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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.
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