John Earle

It used to be said that you could always tell a Wykehamist - one who had been to Winchester College: intelligent, charming, diffident, modest. Such was John Earle. His modesty showed itself in his war memoirs The Price of Patriotism: SOE and MI6 in the Italian-Slovene Borderlands During World War II, which he published in 2005, where he gave himself barely a mention. I persuaded him to publish a personalised memoir, which he finally did in From Nile to Danube: A Wartime Memoir in 2010 (reviewed on The Baron [Tough life with the Partisans before Reuters]). He had a distinguished and hazardous wartime career, but the book does not fail to show the lighter side, with some good anecdotes.

I first met John in the fifties when he was on the London diplomatic desk with Pamela Matthews and Mohsin Ali. Imagine - no less than three diplomatic correspondents in London! He moved to Rome in the sixties when we were engaged in byzantine negotiations with the two Italian news agencies ANSA and RADIOCOR. His knowledge of the ways of the Italian media was immensely valuable.

I last saw him a couple of years ago when he invited me to lunch at his Club - The Special Forces - now known to a wider Reuter audience. He had lost none of the qualities which identified him as a Wykehamist. ■