Austen Kark
British broadcaster (1926–2002)
Austen Steven Kark CBE (20 October 1926 – 10 May 2002) was a managing director of the BBC World Service. He was one of three former holders of that post, along with Gerard Mansell and John Tusa, to oppose the plans of John Birt to merge the service into the BBC. After Birt became director general of the BBC in 1992, he had planned to end the service's independent status at Bush House in central London, and absorb it within the rest of the corporation.
Kark had a varied career before his tenure with the BBC. He was the son of a London army major who became a publisher. He attended Upper Canada College in Toronto, the Nautical College in Pangbourne, the Royal Naval College, and Magdalen College, Oxford. He became a Royal Navy midshipman in 1944, serving two years with the East Indies fleet, aboard HMS Nelson and HMS London.
In 1948, at Oxford, Kark directed the first production of Jean-Paul Sartre's The Flies. He later joined his family's magazine business, Norman Kark Publications. One of its magazines was the glossy literary magazine Courier. Kark married Margaret Schmahmann in 1949; they had two daughters. The couple divorced in 1954.
“Austen Kark” enters the record as british broadcaster (1926–2002). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Austen, Kark and British can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Austen Kark” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.