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Lord Reith: Biography Launch in Aberfeldy
The Watermill and its proprietors, Kevin and Jayne Ramage, sponsored a notable literary event on 19 November, when they played host at the local launch of Marista Leishman’s biography of her father John Reith, the BBC’s first director-general.
Bulky volumes of “My Father - Reith of the BBC” , well received by critics since its publication in October by Saint Andrew Press, Edinburgh, sold briskly to members of an audience invited to meet and hear the author.
Mrs. Leishman, of Donavourd Cottage, Pitlochry, contributed an occasional column to Comment until the writing of her book began to claim all her time.
Although all copies sold out on the day fresh copies are now in stock signed by the author. |
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REVIEW
Marista Leishman, “My Father - Reith of the BBC” .
Saint Andrew Press, Edinburgh, £19.99.
JJOHN REITH, creator and first director-general of the BBC, had rare gifts as an organizer, administrator and team leader. His daughter’s candid book shows that he also had failings as a human being, above all as a husband and father, which sadly are not so rare - except that even the pettinesses of this giant of a man seem to have been on a gigantic scale.
Marista Leishman’s book, two or three years in the writing but a lifetime in gestation, succeeds on several fronts. It is an absorbing account of a notable life - engagingly written, clear-sighted, dispassionate, fair and often delicately humorous. She refrains from passing judgment on her domineering and in many ways appalling father, showing in this a maturity and restraint which other children of famous but awkward people often abandon, sometimes vengefully. Instead, since this is an exercise in truth-telling, she sets out all the elements which readers need to make their own judgment.
On Reith as father there are some chilling passages. When he was briefly out of work in 1942, his daughter, aged 10, found his presence at home “unnatural and oppressive. Would I like him to come with me to feed the hens, or pick brambles? Did I love him? These were terrible questions, to which the answer was as clear as the fact that it could not be spoken.”
The book is important because of the fresh light it shines on one of the great men of his day who, in creating the BBC and setting it on foundations which will keep it secure from state control for as long as its governors do their duty, gave his fellow-countrymen and their descendants something priceless.
There is no obvious reason why the board of the British Broadcasting Company, newly formed in 1922, should have appointed Reith, after a single interview, as its first general manager. (His qualifications were far from obvious and the book comically describes his efforts, after getting the job, to find out, without giving himself away, what broadcasting was.) He had infinite belief in his abilities and the Board evidently took him at his own valuation, as the wider world - Downing Street, Buckingham Palace, even Lambeth Palace - very soon did too.
In no time, it seemed, he had the prime minister, Baldwin, eating out of his hand, asking him to sit in on a Cabinet meeting during the general strike, advising him when to broadcast and writing alterations on the last page of the text even as Baldwin was reading the previous page - something which no broadcaster, however senior, has ever dared attempt since then.
It seems now, 80 years on, to have been a huge piece of luck that this uniquely gifted man, and as it turned out the right man, was chosen for this unique position which so soon became so pivotal in the nation’s life.
The reviewer, JULIAN HAVILAND, was a broadcaster and political journalist.
He was formerly political editor of ITN and, later, of The Times.
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