Greg Dyke: Inside Story. Greg Dyke

father was born in one of these, the Trafalgar. They were a fairly affluent North London family and there is a Dyke family vault in the Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington, near where Christine, my eldest daughter, now lives with her partner Martin. My grandfather died in his early thirties in the 1919 flu epidemic, which worldwide claimed more victims than the First World War. My dad was seven at the time.

      His mother, my paternal grandmother, left home at the age of fourteen when her widowed mother took up with another man – known only in the family as Mr Sadgrove – and had an illegitimate child, Horace James. Years later, at her ninetieth birthday party, everyone kept pointing out Horace and saying, in very loud whispers, ‘He’s the illegitimate one, but don’t mention it.’ When she left home my grandmother got a job as a barmaid at one of the Dyke pubs and married out of her class when she became the wife of the publican’s son, Leonard Dyke. He left my grandmother penniless when he died; any money he had he left in trust for my dad and his brother Leonard. My grandmother wasn’t even allowed to continue running their pub because, as a woman, she couldn’t hold a licence. Instead, the brewery offered her an off-licence and general grocer’s shop in Tresham Avenue, Hackney, where my father and his brother Len were brought up.

      My grandmother Lil came from a big Walthamstow family that was dominated for more than half a century by four powerful sisters: Lil, Beat, Flo, and Ruby. They were known in the family as the big four, and all dominated their husbands. They all lived long lives; two of them received telegrams from the Queen on their hundredth birthdays. My grandmother died at the age of 101. She and I never really got on: according to the rest of the family we were too alike. We were both very competitive and hated losing (as a young boy I regularly beat her at cards). One of her brothers, Albert Silverton, worked as a commissionaire at Broadcasting House in Portland Place in the 1930s. When I joined the BBC it became a family joke – commissionaire to Director-General in only two generations.

      My parents met at St John’s Church in Hackney and got married in 1939, living first in Birmingham and later in Bromley. They moved to Hayes soon after the end of the war. As a family we weren’t poor but we never had any money. Like most of those around us, we never went abroad for a family holiday – my first visit overseas came when I was sixteen on a school trip to Paris. And we certainly never ate in restaurants. The first time we ever ate out together as a family was at the Swan and Bottle, a Berni Inn steak bar in Uxbridge: I was 14 or 15 at the time.

      Some things are memorable from that time. I vividly remember being told by my mother that King George VI had died: it was the same day in February 1952 that my brother Ian took the 11-plus exam. For my parents, the King represented something special because of the symbolic role he had played in the East End of London during the Second World War. People in the East End respected the King and Queen because they had stayed in London during the Blitz and had regularly visited the parts of East London that were badly bombed.

      On the day of the King’s funeral they both went to stand by the railway bridge in nearby Southall as the train carrying the King’s body passed by on its way to Windsor. They thought it important that they pay their respects and I can remember to this day my dad leaving in his best suit and trilby hat and my mother in her best dress. They were dressed to the nines just to stand by a railway bridge. This was still the age of respect.

      None of my memories of living in Cerne Close is as exciting as those of the street party my mother helped organize to celebrate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth the following year. My brother Ian took part in a sketch put on by the older kids and I sang a song, pretending that the tennis racket I was holding was a guitar. We all had jellies and sandwiches in the street – it was a magical day for a six-year-old. Nearly fifty years later I sat in the royal box in the grounds of Buckingham Palace as the BBC put on two spectacular concerts to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Queen’s accession, and afterwards I wandered around the Palace meeting members of the Royal Family. It was a lifetime away from Cerne Close.

      I remember the coming of television vividly. My early childhood was spent with Listen with Mother on the Home Service. Then television arrived. Initially, only two people in our street had television sets, the Riches at Number 21 and Mrs Unstead, who lived in the corner house, and all the kids in the street used to pile into one or other house to watch children’s television. And then, in 1953, came the great day when Howard and I, walking home from school, were, by complete coincidence, counting the number of houses that had television aerials. Life in Hayes wasn’t exactly exciting in those days and this was the sort of thing you did as a kid. We turned the corner and, lo and behold, there was an aerial on the roof of our house. We rushed in to find a television set, which my dad had bought so my mother could watch the Coronation and he could watch the Cup Final. We were really excited until about a week later when it stopped working. My dad called out the TV repair man, who came and plugged it back in. Dad was never a practical man, and I’ve followed in his footsteps.

      Our set only received BBC and when ITV started in 1955 my dad refused to change the set, which meant that my brothers and I missed all those early ITV programmes like The Invisible Man, Robin Hood, Take Your Pick, and Double Your Money. I remember we felt very deprived that we couldn’t join in the conversations at school about these programmes. My dad was always of the view that the BBC was ‘proper’ television and that advertiser-funded television was inevitably inferior. He believed this until the day he died in 1990.

      In our last years in Hayes, in the late Fifties, the area began to change rapidly. Southall became a massive centre for Indian immigrants and changed beyond recognition in just a few years. For those original residents who remained in the area the speed of change must have been traumatic. One moment you knew all your neighbours; the next, most of them were strangers from an entirely different culture who didn’t speak your language.

      After we had moved from our street some residents clubbed together to try to prevent Asian families from buying houses in the road. Of course they were branded as racist by some, but that was unfair. They weren’t being unkind or reactionary – quite the opposite. They were simply scared by the pace and scale of change all around them and didn’t understand its causes. They had seen the centre of Southall change beyond recognition and they didn’t want to see the same happen to their street.

      A couple of years ago I went back to the area when, as Director-General, I was invited to open the new hall at Yeading Junior school, where I was a pupil between 1954 and 1958. In 1958 the school was entirely populated by white working-class and lower-middle-class kids. Forty years later it was 80 per cent non-white, with children from dozens of different ethnic backgrounds. If a sociologist had moved into our house when we moved out in 1956, and had stayed to study Cerne Close and the surrounding area over the next forty years, he or she would have had a brilliant case study of the impact of immigration on a small community.

      These were the days when the 11-plus dominated life for parents in streets like ours. If you were one of the 20 per cent who passed the exam you went to the local grammar school; if you didn’t, you went to the secondary modern and, educationally, were effectively written off. No one we knew went to private school. I don’t think anyone considered it an option: it wasn’t on their radar screen even if they could have afforded it, which they couldn’t.

      One of the most traumatic memories I have of my childhood was when my eldest brother Ian failed the 11-plus. It was a family tragedy, and my parents were distraught. I took the exam six years later when there were four or five boys from our street taking it. Only one failed but his parents were broken hearted. My hatred of the 11-plus, and the whole concept of selection at the age of eleven, is rooted in those experiences. This was one of the main reasons why, later in life, I joined the Labour Party and Sue and I sent all our kids to comprehensive schools.

      We left Hayes in 1957 to move to a bigger house three miles away in Hillingdon. My parents paid £4,500 for it: today it would be worth somewhere between £350,000 and £400,000. We moved there when I was nine and it was certainly a move up market. We had a detached three-bedroomed house with a large garden where my father spent most Saturdays and Sundays tending his vegetables, when he wasn’t fishing at a gravel pit in nearby Harefield.

      Unlike Ian, both Howard and I passed the 11-plus and consequently went to Hayes Grammar School; neither of us