Tim Radford obituary

The Guardian

13-02-2025

Tim Radford, the Guardian's former science editor, was the man who by his professionalism and enthusiasm made the paper take the subject seriously, perhaps for the first time.
Tim, who has died aged 84, was not the Guardian's first specialist science correspondent and indeed he was appointed after working in several unconnected previous editorial roles and despite having no academic scientific training, but he made the role his own. He was awarded science writer of the year four times by the Association of British Science Writers, which in 2004 gave him its first life achievement award.
He could make complex subjects, whether the Large Hadron Collider, the Voyager space mission or indeed climate breakdown, his particular and growing interest, intelligible and thrilling, even to a non-specialist readership.
Roger Highfield, the association's honorary president, wrote that Tim was regarded as one of the great science journalists of his generation: 'He was as at ease interviewing a Nobel laureate for literature as he was gossiping with the Nobel prizewinner for physics. Tim was living proof that, armed with enough curiosity and a great turn of phrase, you can be a brilliant populariser even without a degree in science.'
Tim told an interviewer for the Australian Broadcasting Company in 2019: 'You just ask questions. If you can't ask an intelligent question, ask a stupid one. You still get a good answer. Journalism is an ongoing university course that will last you a lifetime. Our papers are marked not only by the people who gave us the information but by 500,000 other readers as well, so there is an incentive to get on top of the subject.'
What his colleagues recollected, however, even more than his journalism, was his sheer kindness, geniality and equanimity – not necessarily overwhelmingly common attributes in a competitive profession, especially as deadlines approach. Chris Mihill, who sat at the neighbouring desk for 10 years, spoke for many when he wrote: 'I thought he was the cleverest, kindest, most decent journalist I have ever met. A total polymath, who made light of all his skills. And he seemed to know so much about everything. He could write beautifully, and could make the most obscure subjects seem interesting.'
Tim was born in Rawene, at the tip of New Zealand's North Island, the eldest of four children of Keith Radford, a geography teacher, and his wife, Agnes, a nurse. When he was seven, the family moved to Devonport, a suburb of Auckland. He was educated, as he wrote with characteristic good humour for the paper in 1988, by the Marist monks at the city's Sacred Heart college, who frequently resorted to corporal punishment and may well have turned him off religion for life.
Tim left school at 16 for a job as a junior reporter on the New Zealand Herald where, he was proud to relate, one of his first stories was to report on the flight of Sputnik One – the first satellite, launched by the Soviets in October 1957 – as it flew over New Zealand. 'My first science story – after that you can't not be absolutely riveted by what happened,' he recalled.
By the age of 20 he had decided that New Zealand was the end of the world and real life was happening elsewhere, so he caught an Italian steamer meandering its way to England. After 65 years in Britain, what remained was a trace of a gentle New Zealand accent and, although he had no interest in the All Blacks, a penchant for wearing black shirts.
In London, his first job was on Fishing News, the fishing industry newspaper, followed by a reporting job in East Yorkshire, on the Hull Daily Mail, and then subediting at the Dover Express in Kent for three years. After that he spent five years as a civil servant working for the Central Office of Information until, in 1973, he got a job as a subeditor on the Guardian.
Initially, his career was in the features department, still characterised by a certain Guardianesque chaotic eccentricity and indeed amateurism, until it was professionalised by the paper's new features editor, later editor, Peter Preston. Tim was made letters editor in 1975 and two years later arts editor, followed by eight years as deputy features editor and three more as literary editor. These were cultural areas close to his heart: no one could spend much time with Tim without learning about his deep love for writers such as Dickens.
One cherished memory was his role in producing the Guardian's famous San Serriffe 1 April supplement in 1977, a spoof about a mythical island composed entirely of printing terms, which appealed to his sense of humour. There were more mundane matters, such as surviving an annual five-hour boozy lunch with the writer John Arlott who, perennially convinced that he was about to be sacked, sought to stave off the imagined evil day by suborning the features editors. They could talk wine, if not cricket.
In 1992, Preston made Tim the paper's science editor. It proved to be an inspired move. Alex Kirby, the BBC's then environment correspondent and a friend, recalled that Tim knew very little about science but settled down to mug up the subject with meticulous care until he became the go-to person to explain its complexities. He once admitted to having impostor syndrome to Kirby, who said: 'Huh! He was the unlikeliest impostor in the Street – a living reproach to colleagues who really did con their way to fame, wealth and stardom.'
David McKie, the paper's former deputy editor, said Tim was the only person on the staff who could be trusted to write an accurate science story: the Guardian's attitude had been summed up by its former northern editor Brian Redhead, later of the BBC's Today programme, a man never reticent about expressing his opinions, who had declared that science was boring and should be completely ignored.
As Tim said in his ABC interview: 'When I started reporting on science, the idea that a scientific discovery, no matter how momentous, would actually make the front page was near zero. News desks thought that science was something you did in the silly season when you were desperate for stories and nothing else was around – then you could always have a wacky science story.' Tim could write those, too.
After 32 years on the Guardian, Tim retired in 2005, but continued to contribute to the paper's Weatherwatch column – often referring to what famous authors, including Byron, Shelley, Carlo Levi and Proust, had written or experienced – and to the Climate News Network website. This, which Tim set up with Kirby and the Guardian's former environment correspondent Paul Brown, ran for 10 years until 2021.
Tim was a frequent lecturer and debater at conferences in Britain and abroad and wrote three books: The Crisis of Life on Earth (1990), The Address Book (2011) and The Consolations of Physics (2018).
He married Maureen Coveney, a special educational needs primary teacher, in 1964 and nursed her devotedly through a prolonged final illness before her death last year. He is survived by their two children, William and Stella, a granddaughter and great-granddaughter, and a brother and sister in New Zealand.
In a characteristically self-deprecating email a few days before his death, he wrote to a former colleague, John Carvel: 'I like to think I'm still more mesmerised by the unbelievable state of things in Washington than by, for instance, my own mortality. So I'm still a newsman.'
Timothy Robin Radford, journalist, born 9 October 1940; died 10 February 2025