Marmaduke Hussey’s career in newspapers culminated in his years as chief executive of Times Newspapers (TNL) from 1971 to 1982, when the company was owned by the Thomson Organisation. But at the beginning of December 1979 TNL’s strategy of suspending publication of The Times and The Sunday Times as a means of securing economies through realistic production agreements with printworkers and other trade unions led to both titles being off the streets for 11-months.

The confrontation ended in a humiliating defeat for the management, with production being resumed in November 1980 on terms that left the unions as strong and seemingly uncontrollable as ever. As chief executive, Hussey took much of the blame, although the policy of confrontation had in fact been suggested by the proprietor Kenneth Thomson. At 58, Hussey decided to “relax, recoup and look around”. To the rest of the world it seemed he had been put out to grass.

Six years later, in September 1986, he was telephoned out of the blue by the Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, offering him the job of Chairman of the BBC.

Hussey thought he was too old and that it was an “appalling job”, and he went to bed in a state of shock. But William Waldegrave, brother of his wife Susan and then a junior minister in the Thatcher Government, followed up Hurd’s invitation by assuring him that the whole Cabinet backed it. And so Hussey accepted.

It was never going to be an easy task. The BBC was in a precarious state. The Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, was openly hostile (and felt that the feeling was mutual). The future of the licence fee was in doubt.

As soon as Hussey’s appointment was announced, it was criticised in some quarters as a grand establishment stitch-up; it was noted that Lady Susan Hussey had served as Lady-in-Waiting to the Queen since 1960. Within minutes of the announcement, Gerald Kaufman, who confidently expected to be Labour’s Home Secretary after the forthcoming election, broadcast live from the party conference in Blackpool that one of his first actions would be to sack Hussey. Kaufman did not become the next Home Secretary, and Hussey remained in post at the BBC for ten years.

The son of a colonial civil servant and Olympic hurdler, Marmaduke (Dukie to friends and colleagues) James Hussey was born in 1923, and educated at Rugby and Trinity College, Oxford, where he took a first in history and won a cricketing Blue.

During the war he served in the Grenadier Guards. At Anzio in January 1944 he was commanding a platoon when he was hit at point-blank range by sub-machine-gun fire, severely wounded and taken prisoner. His right leg was amputated in Italy, and he was then transferred to a camp in Germany where he underwent surgery for a seriously damaged spine.

He was to spend six years in hospital before being able to complete his university studies. He later recalled that he had never doubted that he would survive, and determined from the start not to let his disability dominate his life. His accompanying cane was his trademark.

On occasion he used it to advantage, unhitching the leg and propping against the wall of his office to discomfit tough union negotiators when they came to confront him. During the dispute at The Times, one of the pickets slammed a car door on his false leg. He took it as good fortune not to have lost his other one. He liked to say that he regarded himself as fortunate in encountering the worst shot in the German army, who failed to kill him at three yards’ range. His injuries and the pain they caused him meant that his life was very clearly focused on targets that he set himself day by day. As he wrote: “I normally meet them because I haven’t got the guts to admit that I failed.”

In 1949 Hussey joined Associated Newspapers as a management trainee. It was to be the beginning of more than 30 years in the newspaper industry, 22 of them with Associated Newspapers, publishers of the Daily Mail. By 1964 he had become a director and by 1967 was managing director of Harmsworth Publications. He always felt that his felt his greatest achievement was to persuade David English to join the Daily Sketch, since English was to go on to transform the fortunes of Associated when he edited the Mail.

By the time Hussey went to TNL in 1971 he had amassed great experience of negotiating with trades unions and was only too aware of their adoitness in extracting pay increases out of a weak, divided group of newspaper managements, who were furthermore suspicious of each other and did not scruple to take advantage of any industrial disputes their rivals might suffer.

At TNL Hussey was to find a Times, in particular, suffering from the multiple ailments of poor circulation and advertising revenue, combined with bad, and deteriorating, industrial relations. Confronting these in a climate of spiralling costs was to be the central preoccuption of his time at TNL.