But for the interruption of wartime service in the Navy and a postwar secondment to the Colonial Service, Oliver Whitley devoted his career to the BBC where he rose to be chief assistant to the director-general and then the first managing director of the corporation’s external services.

John Oliver Whitley was born in 1912. His father, J. H. Whitley, was a Yorkshire cotton-spinner who, after many years as Liberal MP for Halifax, and serving as Speaker of the House of Commons, was a successful Chairman of the BBC during the director-generalship of Sir John Reith.

Whitley was educated at Clifton College and New College, Oxford, and had gone to the Bar, but he was persuaded by his father’s enthusiasm for what he saw as a great new medium of democratic culture, and he joined the BBC in 1935. In 1939 he was attached to the Monitoring Service which soon became a 24-hour operation monitoring 150 foreign news bulletins each day. Amid some controversy, the service moved to Caversham in 1941, and Whitley resigned to join up.

Whitley spent the rest of the war in the Navy. He enlisted as a rating and was commissioned a year later. He served in Combined Operations; shortly before D-Day, while trying to disentangle his landing craft from other vessels in Southampton Docks, he heard his name called, and far above him on the jetty made out the towering, gold-braided figure of Captain Lord Reith, RNVR.

After the Normandy operations he was transferred to the Far East, where he took part in the recapture of Singapore. He returned to the BBC in 1946, and was almost immediately seconded to the Colonial Office to advise on the developments of broadcasting in British territories overseas. He returned in 1949 as head of the General Overseas Service, and in 1955 he was appointed Assistant Controller Overseas Service.

In 1958, feeling that his prospects for promotion at Bush House were blocked, he moved into the corporation’s central administration, first as appointments officer and then as controller of staff training and appointments. The BBC at this time was keenly aware of the scrutiny of the Pilkington committee, and decided to dip its toe into the unfamiliar waters of management training. This was the beginning of the series of Uplands courses, so named after the house in Buckinghamshire where they were held for many years. Their success owed much to Whitley’s unobtrusive but principled direction — his concern for the BBC, like his father’s before him, had an almost pastoral quality.

He was also largely instrumental in effecting a period of reconciliation between Reith and the BBC (the first had been when Sir William Haley was Director-General).

Reith had looked on J. H. Whitley almost as a father and took a paternal interest in the career of his son, although he could be impatient at what he saw as Oliver’s reluctance to promote his own interests. He had been horrified in 1959 when Whitley told him he thought Hugh Greene was the best internal candidate to succeed Sir Ian Jacob as Director- General: “I wondered if there could be anyone better than himself,” Reith wrote in his diary, “and he would have his father to help him.”

Whitley persuaded Reith to visit Uplands several times and they remained on good terms for several years. Reith, however, soon reverted to the belief that the corporation had fallen away from his ideals, and when Whitley declined to assent to the proposition that Juke Box Jury was “evil”, relations were broken off and never resumed.

Whitley had by this time become a member of the board of management as Hugh Greene’s chief assistant. In the turbulent days of the mid-to-late 1960s he was increasingly seen by his colleagues as the conscience of the BBC, and many would have liked to see him follow Greene in Reith’s old chair. But age, and perhaps a certain civilised lack of ambition, told against him, and he returned instead at the end of his career to Bush House as the first managing director of the External Services.

In retirement he and his Scots wife Elspeth moved from Surrey to live near Oban where he cultivated his garden and was active in the Liberal Party and in church work. In 1974 he received the Valiant for Truth Award of the Order of Christian Unity.

He is survived by his wife, and their daughter and four sons.

Oliver Whitley, managing director of BBC External Broadcasting 1969-72, was born on February 12, 1912. He died on March 22, 2005, aged 93.