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This obituary was written for Ariel by David Edmonds:
When the BBC was going through one of its periodic paroxysms of restructuring Ron would always joke: “they can’t fire me, I tick all the boxes”.
One of the boxes Ron ticked was ‘disabled’. He had cerebral palsy, which made walking, talking and typing a tremendous effort. But of course the BBC would never have sacked Ron. This had nothing to do with his disability, and everything to do with his brilliance as a writer.
He started his BBC career in the African service, before moving to what used to be called Central Talks and Features. His job was to write scripts and packages for the language services. This he did for twenty years. He had a sharp, analytic mind, and brought to his talks exceptional clarity. His boss and close friend, Mary Raine, recalls how when the Bengalis or Bulgarians or Somalis rang up with an idea for a topic, they would request what they termed ‘A Gerver’.
Ron was a delightful colleague: helpful, kind, wickedly gossipy and funny, generous: it was always an uphill struggle to pay for cake and coffee, because Ron would invariably and stubbornly insist that it was his round.
He took redundancy from the BBC in 2007. Outside work, he had a broad range of interests: theatre, film, classical music (particularly his beloved Mozart), politics, history. The numerous shelves at his home teetered with non-fiction books, quite a few of them in German. Ron was the only child of refugees from Germany, who arrived in London via South Africa, and he had no close relatives in the UK, though he was surrounded by friends. But it’s fair to say that the BBC – where he only ever worked three days a week - gave a sense of community and loose structure to Ron’s life, and when he left, he missed it.
I shall miss Ronald. I met him on my first day of work for the BBC over two decades ago. I shall miss Ron a great deal.
Ron Gerver died suddenly on 10th August 2011. He was 64 years old.
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