Background
Woodrow Lyle Wyatt was born on July 4, 1918, in Kingston upon Thames, southwest London. He was the second son of Robert Harvey Lyle Wyatt, the founder and headmaster of Milbourne Lodge School, Esher, and his wife Ethel (née Morgan).
Wyatt was first educated at Eastbourne College which he resented for snobbish reasons.
Wyatt read Law at Worcester.
Wyatt was a member of Britain’s Labor Party from 1945 to 1970 and later became a very vocal supporter of Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Wyatt also worked as a weekly columnist for the Daily Mirror during the period from 1965 to 1973.
Coat of arms of Woodrow Wyatt
(Woodrow Wyatt, Chairman of the Tote, journalist, bon vive...)
Woodrow Wyatt, Chairman of the Tote, journalist, bon viveur, confidant of Thatcher and Murdoch, friend of aristocracy and royalty, leaves in these diaries his posthumous last laugh. His observations offer a mix of the historic and the obscure, the public and the personal.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0330390066/?tag=2022091-20
1998
(Margaret Thatcher's fall from power is the dramatic core ...)
Margaret Thatcher's fall from power is the dramatic core of this second volume of Woodrow Wyatt's sensational memoirs, covering the years 1989 until the election in 1992.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0330390074/?tag=2022091-20
1999
(The third and final volume of Wyatt's scandalous journals...)
The third and final volume of Wyatt's scandalous journals. The final journals of Woodrow Wyatt cover the period from the 1992 election to his death at the end of 1997.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/033377406X/?tag=2022091-20
2000
broadcaster journalist politician writer
Woodrow Lyle Wyatt was born on July 4, 1918, in Kingston upon Thames, southwest London. He was the second son of Robert Harvey Lyle Wyatt, the founder and headmaster of Milbourne Lodge School, Esher, and his wife Ethel (née Morgan).
Wyatt was educated at Eastbourne College and Worcester College, Oxford, where he read jurisprudence and graduated with a second-class degree in 1939.
Wyatt served throughout the Second World War with the Suffolk Regiment and rose to the rank of major. He returned to England to run for Parliament from a Birmingham district considered unwinnable for Labour in 1945 and was unexpectedly swept into office in the landslide victory of Clement Attlee. He was a founder of the Keep Left group in the House of Commons and in 1949 began writing a column for a left-wing publication called Reynolds News. Wyatt was also briefly a junior minister in Clement Attlee's final administration in 1951 but thereafter was never in the office.
During his period out of parliament, Wyatt was also a reporter for the BBC's Panorama current affairs programme. His television career came about through a chance encounter with Edward R. Murrow of CBS, who interviewed him in 1955. A BBC executive thought Mr Wyatt handled himself well and invited him to become a presenter on the network's new ''Panorama'' documentary program.
Wyatt returned to Parliament in 1959 as member for Bosworth, Leicestershire. He revelled in the 1964–1970 parliaments over steel nationalisation and then quitted political career. He also worked as a weekly columnist for the Daily Mirror during the period from 1965 to 1973.
After ceasing to be an active politician, Wyatt was appointed by Roy Jenkins as Chairman of the Horserace Totalisator Board from 1976 to 1997. At first, he was an active chairman, rooting out corruption, but later grew complacent and the Tote stagnated. He also held the position at the Sunday Mirror from 1973 to 1983.
In the mid-1980s Wyatt played a key role as Murdoch's fixer in brokering negotiations with the electricians' union, aiding News International to move to Wapping. He also bought a local newspaper, News of the World, and created a chain of papers that were the first in Britain to use colour. His enthusiasm was broader than his resources, however, and the papers eventually failed.
(Woodrow Wyatt, Chairman of the Tote, journalist, bon vive...)
1998(Margaret Thatcher's fall from power is the dramatic core ...)
1999(The third and final volume of Wyatt's scandalous journals...)
2000Though Wyatt made his career as a representative of Labour Party, by 1970 he had become estranged from the working-class ambiance of his party and his views moved markedly to the right. He opposed nationalization of industry and joined Conservative efforts to curb union power.
Woodrow Wyatt always tried to live like a lord even when he was a Labour Member of Parliament. He owned racehorses, drank on average nearly two bottles of wine a day until his doctor and his liver rebelled, and travelled politically from the soft left to the far right accompanied by a succession of beautiful women and a cloud of Havana cigar smoke. It seemed only fitting that he should end as chairman of the Tote and one of Mrs Thatcher's life peers. For more than half a century his trademark was his floppy bow tie and his most useful achievement, despite his considerable talents and early promise, was to secure the patronage of the powerful and famous. His undoubted charm was offset by a rasping personality and often his actions alienated admirers and even close friends.
Quotes from others about the person
Andrew Neil wrote: "Wyatt has done the country a service in giving us the unalloyed truth about how this country's governing and social elite still operates."
During his life, Wyatt was married four times. His first marriage was to a fellow university student, Susan Jacqueline Cox, in 1939. The second was to his secretary, Nora Robbins, in 1948; the third to Lady Moorea Hastings in 1957 and his last, in 1966, to Verushka Banazky, the glamorous Hungarian widow of a London doctor. The third marriage produced a son, Pericles, and the fourth a daughter, Petronella.