John Drummond

Sir John Richard Gray Drummond (25 November 1934 – 6 September 2006) was a British arts administrator who spent most of his career at the BBC. He was described by Rodney Milnes of Opera magazine as "one of the most formidable figures in the arts world of the UK for 40 years".

Early life Drummond was born in London, the son of a Scottish Sea Captain in the British India line and an Australian singer, principally of lieder. He spent much of his childhood in Bournemouth, being evacuated to the resort at the beginning of World War II, spending hours in the public library absorbing all he could on creative arts, and also attending concerts by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra.

He was educated at Canford School on a scholarship (becoming head boy) and, during his National Service in the Navy, he studied Russian on the course at Bodmin. On a major open scholarship, gained in 1953, he read History at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1955 to 1958. At Cambridge he organised cabarets for the Footlights Society and in 1956 wrote a musical about Regency Brighton entitled The First Resort. Kenneth Tynan queried why Cambridge was "wasting time on trash like this when they could be producing Brecht",

His contemporaries included Derek Jacobi, Peter Cook, Michael Frayn and Ian McKellen, and his early career at the BBC was as a foreign correspondent (Drummond spoke fluent French and Russian). In 1961, he went with Richard Dimbleby, Robin Day and David Attenborough to make a series of documentary films in the Soviet Union, selected with his Russian language skills in mind. Later that year he began a two-year assignment for news and current affairs in Paris as assistant to Robin Scott.

Ultimately he became Assistant Head of Music and Arts at the insistence of his immediate superior, Humphrey Burton, In his Guardian obituary, Humphrey Burton listed several highlights from his tenure in Edinburgh: operas in 1980 including Peter Maxwell Davies' The Lighthouse, for international theatre 1979 with the Rustaveli Company, Georgia, and 1980 for Bill Bryden's adaptation of the York and Wakefield mystery plays for the National Theatre, and starting a book fair and commissioning the Queen's Hall as a festival chamber music venue.

Drummond criticised Nigel Kennedy in 1991 for wearing a black cloak and 'Dracula' make-up while performing Berg's Violin Concerto, and comparing Kennedy's usual punk clothing to the vulgarity of Liberace. At the very end of his autobiography he attacked what he saw as trends in the arts: "The lowest-common-denominator, accessibility-at-any-price, anti-intellectual laziness of so many of today's leaders [...] is a form of appeasement. Failing or refusing to differentiate between the good and the indifferent, while sheltering under a cloak of spurious democracy, is simply not good enough. It is a betrayal of all our civilization has stood for".

Other activities and honours John Drummond was chairman of The Theatres Trust (1998–2001). He had also been on the Council of Management of the new music group, the Fires of London. In 1998 he made the annual Royal Philharmonic Society lecture with the title "Taking Music Seriously".

He was appointed a CBE in 1990 and knighted five years later.