John Drummond (arts administrator)

Sir John Richard Gray Drummond CBE (25 November 1934 – 6 September 2006) was an English arts administrator who spent most of his career at the BBC. He was described as "one of the most formidable figures in the arts world of the UK for 40 years".

Drummond was born in London, the son of a master mariner in the British India line and an Australian lieder singer. He spent much of his childhood in Bournemouth, spending hours in the public library absorbing all he could on creative arts, and also attending concerts by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. He was educated at Canford School and, after his National Service in the Navy (where he studied Russian), read History at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1955 to 1958. At Cambridge he organised cabarets for the Footlights Society and in 1956 wrote a musical about Regency Brighton titled The First Resort. His contemporaries included Derek Jacobi, Peter Cook, Michael Frayn and Ian McKellen, and he was also a member of the Marlowe Society, performing in Christopher Marlowe's Edward II, which was broadcast on the Third Programme in 1958 with Jacobi in the title role. That year he had already gained a BBC general traineeship, and his early career at the BBC was as a foreign correspondent (Drummond spoke fluent French and Russian). In 1961 he went with Richard Dimbleby, Robin Day and David Attenborough to make a series of documentary films in the Soviet Union, selected with his Russian language skills in mind. Later that year he began a two-year assignment for news and current affairs in Paris as assistant to Robin Scott.

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