My father, Peter Rosier, who has died aged 82 of cancer, worked for the BBC for 25 years, rising to the top of his profession to become head of corporate affairs and press relations.
He joined the BBC in 1968 as publicity officer for TV news and current affairs programmes, including Panorama, from Southern TV, where he had been a publicist since 1965. At the BBC he was promoted to head of radio publicity and head of its information division before taking up the role of head of corporate affairs and press relations.
Dad’s departure from the BBC in 1993 prompted stories in tabloids and broadsheets alike. They noted his popularity – and his deft manoeuvring from employee to consultant. In 1993 he and a close friend, Marshall Stewart, set up Harthill Communications, where he worked into his early 70s.
As well as being a brilliant communications professional, he was also known for the pioneering medical treatment he received following his diagnosis of laryngeal cancer in 1988. He had already had throat cancer in 1980, but this time the treatment involved the total removal of his voice box. While troubling for someone used to trading on his voice, it didn’t hold him back. At 45 he was one of the youngest people to have had a laryngectomy, becoming a poster person for the procedure.
He was born in Kew, south west London, to Percy, who worked in a bespoke shoemaking business, Kember & Co, that belonged to the family of his wife, Rose (nee Kember). Peter left Therfield school in Leatherhead, Surrey, at 16, determined not to follow his father into the family business. Instead, in 1957, he joined the British Horological Journal in Hammersmith as a writer, while taking evening classes in shorthand.
When he was 21 he left the journal to become a protege of a Fleet Street man, Joe Vodicka, at his news agency in Cambridge in the mid-1960s. His stories about his times there – including interviews with Simon and Garfunkel and drinks with Kenneth Tynan – were fascinating.
In 1971 Peter married Suzy Ingram, and they had three children, Ben, Milly and me. The marriage ended in divorce in 1997.
Dad inspired a love for comms – and Brentford FC – in his children. In the days before mobiles, the kitchen table was covered in newspapers, and we played switchboard to journalists seeking a response on the latest BBC “scandal”; we all vividly recall the fallout following Paul Daniels’s fake death in 1987. It is no surprise that all three of us ended up working in communications.
But it was his tenacity that we will remember. After his laryngectomy in 1988 he was diagnosed in the early 2000s with prostate cancer before a final, terminal diagnosis in 2016. With his usual stubbornness, he well outlived his 18-month prognosis.
Peter is survived by his second wife, Pamela (nee Carpenter), whom he met online in 2000 and married in 2004, his three children, his grandchildren Adam, Francesca and Helena, and his sister, Patricia.
