Edward Ian Claud
Jacob, soldier and administrator: born 27 September 1899; Military Assistant
Secretary, Committee of Imperial Defence 1938; Military Assistant Secretary
to the War Cabinet 1939- 46; CBE 1942, KBE 1946, GBE 1960; CB 1944; Controller
of European Services, BBC 1946, Director of Overseas Services 1947-52, Director-General
1952- 60; Military Assistant Secretary to the War Cabinet 1952; Chairman,
Covent Garden Market Authority 1961-66, Matthews Holdings 1970-76; married
1924 Cecil Treherne (died 1991; two sons); died Woodbridge, Suffolk 24 April
1993.
IAN JACOB was a much underrated Director-General of the BBC. He was overshadowed,
metaphorically as well as physically, by those two titans Sir John Reith
and Sir Hugh Greene. Yet Jacob successfully piloted the BBC through waters
more turbulent than Reith or Greene ever encountered.
Jacob served as a professional soldier in India, the fourth in line in his
family to do so. His father, Field Marshal Sir Claud Jacob, was Commander-in-Chief
there. Ian had had the traditional training for a Sapper officer: Wellington,
the RMA Woolwich, service on the Northwest Frontier and then two years at
King's College, Cambridge, reading mechanical sciences. He was hard-working,
good at games, extremely intelligent and well-endowed with common sense.
His career had the conventional progression of a regular officer between
the wars until shortly after the Munich crisis when he was promoted from
the Canal Brigade in Egypt to the staff of the Committee of Imperial Defence.
In the Second World War he became Assistant Military Secretary to the War
Cabinet, working closely with the Minister of Defence, Winston Churchill.
The prime minister both liked and respected Jacob, and made a point of including
him on wartime visits to confer with Roosevelt or Stalin. By the end of
the war he had become a major-general and was about to receive a knighthood.
His experience at the very nerve-centre of the war gave him an invaluable
insight into world affairs. At the same time it put an end to his professional
career as a soldier. 'I knew I could look for no promotion,' he told me,
'because I had not commanded troops in the field in wartime.' General Jacob
had to look for a civilian job.
By VE Day the BBC's European Service had reached the zenith of its reputation.
From a shaky start it had grown into the largest and most trusted foreign-language
radio operation in the world. The temporary staff of continental broadcasters
and politicians, British journalists, dons, actors and linguists of all
kinds assembled at Bush House was a remarkable aggregation of talent.
Yet by the end of 1945 Bush House was disintegrating. European statesmen
and broadcasters returned to liberated homelands. Newspapers reclaimed their
journalists, and universities their dons. Some of us were sent abroad as
the first of the BBC's own corps of foreign correspondents established by
the new Director-General, William Haley. Others were recruited into the
United Nations radio department.
Few relished the idea of a peacetime career in foreign-language broadcasting.
Moreover the European Service needed a new Controller to replace Ivone Kirkpatrick,
who had been transferred to the Control Commission for Germany.
The BBC were looking for the right quality of leadership to arrest the seepage
from Bush House, and to restore its flagging morale. They also sought someone
with sufficient authority in Whitehall to stave off further cuts in the
grant-in-aid which funded broadcasting abroad. In Ian Jacob they found the
ideal man.
Jacob's grounding in military leadership, together with a recognition that
he needed to learn quickly how broadcasting worked, soon solved the first
problem. The new European Controller made himself visible and approachable,
regularly going to newsrooms and studios to watch the polyglot operation
in action. 'The first time I heard Existentialism explained,' a colleague
told me, 'was when I heard Jacob discussing it with Barbara Ward as they
walked along the corridor in Bush House.'
Jacob rejected the notion that items of news should be suppressed because
they were 'inconvenient from a short- term political standpoint' - a view
that various governments were later to press on occasion, and most flagrantly
over Suez. Nor, despite his Whitehall background, did he expect his senior
staff meekly to accept governmental direction. When they visited the Foreign
Office, he declared, 'they should seek to learn all they can, they should
listen to the views expressed, but they should not act on guidance directly
from Foreign Office officials without testing it by our long-term standards,
referring as may be to me.'
Jacob was so outstanding in the European Service that in 1947 he was put
in charge of all overseas broadcasting, with a seat on the Board of Management,
and a strong voice in the overall direction of the BBC. He continued to
give valued advice to the Ministry of Defence, particularly over the official
histories of the war. However the even tenor of his civilian career was
interrupted by Churchill's return to 10 Downing Street in October 1951.
At first the prime minister again claimed the Defence portfolio for himself
and persuaded the BBC to give Jacob a year's leave of absence to become
his Chief Staff Officer, before setting off for a visit to Washington and
Ottawa.
Churchill promptly found that running Defence in peacetime was much less
fun than in wartime, and when he returned from the New World it was with
the announcement that Earl Alexander of Tunis, the retiring Governor-General
of Canada, would take over the Ministry of Defence. Jacob's enthusiasm was
muted. He had a strong opinion, he said, 'that soldiers, however eminent,
make very bad ministers'. He found it a frustrating time.
In June 1952 Sir William Haley announced his intention of leaving the BBC
to become Editor of the Times, following the Conservative government's decision
to introduce commercial television. At a routine meeting the next day Churchill
asked Jacob who would succeed Haley. 'I don't know, but I suppose I have
some claims to the job,' Jacob replied. He had indeed. Although he had only
been concerned with external broadcasting, he was widely admired; and, unlike
some of the other contenders, he had no enemies within the BBC. The governors
appointed him Director-General in October 1952.
Jacob's regime at Broadcasting House covered a period of great change. Television
licences quadrupled and in 1957 television supplanted radio as the dominant
medium. The successful coverage of the Coronation had helped. So had the
establishment of good programmes, many still running today on either BBC
or ITV.
Though the BBC's early relations with independent television were warily
distant, Jacob enlisted the support of the ITA in a fight to remove the
iniquitous 'Fourteen Day Rule'. This used to inhibit programmes from discussing
any issue due to be debated in Parliament during the next fortnight. The
Director-General argued the case with the government. Simultaneously he
encouraged those of us in charge of current affairs programmes to make sure
that audiences were informed each time the onerous rule had prevented a
topical broadcast. The battle was finally won - by a combination of reason
and ridicule - in July 1957.
Before then the BBC had survived the worst threat to its independence: the
attempt by the Eden government during the Suez crisis to prevent the Overseas
Service from reporting newspaper editorials critical of the bombardment
of Egypt. Those who expected a loyal lieutenant-general automatically to
toe the government line were surprised by Jacob's forthright reaction: 'If
the BBC is found for the first time to be suppressing significant items
of news its reputation would rapidly vanish, and the harm to the national
interest done in that event would enormously outweigh any damage caused
by displaying to the world the workings of a free democracy,' he declared.
In the middle of the Suez crisis Jacob had to leave for a Commonwealth broadcasting
conference in Australia, where he would initiate the British Commonwealth
International Newsfilm Agency, later known as Visnews, and now Reuters Television,
to give the world's new television services access to foreign news other
than items syndicated from the United States. Earlier he had also played
a leading role in founding the European Broadcasting Union, and served as
its first president until his retirement.
Shortly before he flew to Australia the Director-General was summoned to
the Foreign Office and told that as a punitive gesture the Bush House grant-in-aid
would be cut by one million pounds. Jacob and his chairman, Sir Alexander
Cadogan, called on RA Butler early the next day, and managed to get the
threatened cut reduced by half. At the time Eden was also considering other
ways of trying to bring the BBC to heel. However, during Jacob's absence
his stance was stoutly maintained by his deputies and after Eden's resignation
that particular threat to BBC editorial independence was lifted.
Jacob always took a keen interest in the content of television current affairs
programmes. Panorama once sent Woodrow Wyatt to Cyprus to report the insurrection
there. The Governor, greatly worried on hearing that Wyatt had interviewed
Archbishop Makarios, then one of the insurgent leaders, urgently alerted
Whitehall, and Churchill himself asked Jacob to suppress the interview.
The Director-General undertook to review it personally and together we watched
the film at Lime Grove. Before delivering a soothing reply to one of Wyatt's
sharper questions Makarios gave a shifty look sideways. Afterwards Jacob
said to me: 'Television gives you a further dimension of truth. If I'd heard
that reply on radio or read it in the paper I'd have taken it at its face
value. But having seen that shifty look I knew you couldn't trust what he'd
said. I'll tell the PM we will transmit the interview.' Churchill sadly
said to Jacob that he would never have expected it of him.
On 1 April 1957, when Panorama perpetrated its spaghetti harvest hoax -
the BBC's first April Fool joke - I deemed it wise to warn the DG's office
beforehand. Unfortunately someone forgot to pass the message on. The next
time I saw Sir Ian he said, 'I always used to think that monkey nuts grew
on bushes until I went to serve in the Canal Zone and saw them growing on
the ground. The moment I saw the spaghetti item on Panorama, I said to my
wife, 'I'm sure spaghetti doesn't grow on a bush.' We had to look up three
books before we confirmed it.'
I doubt whether either of the Jacobs had ever had to cook spaghetti themselves.
Cecil, a lady of great charm, had married Ian in 1924. She was the daughter
of another distinguished officer, Surgeon Major-General Sir Francis Treherne.
After his death, Treherne's house at Woodbridge, in Suffolk, became the
Jacob family home. It was a very happy marriage, which lasted 66 years.
Ian Jacob retired from the BBC at the end of 1960, having carefully groomed
Hugh Carleton Greene to be his successor. He had promoted Greene to the
Board of Management as Director of News and Current Affairs in preference
to Tahu Hole, the New Zealand Editor whose malign administration of the
BBC news division was one of the reasons for the early lead of Independent
Television News. In later life Jacob was to admit that one of his mistakes
at the BBC was not appreciating Hole's deficiencies earlier.
His retirement was by no means the end of Jacob's long public service. In
1963 he was the principal author of the seminal Ismay-Jacob report on the
central organisation of defence. This report, whose details are still covered
by the 30-year rule, was the blueprint which led to substantial unification
changes in the defence establishment, commissioned by Macmillan and Thorneycroft,
and implemented by Mountbatten. Jacob himself regarded his role in the defence
reorganisation as the most important single act in his career. History may
prefer to regard him as the Director-General who brought the BBC into the
television age.
From left to right: Eliza Wyatt, Rev Wyatt, Claud Jacob,
Ian Jacob, Cecil (Treherne) Jacob, Francis Treherne, Nona (Turner) Treherne,
- w of Francis, Brian Robertson (best man) later General Lord Robertson,
Pauline (Wyatt) Jacob - w of Claud
Ian Jacob' s wedding to Cecile Treherne
.jpg)
