James Hawthorne

Genial BBC NI Controller

James Burns Hawthorne, broadcaster, management consultant and teacher: born Belfast 27 March 1930; master, Sullivan Upper School 1951-60; staff, BBC 1960-76, 1978-87, Schools Producer in charge of Northern Ireland 1967, Chief Assistant, Northern Ireland 1969-70, seconded to the Hong Kong government as Controller of Television 1970, Director of Broadcasting, Hong Kong 1972-77, Controller, BBC Northern Ireland 1978-87; CBE 1982; director, James Hawthorne Associates 1987-92, partner 1993-2006; married 1958 Patricia King (died 2002; one son, two daughters); died Belfast 7 September 2006.

The emollient personality of James Hawthorne, a tall and genial figure, was at first sight not well-suited for controversial and hard-fought firefights at the intersection of journalism, terrorism and politics. Yet for a full decade as head of the BBC in Belfast he coped with heavy pressure from both Labour and Conservative administrations, taking part in bitter battles over accusations that the corporation was falling for IRA propaganda.

As BBC Northern Ireland's Controller between 1978 and 1987, he was in charge during a period which saw recurring crises and during which the BBC's journalists staged a nationwide one-day strike. This was in protest against what was known as the 1985 Real Lives crisis when, under pressure from the Thatcher government, the BBC banned a programme jointly profiling Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein and a loyalist politician.

It is a measure of how far Northern Ireland politics have changed that the republican leader has since become a regular visitor to Downing Street and Chequers. Today McGuinness may be an acceptable politican but back then he was, to official eyes, a red-hot terrorist.

At one point during the Real Lives confrontation Hawthorne threatened to resign but stayed on, and the programme was later broadcast, with cuts.

It was not his first run-in with governments. Labour's former Northern Ireland Secretary, Roy Mason, was described by Hawthorne as being hectoring and sarcastic with an "incandescent dislike of the BBC". An early encounter with Mason - one of a number of clashes between senior BBC figures and ministers - was, he wrote, "nasty, negative and unpleasant". Never one to stand on his dignity, Hawthorne was none the less offended by Mason's habit of calling him "Jimmy Boy".

Hawthorne recounted:

One of the things that offended me most was that, on top of accusations that BBC programmes were dangerous, biased and subversive, we as professionals were deliberately distorting the truth for some unspecified political end.

Though he was not one of nature's revolutionaries Hawthorne, a liberal Protestant, had always been something of a pioneer, certainly by Belfast's staid standards. A graduate of Queen's University in the city, he taught for a time before joining the BBC in 1960.

His radio series on local history was regarded as a signal departure from the tradition of not paying too much detailed attention to the past, with all its potential for stirring controversy. History was, in the old dispensation, rather too dangerous to be dug up.

In 1970 he went to Hong Kong where he set up the television service before returning as Belfast Controller in 1978. There he was plunged into the perennial problems of Belfast broadcasting: was it Derry or Londonderry, was it the Army or the British Army, should Martin McGuinness be on the box? He once said:

Broadcasters cannot work miracles and part of this is due to people seeing conflict in simplistic terms. In Northern Ireland the audience do not watch the news - they monitor it in terms of the treatment given to each side on any given story.

More profoundly, the underlying question was where to draw the line between journalistic independence and Britain's conflict with armed groups. His period in charge included turbulence such as the assassination of Earl Mountbatten of Burma, the 1981 republican hunger strikes, the Brighton bomb and the landmark Anglo-Irish Agreement.

In many of these episodes BBC coverage came under criticism, though Hawthorne and other executives drew some comfort from the fact that the condemnations from republicans and Unionists were often strikingly symmetrical. One side saw the BBC as being too British, the other as not being British enough.

Hawthorne later admitted that the job was "an enormous personal strain" both for himself and his wife Patricia. Almost every time they went out for dinner, he recalled, "the subject quickly became the performance of the BBC - many a boring evening ended up in personal abuse or, as we had on one occasion, an accusation of murdering young policemen".

Following his BBC career, he held many positions in public life, in particular taking a leading role in organisations attempting to improve community relations and recognising different cultural traditions. His activities were acknowledged when he was appointed CBE in 1982. He wrote two books, Two Centuries of Irish History (1966) and Reporting Violence: lessons from Northern Ireland (1981).

David McKittrick