University College Oxford Record 2020

to ask awkward questions rather than just reflect
grief and shock.”
Born in Liverpool, Peter was the son of
George Sissons, a merchant navy officer. Peter was
educated at Dovedale primary school, where the
future Beatle John Lennon and comedian Jimmy
Tarbuck were fellow pupils, and at the Liverpool
Institute high school alongside Paul McCartney
and George Harrison.
He then went to University College Oxford,
where he obtained a degree in philosophy, politics
and economics and had his first journalistic
experience, writing football reports for Cherwell,
the student newspaper. This won him a place on
the ITN graduate trainee scheme in 1964.
Starting as a bulletin subeditor, he became a
general reporter in 1967, where his career and
indeed his life was nearly cut short during the
Nigerian civil war, when he was shot through
both legs. The wound shaved his femoral artery
and left him in lasting pain thereafter.
Returning to Britain, Sissons became from 1978 a
news presenter on ITN’s News at One. Following
the chaotic launch of Channel 4 News in 1982, he
was employed to restore some order
and led the evening bulletin five nights
a week for the next seven years.
In 1989 Sissons was poached by
the BBC to present the Six O’Clock
News. The lure was that he would
chair Question Time in succession to
Robin Day, which he did for four years.
He also presided in turn over the Nine
O’Clock News then its transmogrification
to Ten O’Clock in 2000. Told in 2003 that the
corporation was seeking younger presenters, he
spent the final six years of his career presenting
bulletins for BBC News 24.
In later years, Sissons would become frustrated
by the BBC’s management and bureaucracy, and
after his retirement railed against its editorial
standards. In 2013 he wrote in the Sunday
Telegraph, “The BBC today for all its high salaries
is woefully short of great managerial and editorial
talent, the sort of leadership you would follow
over the top or into the jungle.” He left the BBC
in 2009 “without a pang of regret”, he told the
Mail on Sunday.
A lifelong supporter of Liverpool FC, Sissons
was a member of the Hillsborough disaster
independent panel: “It was the most worthwhile
thing I have done because its work corrected
such a mammoth injustice,” he said. He published
his memoirs, When One Door Closes, in 2011.
He married Sylvia Bennett in 1965. The
couple had two sons, Jonathan and Michael, and a
daughter, Kate. Sylvia and his children survive him.
1963:
SEAN TIMOTHY MCCARTHY
(Marlborough) died on 8 August 2016 aged 72.
He read Medicine at Univ, and spent most of his
working life in the Oxford area, specialising in the
study of geriatrics.
1965:
JOHN LAUCHLAN
CARTER CHIPMAN
(University of Melbourne) died on
13 April 2019. Lauchlan Chipman
came up to Univ as a Commonwealth
Scholar to read for a BPhil in Philosophy.
The following tribute, published by
Monash University on its Vale web page,
is reproduced here by permission:
Former deputy vice-chancellor Professor
Lauchlan Chipman, the lateral-thinking
philosopher responsible for promoting regional
University College Record | October 2020 83