Charles Wheeler dies
- Published: 04 July 2008 12:40
- Author: Chris Curtis
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- Last Updated: 04 July 2008 16:09
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Sir Charles Wheeler, one of the BBC's most respected foreign correspondents, has died aged 85.
A former Panorama and Newsnight presenter, Wheeler covered many of the biggest stories of the twentieth century, including the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, the flight of the Dalai Lama after the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1959, the assassination of Martin Luther King and the Watergate affair.
Director general Mark Thompson led the tributes to Wheeler. He said: "To audiences and to his colleagues alike Charles Wheeler was simply a legend. His integrity, his authority and his humanity graced the BBC's airwaves over many decades."
Deputy DG and head of BBC journalism Mark Byford described Wheeler as "the greatest broadcast journalist of his generation".
He added: "He had the truly outstanding gift for vivid, beautiful writing matched by a quite extraordinary skill for using pictures and sound to convey the power of his own eye witness reportage. As a journalist you saw him as the pinnacle of our profession."
Wheeler began his career in journalism as a tape boy on the old Daily Sketch newspaper. He joined the BBC after the war, in which he served in the Royal Marines.
