John Whale’s professional life was built on the truthful and elegant use of language. His delight in words and grammar emerged when he was a boy at Winchester, to which he won a scholarship. His facility with language extended to the spoken as well as the written word: he was one of those few people who could speak extempore in perfectly balanced paragraphs.
John Hilary Whale was the eldest son of the Rev Dr John Seldon Whale, a serious-minded Congregationalist minister and theologian, who had high expectations of his son. John reflected his father’s outlook and high principles; at Corpus Christi, Oxford, where he read Greats, he was studious rather than exuberant. His sense of fun developed as he matured. He owed this in part to his wife, Judy, whom he met while they were at Oxford, where they shared an interest in acting. He left Oxford intending to be an actor, and for a couple of years played in rep (juvenile leads in Farnham; on tour in Kenya), taught, and wrote plays. It was while he and Judy were in Paris, teaching at the Berlitz School and working as translators, that Whale began his career as a broadcaster, with the Section Anglaise on French radio. In London, in 1960, he joined ITN as a reporter.
He was always gracious to me in our various interactions in the early 1990’s. Read it all.