Derek Ingram

Derek Thynne Ingram (20 June 1925 – 17 June 2018) was a distinguished journalist and passionate supporter of the Commonwealth. In the 1960s he gave up a successful career as a newspaper editor to start a news service that would reflect the views of people in newly independent African countries and elsewhere in the developing world. He was on first name terms with leaders such as Indira Gandhi and Kenneth Kaunda, and was known to many as "Mr Commonwealth".

Biography The only child of a middle-class family, brought up in North London, Ingram was successful immediately after leaving Highgate School at the age of 16 during World War II. He was earning six guineas a week as a sub-editor on the Daily Sketch at the age of 17. He served as a signalman in the Navy, stationed until 1946 in Rome. After being demobbed, he joined the Daily Express, but in 1949 jumped ship to the Daily Mail, where he rose to deputy editor. He might have become editor, but his liberal politics and ferocious opposition to apartheid and racism in any form put him at odds with the paper's proprietor, Viscount Rothermere. Ingram resigned in 1966, but not before making his views known in Partners in Adventure, one of five books he authored. "Two problems above all torture our minds in this second half of the 20th century," he wrote. "The first is the atomic threat to our civilisation; the second the relationship between the black man and the white. The greatest single factor about the Commonwealth idea is that it transcends all racial barriers."

For Ingram, such views were not just theory. In 1967, he founded Gemini News Service, He was a long-serving trustee on the board of the Commonwealth Institute in London. He received recognition from several Commonwealth bodies and in the 1998 Birthday Honours he was awarded an OBE in the Diplomatic List for services to Commonwealth journalism.

Ingram was a member of the Round Table Moot, having first attended a meeting of the Moot in 1971. Until 2007 he wrote the "Commonwealth Update" in The Round Table Journal. He wrote extensively in the journal, including its coverage of Commonwealth Heads of Government Meetings, having attended every one since 1971. He was a vice-president of the Royal Commonwealth Society. Ingram never married, nor had children, though he relished strong friendships across generations from around the world. He loved theatre, music and art and collected anything notable that was printed or published from postage stamps to newspapers, magazines, books and theatre programmes. Cultured, he boasted nonetheless that he had never been in control of a wheel in his life. He neither drove a car nor rode a bicycle. For decades he would always walk from his house in a quiet mews in Marylebone to his office and to meetings all over central London, and at a cracking pace. Right up until the last few months of his life, he would read the newspapers every morning and watch Channel 4 News at 7pm, proud to see one of his Gemini proteges, Lindsey Hilsum, reporting from around the world.

"Eventually the peoples of the world must be colour-blind," he wrote in 1965. "The Commonwealth is there as an instrument to this end, and all of us must try to use it." While others denigrated it as a diplomatic talking shop, or an association of rogues, Ingram, like Queen Elizabeth II, believed in the Commonwealth as a force for good.

He died on 17 June 2018 at the age of 92.