Donald H MacLean
a profile commissioned for a BBC internal publication
His wartime experience of long-range communications produced an unwelcome interruption of his career - the army recalled him to command their Press Communications unit in the 1956 Suez invasion, an ill-judged enterprise of which he disapproved as heartily as of a more recent Mid-East intervention. The story goes that with his engineers working frantically on the squadron's big transmitter, bombed out of action on a Port Said beach, he turned up at a commercial cable office in Cyprus with an armful of reports from War Correspondents for the world's press. It was rumoured that he (a licensed private pilot) had 'borrowed' an aeroplane and flown solo across the Mediterranean and back. A row of medals graces the tunic of his kilt at formal Clan events - asked if any are connected with that story he just smiles and says that such an escapade would have broken a whole raft of regulations.
Subsequently, after 29 years in the BBC and now in his fifties, he decided that the next challenges in broadcasting would be elsewhere and, to the concern of colleagues, he resigned to enrol as a student in the Management School of Westminster University. He says that the BBC regarded him "as they would a deluded monk heading for the exit of the monastery"!
Britain's biggest entertainment corporation at the time was EMI, with a dominant position in television, films, music and electronics - its visionary chairman, Peter Laister (a fellow pilot), persuaded Donald to join him to create new businesses. There followed a hectic 13 year period of reorganisations worldwide and the creation of 32 new enterprises.
Decades before their arrival Donald was internationally regarded as the guru of the future "video-disc" (CD/DVD) - his annual seminars at two major American universities attracted global audiences and evoked the invitation from one of them to the chairmanship of their Communications faculty, which he seriously considered but in the end declined.