversions. Gerry thought that Broadcasting in the Seventies should have been revisited and renewed years ago but somehow I never got round to asking him how it might have changed.

Then Gerry the... Well what was he? His father was English, his mother French and he was born in Paris. Bilingual of course, perhaps an Englishman in France and as he put it once “a bit too foreign, too French” in England. That was a key fact about him. His cast of mind was that of a Gallic rationalist who viewed the human frailties around him with a warm Voltairean laugh.  I never saw him uncomfortable in his dual cultural nationality. But his instincts drew him strongly to people with strong European backgrounds such as Alexander Lieven whom he loved as a brother.

Gerry served as an intelligence officer during the Second World War. Only in his seventies did he indulge a little in reminiscences. One memory was of lying on the beaches of Sicily during the allied landings and being shelled – by the Americans. Another was of landing in Normandy a few days after D Day itself. Mounted on a motorcycle, he was sent off to “locate the Germans!” Pushing deeper inland, all he found was rural Normandy in its summer glory and totally quiet. So he stopped took out his sketch pad and started painting.

Later, advancing through Germany in the closing days of the war, Gerry’s unit ran into a batch of captured SS men. The Germans gestured north eastwards. “You had better go and look over there” they urged. The gesture led to Belsen. That was all he said on the subject.

One evening Gerry came to dinner as news was breaking of allegations that Kurt Waldheim, UN Secretary General and Austrian Chancellor, had been complicit in his unit’s atrocities during the war. Waldheim denied any knowledge of them. “I’ve been thinking about Waldheim”, he said. “His position as intelligence officer in the unit was identical to the one I held in mine. It is inconceivable that he did not know what his unit was doing.”

Gerry the friend, the generous, the engaging companion. An excellent cook – his Boeuf Bourguignon was a treat right up to his early 80s – he loved wine – French of course – and kept a close circle of friends to whom he stayed loyal.

Holidays – well, France of course, mainly Brittany though he did venture into La France Profonde, to Gascony, but returned saying that the unrelenting diet of goose foie gras was already beyond him. He was a very talented painter both in water colours and oils, still lifes and landscapes. His flat was covered with them and he could hang them without self-importance or embarrassment. Later on in his life, after his annual painting trip to Brittany, it was noticeable that all the seascapes were of the shore after a receded tide.

But above all, Gerry Mansell was the consummate political fighter for the independence, integrity and strength of the World Service. He fought many battles with the Foreign Office and Treasury and usually won. His greatest victory was over the Think Tank Report in the late 1970s which under Sir Kenneth Berrill was sent in to find savings. Gerry explained patently why it was important to broadcast to friends as well as opponents; why the constancy of external broadcasting built up the vital sense of trust with the audience; why language services could not be switched on and off like taps in times of crisis; why broadcasts spoke to mass audiences, far wider than the so-called “opinion formers” that the Foreign Office craved.

Then came Gerry’s master stroke. Taking the Think Tank team into the Bush House newsroom, he observed innocently: “Of course, this is a 24 hour operation. If you really want to find big savings, then you would have to reduce 24 hour working!” The Think Tank swallowed the bait hook, line and sinker. The BBC fought back. Michael Swann, the BBC Chairman, hosted a press conference in this very Council Chamber which 100 journalists attended. No fewer than 30 peers spoke in the House of Lords’ 8 hour debate on the Think Tank Report in November 1977. All but one backed the External Services and attacked the Report.

Lord Hill, a former BBC Chairman, summed up the Report’s essential incoherence. “You make the Service more audible; you cut down the hours during which this more audible service is used; you reduce the languages, you reduce the programmes; you invest in the services then you underuse them. For a saving of 10% in cash you cut external service broadcasting by 40%. I find it puzzling”. He wasn’t alone.

Gerry won; he often recalled with glee the way he set the trap for the Think Tank team. But Bush House won; listeners won. He saved the external services for a generation.

So let us honour Gerry Mansell; the BBC owes him a lot.
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