Obituary: Lewis Hynd OBE, television executive

Lewis Hynd, past chairman of Forth Valley Health Board, Dean of the Ancient Guildry of Stirling, and an Honorary Sheriff serving Central Scotland and Fife, died five days before his 88th birthday. He combined a history of public service with a long and distinguished career in television management.

The son of Robert Hynd, a master mariner who’d worked on sailing ships, and his wife, Jemima McLean, a former cook to the Duke of Atholl at Blair Castle, he was born in Throsk, Stirlingshire, on 16 August, 1923.

Educated at Fallin Primary School and Stirling High, on leaving school he took a job in a solicitor’s office, hoping to become a lawyer.

Enlisted as a trooper in the Royal Tank Regiment during the Second World War he landed on the beach at Arromanche, the scene of some of the strongest German resistance, at an early stage of the Normandy campaign. Fighting in France, he was the sole survivor when the tank he was driving attracted heavy fire, killing four of the five-man crew. At the Battle of Arnhem, and the Battle of the Bulge, he was assigned to lightly armoured vehicles, ferrying medical officers to and from the battlefield, a role he was required to reprise in Austria and Italy.

Demobbed as a corporal in 1947, Hynd decided it was beyond his means to train as a solicitor and set his sights on a career in accountancy. Three years later he married Greta Grafen, a Stirlingshire girl he met at a church fellowship evening.

He worked at Remploy, the Gas Board and NCR before joining Scottish Television as chief accountant and company secretary a few weeks before the new company was due to begin broadcasting on Saturday 31 August, 1957. His first budget horrified Roy Thomson, the penny-pinching Canadian millionaire who fathered STV. “Have you gone out of your mind?” Thomson exclaimed after studying his figures. “We are not spending half that money,”

To the Canadian, owning an ITV franchise was akin to having “a licence to print money”. Insofar as this was true (and many people dispute the idea) his senior money man in Scotland believed whatever cash STV generated, a substantial part of it should remain in Scotland for the benefit of Scotland. As his formidable boss happily acknowledged: “Lewis was wild because, every time he got a stack of money paid into the bank, he was told to transfer it to Fred Cusk, my financial director in London.”

At STV he gained a formidable reputation as a tough-minded, no-nonsense executive who believed his duties included providing pleasant working conditions for all staff.

He was a strong advocate of a company pension scheme covering every employee, as well as a staff trust. As one veteran recalled: “There were many occasions when Lewis, who rarely took no for answer, went out of his way to address young single employees on the virtues of saving for retirement, when their natural inclination was to spend, spend, spend.”

When he finally retired from STV after 26 years service, it appeared whatever good work needed to be done in the community, particularly in the Stirling area, the jovial and energetic figure of Lewis Hynd was available to assist.

He was a former chairman of central regional council of the Scottish Society for the Mentally Handicapped, a panel member of the Industrial Tribunals of Scotland, chairman of Scottish Television Staff Trust and a General Commissioner for Income Tax for the Stirling division.

After helping to establish the Glasgow Enterprise Agency, he performed the same service for Stirling Enterprise Trust and Enterprise Park, which he served for nearly 20 years.

He was a past member of the council of Strathcarron Hospice and, starting in 1997, chairman of the Stirling branch of Crossroads for five years.

An elder of the Church of Scotland for more than 60 years, he was a past member and treasurer of the Presbytery of Stirling, and a lifelong supporter of the Iona Community.

In 1985 the Rotary Club of Stirling, in recognition of his services to the community, presented him with its Golden Jubilee Civic Award. The proud recipient donated the cheque which accompanied the award to Talking Newspapers for the Blind.

Much of his work on behalf of the mentally ill focused on the needs of young people and was clearly influenced by the loss of his daughter Valerie, a healthy three-old who contracted meningitis and died, aged nine.

He canvassed widely to ensure the Education (Mentally Handicapped Children) Scotland Act 1974, reached the statute book. Sponsored by a Scots Tory MP, Hamish Gray, later Baron Gray of Contin, it provided statutory recognition of the needs of the mentally ill and mentally handicapped children, including the right to education.

As chairman of the Forth Valley Health Board he encouraged the concept that the mentally ill should be housed within the community, living in hostels or in self-sufficient bungalow units whenever possible, rather than hospital wards of the kind which disfigured a number of hospitals, dating from the Victorian era.

Through his efforts £7 million was spent improving conditions at the Royal Scottish National Hospital at Larbert before its replacement by the Forth Valley Royal Hospital at a cost of £300m.

More than anything, perhaps, he believed passionately in the idea that both sides of the great sickness divide – people undergoing treatment and health workers generally – should be encouraged to build “friendly and fruitful relationships”.

Fair to say, in his private and public life, Lewis Hynd himself achieved no less.

Lewis James McLean Hynd OBE married Greta Grafen on 12 August, 1950. She pre-deceased him on 16 March 1997. He is survived by their son Robert and daughter Jillian, as well as five grand-children, Innes, Iona, Lewis, Rowen and Anna.

RUSSELL GALBRAITH