Goddard was genius

He could be gruff, world-weary and tired of life; but when he saw a story clinging to the margins of some ill-considered piece of copy landing from afar, Dave switched into action like a Swiss mountain rescuer; he arched over whatever keyboard we were using at the time, neck as stiff as a Pointer’s at a shoot, and his hands began pounding at the keyboard as if he were digging the story out of rock. Which he invariably was. His eye for the essence of a story and his ability to distill that into something anyone could and would consume marked him apart.

He loved his work and relished his craft. He drove in nightly from Milton Keynes for his seven-day stint on the overnight shift at the lynchpin copy taster’s desk. Not for him a nap or nip, as others did. He kept his eyes on the incoming wire and would as soon hack out the story himself than pass it down to a somnambulant sub or someone at his sandwich.

Once he was late for the overnight shift, very late. No-one worried unduly, although it was odd. But he had to drive down the M1 Motorway and fog was the story of the night on the Press Association (PA) domestic wire. Round about three in the morning he wandered into the newsroom, rucksack over his trademark anorak, exasperation on his face. “You won’t believe me, but it’s true,” he told us. “I was driving into work down the M1 as usual and it was very foggy and I saw a light in the distance. It was waving from side to side. So I slowed right down and (expletive deleted) me if it wasn’t a (e.d.) dwarf waving a (e.d.) torch. So I stopped and rolled down the window and this midget told me that he was with a circus and they were driving down the motorway when one of the lorries went into the hard shoulder and overturned. And the lion had escaped. And he wanted to warn drivers not to run the (e.d.) thing over. So I had to crawl the rest of the way watching for a (e.d.) lion.”

We all laughed, of course, and it was true, we established from PA. But it was testimony to his commitment to Reuters and the desk that he kept on motoring when others, especially at that hour with only half the shift left, would have turned around and gone home for an all-too-infrequent breakfast with family. But Goddard didn’t do sickies or hangover holidays like some of his colleagues. Chipping that story out of dross was what made him tick. And that tick was the heartbeat of the many desks and places he worked. It was an absolute privilege to work alongside him.

There were great sub-editors on the Reuters desks in London and in Nicosia, many of them. But Goddard, as everyone called him, was something else. He was genius. ■