Derek Ingram
Derek Thynne Ingram (20 June 1925 – 17 June 2018) was a distinguished journalist and passionate supporter of the Commonwealth. In the 1960s he gave up a successful career as a newspaper editor to start a news service that would reflect the views of people in newly independent African countries and elsewhere in the developing world. He was on first name terms with leaders such as Indira Gandhi and Kenneth Kaunda, and was known to many as “Mr Commonwealth”. Biography The only child of a middle-class family, brought up in North London, Ingram was successful immediately after leaving Highgate School at the age of 16 during WW2. He was earning six guineas a week as a sub-editor on the Daily Sketch at the age of 17. He served as a signalman in the Navy, stationed until 1946 in Rome. After being demobbed, he joined the Daily Express, but in 1949 jumped ship to the Daily Mail, where he rose to deputy editor. He might have become editor, but his liberal politics and ferocious opposition to apartheid and racism in any form put him at odds with the paper's proprietor, Viscount Rothermere. Ingram resigned in 1966, but not before making his views known in Partners in Adventure, one of five books he authored. "Two problems above all torture our minds in this second half of the 20th century," he wrote. "The first is the atomic threat to our civilisation; the second the relationship between the black man and the white. The greatest single factor about the Commonwealth idea is that it transcends all racial barriers." For Ingram, such views were not just theory. In 1967, he founded Gemini News Service, a syndication service that provided an alternative to wire services like Reuters by providing a platform for young journalists from the developing world. Gemini writers included a young Trevor McDonald in Trinidad who would go on to gain fame as a newsreader in the UK. A package of six articles, covering everything from politics to healthcare, education and art, copied on a Gestetner machine, was sent out by mail twice a week, Ingram himself stuffing the envelopes alongside a small, overworked staff. Because of Gemini, newspaper readers in Malaysia, for example, could read articles by journalists from Kenya and vice versa. Gemini pioneered the use of graphics and explanatory maps, which later became standard in newspapers. For many young reporters it was an opportunity to be published that they could get nowhere else, and Ingram would champion young reporters, especially those who came from Commonwealth countries where journalism was in its infancy. Ingram's legacy includes the CJA/Derek Ingram Fellowship, a fund administered as part of Wolfson College's Press Fellowship Programme In Cambridge UK, to support the personal and professional development of early career journalists focused on the Commonwealth. While running Gemini, Ingram continued to report on the Commonwealth, covering 20 CHOGMs – Commonwealth Heads of Government Meetings – stopping only when ill health intervened in his late 1980s. He was amongst