Richard
Dimbleby was born in Richmond-upon-Thames on 25th May 1913. After
attending
Mill Hill School he began his career with the family newspaper, the
Richmond and Twickenham Times
in 1931. He later worked for the Bournemouth
Echo and Advertisers Weekly.
In
1936 Dimbleby joined the British Broadcasting Corporation
as a news reporter. In 1939 he accompanied the British
Expeditionary Force (BEF) to France.
After
Dunkirk
Dimbleby
reported from the frontline in Egypt and
Greece. He also flew 20 missions with
RAF Bomber Command. In 1945 he was the first
reporter to enter Belsen Concentration Camp.
After
the war Dimbleby became the main commentator on state occasions. This
included the funerals of George VI and
Winston Churchill. He was also managing
director of the family newspaper business (1954-65) and presenter
of BBC's Panorama (1955-63). Richard
Dimbleby died
of cancer in London on 22nd December 1965.
(1)
Richard Dimbleby, BBC
radio broadcast from
Belsen
(19th April 1945)
I picked my way over corpse after corpse in the gloom, until I heard
one voice raised above the gentle undulating moaning. I found a girl,
she was a living skeleton, impossible to gauge her age for she had
practically no hair left, and her face was only a yellow parchment
sheet with two holes in it for eyes. She was stretching out her stick
of an arm and gasping something, it was "English, English, medicine,
medicine", and she was trying to cry but she hadn't enough strength.
And beyond her down the passage and in the hut there were the convulsive
movements of dying people too weak to raise themselves from the floor.
In the shade of some trees
lay a great collection of bodies. I walked about them trying to count,
there were perhaps 150 of them flung down on each other, all naked,
all so thin that their yellow skin glistened like stretched rubber
on their bones. Some of the poor starved creatures whose bodies were
there looked so utterly unreal
and inhuman that I could have imagined that they had never lived
at all. They were like polished skeletons, the skeletons that medical
students like to play practical jokes with.
At one end of the pile
a cluster of men and women were gathered round a fire; they were using
rags and old shoes taken from the bodies to keep it alight, and they
were heating soup over it. And close by was the enclosure where 500
children between the ages of five and twelve had been kept. They were
not so hungry as the rest, for the women had sacrificed themselves
to keep them alive. Babies were born at Belsen, some of them shrunken,
wizened little things that could not live, because their mothers could
not feed them.
One woman, distraught
to the point of madness, flung herself at a British soldier who was
on guard at the camp on the night that it was reached by the 11th
Armoured Division; she begged him to give her some milk for the tiny
baby she held in her arms. She laid the mite on the ground and threw
herself at the sentry's feet and kissed his boots. And when, in his
distress, he asked her to get up, she put the baby in his arms and
ran off crying that she would find milk for it because there was no
milk in her breast. And when the soldier opened the bundle of rags
to look at the child, he found that it had been dead for days.
There was no privacy of
any kind. Women stood naked at the side of the track, washing in cupfuls
of water taken from British Army trucks. Others squatted while they
searched themselves for lice, and examined each other's hair. Sufferers
from dysentery leaned against the huts, straining helplessly, and
all around and about them was this awful drifting tide of exhausted
people, neither caring nor watching. Just a few held out their withered
hands to us as we passed by, and blessed the doctor, whom they knew
had become the camp commander in place of the brutal Kramer.
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