A bad time for Reuter veterans

It’s been a bad time for Reuter veterans, cherished colleagues all of whom I’ve missed in post-Reuter years.

The Sixties and Seventies saw world conferences galore, and the Reuter team headed by John Earle would be in the thick of it. Much the youngest in the team, I was given free hand to write background features and coverage of the Nordic delegations. It was a hectic Reuter operations room, with the late Ron Cooper as filing editor. He remained ever calm at the old-fashioned keyboard, even when Mohsin Ali dashed in, the latest official communique sticking out of his jacket pocket. “Get it away, get it away,” he’d shout, as Ron sat impassively at the keyboard. “I’ll get it away, Mohsin, if you’ll just tell me what it says,” Ron would say. But everyone loved Mohsin, and he had an encyclopaedic knowledge of every post-World War Two treaty.

John had already handled much more physical challenges, parachuting from a military airplane into German-occupied Greece in the war, and now somehow extracted elegant night leads from all the hubbub.

Years later, Ron Cooper would display the same composure amid the chaos when a dozen of us were covering the notorious 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. Palestinian terrorists had broken by night into the athletes’ quarters and were already shooting Israeli sportsmen. Ron, in charge of the Reuter team, again got the story running as we tried, with limited success, to get to the heard of the action.

Peter Mosley I only met years later, when we’d both returned from long spells abroad, but he had the same composure as a lecturer for the Reuter Foundation as we each tried to pass on Reuter skills to young journalists, both in London and Europe after the Wall.

All of these old colleagues I miss. ■