Gordon Honeycombe, who has died aged 79, was one of the faces of Independent Television News (ITN) between 1965 and 1977, returning to the small screen in the 1980s to read the early morning news on TV-am for five years before leaving Britain in 1989 for a new life in Australia.
He was a struggling actor when he joined ITN as a newscaster. “The news editor invited me to his office where I read two minutes’ worth of headlines as a test,” he recalled. “Two weeks later, I was reading the news, earning £25 a week.”
He left ITN in 1977 to concentrate on a writing career. His last newscast was to have been on Christmas Day, but in mid-November he wrote a controversial article in the Daily Mail in support of the national firemen’s strike. Suspended by the editor of ITN, Honeycombe decided to leave on the spot so that he could speak more freely on the firemen’s behalf.
But in 1984 he returned to news-reading with TV-am. For the next five years he read some seven bulletins a morning until the early starts at 4.30am each day eventually took their toll. In 1989 he decided to change his life. “Although my career was going well, it struck me that I was 53 and time was passing me by. Fed up with the British climate, I quit TV-am and emigrated to Perth.” He became an Australian resident in 1993.
Honeycombe at work in 1972
Honeycombe combined a television career with parallel ones as a novelist, actor and playwright. He was also a successful historian of crime. In 1982 his illustrated survey, The Murders of the Black Museum (1871-1970), detailed 50 case histories of murder for which there are exhibits in Scotland Yard’s Black Museum, now designated the Crime Museum, which is closed to the public.
It included an account of the Victorian burglar Charles Peace, a candidate for the accolade of Britain’s most notorious criminal, hanged in 1879 for the murder of Arthur Dyson. When his book was published, Honeycombe was sent a handwritten account by the descendants of the original investigating police inspector, which he passed to the museum. He incorporated the new material in a retelling of the case in More Murders of the Black Museum (1993).
The son of a sales manager with an American oil company, Ronald Gordon Honeycombe was born on September 27 1936 in Karachi, then in British India, now Pakistan, and educated at the Edinburgh Academy, where he took a part in the school’s dramatic and concert productions. He first acted in Shakespeare in 1950, as Goneril in a school production of King Lear, when he was 13 and six feet tall.
Gordon Honeycombe in 1968
In 1955, he joined the Royal Artillery, and spent most of his National Service in Hong Kong, where he was also a part-time radio announcer with BBC Radio Hong Kong. In a radio talent competition he won second prize, singing The Surrey with the Fringe on Top.
He went up to University College, Oxford to read English in 1957, spending his 1958 summer vacation as a radio announcer with the Scottish Home Service in Glasgow. In December that year he was diagnosed with TB and spent six months in hospital. He acted at Oxford, and in 1960 was Peter in his own dramatisation of the medieval mystery plays called The Miracles, which he co-directed.
Graduating in 1961, he became a professional actor with a company touring schools and other institutions, and in May 1962 joined the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon, for 18 months. Although he took bit parts on television, he spent most of this period on the dole.
Honeycombe reading the news in 1974
In May 1965 Honeycombe joined ITN as a script-writer and newsreader, and over the next 12 years became nationally known as a newscaster, mainly on the early and weekend bulletins. Twice named the most popular newscaster in national polls run by the Daily Mirror and the Sun, he left ITN in November 1977.
He interleaved his news-reading duties with television screenplays; his first play for television, The Golden Vision, written with Neville Smith, was produced and directed by Tony Garnett and Ken Loach in 1968. Later that year he was the ITV commentator for the 50th Anniversary Service of the RAF held in Westminster Abbey. In 1975 ITV screened his second television play, Time and Again.
Honeycombe’s first novel, Neither the Sea Nor the Sand (1969) was followed by Dragon Under the Hill (1972). In 1974 his third book, Adam’s Tale, a factual account of the drug squad at New Scotland Yard, was hailed as “the most remarkable book dealing with the British police ever published”. His fourth, Red Watch (1976), a true account of a fire at Maida Vale in December 1974 in which seven people died, became a bestseller.
His radio work included dramatisations of Paradise Lost and Malory’s Morte D’Arthur called Lancelot and Guinevere, both for Radio 4, the latter transferring to the stage in 1980 at the Old Vic.
Honeycombe with Anna Ford in 2005
In June 1977 he wrote, arranged and appeared in a Royal Gala Performance at the Chichester Festival Theatre, celebrating the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. In October that year he devised another Royal Gala at the Theatre Royal, York, to celebrate the Prince of Wales’s visit to York, as Patron of the York Archaeological Trust.
His other books included Nagasaki 1945, Royal Wedding, and The Edge Of Heaven (all 1981).
His illustrated history of Selfridges was published in 1984 to mark its 75th anniversary.
Honeycombe was fascinated by his own family’s history, and in 1984 organised a gathering of 160 members of the Honeycombe clan. All the Honeycombes in the world (about 350) are descended from one man, Matthew Honeycombe, who lived in a Cornish village, St Cleer, 350 years ago.
In 1993 he became a permanent Australian resident. “I’ve become seduced by the Australian philosophy that 'tomorrow’s another day’,” he confessed, “and I lead a relaxed life which couldn’t be better.”
He never married.
Gordon Honeycombe, born September 27 1936, died October 9 2015
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