Why Wheeler held India ‘very close to his heart’
BOOK EXPLORES LEGACY OF SIR CHARLES AS ‘JEWEL IN THE CROWN OF THE BBC’
A NEW book on the late BBC foreign correspondent, Sir Charles Wheeler, who was based in Delhi from 1958-1962, will reveal the importance of India in his life, the author, who is also his daughter, has said.
It was while he was in India that Wheeler met and married his Sikh wife, “Dip” (short for Kuldip) Singh, with whom he had two daughters, Shirin and Marina.
Witness to the Twentieth Century has been written by Shirin Wheeler, who was herself a BBC correspondent in Brussels.
“India was very close to his heart in many ways,” she told Eastern Eye.
Wheeler, once called “a jewel in the crown of the BBC”, died in 2008, aged 85.
The Daily Telegraph’s obituary said that in the late 1950s, Wheeler “was posted to New Delhi as Asia correspondent... 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 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.”
The paper described Wheeler as “the last working member of the stylish post-war school of television reporting, and one of the few British television journalists to whom the term distinguished could properly be applied”.
Royal visits were not Wheeler’s cup of tea, especially when they included tiger shoots. In 1961, when the Queen and Prince Philip paid a state visit to India, Wheeler referred to her as “that bloody woman”. The remark made in a bar was overheard by a courtier. As a result, Wheeler was persona non grata on his return to England.
However, all was forgiven and Wheeler was “a little shame-faced” when the Queen knighted him in 2006 and told him “how much she admired his work”.
By the early 1960s, he was in Berlin, where his daughters were born. At the age of 41, he went to Washington where he covered Vietnam and the civil rights movement.
Shirin said she was now finishing “the second edit” of her book, which is being published by Manilla Press, an imprint of the Bonnier publishing group in Sweden.
The publishers say Shirin, who was a BBC journalist for 25 years, now advises on EU climate action, gender equality and innovation in and out of Europe.
It describes the book as “a look at the major events of the 20th century through the eyes of the man who witnessed it all”.
It adds: “Charles Wheeler, the BBC’s longest-serving foreign correspondent, was one of Britain’s greatest news reporters. For more than four decades, he reported for radio and television from most of the world’s trouble spots.
“Present at many of the key episodes of the 20th century, he had – as a BBC manager noted after the shooting of George Wallace, presidential candidate and governor of Alabama, on 15 May 1972 – ‘a knack of being in the right place at the right time. It was typical of Charles that he ran towards the sound of the gunshot while the crowd was running in the opposite direction.’
“Wheeler’s investigative skill and sense of judgement made him one of the most authoritative reporters of his generation. But what was it like to have been witness to the events that shaped our modern world?
“In this book – part memoir, part history, part reflection – his daughter, Shirin Wheeler, examines her father’s journalistic legacy and brings her personal knowledge to bear on the project. She will tell the story of her father: a patient listener and forensic interrogator who was driven by curiosity and passion to report and expose injustice, and above all, to give a voice to people ignored or unheard by many.”
In December 2012, Shirin and Marina collected the Lifetime Achievement award given to their father by the Indian Journalists’ Association (IJA). During the ceremony, a Waterford crystal bowl was handed over to them by the then Indian high commissioner in London, Dr Jaimini Bhagwati.
While in India, Wheeler covered the Dalai Lama’s arrival after he had fled Tibet in 1959. In 1977, Wheeler was sent back to India by the BBC to report on the state of emergency that Indira Gandhi had imposed on the country before calling a general election that swept her out of power that year.
Shirin said her father’s “fascination with India never waned”. Compassion, integrity, honesty, “his irreverence and his instinctive dislike of authority” were the hall mark of Wheeler’s reporting, she said.
During the civil rights riots in America, his radical streak was clear in a piece to camera when he reflected what the black protestors were saying: “‘They push us around, they arrest us for nothing , they call us N ****** , they say we stink, they insult our women. We’ve had this for years as long as we can remember, and now the point simply came when somebody decided we wouldn’t take it any more.’”
At a more personal level, Shirin talked about her mother: “We do have, in the house, a framed piece of an article written at the time and whose headline is, ‘The most beautiful woman in Delhi.’
“So Dip met this British man, her British beau, and she took him back to the family . They were a handsome couple and they were slightly concerned about how the family would take them – like many families of that era, they had a rather schizophrenic attitude towards the British.
“Her father, a Sikh, from the Punjab, [was] a landowner, a magistrate, a doctor who had considered himself to be a pretty loyal British subject. On the other hand, his older children had been dressing in khadi and taking part in the Quit India Marches. And his absolute nightmare, our mother used to tell us, was that one day as the magistrate he would be forced to order the police to fire on a crowd and his children would be among the protestors. Thank God that never happened.
“That was the context in which Charles came home. Needless to say, he was a hit. They loved him from the moment they met him. And that carried on – and the fact that we had so many of our young Indian relatives, teenagers and 20-year-olds at his funeral and at his memorial service was testament to how much they adored him.” Dip died in March 2020, aged 88. Marina has also written a family history, My Mother, Partition and the Punjab.
Her mother was born in what is now Pakistan in November 1932 and grew up in Sarghoda in western Punjab. She was 14 at the time of Partition when she had to flee across the new border with her parents and siblings to seek safety in Delhi.
Dip’s first marriage was an arranged affair at 17 to author and journalist Khushwant Singh’s younger brother, Daljit, 10 years her senior. But the marriage was not a success and she showed great courage by walking out within five years – not a done thing in the 1950s.
It was while working as a social secretary at the Canadian embassy in Delhi that Dip met Charles, who was the BBC’s star correspondent based in India.