Personal Life
He was appointed a CMG in 2001, and was knighted in the 2006 Birthday Honours, for services to broadcasting and journalism overseas. Wheeler was married to Dip Singh and the couple had two daughters: the barrister Marina Wheeler (the wife of the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson) and Shirin Wheeler, the BBC's Brussels correspondent.
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.
Wheeler died of lung cancer at his Horsham home on 4 July 2008.
Read more about this topic: Charles Wheeler (journalist)
Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or life:
“It has no share in the leadership of thought: it does not even reflect its current. It does not create beauty: it apes fashion. It does not produce personal skill: our actors and actresses, with the exception of a few persons with natural gifts and graces, mostly miscultivated or half-cultivated, are simply the middle-class section of the residuum.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“I like sometimes to take rank hold on life and spend my day more as the animals do. Perhaps I have owed to this employment and to hunting, when quite young, my closest acquaintance with Nature. They early introduce us to and detain us in scenery with which otherwise, at that age, we should have little acquaintance.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)