Memories of Cy

I have so many good memories of Cy Fox that it is difficult to know where to begin. And, in any case, few of them are fit to print.

Although Cy did not start at Reuters until 1974, he was a familiar figure long before that. I first remember him as the Canapress correspondent coming into the London bureau in 1970 where I was doing a stint just after joining Reuters as a graduate trainee. Cy had come to joust with Pat Massey, just back from Black September in Jordan. Cy regularly joined the Reuters crowd in various pubs during their evening breaks at that time and was an extremely witty and entertaining addition.

One of my fondest memories was when Cy was sent to join a European summit team in Luxembourg in 1980, at which the main subject was the British budget rebate and the antics of one M. Thatcher. Cy, Roger Beetham, spokesman for the then European Commission president, Roy Jenkins, and one or two others joined me in my Holiday Inn room for a nightcap. Cy insisted for years, though I remember no such thing, that we angered Helmut Schmidt by keeping the then West German chancellor awake. In truth, I am pretty sure Schmidt was nowhere near the Holiday Inn. Cy was both great company and very professional. He did the final edit and filing of all our copy, raising all the right questions at the same time as keeping us in tucks with his frequent bon mots.

Thanks to Cy, a copy of Wyndham Lewis’s “The Revenge for Love,” a somewhat unorthodox view of the Spanish civil war and the British left in the 1930s, still graces my bookshelves. ■