Sir Hugh Carleton Greene KCMG, OBE (15 November 1910 – 19 February 1987) was a British journalist and television executive. He was the Director-General of the BBC from 1960―1969, and is generally credited with modernising an organisation that had fallen behind in the wake of the launch of ITV in 1955.
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Hugh was born in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire,[1] one of the four sons and two daughters of Charles Henry Greene, the then Headmaster of Berkhamsted School. He was the brother of the famous writer Graham Greene and Raymond Greene, a distinguished physician and Everest mountaineer. (The eldest brother, Herbert Greene, was a relatively little-known poet recruited in 1933 as a Japanese spy and now perhaps best remembered for leading a march at BBC Broadcasting House in protest against one of his brother's actions as Director-General.)
After education at Berkhamsted School and Merton College, Oxford, Greene came to prominence as a journalist in 1934 when he became the chief correspondent in Nazi Berlin for the Daily Telegraph newspaper. He and several other British journalists were expelled from Berlin as an act of reprisal for the removal of a Nazi propagandist in England. Greene, however, went on to report from Warsaw on the opening events of the Second World War and continued to follow its progress through the early stages. He served briefly with the Royal Air Force in 1940 as an interrogator, but was encouraged by the military authorities to join the BBC later that year.
Greene entered the BBC as head of the German Service at the age of 29. He made significant improvements to their transmissions following a risky flight in a De Havilland Mosquito aircraft over occupied Norway to study the effects of Nazi radio jamming. He also presented news and discussion programmes and became fairly well known in Europe for this role. From 1941, Greene also helped to smooth the relationship between the BBC and the Political Warfare Executive (PWE) whose goals were somewhat at odds (the BBC strove for accurate, unbiased journalism whereas the PWE was largely concerned with propaganda).
Following the war, Greene helped with the rebuilding of German broadcasting infrastructure in the British Occupied Zone. As the Cold War got underway, he was given the task of leading the BBC's East European service and later produced propaganda for the British Army in Malaya during the Communist uprising of 1947 (see History of Malaysia).
Greene returned to the BBC in the 1950s where his reputation and ability caught the attention of Director-General Sir Ian Jacob. (It was probably during this period that he began using his middle name, Carleton, presumably to distinguish him from the popular ITV presenter Hughie Green.) He started as Director of Administration but in 1958 he swapped jobs with the unpopular Tahu Hole to become Director of News and Current Affairs. He succeeded Jacob as Director-General two years later in 1960. Mere days after his promotion, Greene made arrangements for Hole to receive a golden handshake to persuade him into early retirement. Indeed, according to one of his biographers, Greene thought one of his greatest contributions to broadcasting was the restoration of order to Hole's austere news department, which had come to be known as the Kremlin of the BBC. It later materialised that Hole had leaked a secret BBC document to the competing Independent Television Authority (ITA) in which concerns were voiced about the financial interests of newspapers in ITV companies. Greene learned of the leak from a displeased Ivone Kirkpatrick, then chairman of the ITA. (Kirkpatrick had previously been a member of the Political War Executive, Head of the BBC's wartime European Services and High Commissioner of the British Occupied Zone in Germany and had worked with Greene many times before.) The leak would have led to Hole's immediate dismissal but actually it was only detected shortly after his retirement.
Greene kept the BBC in pace with the major social changes in Britain in the 1960s, and through such series as Steptoe and Son, Z-Cars and That Was The Week That Was, the BBC moved away from the ethos of Reithian middle-class values and deference to traditional authority and power. Controversial, socially concerned dramas such as Up the Junction and Cathy Come Home were broadcast as part of The Wednesday Play strand, which also gave Dennis Potter his breakthrough as a dramatist with, among other works, the "Nigel Barton" plays. Directly though, Greene is thought to have directly suggested only two programmes, the imported American series Perry Mason and Songs of Praise[2] which began in 1961.
The tone of BBC radio overall changed less radically in the Hugh Greene era than that of BBC television, with full reforms of the networks not coming until 1970 (by which time Sir Charles Curran was Director-General). However it was in 1967, under Greene's directorship, that the corporation embraced pop radio for the first time with Radio 1, taking most of its DJs and music policy from offshore radio (on the notorious pirate ships), which had just been banned by the government. Hugh Greene also strongly resisted pressure from the 'clean-up TV' campaigner Mary Whitehouse, a policy not always followed by future directors-general.
Greene's undoing followed the appointment of the former Conservative minister Lord Hill as chairman of the BBC governors from September 1, 1967, by Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who had criticised Hill's appointment as chairman of the Independent Television Authority by a Conservative government in 1963. A more cautious and conservative atmosphere then took hold in the corporation, typified by the axing (until 1972) of Till Death Us Do Part, one of the series most despised by Mary Whitehouse, but conversely one of its most popular in the ratings. In July 1968 the BBC issued the document Broadcasting In The Public Mood without Greene's significant involvement, seeming to question the continued broadcasting of the more provocative and controversial material (one of Greene's allies at the top level of the corporation described this document as "emasculated and philistine") and in October 1968 Greene announced that he would be retiring as Director-General. He was succeeded the next year by the more conservative Sir Charles Curran. This move was welcomed by a great many MPs, Governors of the BBC, Churchmen and Whitehouse's National Viewers and Listeners Association, as Greene was regarded, by the conservative minded, as a man of low moral fibre and as the person responsible for the increasing volume of sex and violence on television.
Echoes of the removal of Hugh Greene could be heard in the departure in 2004 of Director-General Greg Dyke in the wake of the Hutton Inquiry.
Hugh Greene then became one of the BBC governors, a position he held until 1971. He has remained a divisive figure in what have been called the British "culture wars" (after the American term for the liberal-conservative divide in US society); he has frequently been attacked by those of a conservative bent, especially the writer Peter Hitchens, for his part in the erosion of, what they see as, a better Britain. But he has been praised by some of liberal and Leftish leanings for opening up an, as they claim, ossifying institution, and creating a more tolerant and open-minded society. The fact remains that one's opinion of Sir Hugh Carleton Greene can depend entirely on one's opinion of the social changes—less deference to traditional authority and the traditional establishment—that are most frequently associated with the 1960s. Sir Hugh Greene's influence on British society—both on those who approve of what he stood for and on those who despise it—remains, as does the influence of those social changes more generally. Recently, in the wake of the Hutton Report, there has been some further debate about the relationship between the government, the Establishment and the BBC.
In 1985 he received the Eduard Rhein Ring of Honor from the German Eduard Rhein Foundation.[3]
Beyond his broadcasting and journalistic work, Greene was also known for his appreciation of beer and eventually became a director of the Greene King Brewery, originally established by his great-grandfather, Benjamin Greene, in 1799. He also once bested his famous brother Graham in a writing contest to parody the novelist's writing style in the New Statesman.
Sir Hugh Greene was knighted in 1964. He was married four times: to Helga Guinness, Elaine Shaplen, Tatjana Sais and Sarah Grahame. He had two sons by each of the first two marriages.[4]
He died in Westminster, London, of cancer aged 76.[5]
In 2008 the role of Greene was played by the actor Hugh Bonneville in the BBC drama Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story. The play focused on Greene's war with Whitehouse (played by Julie Walters) and latterly with Lord Hill (played by Ron Cook) in the period while he was BBC Director General in the 1960s. The script, and Bonneville's performance, brought out many of the character's personal eccentricities, as well as his firm - and confessedly lustful - principles in withstanding calls for censorship.
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| Preceded by Sir Ian Jacob 1952–1959 |
Director-General of the BBC 1960–1969 |
Succeeded by Charles Curran 1969–1977 |