This is taken from the Daily Telegraph:

Lord Hussey
Last Updated: 1:18am GMT 28/12/2006

Lord Hussey, who died yesterday aged 83, was the longest serving chairman in the BBC's history; appointed in 1986 by Margaret Thatcher, "Duke" Hussey led the corporation for almost a decade during some of its most turbulent years.
     
Hussey succeeded in restoring corporate governance and financial control at the BBC and laid the basis for a renewal of its charter by the Conservative government in 1996. But his appointment led to a series of damaging internal divisions which caused a haemorrhaging of talent from the corporation, and provoked criticism that he had sacrificed the BBC's institutional soul to cost-effectiveness.

When Hussey arrived at the BBC, its future looked grim. Not only was it badly managed, it had landed itself in considerable disfavour in Downing Street with perceived Left-wing bias in its news and current affairs programmes. Shortly before Hussey's arrival it had come under attack from Norman Tebbit over its reporting of the American bombing of Libya.

Hussey arrived at the BBC with a reputation for toughness but with a somewhat chequered track record as a manager; as managing director and chief executive of Times Newpapers he had restored the newspapers' finances during the early 1970s, but had then gone on to lead the management in a prolonged — and ultimately ruinous — battle with the printing unions that led to an 11-month shutdown in 1978-79.

Hussey's first act was to sack the director-general Alasdair Milne, who was widely blamed for the BBC's recent failures, replacing him with his deputy, Michael Checkland. Within a fortnight he had acted to prove he was no government stooge by brusquely rejecting Tebbit's call for an independent inquiry into the BBC's coverage of the raids on Libya.

At first all appeared to be going smoothly. Though Hussey continued to defend the BBC's independence, relations with the government improved and with them the BBC's financial situation.

But Hussey became increasingly frustrated at what he saw as Checkland's failure to wield the axe; by the 1990s the BBC was still overstaffed, yet Hussey knew it was under pressure to reform.

In 1991 Hussey announced that Checkland would be replaced in 1993 by John Birt, then director of news and current affairs. It was a messy compromise which created a 21-month vacuum and resulted in Checkland's premature resignation, but not before he had launched a blistering attack on Hussey.

Birt proved more effective at tackling Hussey's main targets: weak management, overmanning and better financial control and — with the help of the management consultants McKinsey — undertook a radical restructuring of the corporation, creating an internal market. But the Hussey-Birt regime and the new management consultant ethos was deeply resented and led to a flood of demoralised staff leaving.

Brickbats came from all sides. In 1992 Michael Grade, chief executive of Channel 4 and a former director of programmes at the BBC, accused the governors of appeasement, "pseudo-Leninist management" and obsessive secrecy. The next year the foreign correspondent Mark Tully launched a vitriolic attack on the "culture of fear" in the BBC, an organisation which "George Orwell would recognise". Dissent spread to the board itself in 1993 when it emerged that in 1987 Hussey and his deputy chairman, Lord Barnett, had sanctioned an arrangement whereby Birt was paid through his own company in order to minimise tax liabilities, without telling other board members.

Eventually, even Hussey's relations with Birt became strained. In 1995, when Panorama conducted its interview with the Princess of Wales without informing Buckingham Palace, Birt and the programme's producers also failed to inform Hussey, possibly fearing that he would point out the impropriety; his wife, Lady Susan Hussey, was a lady-in-waiting to the Queen.

On his retirement in 1996 Hussey rebuked the BBC over the interview and in 1998 criticised Birt in the House of Lords for creating overbloated policy units.

Marmaduke James Hussey was born on August 29 1923. Young Marmaduke went to Rugby, where he was a natural sportsman — an outstanding wing forward and destructive slow left-arm bowler — who through some genetic freak was also good at exams. After going up on a scholarship to Trinity College, Oxford, to read History, he remained there long enough to win a cricket Blue, but his studies were interrupted by the war and he was commissioned as an officer in the Grenadier Guards.

In 1943, after five days' active service, he landed on the Anzio beachhead where, within hours, he was badly injured when hit at point-blank range by machine-gun fire. After having one leg amputated on the edge of the battlefield by a German surgeon of the Hermann Goering Parachute Regiment, he was taken to hospital by Italian nuns, then sent to Germany as a prisoner of war.

He remained seriously ill, with bullets in his arm, in his remaining leg and in his spine and, after seven months in a military hospital in Frankfurt, he was repatriated because the Germans thought he was going to die. On his departure, the hospital commandant turned out the guard to salute him for his courageous bearing.

For the next few years, Hussey was in and out of hospital, sometimes critically ill. A bullet lodged in his spine caused osteomyelitis and he was told that if the bullet was not removed he would probably die, but if it was he would have a 50-50 chance of surviving. He was lucky, but for the rest of his life was often in considerable pain: "He thinks he's bloody lucky to be alive," a colleague said later; "for that reason he takes a pretty devil-may-care view of everyday obstacles."

Hussey often used his tin leg to attract sympathy in the office. When scenting unpleasantness, he would unstrap it and lean it conspicuously against the wall. Seeing it, his assailant would usually visibly falter: "That fixed the bastard," Hussey would say.

Eventually, he returned to Oxford, taking a First in History. In 1949 he joined Associated Newspapers, where his talents soon brought him to the attention of Lord Rothermere, who gave him a directorship in 1964 and in 1967 made him managing director of Harmsworth publications.

In 1971 he was headhunted to be managing director and chief executive at The Times, then suffering serious financial problems. One of Hussey's great achievements in his early years was to recognise that the newspaper's drive towards increased circulation was financially disastrous. He concentrated on a smaller high-quality readership to maximise advertising revenues. This decision brought The Times from accumulated losses of more than £10m to the prospect of reasonably healthy profit.

But from the mid-1970s, things began to go wrong. Trouble started under the Labour government's voluntary wage controls of 1977-78. The Thomson organisation decided to obey the government's voluntary rulings, but its attempts to enforce them on the printing unions at The Times resulted in a series of wildcat strikes. Thomson opted for confrontation and instructed Hussey to act.

In 1978, after prolonged disruption, Hussey informed print union leaders that unless agreement was reached on the introduction of new technology, publication would be suspended. The suspension lasted for 11 months of siege warfare and ended — effectively — in victory for the unions. The shutdown cost the Thomson Organisation £40 million and following the resumption of publication, in 1983, Thomson sold the titles to Rupert Murdoch. Hussey attracted much of the blame for the debacle.

In June 1980 Hussey was moved sideways to be a director of Times Holdings. So it came as a surprise, when, following Rupert Murdoch's purchase in 1983, Hussey was reappointed to the board, and an even greater surprise when he was appointed to chair the BBC. He was created a life peer in 1996.

He married, in 1959, Lady Susan Waldegrave, daughter of the 12th Earl Waldegrave, by whom he had a son and a daughter.

This is taken from The Guardian:

Marmaduke Hussey
Management roles at Associated and Times newspapers prepared Duke Hussey for a controversial career as BBC chairman
by Dan van der Vat
Wednesday December 27, 2006

Lord Hussey, who has died aged 83, was a shining example of the widespread belief among the "great and good" of the British establishment that corporate management is a profession which can be practised without technical knowledge.

Marmaduke James Hussey, as he was born, was generally known as "Duke" but was called "Dukey" by family and friends at his own request, a cloying soubriquet for a man of six feet five inches and 17 stone.

The massive physique was accompanied by a booming and not infrequently bullying bonhomie, underneath which lay the permanent pain of terrible war wounds.

All he ever did professionally was manage; many would say mismanage. He started his working life as a management trainee without a shred of editorial experience at Associated Newspapers. Eventually, as managing director of its Harmsworth Publications subsidiary, he almost destroyed the Daily Mail.

Then he moved on to Times Newspapers, masterminding the catastrophic 1978-79 lockout which cost £40m and opened the way to the takeover by Rupert Murdoch - who, with unlikely gratitude, kept him on the board. As a staff journalist on the Mail and later the Sunday Times and then the Times, I got a worm's eye view of the Hussey management style twice over.

After that, Duke Hussey climbed his highest mountain as chairman of the BBC, wrecking its confidence and morale and appointing the egregious John Birt as director general. The playwright Dennis Potter described them as "a pair of croak-voiced Daleks".

Duke's father, Eric Hussey, an Olympic hurdler, was in the colonial service. And thanks to the overseas postings, the athletic young Hussey was educated at Rugby at the taxpayer's expense, winning a scholarship to Trinity College, Oxford, where he studied for a year and won a cricket blue.

The next gilded milestone was the Grenadier Guards, the army's senior and socially supreme non-cavalry regiment. Status was always of maximum importance to the middle class Hussey, who turned himself into a caricature of a Wodehousian aristocrat.

But his active service with the Grenadiers was tragically short. As a freshly appointed platoon commander, Hussey in February 1944 went ashore at Anzio, the bungled allied landing in Italy. After just five days he was cut down by German machine gun bullets, at least one of which lodged immovably in his spine. His leg was amputated in captivity and the Germans later repatriated him on mercy grounds.

He spent the next five years and more in hospitals, his leg requiring daily dressing throughout. If there is one virtue that stood out in Hussey's postwar life it was his courage in coping with his handicap and the unrelenting pain.

He managed to complete his Oxford degree and in 1949 joined Associated, soon making himself indispensable to the second Lord Rothermere as a personal assistant.

Ten years later he married the striking, 20-year-old Susan Katherine Waldegrave. She was 16 years younger and impeccably connected, the fifth daughter of the 12th Earl Waldegrave (and elder sister of William, the future Tory cabinet minister).

In 1960 she became a lady in waiting to the Queen, who occasionally graced the Husseys' dinner table. His wife was thus a source of immense, sometimes indiscreet, pride - and of contacts in the highest reaches of the establishment. They had a son and a daughter.

Hussey became a director at Associated in 1964, and managing director of Harmsworth three years later.

His time on the board was marked by the costly failure to dent the mid-market supremacy of the Daily Express. Having failed to beat it he tried to join it, but merger efforts collapsed, plunging the Mail group into even greater losses.

When he left, the company shut down the ailing Daily Sketch and merged the London evening papers, founding Associated's revival, and the eventual trouncing of the Express group.

Nevertheless, the Duke was headhunted in 1971 by the Thomson Organisation, then owner of the Times and Sunday Times. He became managing director of Times Newspapers Ltd (TNL).

As deputy chairman of the Newspaper Proprietors' Association he worked with Bill Keys, head of the print union Sogat, on a "Plan for Action" aimed at revamping industrial relations in Fleet Street and paving the way for new technology.

In house, Hussey's apparent determination to tame the rampant print union chapels, egged on by decades of beggar-my-neighbour deals with the ineptly competing managements at the Express and the Mail, among others, was set down in a letter to all staff. It proclaimed that "no newspaper can stand such losses".

But it did, somehow, for several more years, amid steadily worsening disputes, guerrilla strikes and management inertia. Nothing came of the letter of the "Plan for Action".

The fate of the Times as Thomson's flagship, and ultimately of the group's waning interest in Britain and concomitant apotheosis of Murdoch, was sealed when Hussey's board decided to move the daily from Blackfriars to the Sunday Times building in London's Gray's Inn Road in 1974.

It was an accountancy exercise in which the bean-counters overlooked the fact that the best printers in Fleet Street (and about the lowest-paid) were now to be exposed to the indifferent rapacity of the casuals who came from elsewhere to print the Sunday paper (when it suited them).

The disputes intensified. The second Lord Thomson lost patience after six years and demanded drastic action. Hussey announced that the two titles would shut down on November 30, 1978, unless agreement was reached by then on new technology, manning levels, disputes procedures and wages. Negotiations dragged on.

The genial giant became a TV personality, exuding misplaced good cheer as the talks foundered on the inability of the leaders to control their chapels.

Only on October 21 1979, 50 weeks after the lockout began, there was an agreement on resumption of publication - without progress on any of the management's main aims.

Legends emerged about the Hussey approach to negotiation. On one occasion he sought to disarm his interlocutors by taking his leg off and standing it, trouserless but with sock and shoe, in full view against a wall.

On another, he broke off discussion to take a telephone call. He returned to announce: "Gentlemen, my wife has just informed me that HRH Princess Anne has been safely delivered of a son. You are among the first to know." The presses immovably failed to record the happy event.

Sir Denis Hamilton, then editor-in-chief of TNL, compared Hussey to Haig in the first world war - a one-tactic general obsessed with frontal assault.

More tellingly, Louis Heren, then deputy editor of The Times, described Hussey as a "good company commander" unfit to be a general: "He had no battle plan."

This was the nub of the disaster at TNL. The new technology issue was entrusted to Harvey Thompson, a manager whose plan was still inside his head when he died suddenly (he had received anonymous death threats by telex and was under huge stress) before the ultimatum expired. So when Hussey went ahead anyway he had no strategy for achieving his main objective.

Less than 18 months after the return, Thomson sold out to Rupert Murdoch for £12m (30% of the closure bill).

Hussey stayed on the board, kept there by Murdoch to oversee the royally favoured Times bicentenary binge at Hampton Court in 1982 and duly leaving in 1983.

Fortunately for him he had several other directorships to keep him warm, as well as much voluntary work for the Royal Marsden Hospital and the limbless to keep him busy.

Hussey's surprise can be imagined when in September 1986 he received a call from the then home secretary, Douglas Hurd, offering him the chairmanship of the BBC governors.

The corporation was in a bad way, financially stretched, massively overmanaged, mired in a messy libel case, under constant attack from right wing politicians such as Norman Tebbit and Jeffrey Archer and apparently a constant goad to Margaret Thatcher, infuriated daily by the alleged "pinkoes" running the Today programme.

An anonymous briefer at Conservative Central Office said at the time that Hussey's job was "to make it bloody clear" that change was urgently required; he was "to get in there and sort it out". Hurd denied issuing a brief, telling Hussey he would find out what he had to do when he got to the BBC.

The first trick was to find the place. He said at the time: "I know so little about the organisation that my wife and I had to go through the telephone book to find out the address where I will be working."

Soon after he found it, Hussey said: "The BBC is in danger of becoming a fossilised relic."

A technician who wired his new suite was bemused to be asked why the TV needed an aerial or his office a socket.

Sir Michael Checkland, whom he made director general after he sacked Alasdair Milne, remarked in exasperation when he fell from grace in his turn, that he expected a BBC chairman to know that FM "means frequency modulation, not fuzzy monsters".

He had some experience of broadcasting management, having merged two West Country commercial radio stations and turning loss into profit by "downsizing" staff. Despite his aggressive record Hussey's instinct was to compromise and do deals personally over a lavish meal.

This may explain why he made so many mistakes when adopting a hawkish mode on the bidding of his masters. He shocked BBC management by sacking Milne a few months into his first five-year term; but protested loudly when the special branch raided BBC Glasgow and seized material for a programme on a government spy satellite.

He chose Sir Michael Checkland, the first accountant to run the BBC, as director general, with John Birt as his deputy. Checkland's gradualist approach to winnowing the massive BBC bureaucracy, whose scope is most readily revealed by a glance at the thickly impenetrable, internal telephone book, was not good enough for Hussey and his hawkish deputy, Lord Barnett.

Birt - who had come from LWT and whose main claims to fame had been the popular if undemanding London's Burning and Blind Date - impressed them with his reorganisation of news and current affairs.

Hussey gave Checkland an extra, sixth year while simultaneously appointing Birt as director general designate, a recipe for chaos.

He saw this as a decent compromise and could not understand why Checkland took a rather different view.

Hussey saw the BBC through to the renewal of its charter in 1996 and a form of financial stability whereby the licence fee kept pace with general inflation (but not with the higher rate of technological inflation).

Out-of-favour broadcasting liberals saw Hussey as Frankenstein and Birt as his monster. They were devastated by the chairman's lack of interest or skill in intellectual argument and his readiness to make big decisions on a basis of ignorance or prejudice.

He never lost his belief, derived from his own courage in personal adversity, that sheer willpower could overcome all obstacles and resistance, despite a lifetime's evidence to the contrary.

Hussey turned the chairmanship into a full-time job, demanding full secretarial services and a car. Barnett also moved into Broadcasting House. After five years Hussey was given an unprecedented second term. He was a consummate survivor.

Inclined to quote Machiavelli, Hussey was undoubtedly cleverer than he looked but almost certainly not as clever as he thought. Secretive, sly and smug as well as patronising, charming and physically overwhelming, Duke Hussey, quintessence of the British patrician amateur, managed to cut a unique swathe through the British media, which have never been the same since.

This is taken from The Guardian:

Unfair scorn for Duke Hussey
Monday January 1, 2007

If Duke Hussey had never done anything other than be still standing on two feet into his 80s despite the appalling wounds he suffered during the second world war, he would have deserved better than Dan van der Vat's sneering obituary (December 28). As it is, that outpouring of snobbish bile dishonoured the memory of a truly decent and courageous man who held the chairmanship of the BBC through 10 difficult but successful years. It ignored his wicked sense of humour, his infinite concern for the personal wellbeing of all manner of people he came into contact with and his passionate love of and defence of public service broadcasting.

By circumstance Duke Hussey could easily have been the caricature Van der Vat portrays - stupid, snobbish, in thrall to powerful governments. In fact, he was none of these. Those of us who worked closely with him during his BBC days have cause to mourn a brave man and a faithful friend. Everyone who still enjoys a BBC that is strong, independent and free of party political trammels owes him better than Van der Vat's mean-spirited piece.
Liz Forgan
London

This is taken from The Guardian:

Letter: Lord Hussey of North Bradley

Sir Robert Phillis writes: In his obituary of Lord Hussey of North Bradley (December 28), Dan van der Vat conceded that his perspective should be seen as "a worm's-eye view of the Hussey style, twice over". I was perhaps fortunate to gain a more balanced appreciation of this remarkable man.

Duke Hussey's attempt to revamp industrial relations in Fleet Street was a much needed and long overdue reform. The dispute at Times Newspapers was a long and costly affair, but it was the episode that triggered the ongoing process of change in the publishing of national newspapers, without which many current publications would not have survived.

Change was also necessary when Hussey was appointed chairman of the BBC in 1986. He worked successfully with both Michael Checkland and John Birt to bring financial and managerial discipline to the organisation; and, more importantly, robustly to resist the attempts of the Conservative government to interfere in matters of editorial independence. As a result, the possibility of the break-up and privatisation of at least part of the BBC was averted. It is to the considerable credit of Hussey and the two director generals with whom he worked most closely that the licence-fee settlement and review of the charter, together with Birt's vision of the digital future, provided the secure base for the current director general, Mark Thompson, and his colleagues. Hussey's legacy to the BBC, and thus to the nation, is considerable and should never be underestimated.