**Edwin Robertson dies aged 95**
Edwin Robertson (b. 1912), who has died in London (United Kingdom) of bronchial pneumonia, was Executive Director of the World Association for Christian Broadcasting (WACB) from 1964 to 1968. WACB was one of the groups of Christian communicators that preceded the formation of the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC).
In the words of Canon Paul Oestreicher, he was 'a renaissance man with a breadth of knowledge and a sharpness of wit that never diminished and never ceased to delight. He was a Baptist minister, broadcaster, author, translator and editor, notably in making known the life and work of the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer' (/The Guardian/, December 11, 2007).
After the 1939-45 War, Robertson was a senior officer in the British Control Commission for Occupied Germany. It did not take him long to realize that the broadcasting industry was highly developed technically, but that production had been subordinated to the State. He vividly remembered that experience when he joined the staff of the BBC in 1949 as Assistant Head of Religious Broadcasting.
A few years later, in consultation with a senior colleague, he planned a conference of European broadcasters to work out objectives and methods for religious broadcasting in the context of the latest technical developments. It was held in Chichester, England, 9-13 October 1950 and the Rt. Revd. George Bell was the host. That conference created an informal group of professionals in religious broadcasting that led to the eventual birth of WACC.
Born in West Ham, London, Robertson began his ministerial life in 1938 in Stopsley, Luton. Having gained a first-class degree in physics and chemistry at London University before training for the Baptist ministry at Regent's Park College, Oxford, he was directed into oil research, specifically on fuel for Spitfires.
Robertson took a deep interest in German Christians who resisted Hitler and he befriended those in exile in England as well as German prisoners of war. Like George Bell of Chichester, to whom Dietrich Bonhoeffer sent his last letter, Robertson deplored the bombing of German civilians. Speaking fluent German, he became close friends of the survivors of the German opposition, such as Martin Niemoller, who were now Germany's church leaders.
In 1949 Robertson joined the BBC and from 1956 he spent six years in Geneva as study secretary of the United Bible Societies (whose history he wrote and published in 1996) and consultant to the World Council of Churches and the International Missionary Council.
From 1964, as executive director of the WACB, he was responsible for the mass media training of students from around the world and, together with the Evangelical Alliance and the Roman Catholic Church, he set up the churches' advisory committee for local broadcasting.
Robertson wrote several biographies, and discovering that the only serious account of the life of Bishop Bell neglected his involvement with Germany and Bonhoeffer, he wrote /Unshakeable Friend: George Bell and the German Churches/ (1995). Robertson treated academic theology with scepticism and the growth of religious fundamentalism disturbed him.
Edwin Robertson never lost faith in the work of WACC, keeping an avuncular eye on the positions and directions it took. He regularly wrote letters of support to the editors of WACC's journal /Media Development/, commending such themes as 'The News Embargo on Iraq', 'Impunity and the Media' and, most recently, 'Media and Terror'. He was one of the earliest recipients of Honorary Life Membership of WACC, an honour he accepted with characteristic modesty.
According to Paul Oestreicher's obituary in /The Guardian/, Robertson preached at his own Hampstead Baptist church only days before his final brief illness. For hospital reading, he took a biography of D. H. Lawrence. He found depth of meaning in Lawrence's poem 'The Ship of Death', an unflinching reflection on our vulnerability and our need for cheerful courage in what lies ahead. Asked, near the end, what that might be he replied, 'There will be work for me to do on the other side.'
/Philip Lee (WACC Deputy Director of Programmes)