Mary Kellett-Long, 'Old Reuter' wife who provided support in 'difficult postings'

I am sure many colleagues and spouses will be as sad as we were to learn of the death on 9 May of Mary, wife of Adam Kellett-Long, one of the big-name Reuter correspondents of the 1960s who fitted bureau chief postings to East Berlin, Peking (as it was then), Johannesburg and Moscow into that newswise eventful decade.

Mary (photo) was an archetypal English rose whose only failing was that she could not give up the cigarette habit she had acquired as a trainee nurse before she met Adam in 1957 in the Oxford hospital where she worked but where both at the time were patients. She was also a prime example of those "Old Reuter" wives who made the company in past times a pleasure to work for and to move around in, and without whose support - especially in what were then called "difficult postings" - their husbands may well have been less successful than they were. (A shame that their contribution was never properly recognised - even the thoroughly modern-minded editor of The Baron will only consider such contributions as this tribute for the Comments page of his esteemed organ.)

Adam married Mary, a vicar's daughter from a small town in Warwickshire, in May 1959 soon after he had joined the Company as a graduate trainee, and in 1961 they were despatched to East Berlin. On the night of 13 August that year, the Communist regime shut off access from West Berlin and started building the Wall. This was Adam's first great scoop as, on a tipoff, he got to the border in time to watch the first blocks going up and so broke the news to the outside world. Back in the tiny bureau which was also their flat, Mary, clad - as Adam fondly recalls - in a pink dressing gown, spent the entire night punching his copy onto teleprinter tape and transmitting it. A year later, Adam was posted to Peking where Mao was launching the communist world's Great Schism, the ideological split with the Soviet Union, and again Mary acted as his full-time assistant in keeping the copy flowing. After two years, they were in Tokyo for the Olympics where Mary's keyboard skills were finally officially recognised, if only briefly, and she was hired as a copytaker for the Reuter operation while Adam covered track and field events. Then they moved on to South Africa in 1965 as resistance was growing in the townships to the apartheid regime, and to Moscow in 1967 just in time to cover the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the aftermath of the crushing of the reform movement there.

In Moscow, where Adam was my low-key boss, Mary watched fondly over the three-man bureau and became a good friend to the other Reuter wives. And although she now had their first adopted daughter Amanda to attend to, she was an active hostess and ran some of the nicest dinner parties I can recall, while Adam was kept busy by East-West tension, the Space Race and the emergence of the dissident movement. At the end of 1970, he moved on to Bonn as chief representative for Germany, marking the beginning of his unenthusiastic final switch to management which at least enabled them two years later to return to UK and settle down, for the first time, on the banks of the Thames in East Molesey to bring up Amanda and their second adopted daughter, Lisa, in a semblance of calm.

Over the next decades, before and after Adam's retirement in April 1989, they welcomed many old friends as guests. I remember arriving at Heathrow in the 1980s from Moscow expecting to take the tube into London only to find an ever-smiling Mary waiting for me outside Arrivals to whisk me off to their riverside home for a fine dinner and to stay the night. I know many others who had worked with Adam had similar experiences. For 20 years from 1989, Mary kept herself busy managing a well-known toy shop owned by a brother-in-law in the Covent Garden precinct, while Adam was for a while spokesperson for the British Red Cross and, briefly, for the Red Cross Federation in Geneva in the early 1990s. When they could, they travelled widely, often to visit Amanda who had emigrated to the United States.

In 2010, Mary was struck by a serious chest illness that almost killed her, but her determination brought her through - "against all the odds," her consultant said. Nevertheless, the experience took its toll and for the next four years she was in and out of hospital and could only move around on a walker and later in a wheel chair. All the same, she managed to keep up her old friendships, and many of us will remember her cheerfulness when Adam brought her to the Baron's Bash in March this year.

Her funeral will be at 2.20 pm on Friday 23 May at St Paul's Church in East Molesey, followed by tea and cakes in the Mitre Hotel next to Hampton Court Bridge. Adam and Lisa will welcome all old colleagues and friends. My wife and I deeply regret that we can't be there. ■