Joshua White

Lecturer, teacher, TV presenter, writer, former gallery director and all-round advocate for the arts, Joshua White has quite the portfolio career. In this interview, he traces the influence of Bedales on his subsequent achievements, which include founding and editing the first online listings guide to the city of New York and becoming the first producer of the new BBC Online home page. An inveterate acquirer of new experiences and skills, Joshua pays particular tribute to the Bedalian ethos of “a willingness to take risks combined with an innate suspicion of peer pressure.”

At this distance, it seems somewhat counter-intuitive to discover that Joshua White, by his own estimation a resolutely non-sporty type of person, should have spent his prep school days at the junior school of that bastion of sporting excellence, Millfield. “My sister Liberty played county cricket and my brother Sasha also loved the game but it somehow passed me by,” Joshua explains. “The emphasis was always on sport at Millfield; interestingly, the headmaster of the main school, Meyer, was an old boy of Rugby like John Badley, although they went on to have very different views about education.”

None of the White children would finish their schooling at Millfield. Instead, Joshua was the first of the three to be sent on to Bedales at the age of 13. “There wasn’t much consultation about it, as I recall,” he says. “My father just indicated that he would like me to go there and so I went down for the interview, which I passed. Later it was only natural that my siblings would join me at Bedales.”

Joshua’s new school certainly offered a more informal environment than his previous one. “I was happy enough with that more relaxed atmosphere and as a result I was soon quite at ease for the most part,” he says. “Bedales was, I found, a place to which students needed to adapt, rather than expecting it to be tailored to them as individuals. Opportunities existed for the self-sufficient but you had to go out and find them. I was, I suppose, quite mature for my age, far from one of the cool kids but certainly respected by my peers, I would like to think. Most of my closest friends were girls from my year although there was always the odd solid male friendship mixed in as well."

The only drawback for Joshua lay in the concept of boarding. “It had been the same at Millfield – I very much disliked the lack of privacy that boarding always entailed,” he says. “I’m still amazed that parents are so ready to send their children to be looked after by strangers at such an early age. Other than that, I had few complaints. We tended to be left to our own devices and given plenty of trust by the school, a trust that the behaviour of some did not always do much to deserve!”

Joshua filled his Bedales days with a wide variety of extra-curricular activities. “There were lots of different things to do,” he agrees. “I worked on the Chronicle, adored the library, which was my refuge when I wanted to take myself away from the hurly-burly, and later became a librarian and I was also a member of the school’s Amnesty International group. Otherwise I planted a lot of trees, cleaned out numerous chicken sheds (a memorably horrid job) and did some barn-building; there was also some vocational work with a local historian and there was a great deal of involvement in drama. In that area, I especially remember appearing in a student-directed performance of Chekhov’s The Bear and a part in The Real Inspector Hound.”

“The truth is that you were spoiled for artistic choice at Bedales,” Joshua continues. 

A confirmed specialist in the humanities, Joshua took his A-Levels in French, English and History. “I didn’t excel at French, although I remember George Smith as a stabilising and calming influence on his students,” Joshua reflects. “That also applied to Tim Williams, a benign, quasi-parental presence whom I admired and respected. In English, John Batstone was a great force of nature; he asked me to consider taking an S-Level in the subject but I had already decided that I wanted to focus on history and he was rather disappointed when I told him of my intention.”

Ruth Whiting was therefore the primary influence on Joshua’s academic progress at Bedales: “It’s probably fair to say that I was one of her favourites – I loved history, I was quite good at it and Ruth always responded to that in her students. I thrived on her tuition, passion and knowledge but when the time came for me to do Oxbridge, I felt that I needed to leave the school and sit those exams somewhere else, which turned out to be Westminster Tutors. I’ve always rather regretted the fact that I never thanked Ruth properly for the debt that I undoubtedly owed her.”

Joshua’s decision was rewarded with a place to study Modern History at New College, Oxford. “University was challenging, a real hothouse environment,” he recalls. “It was, I think, the weight of the institution and its history that I found the toughest aspect of student life. There was always the sense that through these ancient walls we were all merely passing through. Not that there was any sort of pastoral care in those days to which a student could turn for help in solving his or her doubts, which at least teaches a sort of resilience. The best part of university was undoubtedly the lifelong friendships I made there; in that sense Oxford had its similarities to Bedales.”

With his degree securely tucked away, Joshua made for London, where he began working life as a television researcher. “It was a job that could be quite stressful at times,” he says. “At Channel 4, I worked on a programme called The World This Week, where I was the designated researcher for stories affecting North and South America. That often involved getting hold of guests at the last minute and having them flown over to our studios, where they would, with a bit of luck, arrive on time!”

Two years later, Joshua was on his way to New York and a very different series of adventures: “I started out there by working for the production company that was responsible for Saturday Night Live. After that and together with an especially prescient friend who could see the potential of the internet, I helped to found and edit Metrobeat New York (now called Cityscape), which was the first online listings guide to the city and took its inspiration from London publications such as Time Out and City Limits. They were great days – fun, exciting and mad. We had no money most of the time and I slept on the floor for the best part of a year but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. New York was such an exciting place for me to grow up and set a bit of distance from the comforts of home.”

The time eventually came for Joshua to decide whether to remain in the exciting melting pot of New York or head back to his roots. London won out and he returned to join the BBC, where he became the launch producer of the new BBC Online home page. It was not, however, to prove a natural milieu for Joshua. “Bureaucracy was everywhere, together with office politics and inter-departmental competition,” he says. “The particular bane of our lives was something called the Department of Policy and Planning, which was very nearly as Orwellian as it sounds, and in the end I’d had enough of it.”

During the next couple of years Joshua kept himself busy with freelance journalism while he considered what he truly wanted to do with the rest of his working life. “There were various guides and books that I wrote in that period, including, ironically, one on the subject of taking a mid-career break,” he says.

The next phase of Joshua’s career began with a year on a Christie’s Education course at the University of Glasgow, where he took an M.Phil in Modern and Contemporary Art. “Since then, I have never really followed a typical career trajectory,” he says. 

The list of Joshua’s accomplishments over the past two decades is both lengthy and impressive. A lecturer and course director of the London Art Course at Christie’s Education, he has also, inter alia, been a gallery director at Hamiltons in Mayfair, served as a judge for the International Colour Awards for Photography, written exhibition reviews for the art press and published catalogue essays and co-presented The Art Channel for the past nine years. “The arts are a paradox in this country,” he says. “On the one hand it is a sector that is profoundly distrusted by modern politicians, who tend to view it as an area that attracts no votes. On the other, though, arts and culture happen to be pursuits in which we are consistently world-class, from our theatres to our museums and I am passionate about showing others what we have to offer in that respect.”

There still courses within Joshua a desire to explore yet more avenues. “My credo has always been that life is all about acquiring experiences and I do find myself longing for the open road from time to time,” he acknowledges. “That’s a very Bedalian trait, I expect. There are one or two specific ambitions – I want to publish books, for example, and I’m developing a few ideas in that line. I also want to speak another language properly – my French is nowhere near what it should be. There will doubtless be many other possibilities – the only snag is that every time you decide on one course of action, there are other appealing choices that necessarily fall by the wayside. Life is full of dilemmas like that!”

Joshua White was interviewed by James Fairweather in August 2023