Exhibit JC42 - The Leveson Inquiry

For Distribution to CPsYoung Women Learning Journalism at London University, 1919-1939Descartes, Kant, Leibnitz, Spinoza, Berkeley et al. Still alas,incomprehensible, but splend!dly quotable [and] gained a distinction in[both]. I was triumphantly through and two fascinating years were over.They were very happy ones though my fellow students, apart from a coupleof congenial spirits, did not seem a very lively lot [who joined] a number ofgroups and societies which, after one experience, I decided were a wasteof time. How they could fit in such interests and concentrate on work wasdifficult to understand, yet most of them passed the exams. And, of course,they did not go out dancing at night. ’43Social life certainly had to be curtailed but the evenings were still free,and lovely long weekends in the country at Tye House in Sussex [whereher] neighbours [included] A.A. Milne (1892-1966) and his family:’Christopher Robin, though some years younger than I, joined in swimmingraces in a muddy field pool. He and his father called each other Moon andBlue. I never knew why or which was which, but felt deeply sorry for himhaving to play in a garden with a statue of himself surrounded by littleanimals. ’44 After leaving University Diana married Kenneth Marr-Johnson,began to write novels and had three sons. Her experiences among thedepressed parts of north Paddington led to her founding Beauchamp Lodgein 1940 - still going strong - and joining the Labour Party. The mysteriousfigure, Brendan Bracken (1917-1958), North Paddington’s Member ofParliament 1929-45, helped in this endeavour and also took her adviceabout opening the Underground to the public during wartime air raids overLondon when she worked as a fire-warden in Chelsea.Clare Lawson Dick (1913-1987) from the class of 1931-33, foundemployment as a filing clerk at the BBC in 1935, and her diaries reveal afrantic social life, turning down several proposals of marriage while stillenjoying the sexual freedom the 1930s allowed to young people. 4s With theoutbreak of the Second World War she moved centre stage to become aminuting clerk for the BBC’s programme board and, in 1942, was promotedto programme planning assistant. By 1962 she was chief assistant in whatwas then the Home Service and served as its acting head from 1964-5,then acting controller of its replacement, Radio 4, from 1968-9, and shouldhave been appointed controller Radio 4 in 1969 but Tony Whitby (1929-1973) was given the job. However, he died of cancer and she becameacting controller again from 1974, finally being appointed controller in 1975,retiring in October 1976. During these years she was a caustic observer ofwhat she described as the mismanagement of BBC radio and, with GerardMansell, helped to start the World at One news programme and her namewas also linked with such programmes as The Critics and, after herretirement, she proposed the format that became Radio Scotland. The titleof one of her tape-recorded oral history interviews, held in BBC archives,illustrates how she felt about the BBC: Women’s Place is in the Wrong! 4~Joan Skipsey (1915-1999), later Galwey, joined the Diploma course in1934 and so experienced two entirely different approaches to howjournalism was taught in London University. In her first year PracticalJournalism ’appeared to be simply one afternoon a week, with a kindlygnome hunched over a table on a rostrum, talking. I don’t think he everasked us to write anything. None of it seemed to relate in any way to my212MOD100051383