Austen Kark

Austen was one of Alan's oldest friends and with him in Holloway on the day we first met in 1993. He was also the influence behind Alan getting one of his first jobs, on his father's magazine, as associate editor, Mini-Cinema 1950-52.


obituaries
Austen Kark
BBC mandarin who successfully defended the world service

Dennis Barker The Guardian, Monday May 13 2002

Austen Kark, who died in the Potters Bar rail crash aged 75, secured a place in broadcasting history as one of the three former managing directors of the BBC World Service to oppose the plans of John Birt, after he became director general in 1992, to end the service's independent status at Bush House, in central London, and absorb it within the rest of the corporation.

With Gerard Mansell and John Tusa, the other two of the "three wise men", Kark opposed the plan in speeches, letters, newspaper articles and behind-the-scenes lobbying. While they campaigned, plans were drawn up to sell the lease of Bush House, only to be reversed. Nearly a decade later, victory went to the trio by default, and today the world service remains at Bush House, with its own management structure substantially in place.

Coming into office as managing director in 1984, exactly 30 years after he joined the corporation, Kark was the man-in-the-middle of another great BBC controversy - the launching of the world television service to complement its radio counterpart. The idea was first mooted by Kark's predecessor, Douglas Muggeridge, who had a certain protective public profile as the nephew of the broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge.

Douglas leaked the idea to a Guardian journalist, and made a speech in the United States implicitly urging the Thatcher government to supply the funds for a scheme to keep British broadcasting ahead of other nations. He was rapped over the knuckles for his pains, and told by Mrs Thatcher that if ITV could run the beginnings of an external television service without government funding - as it was then doing - the BBC should not expect feather-bedding.

After Muggeridge's retirement, Kark kept the idea of world service television alive but, being a man of lesser public profile and more reticence, did not stick his neck out with any public announcements. It was his successor, the former news presenter John Tusa, who finally got the service launched.

Tall, reserved, and with a hesitant manner that concealed an incisive mind - and a generous awareness of the qualities of his staff - Kark had a chequered career before joining the BBC. He was born in London, the son of an army major who became a publisher. He went to the Upper Canada College in Toronto, to the Nautical College, Pangbourne, the Royal Naval College, and Magdalen College, Oxford. He joined the Royal Navy as a midshipman in 1944, and served for two years with the East Indies fleet, aboard HMS Nelson and HMS London.

At Oxford in 1948, Kark directed the first production of Jean-Paul Sartre's play The Flies, before going into the family magazine business, Norman Kark Publications, among whose products was the glossy literary magazine Courier, which flouted the austerity of wartime and postwar publications. Kark worked on one of the less ambitious magazines, Bandwagon, and became associate editor (1950-52) before editing the London Mystery Magazine for two years.

From 1954, he was a BBC reporter, and, 10 years later, became head of the South European service at Bush House. This fostered his already existing interest in countries of the region, especially Greece, about which he later wrote guidebooks.

In 1972, he switched to the East European and Russian service, and became editor of the world service the following year. He was adviser to Lord Soames, the last governor of Rhodesia, on election broadcasting in the colony, and, in 1980, chaired, for Robert Mugabe, the Harare government report on radio and television in Zimbabwe.

In 1974, he became controller of engineering services, but moved back into the broadcasting mainstream in 1981 with his appointment as deputy managing director of external broadcasting. After two years as deputy, he became managing director, retiring in 1986.

Kark was a man of broad interests, especially involving southern Europe and the Commonwealth. He was made a trustee of the Commonwealth Journalists' Association in 1993.

In retirement, he wrote Attic In Greece (1994); his spy thriller, set in the Middle East, The Forwarding Agent (1999), was praised by the crime writer PD James, an old friend. Most of it was written at his home in Nauplion, a port in the Aegean, where he and his wife, the novelist Nina Bawden, spent much of their time. In London, the couple lived in Islington, in a house backing on to the Grand Union canal. His hobbies included real tennis, travelling and studying mosaics. He was a member of the Oriental Club and the MCC, and was appointed CBE in 1987.

In 1949, Kark married Margaret Solomon, a relationship that produced two daughters but ended in divorce in 1954. That same year he married Nina Bawden; they had one daughter, and he was stepfather to her two sons, one of whom predeceased him.

Dennis Barker

Antonio de Figueiredo writes: I was in close professional contact with Austen Kark during the cold war years, when Bush House was like a mini-United Nations, bypassing the curtains of censorship and dictatorial rule that smothered many countries of the world. At that time, hundreds of foreign refugees, including myself, congregated daily in the canteen, hoping for the day British freedom and democracy, for all its shortcomings, would be extended to our homelands.

Kark had the right combination of cosmopolitan open-mindedness and dedication to British democratic toler ance to ensure that the much admired English-language world service was the model for more than 46 foreign language services that broadcast objective news and comment not available to hundreds of millions of people then deprived of freedom.

Once, when I praised the world service for the role it played on behalf of demo-cratic rights and values, he replied with what struck me as typically English laconic objectivity: "Well, let us try and keep it that way."

Austen Steven Kark, journalist and broadcasting executive, born October 20 1926; died May 10 2002.

This article appeared in the Guardian on Monday May 13 2002 . It was last updated at 00:19 on January 11 2008.