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 Friday 16:00-16:30
Sunday 20:30-21:00 (rpt)
Radio 4's weekly obituaries programme |
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This week |
Friday 11th January 2008
(Rpt) Sunday 13th January |
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Sir John Harvey-Jones
Chairman of ICI who has died aged 83
Sir John Harvey Jones who was a successful chairman of one of Britain’s biggest companies – ICI. However, he was best known to millions of TV viewers for his role onTroubleshooter – analysing the problems of failing British companies and offering them no nonsense advice. With his plain spoken views, unruly hair and idiosyncratic dress sense he was instantly popular.
John Harvey Jones grew up in India. He remembers his father as a very repressed and controlled man who once threw him into the deep end of a swimming pool in an attempt to teach him to swim. At the age of six the young John Harvey Jones was sent to boarding school, near Deal in Kent where he described himself as being beaten and bullied because he was “weedy, underweight and a wimp”. He once even tried to slit his wrists with a blunt penknife in the lavatory. However, at the age of twelve things looked up when he was sent to Dartmouth Naval College which he loved. John spent twenty years in the navy, serving on two destroyers sunk by torpedoes during the war, then moving to submarines before ending up in naval intelligence. It was for this work that he was awarded the MBE in 1952.
Sir John Harvey Jones was appointed ICI chairman in 1982. The company had just made its first full year loss since its foundation in 1926. However, three years later it became the first British industrial company to post a profit of over one billion pounds, catapulting Sir John into the public eye.
Matthew Bannister talks to TV producer Robert Thirkell, who worked with Sir John Harvey-Jones to create the Troubleshooter series and we hear him talking to Anthony Claire about his life and business approach in an edition of Radio 4’s In the Psychiatrist’s Chair in 1987.
Sir John Harvey-Jones was born April 16th 1924. he died January 9th 2008. |
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Professor Bert Bolin
Meteorologist who has died aged 82
The fact that climate change is now so high on the global political agenda can be traced back to the work of the Swedish meteorologist Bert Bolin. Professor Bolin was one of the first scientists to warn of the dangers of global warming. In the 1980s he was a leading figure at an international meeting of scientists held in Austria to discuss the threat of climate change and warned that “in the first half of the next century a rise in global mean temperatures could occur which is greater than any in man’s history.” His report called for a global convention to prevent this happening. The United Nations responded by setting up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the IPCC – and inviting Professor Bolin to become its first chairman. He held the position for nine years, marshalling the work of hundreds of scientists into influential reports, which led to the UN Climate Change Convention and the Kyoto Protocol.
When the IPCC won the Nobel Prize jointly with the former US Vice President Al Gore last year, Professor Bolin was invited to accept it. Unfortunately he was too ill to travel to the ceremony.
Bert Bolin was Professor of Meteorology at Stockholm University. Matthew Bannister talks to his colleague there, Professor Henning Rodhe and to Sir John Houghton who chaired Working Group 1 of the IPCC.
Bert Richard Johannes Bolin was born May 15th 1925. He died December 30th 2007.
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Joan Ingpen
Agent and opera administrator who has died aged 91
Joan Ingpen was an influential agent and opera administrator who spotted the talent of the young Pavarotti and formed a close collaboration with the conductor Sir Georg Solti. The agency she founded – Ingpen and Williams – represented Solti as well as other leading artists including Rudolf Kempe and Joan Sutherland.
In 1962 she took up the role of Controller of Opera Planning at Covent Garden, where she famously booked Luciano Pavarotti to cover the role of Rodolfo in La Boheme in case Guiseppe Di Stefano was unable to perform. Di Stefano withdrew on the second night and Pavarotti’s subsequent success catapulted him to international attention. When Sir Georg Solti was invited to join the Paris Opera in 1972, he accepted on the condition that Joan Ingpen could go with him. Six years later – after a recommendation from Placido Domingo - she was offered the position of artistic administrative director at New York’s Metropolitan Opera where she worked until her retirement in 1987.
Matthew Bannister talks to fellow agent Jasper Parrott and to Jonathan Friend who is the current Artistic Administrator at the Met.
Joan Ingpen was born January 3rd 1916. She died December 29th 2007.
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Philip Agee
CIA case officer and writer
The former CIA agent made international headlines in the 1970s when he quit the agency and published a book which named 250 of its operatives in South America. Philip Agee claimed he was disgusted by the CIA’s collusion with military dictators in the region, but his former employers were outraged and accused him of being responsible for the deaths of a number of their agents. Agee moved to London and collaborated with left wing journalists in his campaign to expose the international work of the CIA. The American government put pressure on the British authorities to deport Agee. In 1977, despite protests from activists on the British left, the Home Secretary Merlyn Rees issued an order expelling Agee.
Philip Agee was born into a middle class family in Florida and was recruited into the CIA after graduating from University in Indiana in 1956. Following his expulsion from Britain, he lived a peripatetic life, ending up in Cuba where he died.
Matthew Bannister talks to Chris Andrew a Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University who specialises in the work of intelligence agencies.
Philip Burnett Franklin Agee was born July 19th 1935. He died January 7th 2008. |
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Sir Edmund Hillary
Mountaineer and explorer who has died aged 88
The New Zealander’s ascent of the world’s highest mountain with Sherpa Tensing Norgay made Sir Edmund Hillary an instant hero, prompting newspaper headlines around the world and earning him a knighthood. However, he remained modest about his achievement and devoted much of his later life to helping build schools and bridges for the Sherpa people of Tibet.
Matthew Bannister talks to British mountaineer Sir Chris Bonnington and extracts from Sir Edmund Hillary's book on the ascent of Everest High Adventure are read by Philip Fox.
Sir Edmund Percival Hillary was born July 20th 1919. He died January 11th 2008. |
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