Digger - a true original who loved being mischievous

Very sad news. We must celebrate the life of the Digger, a brilliant reporter and above all a good friend and colleague who was a consummate professional wherever he worked in the world, yet saw the absurdities of journalism and never took himself or the trade so seriously to be boring. He loved being mischievous. In 1973, after the Paris Peace Agreement, the South Vietnamese government tried to project South Vietnam in a new light as a tourist destination. The Digger went to Hue to write a travel piece for Reuters. Some of us will remember the pleasures we had of having a few pipes of opium followed by an exotic night sharing a sampan in the midst of the Perfumed River with a girl while the war rumbled on in the hills around. In his tourism piece the Digger capitalised on this theme with a brilliant lead paragraph for his story: "The rocking of the sampans on the Perfumed River at Hue is not entirely due to the motion of the waves." The Reuters subs loved it and it went straight on the wire with plaudits.

Later, covering the winter Olympics in Japan, the Digger came up with another masterpiece. Late at night, he wrote a suggestive piece about spotting sets of mysterious footprints in the snow leading from the mens' quarters to the womens' quarters, suggesting there was a lot more fun going on at the Games than skiing. At about four in the morning, the Digger was woken up by furious pounding on his door by irate Fleet Street sports reporters who had got callbacks from their desks and demands to match his story. "Were the footprints real," they asked the Digger. "Yes," he said. Unfortunately, for them, and happily for the Digger, it had snowed since he wrote his story. The footprints had disappeared and the Digger kept his exclusive.

I last saw him amid the carnage of a car bomb which had ripped through a street in Baghdad a few years back. He was still hard at it, interviewing survivors. A true original. RIP. ■