Moral maze for BBC’s Buerk over new passport
DURING a long and distinguished broadcast career, he often reported on harrowing stories, most famously from Ethiopia when it was laid waste by famine in 1984.
But it was only two decades later, in a beautifully written memoir, The Road Taken, that broadcaster Michael Buerk, presenter of Radio 4’s Moral Maze, exposed the truth about his own father, Gordon, a Canadian bigamist whose ‘war wound’ was, in fact, a scar from a hernia operation.
His father had been born not, as he claimed, in 1920 but in 1914, and his entire life was layered in deceit.
Now, aged 78, Buerk has discovered that those layers even helped obscure the truth about his own life — in particular, his birthplace.
Far from being born in Solihull, Warwickshire, as Buerk has always believed — and as he faithfully recorded in successive passports — he wasn’t even born in Britain.
‘Michael was actually born in
Canada,’ a friend tells me. ‘He’s just got his first Canadian passport.’ Buerk declines to discuss how he made this startling discovery, but has never made any secret of the enduring pain his father caused.
In The Road Taken, he recounted how his mother, Betty, met his father at a Christmas dance in Birmingham 1944. Dazzled by the Canadian — who said he was a widower who’d survived ‘hand-to-hand fighting in Italy’ — she married him in 1945. Michael was born the following year.
Soon afterwards, his father’s first wife, Helen — living in Canada — learned of his marriage to Betty. She magnanimously agreed to a speedy divorce — after which, astonishingly, Betty and Gordon married for a second time. But the union soon unravelled.
Buerk met his father only once, tracing him to Vancouver in 1972. By then, Gordon was dying.
But, I’m told, Michael is now ready for a return journey. ‘He’s intending to go back soon,’ says a chum, ‘using his Canadian passport.’