George Vine and 'the Russian horses'

I remember George with great affection. He was a great journalist and a very nice man. Throughout the 1960s and the early part of the 70s George was the highly regarded Bonn correspondent of the London Daily Mail and, for a brief period until it ceased publication in May 1971, of the Mail's sister paper The Daily Sketch.

I remember first meeting George in our East Berlin office in the late March or early April of 1961. Still a green trainee, I had been in East Berlin for only about three months on my first assignment for Reuters and was in Leipzig covering, or trying to, the Spring (trade) Fair when I received a service message telling me to return to East Berlin to cover "the Russian horses". I drove straight back to the office where I found George, who had flown in from Bonn for the same purpose, in jovial conversation with my wife, Mary, and Erdmute Behrendt, the office secretary. I soon found out that "the Russian horses" were two horses belonging to the Soviet army who were on their way to England to take part in that year's Grand National steeplechase. After a long delay in Poland, they were supposed to be in Berlin the following day for a brief stopover on the journey to Aintree via Dunkirk and Dover. George and I agreed to work together on the story and, with the help of Erdmute, the next morning, established the estimated time of the horses' arrival at East Berlin's Ostbahnhof station.

For once things went according to plan, and George and I soon discovered the carriage containing the two great animals in a virtually deserted part of the station. The groom accompanying them was pleased to meet us and to explain in his native Russian the travails of the journey from Moscow. Luckily I was able to understand and translate the gist of his story. After about 20 minutes we were told the train was due to leave, and we should get out of the carriage. As we did so, we saw a figure hurtle down the stairs and leap past us into the carriage literally as the doors were closing. George recognised the figure as a Daily Express correspondent especially flown in from London to cover the story. The poor man was not going to be able to file anything until the train's next scheduled stop in Dunkirk. It took George and me some minutes to recover from our hilarity and to return to the office to file our stories. The Daily Mail had what it wanted and the Express absolutely nothing except, I suppose, the Reuter copy. I shall never forget reading George's opening sentence and wishing that I would be allowed to write in that vein. I cannot quote it exactly but it read something like : "Judging by the Red Army's tortuous efforts to move two horses from Moscow to London, the West has very little to fear..."

The horses did reach Aintree and run in the race. Neither finished. A few weeks later the ever-courteous George invited Mary and me to join him for a splendid dinner in the West Berlin Hilton. After three months in East Berlin, it seemed like paradise to us. We remained friends for many years to come until the onset of George's long illness. ■