Charles Wheeler (journalist)

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Sir Charles Cornelius Wheeler CMG (born Selwyn Charles Cornelius-Wheeler on March 26, 1923) is a veteran British journalist and broadcaster. Having joined the BBC in 1947, he is currently their longest serving foreign correspondent. He was educated at Cranbrook School in Kent.

Wheeler's long career has involved postings to Berlin, Delhi and Washington, D.C.. In the later years of his career he was the American correspondent of Newsnight. He was the first presenter of BBC World's Dateline London discussion programme. He remains active as a presenter of documentary series on Radio 4.

He was appointed a CMG in 2001, and was knighted in the 2006 Birthday Honours, for services to broadcasting and journalism overseas. Wheeler is married to Dip Singh, of Sikh Indian descent, whose daughters are the barrister Marina Wheeler, the wife of the Mayor of London Boris Johnson and Shirin Wheeler, the BBC's Brussels correspondent.^[1]

In June 2006 Charles Wheeler announced he had discovered that a painting by Alessandro Allori of Eleonora of Toledo, the wife of Cosimo de Medici, which had been given to him in Berlin as a wedding present in 1952, had been looted during World War II. Via the Commission for Looted Art in Europe it was returned to its legitimate owner, the Gemäldegalerie of Berlin from whose possession it had been absent since 1944.^[2]

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