My friend and former work colleague Peter Fraenkel, who has died aged 98, was a greatly admired radio broadcaster. He began his career in Africa before moving to the BBC in London, where he was instrumental in shaping the corporation’s broadcasts to Greece and eastern Europe.
Starting out in the 1950s at the Central African Broadcasting Service, Peter initially made programmes only for African people and entirely in local languages before moving in the early 60s to the BBC’s External Services, writing radio programmes for translation.
Able to speak five languages, in the mid-60s he became Greek programme organiser for the BBC, creating broadcasts that were listened to by many people in that country during an era of censorship following the coup of the colonels.
In the 70s, during the cold war, he became head of the BBC’s East European Service, broadcasting to the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Romania and Yugoslavia. His final job, before retiring in 1986, was as controller of the service.
Peter was born in Breslau (now Wrocław in Poland) in Germany to Hans, a civil servant, and his wife, Margot. His parents were Jewish by culture but were not religious. Considering themselves to be Germans, when the Nazis came to power in 1933 they remained where they were – until Kristallnacht in 1938 convinced them they had no alternative but to leave.
After the family fled to Lusaka in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), Peter went to boarding school in Bulawayo in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and then to the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.
After graduation he returned to Lusaka and joined the Central African Broadcasting Service, where he met the New Zealand-born anthropologist Merran McCulloch, a visiting scholar at Lusaka’s Rhodes-Livingstone Institute. They married in 1958 and later relocated to the UK.
Peter’s years with the BBC were eventful ones. During his time at the East European Service a Bulgarian work colleague, Georgi Markov, was killed in what became known as “the umbrella murder” in 1978, and later, as controller, he oversaw coverage of the rise of Solidarity, the independent trade union in Poland, as well as the emergence of Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia. He also supervised the broadcast by the Russian Service of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s readings of his book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
Throughout an outstanding career Peter was an inspirational figure to many people, including me. He was my supervisor/manager at the BBC from 1982 until 1986, but was well known to me before that and a huge influence, from 1970 onwards, when I was appointed to the post of Zambia Broadcasting Services research fellow at the University of Zambia.
Peter had his first book, Wayaleshi, which chronicled his broadcasting experiences in Africa, published in 1959, and in retirement he wrote extensively, including an autobiography, No Fixed Abode (2005). Just before he died, his first novel, Return of the Wolves, which he had written in the 90s, appeared in print.
Merran died in 2018. He is survived by their sons, Jonathan and Mark.
