Farewell

After one-third of a century exactly (33 years AND four months), it’s time to say goodbye and thank you to all you colleagues who have made working at Reuters such a pleasure and a source of pride.

When I joined the company from The Scotsman in July 1980, my intention was to spend 10 years here, get three good postings under my belt and then return to the paper as diplomatic reporter, a job similar to one I’d done for a couple of years with the Melbourne Age in Canberra, unquestionably Australia’s best newspaper at the time.

In the event, I got precisely that job offer from The Scotsman at the end of 1985, just as I was about to head off from my first Reuter posting in Brussels to go to China. That was such a hard choice to make, but I don’t regret sticking with Reuters as they gave me the best experience of my journalistic life.

My two years in China are gold dust in the memory. It was wonderful in those pre-mobile phone, pre-Internet days to do things like go on a week’s feature gathering trip to Tibet, and to get the main front-page bylined story in The Independent on New Year’s Day 1987 for coverage of a student demonstration in Tiananmen Square, which passed off peacefully, but felt very ominous  and daring at the time.

Later, I returned to Belgium for a second period of exposure to the intricacies of European construction. Hugely important as all of that was, it’s odd how EU meetings dubbed make-or-break or critical merge in retrospect into a grey mass of diplomatic fudge, while bits of real-life colour from host nation Belgium survive most vividly in my recollections.

I was particularly chuffed at getting a little story, before a papal visit in 1985, about a fashionable church tailor in Bruges who designed a diamond-encrusted mitre for the Pope, only to find he had got his hat size wrong. It was too small, so a last-minute replacement had to be made at great expense. When our story got play in The Times, the one-word compliment from Paul Taylor (ever a man for le mot juste) was “Chapeau!”.

In 1995 (I’m almost embarrassed to admit), I began a marathon stretch on the Money Desk and its legacy versions. In the very first couple of weeks, I was subbing a story about the design of euro coins, based on a private Bundestag committee meeting at which the head of the Bundesbank was speaking. Buried around paragraph 10 was a comment by him that Italy would not make the first round of European Monetary Union. In consultation with desk head Ruth Pitchford, I extracted an alert that sent the lira diving, winning me herograms and a feeling that I could get used to exercising that kind of power.

The thing that will stick with me in retirement is a feeling of pride to have worked so long with such splendid colleagues engaged in an activity which is without equal in its importance. At various times, I was tempted to go into PR but the temptation didn’t last very long. Our job at its best as humble servants of the truth is so much more dignified (and fun).

I’d lastly like to thank my editorial managers who have been so generous and humane in permitting me to work part-time for so long, and allowing me for personal family reasons to work mostly for the past five years out of my home town of Edinburgh. The Reuters office there has stunning views over Princes Street and is next door to the Old Waverley Hotel where I began my working life as a waiter aged 15 after leaving school in 1962. So I feel I have come full-circle, and for me, no swansong to my Reuter career could have been sweeter.

My e-mail address for those of you would like to stay in contact is stephen_nisbet@hotmail.com and mobile is 0796 949 7878. It would be a pleasure to share a drink with you if you venture north of the border (whatever the result of next year’s independence referendum). ■