Marmaduke James Hussey

MARMADUKE Hussey will be remembered in pages such as these mostly because he was chairman of the BBC during its troubled times in the 1980s and Nineties, because he was named a Lord ten years ago and because his wife was Lady-in-Waiting to the Queen and became Prince William's godmother.

Hussey also famously admitted that, as BBC boss, he would not have allowed the famous 1995 Martin Bashir interview with the Princess of Wales on Panorama, in which she stunned the nation with her comments about her marriage and the Royal Family, to have been aired without Buckingham Palace's approval.

Knowing that was how he would react, his Director-General at the time, John Birt, had kept him in the dark about the interview until it was too late. Hussey was furious and appeared only too happy to retire the following year.

He might also be remembered as the man who, as chief executive of Times Newspapers in the 1970s, called the bluff of the all-powerful print unions and, at least in the short term, lost. The Times and Sunday Times remained shut down for almost a year, eventually to be "saved" and streamlined by new owner Rupert Murdoch. It was a turning point for the British media.

Perhaps, however, Marmaduke Hussey should best be remembered for what was doubtless the most significant day of his life, the day a German soldier aimed a sub-machine gun at him from point-blank range during the Battle of Anzio, Italy, in January 1944. That was certainly the day he himself remembered most, going into battle with his own Grenadier Guards alongside young soldiers of the Scots Guards whose accents he could barely understand and who teased him with the nickname "Dukie".

The Patrician Englishman liked to say that he had been fortunate to have gone into battle alongside Scottish soldiers, but also to have run into the worst shot in the Wehrmacht, a young man so nervous that he failed to kill him from only three yards away. Hussey's wounds were bad enough, however, to lead to his capture, the amputation of his right leg by a German medic and his return to England as a semi-walking wounded before the war was over.

Back home, still only 21, Hussey received an artificial leg, but other bullets, including one in his spine, meant he had to spend the rest of his life in pain and leaning on a cane. That did not stop him from becoming a significant, if often controversial figure in British publishing and broadcasting, eventually hand-picked by Margaret Thatcher to head the BBC. His term as chairman from 1986, when he admitted: "I know nothing about broadcasting," until 1996 was seen as crucial to the BBC's development. Some say it was the start of the Corporation's decline, others that Hussey steered it towards the internet and the digital age.

Although he had been a senior editorial figure or executive at Associated Newspapers (including the Daily Mail) and Times Newspapers in the post-war years, few, if anyone in TV had heard of Marmaduke Hussey when Mrs Thatcher's home secretary Douglas Hurd appointed him chairman of the BBC in 1986. "Dukie" Hussey - a nickname first coined as "Jookie" by the Scots Guards, but long since picked up affectionately by his friends - immediately used his military discipline to tighten up the BBC.

His first significant act was to force the "resignation" of the BBC's Scottish-born Director-General Alasdair Milne, a lifelong BBC employee and former Controller of BBC Scotland. Hussey apparently felt that Milne, and a growing segment of Corporation staffers, were leaning too far to the Left, embarrassing Thatcher's government and even "endangering national security".

Shortly before Milne "resigned", officers from Scotland Yard's Special Branch had launched an unprecedented raid on BBC Scotland's Glasgow headquarters, apparently "tipped off" that an upcoming programme, revealing a secret spy satellite known as Zircon and commissioned by the Thatcher government, would be a threat to UK security. According to Milne, "the Special Branch were running all over the BBC in Glasgow like mice, removing boxes of papers and impounding every foot of film they could find". The programme was blocked by the BBC, but was later leaked.

Always described by friends as a "brave and honest man", Hussey quickly sought to distance himself from Mrs Thatcher and the Conservative government, publicly rejecting their criticism, including ongoing calls for an independent inquiry into BBC reports from correspondent Kate Adie on the 1986 US bombing raids on Libya.

Many BBC staffers, including Adie herself, warmed to him and she eventually called him "Dukie" to his face. But the "jobs for the boys" label, partly because his wife was Lady-in-Waiting Susan Waldegrave and her brother William was a junior minister in the Thatcher Cabinet, was hard to live down.

In his ten years as chairman, the longest so far in BBC history, Hussey succeeded in tightening up the BBC, at least financially, but at the cost of a noticeable exodus of some of its greatest talent in all aspects of both radio and TV. During Hussey's watch, the Corporation's highly-respected correspondent in the Indian subcontinent, Mark Tully, launched a scathing attack on BBC management, calling them "Orwellian", and speaking of a "culture of fear".

Hussey himself always said his wartime experiences had left him immune to such criticism. He retained a sense of humour, notably removing his artificial leg to faze interlocutors when necessary, and he admitted in interviews that he did not mind being seen as "an upper-class twit". That perception of being an idiot, he said in his memoirs, "gives you an immediate advantage over those around you".

Marmaduke James Hussey was born on 29 August, 1923, in Surrey. He was named after an uncle who died in the Battle of the Somme. He spent his early years in Africa, mainly Uganda, where his father, a member of the Colonial service, was stationed, but he returned to England to go first to boarding school in Hampshire, then to Rugby School and later to Trinity College, Oxford.

He left university to join the Grenadier Guards in 1943, posted to Italy and seeing his first action in the allied landing later that year, then the fierce Battle of Anzio in the first months of 1944.

He married Susan Waldegrave, daughter of Earl Waldegrave, in 1959 and was created a life peer, with the title Baron Hussey of North Bradley, in 1996. His memoir, Chance Governs All, was published in 2001.

He is survived by his widow, a son and a daughter.