A talk by Sir John Tusa, Recorded on Tuesday, November 19, 2024
Sir John Tusa is a highly distinguished British arts administrator, radio and television journalist and writer. John was born in Zlín in Czechoslovakia in 1936 into a world on the brink of war, arriving in England in 1939 at the age of three.
Two days before the German occupation of Czechoslovakia on 15 March 1939, John’s father, also John Tusa, flew out of Czechoslovakia on a Bata company plane via Poland, Yugoslavia and France, becoming general manager and later managing director of the Bata factory and its associated village in East Tilbury
British Bata Shoes which was established by the Czechoslovak shoe company according to its international pattern, created a pioneering work-living community around its model modern movement factory in East Tilbury, Essex. Estate houses, tennis courts, a swimming pool, and factory buildings all in for 1930s England, a radical modernist architecture, established an entire live/work community for those that worked at Bata.
Growing up initially near the Bata factory in Tilbury, John was later educated at Gresham’s in Norfolk before reading history at Cambridge.
After Cambridge, he joined the BBC as a radio producer in 1960, going on to present Newsnight from 1980-1986 before becoming MD of the BBC World Service 1986-92. He ran the Barbican Arts Centre 1995-2007 as its managing director and was Executive Chairman of the Clore Leadership Programme from 2007-14.
He has written numerous books on the arts and co-authored “The Nuremberg Trial” and “The Berlin Blockade” with his late wife Ann Tusa.
His latest book, "Bright Sparks - Seven cases of not becoming Damp Squibs" is published by Bloomsbury Business.
John commented, "From the neo-Bauhaus modernism of my birth town, Bata Zlín, to the so called 'brutalism' of the Barbican, I have always lived comfortably with modernism. After all, it is the architecture of my life and times"