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John Bamber has written the following, full obituary for George:
George Balazs, one of the surviving doyens of Monitoring, died on 13
August at a care home in Dartford. He was 92. He had a distinguished
career at Caversham and Bush House, but will perhaps be best
remembered as Head of Unit at Monitoring´s outpost at Karen in
Nairobi.
George (Gyorgy) was born in 1920 in Transylvania in what is now
Romania. As Klausenberg his home town Cluj was part of the
Austro-Hungarian empire until two years before George was born. In
Hungarian it is known as Kolozsvar. His family were from the Jewish
intellectual elite, and George's mother tongue was Hungarian. With
the children on the street he spoke Romanian and with the servants
German. French was also spoken in the house.
It was in the late 1930's that George came to Britain like so many
others fleeing the Nazis. In 1942 the Germans conscripted most of the
men of fighting age in Cluj and sent them to the eastern front in the
Soviet Union, where most of them perished. Two years later the rest
of the Jews and gypsies were taken to Auschwitz.
Other Monitoring Service luminaries who had fled central Europe at the
time included the publisher George Weidenfeld, the famous art
historian Ernst Gombrich and countless others. George started his
BBC career at Evesham monitoring wartime broadcasts.
He rapidly rose through the ranks, finally ending up as Organizer,
News and Publications. He also had a successful career in Bush
Newsroom, finally being promoted Duty Editor.
It was in the late sixties that George started his love affair with
Africa. The Monitoring outpost at Karen was made for him. Nestling
in the foothills of Ngong, it housed about forty Ethiopians, Somalis,
Kenyan Arabs and Mozambicans and monitored a whole host of interesting
developments ranging from the antics of the Ugandan Conqueror of the
British Empire, Idi Amin, to the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie
in Ethiopia to wars in the Ogaden desert between Ethiopia and Somalia
and in Zaire. All this was interspersed with regular assassinations
and coups d'etat.
Through all this George was looking after his charges as a kind of
benevolent dictator. He was highly impatient and one of the most
irascible men I´ve ever met. On one occasion he threw a barbecue
with much alcohol. Because I spoke Swahili I was deputed to supervise
the local staff including the cook Henry Omulema, who I unwisely put
in charge of the booze. When the drinks dried up I went into the
kitchen to see Henry spark out on the floor surrounded by empty beer
bottles. Challenged in the morning, he said: "All your fault.
Shouldn´t have put the chui pamoja na wambuzi ( leopard in with the
goats)".
George could never stay angry with the local staff for long. He was
much loved and was very kind to them. He often used to help them with
BBC loans to tide them over or to buy land.
George Balazs was just one of many Jewish intellectuals who enriched
the life of Monitoring at Caversham. Others included Vova Rubinstein
and the distinguished translator of poetry Ewald Osers. With his
Newsroom friends Martin Sullivan, Martin Heyman and Karl Lehmann,
George was always reading the Racing Post. Between them they could be
relied upon to come up with good each-way bets at long odds on the
Grand National. George owned one leg of a racehorse called Midnight
Ride which he used to race at the Ngong racecourse in Karen. His
heart went out of it and he sold his interest after his local jockey
was kicked in the head and killed on an early morning training run.
George never married, although it was not for want of offers. Despite
his diminutive stature George's good looks, charm and wit made him
very successful with the ladies, whom he tastefully categorized into
"horizontal" and "(strictly) vertical."
He could not be said to have wanted to waste excess joules. One of
his favourite sayings was "they´re using crampons to scale molehills."
His memos were a model of precision. Karl Lehmann, who is still
going strong in his nineties, writes, "George had an unusually tidy
mind. His memos as Organiser News and Publications in the Monitoring
Service were half the length of other incumbents’ and yet contained
all the necessary points with the utmost clarity." His passion for
summarising extended into his Bush House career to such an extent that
one evening when Duty Editor on an Asian desk he boiled a cricket
story and said that Australia won by four wickets against Pakistan,
and scored a total of 913 for 16!
George´s spell in Nairobi saw us cooperating with a number BBC
correspondents and stringers including the late Brian Barron, John
Osman, Charles Harrison and Tim Llewellyn. The correspondents were
rightly indignant at the Monitoring Service´s predilection for
jealously guarding stories until Caversham had broken them first. Tim
Llewellyn continued a lasting friendship and in recent years used to
take George for walks from his flat in Belsize Park to his beloved
Hampstead Heath.
George was a deeply cultured man and loved opera and classical music.
He used to come to dinner once a week when we were both in Karen in
his much-loved orange convertible until forced to give up because of
failing eyesight. We would play chess, drink gallons of ouzo and
Tusker export and in keeping with the norm of the time would repair to
the garden to relieve ourselves. On one occasion there was an agonized
scream from the sleeping Kipsigis night guard. George had given him
an impromptu watering!
George had no truck with corporate bollockspeak and would have roundly
condemned most of the present changes in the BBC being carried out by
people whom he would have dismissed as "comma pushers" and people "who
wouldn't know a flash from an airmail letter."
George Balazs was a remarkable man and very good and loyal friend. He
will be missed by all who knew him.
John Bamber,
Costa del Sol 14 August 2012
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