Arthur Marshall (broadcaster)

Arthur Marshall (10 May 1910–27 January 1989) was a British writer and broadcaster, born in Barnes, London in the UK. He was best known as a team leader on the BBC's Call My Bluff, a long-running British panel game in which celebrity teams guessed obscure word definitions. (Marshall took over from Patrick Campbell. They had been friends for many years; ' ever since we used both to write, from around 1948 onwards, for [the magazine] 'Lilliput.') He appeared on radio and TV occasionally and published books of humorous pieces among other writings. The most widely known of these were his skits on the life and antics of public schoolgirls.

He was also a newspaper and magazine columnist, writing for The Sunday Telegraph in the 1970s and 1980s, and enjoying an association with the New Statesman that began in 1935 when he wrote his first of many Christmas reviews of books for girls, and ended in 1981 when he was sacked from its "First Person" column, which he had been writing since the beginning of 1976, allegedly for being overtly sympathetic to Margaret Thatcher.

He also had some success on radio and the stage. His wartime radio programme A Date with Nurse Dugdale was very popular, and he wrote numerous revue sketches for performers like Hermione Gingold. He adapted the novel Every Third Thought by American writer Dorothea Malm into the play Season of Goodwill. This starred Sybil Thorndike and Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, but was not a success. He also wrote the British version of the French play 'Fleur de Cactus' which had been adapted for the American stage by Abe Burrows' as Cactus Flower. This starred Margaret Leighton and Tony Britton and was a smash hit on the West End stage, until Leighton left to go to Broadway.

He went to Oundle School and then Cambridge University and wanted to be an actor. As he could not find enough acting work he became a school teacher. In the fifties he began work in the theatre in London as a script-writer and also began having his humorous books published. As he became more well known he appeared on radio and TV (although his first radio broadcast had been in 1934), and then in 1979 began his time as a regular on Call My Bluff, which continued until shortly before his death.

References

• Marshall, Arthur (1984). Life's Rich Pageant. London: Hamish Hamilton. ISBN 0-241-11306-7.
• Bailey, Paul (2001). Three Queer Lives: An Alternative Biography of Fred Barnes, Naomi Jacob and Arthur Marshall. London: Hamish Hamilton. ISBN 0-241-13455-2.
• The Times, Obituary, 28 January 1989