Leonard Miall

Rowland Leonard Miall (6 November 1914 – 24 February 2005) was a broadcaster and administrator at the BBC for 35 years, from 1939 to 1974. In retirement, he became a research historian, studying the history of broadcasting.

Miall was born in London and educated at Bootham School in York. He learned German at Freiburg University, and read economics and law at St John's College, Cambridge. He was President of the Cambridge Union Society and Editor of the Cambridge Review.

Miall joined the European Service of the BBC in early 1939. He took charge of broadcasts in German until 1942, when was seconded to the Political Warfare Executive and sent to work on psychological warfare in New York City and San Francisco. He returned to London in 1944, and then worked in the Psychological Warfare Division of SHAEF in Luxembourg.

He returned to the BBC in 1945, and was briefly a special correspondent in Czechoslovakia. He became the BBC's American correspondent from 1945 to 1953, covering nearly all of the Harry Truman's presidency, and the first year of Dwight D. Eisenhower's. Although based in Washington, D.C., he visited all of the then 48 U.S. states. His radio broadcasts made his voice a familiar feature of BBC news coverage.

In June 1947, he reported a speech at Harvard by George Marshall, on reconstruction in Europe. Ernest Bevin, then British Foreign Secretary, heard the broadcast, and was spurred to press ahead with what became the Marshall Plan for the nations of Europe to rebuild their economies after the war.

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