Graham Binns

Campaigner for the Elgin Marbles

Graham Binns campaigned for the last 20 years of his life for the return of the Elgin Marbles to Athens. With Christopher Hitchens and Robert Browning he was the author of The Elgin Marbles: should they be returned to Greece? (1987) and from 1997 until last year he was the energetic chairman of the British Committee for the Restitution of the Parthenon Marbles.

Graham Binns, arts and broadcasting administrator and campaigner: born Barking, Essex 13 June 1925; married 1950 Jillian Palmer (died 2003; two sons); died Cleveley, Oxfordshire 12 May 2003.

Graham Binns campaigned for the last 20 years of his life for the return of the Elgin Marbles to Athens. With Christopher Hitchens and Robert Browning he was the author of The Elgin Marbles: should they be returned to Greece? (1987) and from 1997 until last year he was the energetic chairman of the British Committee for the Restitution of the Parthenon Marbles.

Before then he had enjoyed a busy and varied career first in arts administration for the Arts Council, then in broadcasting and video. In 1974 he was one of the founders of Capital Radio.

Graham Binns cut quite a figure at Oxford at the end of the 1940s. "The Grand Young Man of Ouds", as Anthony Blond described him, co-directed with Nevill Coghill a 1949 production of The Tempest on Worcester College lawns and lake that is still remembered for its extravagant effects. He succeeded Ken Tynan as Theatre Editor for Isis, and hitched his wagon to Christopher Fry and the revival of poetic drama. He was the first (and only) undergraduate member of the Playhouse Management Committee. In his Schools year, 1950 (he read English at Corpus Christi College), Binns distinguished himself mainly in marrying Jillian Palmer, an actress in the theatre company.

The newly weds went off together to the United States with Fulbright scholarships and grants from the American National Theatre Academy and Syracuse University. On their return to Britain, Binns diverted from theatre and was appointed Assistant Regional Director of the Arts Council, responsible for painting and sculpture in south-west England. This switch of direction mirrored his earlier desertion from the Navy in 1944 and his re-emergence as a subaltern in the Royal Garhwal Rifles, Indian Army, until his return to England and Oxford in 1947.

Binns's taste for the quirky had been nurtured at Bembridge, a somewhat eccentric school on the Isle of Wight, where he followed Robin Day as head boy. ("We wrote a nativity play together," he recalled in The Independent on Day's death.) His father, Joseph Binns, had won Gillingham for Labour in 1945 but, after a number of visits to the Strangers' Bar, the son avoided another switch of focus, being too fastidious to pursue a political career.

He was probably happiest when working for the Arts Council. Between 1951 and 1956 he was given the freedom to involve himself closely with painters and sculptors working in the West Country and in selling their work. For example, he succeeded in persuading the Friends of the Bristol Art Gallery to purchase a Lynn Chadwick bronze (for £28), exhibited sculpture by F.E. McWilliam and others in a Dolcis shoeshop and organised the Arts Council's first touring exhibition of work by John Ruskin.

When, in 1956, the Arts Council closed its regional offices, Binns made another career change. After a short course with the BBC, he took up a job with Rediffusion in Malta, where the company broadcast Maltese- and English-language programmes over a wired network. In Malta he became keenly interested in the history and culture of the island, overseeing the restoration of its early-18th-century Manoel Theatre in Valletta. His Arts Council contacts were exploited and he brought the Nottingham Playhouse, the Ballet Rambert, Benno Moiseiwitsch, Shura Cherkassky, Moura Lympany and other artists to perform in Malta. He also enticed Julian Trevelyan and Mary Fedden, whose work on the island roused an interest in Malta among other artists such as William Scott and Victor Pasmore.

Binns was then offered the management of Radio Jamaica. The dramatic contrast between the bare rocks and intrigues of Malta and that lush other island, with its punchy politics, was lure enough. He came to know the people of Jamaica at a deeper level than do most expatriates. He set up discreet literacy classes for the company's lower-grade staff. Under his presidency of the Jamaica Library Services Association, a proper salaries and grading structure was introduced. He promoted real political debate over the air and, in doing so, was prepared to take risks.

By 1970 Binns had become so involved with Jamaica that he had either to leave or stay for good. The agglomerate that was the BET/ Rediffusion group of companies invited him to represent their interests in the new Independent Local Radio Network. He put together a consortium from a number of different applicant groups and the result was Capital Radio. Richard Attenborough was its chairman and for its first eight years Graham Binns was his deputy.

Even in later life Binns cut a fine figure and he retained his unusual sense of humour. In 1972 he had been invited to the 40th birthday-party weekend for Elizabeth Taylor in Budapest – what could he have given but another "rock"? A photograph duly appeared in the paper of Binns, Taylor and Princess Grace of Monaco examining a painted pebble that he had decorated for the occasion. "Graham was great fun," wrote Taylor to Nevill Coghill. "All the girls had a pash on him – he was a whirling dervish."

(Indeed, as an undergraduate at Corpus he had achieved a certain reputation, the story of his being surprised in bed with a young Wren by the chaplain in 1943 being recorded for posterity in the college history, Corpuscles, published in 1994. "She was a pretty thing, although sadly I have forgotten her name. She had these nice black stockings," Binns remembered. "There was a fine of course, but it was nothing enormous.")

Binns's voluntary work was as diversified as his career. He was for a time a member of the South Metropolitan Committee of the old Race Relations Board, was founder chairman of the Blake Society at St James's, Piccadilly, and founder chairman of the British Fulbright Scholars' Association. He was devoted to the cause of the Elgin Marbles, bringing "his erudition, creative imagination and delightful sense of humour", in the words of Eleni Cubitt, Secretary to the British Committee (of which, in 1983, he was one of the first members), to the campaign for their restitution. "We know we are winning," he said in 2000. "The enemy has just to recognise that it has lost."

He was an inveterate, and accomplished, writer of letters to The Independent, not only on the marbles, but on subjects ranging from caulking, brain power and school skirts to Robert Fisk, the renaming of the British Isles and the passing of the aluminium car. His last letter, in February, was to authenticate the Archangel Gabriel as patron of broadcasting, because he had made the first announcement.

Graham Binns could appear authoritarian, yet he was a gentle man and had that essential humility that ensured he laughed more at himself than others. He had an eye that quickly spotted the humour in situations that most would have missed. When he was told that he too, like his wife, had terminal cancer, he said to her, "Well – we always did do everything together." She predeceased him by eight days.

Clive Cowen