Gerard Mansell

Gerard Evelyn Herbert "Gerry" Mansell (16 February 1921 – 18 December 2010) was a BBC executive, most famous for reorganising BBC Radio into Radio 2, 3 and 4 as controller of the BBC Home Service, and for a political conflict early in Margaret Thatcher's tenure as Prime Minister.

Biography

Mansell was born in Paris to an English father and French mother. He was educated at the Lycée Hoche (Versailles), the Lycée Buffon (Paris) and l'Ecole des Sciences Politiques. As the German invasion of France proceeded in 1940, his family moved to the UK.

In 1956, he married Diana Sherar, with whom he had two sons, James and Francis.

In October 1979, with the Director-General, Ian Trethowan, recovering from a heart attack, Mansell found himself in controversy. A television crew from Panorama had filmed the Provisional IRA manning a makeshift roadblock in Carrickmore. Newly elected Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, determined to deny the "oxygen of publicity" to the IRA, complained to the BBC governors. Managing director of Television Alasdair Milne was on leave, so the governors called in Mansell and ordered him to discipline Panorama editor Roger Bolton. Shocked at the apparently casual manner in which the film unit operated, Mansell fired him.

Mansell retired from the BBC in 1981, at age 60. He produced a history of the World Service, Let Truth Be Told (1982). In 1988, he received a Sony gold award for services to radio.