Dennis Bardens
Occult writer who founded Panorama
CAR Hills
Saturday February 21, 2004
The Guardian
Dennis Bardens, who has died aged 92, played a brief, but crucial, role in broadcasting history as the founding editor, in 1953, of BBC Television's Panorama programme, then a news magazine. He was also a friend and encourager of the occult artist Austin Osman Spare. Many of the books that Bardens was later to write concerned magical subjects, on which he was an acknowledged expert. The disparate character of these achievements gives some clue to his protean nature.
Bardens was born in Midhurst, Sussex, the son of an army major and an actor. His mother deserted him and went to Australia when he was three, and his father was often away on military duty. Bardens did not get on with his siblings, so he had to fend for himself at Portsmouth grammar school, which he left early.
After serving a newspaper apprenticeship in Cardiff, he made his way to London in the late 1920s, with the intention of becoming a poet. He soon joined the bohemian and occult circles gathered around Victor Neuberg, the great disciple of Aleister Crowley - whom Bardens once met - and discoverer of Dylan Thomas.
It was through Neuberg that Bardens met Spare, whose works are now highly regarded, but who was then living in squalor on the Walworth Road, in south London. They became great friends, and, shortly after the second world war, Bardens organised an important exhibition of Spare's work. Spare subsequently painted several portraits of Bardens.
Meanwhile, Bardens was proving himself as a journalist, working, during the 1930s, for the Sunday Chronicle, Sunday Express and Daily Mirror. In 1940, he became a distinguished reporter of the Blitz. After discharge from the Royal Artillery on medical grounds, he spent two years with the Ministry of Information, and was in charge of coordinating plans for newspaper services in Britain in the event of a German invasion. In 1943, he was transferred to liaison work with the Czechoslovak government in exile, which included, at the end of the war, secret service work in Czechoslovakia.
After 1945, Bardens worked on periodicals published by Odhams Press for three years, and, in 1949, was appointed editor of the BBC radio documentary series Focus. However, Panorama, the product of his subsequent move into television, was not, at first, a great success, and, after six months, he moved on to work, initially, for the Foreign Office and then for commerical television, at the inception of ITV in 1955.
In later life, he was mainly a freelance television editor, writer and journalist, distinguishing himself as a royalty watcher and occultist, and with 15 books to his name, ranging from Churchill In Parliament (1962) to Ghosts And Hauntings (1965) and The Lady Killer (1972), about the French multiple murderer Dr Landru. Another of his books, Elizabeth Fry (1961), is to be republished this year.
Bardens had a lifelong interest in psychical research, and was a life member of the Ghost Club Society. He was also a member of International Pen, the Society of Authors and the National Union of Journalists. A man as sharp as he was kindly, as mischievous as he was portentous, he was an indefatigable coureur de femmes, and was the centre of a vast, vivid and sometimes quarrelsome circle which, despite a whiff of the aristocracy, was essentially democratic.
Bardens was always vigorous in defending his right to be acknowledged as the true founder of Panorama and, at the programme's 50th anniversary celebrations last year, he spoke movingly about those long-past events, with which the official Panorama history, by Richard Lindley, fully credits him.
Essentially a self-made man, he had all the passionate enthusiasm and volubility of the autodidact. Hard-nosed newspaperman, occultist, mason, clubman, spy, writer, gamey man about town, Bardens's roles were infinite and, although he talked about every aspect of his existence at disarming length, he retained a core of mystery.
He was married to the former Marie Marks, who predeceased him, as did their son Peter (obituary, April 8 2002), a rock keyboard musician.
· Dennis Conrad Bardens, journalist and occultist, born July 19 1911; died February 7 2004