Paul Leonard Fox
Kindertransport child who became British television mogul
FOLLOWING KRYSTALLNACHT, the mass pogrom in Germany on November 9 1938, a deputation of Jewish and non-Jewish organisations in the UK asked the government of Neville Chamberlain whether, as an emergency measure, it would permit the immigration of a limited number of Jewish children from Germany and Austria unaccompanied by their parents.
Such were the origins of the socalled Kindertransport, the first of whose immigrants arrived at Parkeston Quay (Harwich) aboard the steamship Prague on December 2 of that year. Among the 196 children rescued was a 13-year-old boy whose Jewish father, Walter, a doctor, had died when he was six and whose Jewish mother, Hilda, a nurse, would perish in a concentration camp.
The family had lived in the German town of Kreuzburg (now Kluczbork in southern Poland). Recently bar mitzvah in Breslau (now Wrocław), the boy remained reluctant to reveal his original German name. Adopted by a medical family in Bournemouth, he was known ever after as Paul Leonard Fox. He was to become one of the most iconic and influential British television executives of the age.
Fox attended a local grammar school in Bournemouth. At the age of 18 he enlisted in the Parachute Regiment. Wounded while crossing the Rhine as part of the Sixth Airborne Division, Fox accepted a place on a journalism course run by the American Forces University in Biarritz. He spent some time as a junior reporter on the Kentish Times before moving to the BBC in 1950 to work on Television Newsreel, the first regular newsreel programme on British TV.
During the course of a brilliant career lasting half a century, Fox rose to become controller of BBC1 and later chairman of Independent Television News. In these positions he virtually redefined news reporting and light entertainment, using his formidable personality and professional clout to schedule and reschedule programmes to perfection.
In 1961 he supervised the first live TV broadcast from the USSR when Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, was welcomed back by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Two years later he somehow managed to persuade prime minister Alec Douglas-Home and opposition leader Harold Wilson to deliver, live on television, moving tributes to the assassinated US president John Kennedy. Six years after that he used his authority to insist on a massive rescheduling of BBC1 programmes in order to cover the first Moon landing.
Fox had already served as editor of Panorama. In 1963 he became head of all BBC Television current affairs programming. He formed a close professional relationship with Richard Dimbleby, whom he declared had “an understanding with the (Panorama) audience that no other television reporter or presenter has ever had before or since”. At Dimbleby’s request Fox was the only non-family member permitted to visit him during his final days in hospital, where he died of cancer in 1965 at the early age of 52.
Fox was also responsible for the launch of a number of highly successful entertainment programmes, chief among them Dad’s Army, The Two Ronnies, Bruce Forsyth and the Generation Game and Parkinson. He supervised the transition of BBC1 from black and white to colour. And he oversaw the BBC’s first live coverage of the Rome Olympic Games in 1960. He had already launched Sportsview in 1954 and made sure that BBC cameras were there to film Roger Bannister’s first sub-four-minute mile run. Out of these successes came the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year. Four years later came Grandstand, an immensely popular Saturday-afternoon live TV sports programme.
In 1973 the post of managing director of BBC Television became vacant. Fox was expected to fill it, but the job went to Alasdair Milne. Fox left to become director of programmes at Yorkshire Television. Four years later he was made managing director of the company where he stayed until 1988, having already been appointed chairman of ITN and in 1985-92, president of the Royal Television Society. In 1988 he returned to the BBC as managing director of television, retiring two years later at the age of 65.
Fox was not the easiest of persons to deal with. He certainly did not suffer fools gladly. It was sometimes said of him that he was a bully. The truth was that his professional standards were of the highest, and that he demanded of others the professionalism and capacity for hard work that he demanded of himself. His generally low opinion of politicians was widely shared. He was an enthusiastic and loyal member of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue, and a regular reader of the Jewish Chronicle.
A member of the Garrick Club and the holder of honorary doctorates from Leeds and Bradford universities, Fox had been appointed CBE in 1985; a knighthood followed in 1991. In 1992 he was awarded the Royal Television Society’s Gold Medal for services to television.
Fox died following a stroke. His wife Betty Ruth, née Nathan, a milliner whom he had married in 1948, predeceased him in 2009. He is survived by their sons Jeremy, a television producer, and Jonathan, a retired accountant.