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Birth of John Cole, Northern Irish Journalist & BBC Broadcaster

John Morrison Cole, Northern Irish journalist and broadcaster best known for his work with the BBC, is born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on November 23, 1927. He serves as deputy editor of The Guardian and The Observer and, from 1981 to 1992, is the BBC’s political editor. Donald Macintyre, in an obituary in The Independent, describes him as “the most recognisable and respected broadcast political journalist since World War II.”

Cole is the son of George Cole, an electrical engineer, and his wife Alice. The family is Ulster Protestant, and he identifies himself as British. He receives his formal education at the Belfast Royal Academy.

Cole starts his career in print journalism in 1945, joining the Belfast Telegraph as a reporter and industrial correspondent. He subsequently works as a political reporter for the paper. He gains a scoop when he interviews the then Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, who is holidaying in Ireland.

Cole joins The Guardian, then The Manchester Guardian, in 1956, reporting on industrial issues. He transfers to the London office in 1957 as the paper’s labour correspondent. Appointed news editor in 1963, succeeding Nesta Roberts, he takes on the task of reorganising the paper’s “amateurish” system for gathering news. He heads opposition to a proposed merger with The Times in the mid-1960s, and later serves as deputy editor under Alastair Hetherington. When Hetherington leaves in 1975, Cole is in the running for the editorship, but fails to secure the post, for reasons which may include his commitment to the cause of unionism in Northern Ireland, as well as what is seen by some as inflexibility and a lack of flair. Unwilling to continue at The Guardian, he then joins The Observer as deputy editor under Donald Trelford, remaining there for six years.

After Tiny Rowland takes over as proprietor of The Observer in 1981, Cole gives evidence against him at the Monopolies Commission. The following day he receives a call from the BBC offering him the job of political editor, succeeding John Simpson. He has little previous television experience but proves a “natural broadcaster.” Reporting through most of the premiership of Margaret Thatcher, he becomes a familiar figure on television and radio.

Cole’s health is put under strain by the workload, and he suffers a heart attack in February 1984. Returning to report on that year’s conference season, he covers the Brighton hotel bombing, getting a “memorable” interview with Thatcher on the pavement in its immediate aftermath, in which she declares that the Tory conference will take place as normal. An astute observer of the political scene, he is one of the earliest to forecast Thatcher’s resignation as Prime Minister in 1990, in what colleague David McKie refers to as “perhaps his greatest exclusive.”

Cole establishes a strong reputation for his “gentle but probing” interviewing style, for his political assessments, and for presenting analysis rather than “bland reporting.” Held in enormous affection by viewers, he is trusted by both politicians and the public. He is known for speaking in the language used by ordinary people rather than so-called Westminster experts. His distinctive Northern Irish accent leads the way for BBC broadcasters with regional accents.

Cole retires as political editor in 1992 at the age of 65, compulsory at the time, but continues to appear on television, including making programmes on golf and travel. He also continues to appear on the BBC programme Westminster Live for several years after he retired as political editor.

In addition to his journalistic writing, Cole authors several books. The earliest are The Poor of the Earth, on developing countries, and The Thatcher Years (1987). After his retirement as BBC political editor, he spends more time writing. His political memoir, As It Seemed to Me, appears in 1995 and becomes a best-seller. He also publishes a novel, A Clouded Peace (2001), set in his birthplace of Belfast in 1977.

In 2007, Cole writes an article for the British Journalism Review, blaming both politicians and the media for the fact that parliamentarians are held in such low esteem, being particularly scathing of Alastair Campbell‘s influence during Tony Blair‘s premiership.

In 1966, the Eisenhower Fellowships selects Cole to represent Great Britain. He receives the Royal Television Society‘s Journalist of the Year award in 1991. After his retirement in 1992, he is awarded an honorary degree from the Open University as Doctor of the University and receives the Richard Dimbleby Award from BAFTA in 1993. He turns down a CBE in 1993, citing the former The Guardian newspaper rule that journalists can only accept gifts which can be consumed within 24 hours.

In his private life Cole is a supporter of the Labour Party and is a believer in the trades union movement. He considers that the combating of unemployment is one of the most important political issues. He is a British Republican and a committed Christian, associating in the latter part of his life with the United Reformed Church at Kingston upon Thames.

Cole suffers health problems in retirement including heart problems and two minor strokes. In 2009, he is diagnosed with cancer. He subsequently develops aphasia. He dies at his home at Claygate in the county of Surrey on November 7, 2013.

Tributes are paid by journalists, broadcasters and politicians across the political spectrum. Prime Minister David Cameron calls Cole a “titan at the BBC” and an “extraordinary broadcaster.” Labour Party leader Ed Miliband says that “my generation grew up watching John Cole. He conveyed the drama and importance of politics.” The Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond says that Cole is “an extremely able journalist but also extraordinarily helpful and generous to a young politician.” The BBC’s political editor at the time, Nick Robinson, writes that Cole “shaped the way all in my trade do our jobs.”


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Death of Newspaper Editor Douglas Gageby

(Robert John) Douglas Gageby, one of the pre-eminent Irish newspaper editors of his generation, dies on June 24, 2004, following a lengthy illness. His life is well documented and a book of essays about him, Bright Brilliant Days: Douglas Gageby and the Irish Times, written by many of his colleagues, some of whom had attained fame for their literary achievements, is published in 2006.

Gageby is born at 54 Upper Beechwood Avenue, Ranelagh, Dublin, to Thomas Gageby, a Belfast-born civil servant. His mother, Ethel Elizabeth (née Smith), is a schoolteacher from County Cavan. The Gageby family moves to Belfast when he is about three years old as his father goes to work for the Northern Ireland Civil Service following partition. His paternal grandfather, Robert Gageby, stands as a Labour Party parliamentary candidate in Belfast North in 1910, and is a Belfast City Councillor for 20 years, first elected in 1898 as a trade union candidate supported by the Independent Labour Party.

Gageby is educated at Belfast Royal Academy and Trinity College Dublin, where he is elected a scholar in Modern Languages (French and German) in 1940. He is also actively involved with the student newspaper, Trinity News. He enlists in the Irish Army as a private soldier at the outbreak of World War II. He is commissioned later, and he serves as an intelligence officer. He reports from post-war Germany for The Irish Press and goes on to work under Conor Cruise O’Brien in the Irish News Agency. In 1954 he is the first editor of the Evening Press. In 1963 he becomes editor of The Irish Times, a post he holds until 1986, having been brought back from a short retirement in 1974. He is credited with moving The Irish Times from a Unionist organ into a successful Irish journal of record.

In 2003 it is revealed that a director, and later Chairman, of The Irish Times, Major Thomas Bleakley McDowell, had referred to Gageby as a “white nigger” for his views and role in the paper during the Northern Ireland civil rights movement‘s campaign in the 1960s. The comment appears in a letter from the British Ambassador to Dublin, Sir Andrew Gilchrist, to Kelvin White, head of the Irish Section of the British Foreign Office and is dated October 2, 1969. Gilchrist is referring to conversations which he had with McDowell where the latter professes himself to be fully behind the British government in the North and hostile to Gageby’s coverage of the civil rights movement. However, historian Mark O’Brien notes, “Despite his contacts with London, McDowell’s actions did not interfere with Gageby’s editorials on Northern Ireland”, due to the fact McDowell believes in editorial independence (even though McDowell strongly disagrees with Gageby’s nationalist views), and because Gageby is making the newspaper commercially successful. Under the 30 year rule, this letter is made available to newspapers on December 22 and 23, 1999, but no newspaper publishes it at that time.

The communiqué is later discovered by the historian Jack Lane and published in the Irish Political Review, a small magazine strongly antagonistic to The Irish Times, in January 2003. He brings it to the attention of The Irish Times editor, Geraldine Kennedy, on January 10, 2003, and she replies on January 15, 2003 saying she is “unable to confirm the veracity of it” and does not publish it. When, on January 26, 2003, the Sunday Independent (Ireland) publishes the story, The Irish Times finally follows the next day, January 27. Nonetheless, on April 24, 2004, Kennedy defends her position by saying, “The contents of the letter in question were published on January 27, 2003, as soon as its existence was drawn to my attention.”

Gageby dies on June 24, 2004, following a two year illness. His private funeral is conducted by Rev. Terence McCaughey, a family friend. The Irish Times endows an annual Douglas Gageby Fellowship for young journalists and a stand of trees is planted in his memory at Moynalty. His papers are presented to Dublin City University (DCU).

Gageby is married to Dorothy, daughter of Seán Lester, last Secretary General of the League of Nations. His daughter, Susan Denham, is the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Ireland from 2011 to 2017.


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Birth of Thomas Andrews, Chemist & Physicist

Thomas Andrews FRS FRSE, chemist and physicist who does important work on phase transitions between gases and liquids, is born in Belfast on December 19, 1813. He is a longtime professor of chemistry at Queen’s University Belfast.

Andrews’ father is a linen merchant. He attends the Belfast Academy and the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, where at the latter of which he studies mathematics under James Thomson. In 1828 he goes to the University of Glasgow to study chemistry under Professor Thomas Thomson, then studies at Trinity College, Dublin, where he gains distinction in classics as well as in science. Finally, at University of Edinburgh in 1835, he is awarded a doctorate in medicine.

Andrews begins a successful medical practice in his native Belfast in 1835, also giving instruction in chemistry at the Academical Institution. In 1842, he marries Jane Hardie Walker (1818–1899). They have six children, including the geologist Mary Andrews. In 1845 he is appointed vice-president of the newly established Queen’s University Belfast, and professor of chemistry there. He holds these two offices until his retirement in 1879 at age 66.

Andrews first becomes known as a scientific investigator with his work on the heat developed in chemical actions, for which the Royal Society awards him a Royal Medal in 1844. Another important investigation, undertaken in collaboration with Peter Guthrie Tait, is devoted to ozone.

Andrews’ reputation mainly rests on his work with liquefaction of gases. In the 1860s he carries out a very complete inquiry into the gas laws, expressing the relations of pressure, temperature, and volume in carbon dioxide. In particular, he establishes the concepts of critical temperature and critical pressure, showing that a substance passes from vapor to liquid state without any breach of continuity.

In Andrews’ experiments on phase transitions, he shows that carbon dioxide may be carried from any of the states we usually call liquid to any of those we usually call gas, without losing homogeneity. The mathematical physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs cites these results in support of the Gibbs free energy equation. They also set off a race among researchers to liquify various other gases. In 1877-78 Louis Paul Cailletet is the first to liquefy oxygen.

Andrews dies in Belfast on November 26, 1885, and is buried in the Borough Cemetery in the city.


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Birth of Robin Eames, Primate of All Ireland & Archbishop of Armagh

Robert Henry Alexander “Robin” Eames, Anglican Primate of All Ireland and Archbishop of Armagh from 1986 to 2006, is born in Belfast on April 27, 1936, the son of a Methodist minister.

Eames spends his early years in Larne, with the family later moving to Belfast. He is educated at the city’s Belfast Royal Academy and Methodist College Belfast before going on to study at Queen’s University Belfast, graduating LL.B. (Upper Second Class Honours) in 1960 and earning a Ph.D. degree in canon law and history in 1963. During his undergraduate course at Queen’s, one of his philosophy lecturers is his future Roman Catholic counterpart, Cahal Daly.

Turning his back on legal studies for ordination in the Church of Ireland, Eames embarks on a three-year course at the divinity school of Trinity College, Dublin in 1960, but finds the course “intellectually unsatisfying.” In 1963 he is appointed curate assistant at Bangor Parish Church, becoming rector of St. Dorothea’s in Belfast in 1966, the same year he marries Christine Daly.

During his time at St. Dorothea’s, in the Braniel and Tullycarnet area of east Belfast, Eames develops a “coffee bar ministry” among young people but is interrupted by the Troubles. He turns down the opportunity to become dean of Cork and in 1974 is appointed rector of St. Mark’s in Dundela in east Belfast, a church with strong family links to C. S. Lewis.

On May 9, 1975, at the age of 38, Eames is elected bishop of the cross-border Diocese of Derry and Raphoe. Five years later, on May 30, 1980, he is translated to the Diocese of Down and Dromore. He is elected to Down and Dromore on April 23 and that election is confirmed on May 20, 1980. In 1986, he becomes the 14th Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland since the Church of Ireland’s break with Rome. It is an appointment that causes some level of astonishment among other church leaders.

Drumcree Church, a rural parish near Portadown, becomes the site of a major political incident in 1996, when the annual Orangemen‘s march is banned by the Chief Constable of the Royal Ulster Constabulary from returning to the centre of Portadown via the nationalist Garvaghy Road after attending worship at Drumcree Church. Public unrest and violence escalates over the next three summers as other parades come under first police and later commission sanction.

Eames, as diocesan bishop and civil leader finds himself immersed in the search for a resolution to the issue. Within the wider Church of Ireland there is unease as it is a broad church in theology and politics including within its congregations nationalists in the south and unionists in the north. Eames, along with the rector of Drumcree, has to navigate this political and social controversy and seeks political assistance to diffuse tension. Some bishops in the Republic of Ireland call for Eames to close the parish church, including Bishop John Neill who later becomes Archbishop of Dublin. He refuses to do so, believing this action could precipitate greater unrest and possible bloodshed.

Eames is, for many years, a significant figure within the general Anglican Communion. In 2003, the self-styled ‘divine optimist’ is appointed Chairman of the Lambeth Commission on Communion, which examines significant challenges to unity in the Anglican Communion. The Commission publishes its report, the Windsor Report, on October 18, 2004.

At the Church of Ireland General Synod in 2006 Eames announces his intention to retire on December 31, 2006. Church law permits him to continue as primate until the age of 75 but he resigns, in good health, at the age of 69. On January 10, 2007, the eleven serving bishops of the Church of Ireland meet at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin and elect Alan Harper, Bishop of Connor, as Eames’s successor.