Our school was dominated by the headmaster, Ralph Scurfield. When I look back I think he was a really good headmaster, a great character, and a real leader, but we all lived in fear of him. After I left school I had no contact with him for nearly twenty years until I first hit the headlines at TV-am. One day Jane Tatnall, my secretary at the time, told me there was a Mr Scurfield on the phone. I picked it up and he said ‘Is that you, Dyke?’ My answer was entirely predictable. I said ‘Yes, sir’, as if nothing had changed over the intervening years. I was even tempted to stand up when I said it. Mr Scurfield had retired by then but was phoning on behalf of the new head teacher to ask me to give the prizes at speech day.
I went, and so did Mr Scurfield, who confided in me that day that he wished he had never used the cane while a headmaster. As I had been beaten by him on a couple of occasions, his conversion to non-violence didn’t impress me. I wasn’t ready for truth and reconciliation yet. Mr Scurfield is still alive and living in Sheffield and we write to each other once or twice a year.
Soon after I became Director-General I invited a few of my old teachers to dinner at the BBC, along with my brother Howard. I suppose I invited them so I could say to them ‘OK, I didn’t do so badly after all, did I?’ All the teachers were retired and seemed to enjoy their evening, especially the red wine. After a few bottles one of them said to me that on the way there they had discussed my progress in life. ‘We would like to say we spotted your potential,’ he said, ‘but in truth we all agreed you were one of the least likely pupils to succeed.’ It’s amazing how teachers can still wound, even after nearly forty years.
In Hillingdon we lived in a road called Cedars Drive, where I really enjoyed my teenage years. The street was full of boys (there were very few girls, except for my friend Val Clifton), and we did all the things boys did. Some of us became paper boys at the local newsagent’s, which was run by a retired army officer, John Kane, known to us as Major John. We all liked working there, but he drove us all mad. He smoked like a chimney and would regularly leave his cigarette on the pile of newspapers he was marking up, which would then catch fire. But what really annoyed us about Major John was his habit of sleeping in so that when we turned up to collect our papers for delivery they were never ready for us. My first experience of being an ‘activist’ came at the age of fourteen or fifteen when I organized industrial action amongst the paper boys. We weren’t bold enough to strike, but we decided that it was time we frightened Major John, so none of us turned up for our rounds until an hour after the normal time. I think he was a bit shocked but he quickly found out I was the ringleader and took me to task. He told me that if I didn’t want to work on his terms and conditions I should leave. Forty years later I can understand what he was getting at, but at the time I thought he was being extremely unreasonable. My greatest success as a paper boy came when my friend Mick Higgins and I decided to go round to all our customers at Christmas, knock on their door, and wish them the compliments of the season. I think we got twice as many Christmas tips as anyone else.
Until girls came along, sport dominated the lives of all the boys on our estate and over the years we set up two football teams. The first, called Cedarwood Rangers, played in Newcastle United’s black and white shirts; then, when we were older, we started Vine Athletic, who played in blue. The team was named after the local pub, the Vine, where we did most of our training. It was one of those pubs where you could be a regular at sixteen.
I’ve often wanted to make a documentary about kids from a typical street and tell the story of what happened to them in later life. In our street, the boys went on to do a whole range of things. Roger Weller became a teacher while his brother Keith was a senior civil servant in the Department of Education and ended up with an OBE. Mick Higgins went to work as a sales rep in the food industry, and Peter Hinley became a hairdresser but sadly died young. John Hayes did well in finance, while Martin Webb worked for British Airways before joining his dad’s business. Peter Bowden became an estate agent and Robin Cameron went into interior design. My brother Howard is currently a professor at the top university in South Korea while my brother Ian, after a life in the insurance industry, was the first to retire and was very proud of it.
I suppose I became the most famous by becoming Director-General of the BBC, but Christopher Barrett-Jolly came a close second. He came from the poshest family on our estate – at least we all thought they were posh because they had a double-barrelled name – and went off to be an airline pilot. At one time he ran a company flying live animals in and out of Birmingham Airport, which brought him a lot of flak from the animal rights lobby. Later, Chris hit bad times and received a good deal of publicity when he was sentenced to twenty years in jail for trying to smuggle £22 million worth of cocaine into the country. He had been caught flying a plane full of the drugs into Southend Airport. When he realized the police were waiting for him at the airport, he and his colleagues decided to try throwing the drugs out of the back of the plane, littering the runway with cocaine.
My best friend, then and now, is Richard Webb, who also lived on our estate. He had TB as a kid and as a result has a shortened left leg, which means he has had to wear a raised boot for most of his life – although you’d never have known it as you watched him playing football, cricket, or, in later life, in business. When people accuse me of being a competitive human being I always tell them they ought to meet my friend Richard. This was a man who impounded an easyJet plane, when it was full of passengers and just about to leave Stansted Airport for Nice, because he was owed £520 by the company. They refused to pay, so he went to the local County Court, representing himself, and got a court order. EasyJet still refused to pay so he got the bailiffs out and seized the plane. When an anxious easyJet executive rang and agreed to pay up, Richard made him send the money in cash by bike before he would release the plane.
Richard left school at sixteen and trained to become a chartered accountant. He’s been my financial adviser for most of my life and in recent years has been involved in virtually all the business ventures I’ve undertaken. The only reason I’ve got lots of money today is because Richard has looked after it for me. I’ve only ever paid him for his advice once. When we all made a lot of money out of London Weekend Television in the early Nineties I gave him a pile of my shares, explaining that it was his payment for life: twenty years in arrears and twenty years in advance. I’m a bit worried that the second twenty years ends in 2012.
I trust Richard more than anyone else I’ve ever met in my life. We’ve always argued and disagreed about all sorts of things, but we go back so far that it would never occur to either of us not to act in the other’s best interests. Richard has access to every bank account I possess and he could completely clean me out if he wanted to, but of course it would never happen. That’s what friendship is. When I was running the BBC and was criticized for retaining certain private business interests – on the grounds that I couldn’t do more than one job at once – I tried to explain that they took up very little of my time because my friend Richard looked after my business interests for me. Of course for the journalists that spoiled a good story, so they ignored it.
I had a very happy childhood; as the third son in the family I had few of the battles with my parents that my elder brothers had had. In those days the vast majority of school leavers didn’t go on to higher education; sadly, many of the brightest kids at my school left at sixteen because their families either couldn’t afford, or didn’t have the aspiration, for them to stay on. Although I had not done well at school my results picked up a bit in the last year or two and I passed six GCE O-levels. It was just about enough for me to stay on for the sixth form, but going on to university or college was never a realistic prospect.
I had a great time in my last two years at school. I played rugby for the First XV, was the school 440 yards running champion, was in all the school plays, and even sang in the choir. That’s a slight exaggeration. I used to stand next to my good friend Dave Hornby, who had a great bass voice. He sang and I mimed. In fact we were together in the choir at the Royal Albert Hall on the night President Kennedy was assassinated. When people ask me where I was when JFK died, I always tell them I was miming at the Albert Hall.
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