The Times OBITUARY - Waldo Maguire ( ex-BP )

The Times
November 30, 2005

OBITUARY - Waldo Maguire, May 31, 1920 - November 23, 2005
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Broadcaster who became the first Ulsterman to hold the post of BBC 
Controller, Northern Ireland

FROM Bletchley Park to Belfast via Alexandra Palace and New Zealand, Waldo 
Maguire's was a remarkable career in broadcast journalism.

Maguire played his part in the Second World War, but he was never in 
greater danger than when he was working in the land of his birth as BBC 
Controller, Northern Ireland. His many years of broadcast journalism 
equipped him with the knowledge and experience to provide objective 
coverage during some of the darker periods of sectarian mayhem.

This very quality ensured that he was reviled and threatened by extremists 
on both sides and criticised by politicians of all parties. On the surface 
he took these attacks philosophically, but he was privately distraught at 
his beloved country's descent into the maelstrom. The tensions of this 
most exposed of BBC editorial positions led eventually to the stroke which 
ended his career with the corporation.

Benjamin Waldo Maguire was born in 1920. His father, also Benjamin, was an 
official in the Post Office. The young Maguire showed early signs of being 
at ease with both words and numbers. He went from his local school, 
Portadown College, to Trinity College, Dublin, where he took a first-class 
degree in philosophy, with mathematics as a sideline. He played chess, 
caught fish and talked (he was later to give angling and conversation as 
his two main recreations). He also eased his financial constraints with 
freelance journalism.

Coming from a bombed and blacked-out Northern Ireland, he found it bizarre 
to be living in a city with all the lights on, where German 
representatives were freely circulating.

As soon as he had graduated in 1942 he joined up, and was instantly 
earmarked for secret work at Bletchley Park. His particular mental 
disciplines, allied to his, by now, high-standard chess, made him a 
natural for code breaking â- he worked for a time alongside Harry 
Golombek. It was at Bletchley that he met and married Lilian Martin, who 
was recruited because of her skill with crosswords, but it was not for 
decades that they could reveal what had been happening there during those 
war years.

Demobilised in 1945, Maguire was invited to join the BBC Latin American 
Service: languages came easily to him. He transferred to Radio News the 
next year, worked his way up the ranks, moved to Alexandra Palace, the 
home of television news, in 1955, and was made editor, TV news, in 1962. 
This was a period of great technical and managerial bustle, with the 
balance of power in the corporation steadily shifting as the newer medium 
attracted the mass audience. Among other big events for which he was 
responsible was the news coverage of President Kennedy’s assassination 
in 1963. 

Maguire was a hands-on editor, a workaholic, witty, gregarious, 
attractively eccentric: his ancient Opel car was rumoured to have been 
rescued from a tip, and he rejoiced in the dismay of unwary passengers 
when they discovered that there were no floorboards in the rear 
compartment..../snip/


...He retired fully in 1976, to the South of England, where he continued 
to indulge in his fishing, rejoiced in his family, and grew prize 
fuchsias. His wife died in 1998, and the following year he suffered a 
second stroke, which left him sadly impaired. But he remained essentially 
the same man: kind, friendly, funny.

His four sons survive him.

Waldo Maguire, OBE, BBC Controller, Northern Ireland, 1966-72, was born on 
May 31, 1920. He died on November 23, 2005, aged 85.


see : http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-1896842,00.html
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