Ray Gosling

Ray Gosling, speaking at The Brief Encounter (Croydon), 2 December 2008

Ray Gosling (1939–2013) was a journalist, broadcaster, and gay rights activist, and one of the founders of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality. He was brought up in Northampton, but lived mainly in Nottingham for most of his life. He wrote and presented more than 100 television documentaries, and was a long-term presenter on the Inside Out programme for BBC East Midlands.

Early life

Gosling was born in Brixworth, near Northampton in 1939. He was educated at Northampton Grammar School and the University of Leicester, and also briefly worked as a railway signalman, before dropping out to become the manager of a band, and then working in a factory in London and as a youth worker in Leicester. His book Personal Copy: A memoir of the 60s, published 2010, is a vivid description of his time in Leicester, running a youth group and trying to avoid the wholesale demolition of the St Anns area, where there were still many sound and valued houses amongst the slums.

Broadcasting career

He first worked in radio when he was interviewed as a campaigner for tenants' rights in Nottingham. He was then commissioned to record a series of talks, mostly interviews with what were called "ordinary people", broadcast during intermissions of classical musical recitals on BBC radio.

Over the years Gosling wrote and presented more than a hundred television documentaries, as well as several hundred radio documentaries. In the 1960s and 1970s he was one of the best known faces in television documentary programming. In this period he also hosted a weekly North West regional programme on Granada TV, On Site, in which members of the public, in a different town each week, confronted officialdom with their concerns and complaints. His 1974 Granada series Gosling’s Travels was praised by the Sunday Telegraph and compared to documentaries by John Betjeman and Ian Nairn. He specialised in "the sideways look at such eclectic and quintessentially British institutions as the working classes... and faded seaside towns, the minutiae of life."

In many of his documentaries on BBC Radio he used his distinctively quirky writing style to point up the rich diversity of people and places in Britain. Some of his best-remembered radio programmes were personal portraits of a series of different towns. In 1982 he wrote and narrated an episode of the television series Great Little Railways for the BBC, featuring northern Portugal. His television documentaries also included Granada TV's The Human Jigsaw in 1984, and a series about football supporters, The People's Game, which he narrated.

In 2000 he returned to television in a series of documentaries about his personal life over recent years, including his bankruptcy. This led to him being taken on by BBC East Midlands in 2004 as a regular presenter on Inside Out, where he reported in his own individual style. His first film for Inside Out revisited his first TV documentary, Two Town Mad, made for the BBC in 1962. It was a comparison between Leicester and Nottingham and Gosling went back to the places and the people in the original film.

Next came films on garden gnomes, statues, bus travel, OAP workers, frugal living, new arts buildings and windmills. His film on Joe Orton was part of a programme which won the RTS Midlands Best Regional programme in 2008.

Gay campaigning

Initially sceptical about the need for homosexual law reform, he changed his mind when an acquaintance was sent to two years in prison, and became an active supporter of the North West Committee for Homosexual Law Reform which later became the Campaign for Homosexual Equality.

An early CHE project was Esquire Clubs, aiming to set up clubs for gay people in various towns. Ray was unable to persuade friends in his home town of Nottingham to work for a club there, and spent a lot of time visiting other towns to promote the idea.

I was always doing meetings. Once, twice a week. Wolverhampton, Bournemouth, Southampton, Norwich. All meetings of gay people. And they would all be very enthusiastic to begin with. …. When they’d talked about it a little bit, and you wanted their name on the committee, because you wanted local committees, they all started to pull out.

In 1971 there seemed to be a real chance to get a club going in Burnley. Faced with considerable local opposition, CHE organised a public meeting in Burnley library with Ray in the chair.

"That there was no violence was largely due to the chairing of Gosling, who was praised in the Express and News report of the meeting for maintaining order 'precarious at times'.

Gosling's background in grass-roots activism chimed with CHE's stated attempt to forge a democratic mass movement in which gay people were encouraged to take control of their own lives and fight for their rights. This was in contrast to much pre-1967 work by, in particular, the London-based Homosexual Law Reform Society, which was seen as "top-down", metropolitan and somewhat elitist and not run by gay people themselves (or not ostensibly so: in fact, HLRS founder A E Dyson and long-time HLRS Secretary Antony Grey were both gay, but never said so at the time). Thus, at a CHE rally in Trafalgar Square, on 23 November 1975, Gosling said: "Last time it was done by an elite, who did it by stealth ... This time it has to be done by us, brothers and sisters". Ray continued to be an active member of CHE, and remained one of its vice-presidents until his death.

In later years Allan Horsfall and Ray Gosling ran Gay Monitor seeking justice for men wrongly accused of sexual abuse.

Later life

During the 1990s, his professional fortunes waned, and his long-term partner Bryn Allsop was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Gosling nursed him until his death in late 1999. He was declared bankrupt in 2000, and was stated to be living in poverty in 2002. In an interview with LeftLion magazine in August 2013 Gosling stated that he had planned on writing his memoirs for a few years but had never quite got round to doing it. "Life is for living, not for writing," he said. He also talked about his lifelong relationship with alcohol: "I've been drinking since I was twelve. I drink brandy and wine now. In those days I drank ten pints a night. There were fifty pubs in my St Anns. I'd have a drink in every one."

His BBC Four documentary Ray Gosling OAP concerned his decision to move into sheltered accommodation. It won the Jonathan Gili Award For Most Entertaining Documentary Award at Grierson 2007 over tough competition from Alan Sugar's The Apprentice. It followed the highly acclaimed BBC Four documentaries Bankrupt and Pensioned Off. Other radio contributions included items on BBC Radio 4's You and Yours in 2008 and 2009.

He was also involved in the work of young film maker Leila Newton-Fox, as his house was used as a location for her short film Stalemate. Also, he did some narration for another short film by Leila that is currently in development about a blind man who was led down the stairs of the twin towers and brought to safety by his guide dog during 9 11.

In 2011 he confessed on television to having used a pillow, many years before, to suffocate a former lover who had been dying in terrible pain from AIDS. He was arrested on suspicion of murder, but released without being charged, and later given a suspended sentence for wasting police time.

The value of Gosling's work was recognised by Nottingham Trent University in 2005, when it stepped in to save "an amazing treasure trove of groundbreaking TV and radio work which was in danger of being lost forever". The veteran broadcaster's archive, which includes films, tapes, scripts, cuttings and background notes providing perspective on 40 years of social history, is now safely preserved within the School of Arts and Humanities.

Ray Gosling died in November 2013, aged 74.

References

<references>