Although best known as a television newsreader, Gordon Honeycombe, who has died aged 79, was also an actor, narrator and writer. Behind the mask appropriate to the authoritative imparting of information lay a restless and inquiring mind.
At one point in 1965 his acting work was going nowhere, and he was thinking of emigrating to Australia. However, when he saw a student contemporary from Oxford reading the news on television, Honeycombe decided that he could do it better. Within a fortnight of an audition, he was reading the national news. It was his first “real” job, and in staying for 12 years he became one of ITN’s longest-serving newscasters, presenting mainly early evening and weekend bulletins.
During that time he contributed to the writing of a Wednesday play, The Golden Vision (1968) for the BBC, and produced his first novel, Neither the Sea Nor the Sand (1969). This was made into the film also known as The Exorcism of Hugh (1972), a fantasy combining romance and horror, with Susan Hampshire, Frank Finlay and Michael Petrovitch. The Northumbrian ghost story Dragon Under the Hill (1972) was followed by a factual account of the drug squad in London, Adam’s Tale (1974), and a book on the fire service, Red Watch (1976), which scrutinised the courageous actions of firefighters at the Worsley hotel, west London, in 1974. They rescued 50 people by scaling ladders and climbing up the walls of the building, but seven people died, including a probationary firefighter.
By November 1977, the firefighters were taking industrial action, picketing fire stations in support of a pay claim which they saw as years overdue. As a newscaster discussing and preparing the content of his bulletins, as well as reading them, Honeycombe was familiar with the usual objective reports about the issue. But he then wrote for a national daily newspaper a full-page article backing the firefighters: “It is sad that the rights of these men to a better wage have been ignored, not just this year or during the last decade, but for 100 years since the brigade was formed,” he said. “There is only one humane solution. Give the firemen back their self-respect and pride. Give them the money.” His ITN editor suspended him and asked for assurances that he would make no further statement on the dispute. Honeycombe had already arranged to leave ITN to concentrate on writing, and since he had the paperback of Red Watch appearing imminently, he declined. He pointed out that he was bound to be asked by journalists covering his book what he thought about the firemen’s industrial action, and that he could not in honesty say other than that he supported it. This he continued to do, greeted as a hero when speaking at union meetings and picket lines around England and Wales, and helping the firemen to a positive outcome.
After parting company amicably with ITN, he spent the next year doing acting jobs, singing ballads as a part of music-hall turns and making his debut as a television actor, playing a Jeremy Paxman-type interviewer in the ATV series The Foundation. People had forgotten, he said cheerfully, that he had started off as an actor.
His prolific writing for the stage included a musical, The Princess and the Goblins, staged at the Quaker school, Great Ayton, North Yorkshire (1976); a version of Paradise Lost, given in York, and at the Old Vic and the Edinburgh festival (1975-77); another musical, Waltz of My Heart (1980), given in Bournemouth; and Lancelot and Guinevere (also 1980), staged by the Old Vic.
His books continued with Nagasaki 1945 and Royal Wedding (both 1981). In a return to true-crime writing, The Murders of the Black Museum (1982) spawned a number of sequels.
In 1984 Honeycombe joined the new breakfast television station TV-am as a newscaster, and stayed there for five years. Getting up at 4.30 each morning, he presented seven bulletins. A return to acting followed: Suspects (1989) in Swansea; Aladdin in Wimbledon (1989) and in Bournemouth (1990), where he lived; and a tour of Run for Your Wife (1990) with the comedian Les Dawson.
Then came the move to Australia that he had contemplated a quarter of a century earlier. At the start of it he produced and directed The Redemption: A Play of the Life of Christ, his own adaptation of medieval dramas from York, Towneley, Chester and Coventry, at the Perth festival, Western Australia. He remained in Perth, where he found the climate much more to his liking.
Gordon was born in Karachi, in pre-partition India, now in Pakistan, the son of another Gordon, a sales manager with an American oil company, and Louie (Louise, nee Fraser). He went to Britain with his parents in 1946 and was educated at Edinburgh academy, after which national service with the Royal Artillery (1955-57) took him to Hong Kong, where he doubled up as a radio announcer. He then gained an English degree at University College, Oxford.
His first ambition was to be a writer, but he was offered a job in a theatrical company run by Richard Ingrams. For four months the six actors in the group each played 10 parts, touring schools with a dramatised anthology about prisons and prisoners in various countries and at various times in history.
When he was auditioned by Laurence Olivier for a part at Chichester, he put his rejection down to being so tall – 6ft 4in – that he dwarfed other actors. “I present such an extreme figure – useful to drape a set with, but to be featured in front isn’t so good, especially for smaller actors,” he said.
But the Royal Shakespeare Company felt differently. In 1960, his play The Miracles had been staged at Oxford, with Honeycombe as Peter, and the RSC took it up for performances in Southwark Cathedral in 1963 and at Consett, Co Durham, in 1970. In 1962 the RSC had wanted an extra actor at Stratford, and gave him £11 a week. After a year, he was moved to the company’s London theatre, the Aldwych, where he played for another year.
However, when the company went to the US with King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he realised that he would be travelling 3,000 miles to say five words in one play and none in the other. He decided to stay in London, with some acting on television until he found the role in that medium in which he excelled.
In Australia he specialised in voiceovers for radio and television, and continued to take a few film roles. “I’ve become seduced by the Australian philosophy that ‘tomorrow’s another day’ and I lead a relaxed life which couldn’t be better,” he told an interviewer in May 2013.
In 2005 he returned to Britain to co-present an edition of ITV’s Evening News with Mary Nightingale to mark the channel’s 50th anniversary. He was also a visitor to Cornwall, and remained fascinated by his family’s roots, having made his forebears’ dispersal beyond the county the subject of a BBC TV series, Family History (1979).
As he noted in starting his family archive from the 14th century, “In the beginning was a word, and that word was Honyacombe.” In 1984 he organised a Honeycombe Heritage Weekend to bring together from around the world 160 of the clan descended from Matthew Honeycombe of St Cleer, on Bodmin Moor, born about 1660. But he did not add to the number of those bearing the name, claiming to be too immersed in his work to marry.
• Ronald Gordon Honeycombe, television newscaster, author and actor, born 27 September 1936; died 9 October 2015
• Dennis Barker died in March this year
