Charles Wheeler

This is from the Daily Telegraph.

Sir Charles Wheeler, the BBC foreign correspondent who has died aged 85, was the last working member of the stylish post-war school of television reporting and was one of the few British television journalists to whom the term distinguished could properly be applied.
Wheeler’s craggy, birdlike features, well-brushed sweep of grey hair, glistening spectacles and laconic delivery may have seemed out of place in a medium increasingly obsessed with youth and good looks; but his dispassionate air of world-weary integrity and soundness of judgment were indispensable whenever there were serious and complicated issues to be investigated.

He soldiered on at the BBC well into his seventies, and was considered by many of his colleagues to be one of the most elegant and authoritative correspondents the Corporation ever produced.

Anti-establishment by instinct and modest by nature, Wheeler preferred to rely on direct experience and refused to have anything to do with the inside track of off-the-record briefings beloved of diplomats, ministers and many of his fellow journalists.



As a general rule he held politicians in low esteem and avoided meeting them socially. His reports on such programmes as Panorama and Newsnight as well as countless BBC news bulletins, seemed to suggest that all political motives are flawed and that information must be judged accordingly.

He was particularly effective as a commentator on the American political scene, as the BBC’s Washington correspondent from 1965 to 1973. His reports on the assassination of Martin Luther King, the Johnson and Nixon presidencies, the anti-Vietnam war protests and the civil rights movement cut through the spin and made him a household name.

Long after he had left America Wheeler found that many people retained an image of him delivering his piece against the backdrop of the White House.

Slim and somewhat Napoleonic in temperament, Wheeler set high standards for himself and for those around him. Though he was always generous to colleagues and never cut the ground from under the feet of his opponents, he was known to administer withering dressing-downs to those he considered did not come up to scratch.

Yet he himself was not entirely flawless: producers found it difficult to get him to take deadlines seriously when he was on to a good story, and he had an astonishing knack for getting up the noses of officialdom.

He was also surprisingly camera-shy, a quality which denied him the stardom which came to contemporaries such as Alan Whicker. “Dear Mr Wheeler,” a viewer once wrote, “you always look so miserable. Can we have a smile for Christmas?”

He was unable to relax on camera and his inherent honesty made him uneasy about sustaining the illusion of the omniscient anchorman and incapable of spouting flim-flam.

Thus when, in 1980, he was invited to present the new BBC current affairs programme Newsnight, it soon became clear he was a disastrous choice. One night he was on duty during one of the BBC’s technical meltdowns. The director took the usual precaution of cutting back to the presenter, only to hear Wheeler telling his audience he had no idea what was going on, then twiddling his fingers until the problem was sorted out. The moment the programme was off the air the editor stormed down to the studio and sacked him. Wheeler returned with relief to life on location.

Charles Cornelius-Wheeler was born on March 26 1923 in Bremen, Germany, where his father was working for the British Council. He grew up in Hamburg, witnessing the rise of the Nazis, and was sent to Cranbrook School in Kent.

On leaving school at 17 he joined the Daily Sketch as an office boy, which, he claimed, “mostly involved slipping out to the pub at night and buying quarter bottles of whisky for alcoholic sub-editors”.

The following year he volunteered for the Royal Marines and, as a fluent German speaker, was assigned to 30 AU, a team formed by Ian Fleming to forage for intelligence ahead of the main allied invasion force after D-Day.

Assigned to Team 4, led by the dashing Patrick Dalziel-Job (on whom Fleming is supposed to have modelled James Bond), he served as second in command and was mentioned in dispatches. In 1945 he found himself among the ruins of Berlin, smuggling U-boat commanders out of the Soviet zone before the Russians could acquire their technical expertise.

Unable to return to the overmanned world of Fleet Street in an era of post-war paper rationing, Wheeler applied in some desperation for a job at the BBC where, “since I spoke fluent German, they put me in the Latin American service at Bush House.”

There he wrote news bulletins in English for translation into Spanish. After 18 months he was transferred to the newsroom to cover the 1948 Olympic games’ and in 1950 was posted at short notice to the German service to take over from the BBC’s man in Berlin who had a bad case of DTs. Initially assigned for three months, he stayed three years.

With an audience in East Germany, Wheeler’s role verged on the propagandist and he was deeply affected by the tragic struggle of the East German Democrats against Communist rule. Following a tip-off from a Foreign Office contact, he was in East Berlin during the East German uprising and its brutal suppression by Soviet troops. He co-wrote, with Stefan Brant, an account of the rising, and was unhappy when the BBC brought him back to a desk job in London in 1953.

In 1956 Wheeler moved from radio to television as a producer on Panorama, then in its infancy. His knowlege of eastern Europe proved invaluable during the Hungarian uprising with its consequent effects on east-west relations, and within two years he had been offered the editorship, a job that offered him a fast-track to the top echelons of the BBC. Disliking office politics and longing to return to life in the field, he turned it down.

In 1962, he was posted to New Delhi as Asia correpondent. It was his first posting as a foreign correspondent, and sometimes his inexperience showed. On one occasion he described the prime minister of Ceylon as “an inexperienced eccentric at the head of a cabinet of mediocrities”, a comment which provoked a major diplomatic row with the Ceylonese who threatened to leave the Commonwealth. Wheeler’s editor stood by him, though Harold Macmillan, the prime minister, had to express his regrets before things calmed down.

Wheeler then returned to Berlin for a second stint, reporting on the construction of the Berlin Wall and a series of spectacular escapes to the west. But, never a one to flog a story after its time had passed, in 1965 he recommended the closure of the Berlin office on the grounds that the wall was old news and the Russians had become far less aggressive. He was promptly posted to Washington and spent the next eight years in America.

In one of his most memorable reports, during the 1972 Republican convention in Miami — the night of Nixon’s renomination — Wheeler informed the viewers: “I was going to tell you what happened today. Instead I’ll tell you what will happen tomorrow. Nixon will enter the hall. There will be two and a half minutes of applause. He will speak for 15 minutes, when there will be a further standing ovation of 10 minutes”. Wheeler had got hold of the plan for how the Republicans were going to stage-manage the whole event and turned it into an ironic commentary on the American political system.

When he was posted in 1973 as the BBC’s chief Europe correspondent, it seemed that Wheeler’s career might be drawing to a close; but at the age of 55, he resigned his job at the BBC and went freelance, thus avoiding compulsory retirement at 60. He worked for BBC News and Panorama before joining Newsnight, first as a presenter and then as a roving correspondent. He also featured regularly on radio in From Our Own Correspondent.

Though Wheeler’s reporting was dispassionate to a fault, he cared deeply about the suffering he saw on his travels. In 1980, after a visit to Poland where he had seen many people going barefoot, he instigated a campaign through his local paper in West Sussex to send thousands of shoes there by lorry.

In the aftermath of the first Gulf War, Wheeler spent nights sleeping out in the open with Kurdish Peshmurga guerrillas; his reporting of Saddam Hussein’s campaign against the Kurds was widely believed to have persuaded the Allies to establish safe havens for the Kurds in Iraq.

Wheeler won numerous awards for his reporting and presented many one-off documentaries and two series, The Road to War (1989) in which he traced events leading up to the war from the different standpoints of the main participants, and Charles Wheeler’s America (1996) in which he reflected on America’s experience in the post -war period.

On his 68th birthday, which he spent in a burnt-out hotel in Kuwait City, Wheeler was heard to remark: “I can’t believe how lucky I am to be here. Something awful might have happened to me — like retirement”. He made a radio documentary series Coming Home, about the end of the Second World War, in 2005 and was at work on a programme about the Dalai Lama until his last weeks.

Charles Wheeler was appointed CMG in 2001 and knighted in 2006. His first marriage ended in divorce, and he married, secondly, Dip Singh, by whom he had two daughters.