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Marmaduke Hussey 1943.
The son of an Olympic athlete and
colonial administrator, Marmaduke
James Hussey was born in Surrey on
29th August 1923. Spending much of
his early life in Uganda, he was shunted
between various relatives as his father was
posted to Nigeria. Educated at Rugby
School, he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1942 but left after a year having volunteered for the army. Commissioned from Sandhurst into the Grenadier Guards on 4th June 1943, he joined the 5th Battalion, part of the 24th Guards Brigade. On 22nd January 1944, the battalion formed part of the 1st Infantry Division during the joint Anglo-American landings at Anzio in Italy.
However, Hussey’s combat career was short and, leading his platoon on an attack, five days after the landing, he was wounded in the hand, legs and back by a burst of machine gun fire. Captured by the Germans, a surgeon amputated his right leg, which had become infected and, after several more operations, he was repatriated in an exchange of prisoners who were deemed to have a minimal chance of survival. The bullet lodged in his spine proved problematic, and he spent six months in an orthopaedic hospital in Roehampton before returning to Oxford and completing his degree in 1949.
Joining the Daily Mail as a management trainee, he had worked his way up to managing director by 1967. Later, he was chief executive of Times Newspapers, remaining as a full-time consultant after the company was bought by Rupert Murdoch. Hussey was also chairman of GWR, a small radio station – his only broadcasting experience, which made his appointment as head of the BBC board of governors a surprise. It is still unclear why Margaret Thatcher approved the appointment, although it is known she was angry about what she saw as the corporation’s anti-government reporting of events in Northern Ireland and saw the patrician Hussey (whose wife, Susan, was a lady-in-waiting to the Queen) as an ‘establishment’ man.
His first act was to fire the director-general, Alasdair Milne, and bring in the ruthless John Birt as deputy director-general. In 1991, having had his appointment extended by a further five years, Hussey elevated Birt to director-general. Having saved the BBC
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