Murray Sale, hero of his own story

Murray Sayle, who died aged 84 in his native Australia on Saturday, never worked for Reuters but he was well known in many of our bureaux where he filed his copy as a Special Traffic client.

One of the outstanding reporters of the post-war era, his heyday was when he wrote for The Sunday Times under the great Harold Evans where, as The Times noted in its obituary, he recreated the 19th century art of the journalist as hero of his own story. He climbed Everest, sailed single-handed across the Atlantic, hired a plane to find missing yachtsman Francis Chichester in a storm off Cape Horn and located Che Guevara in the South American jungle. In Japan, where he lived for 30 years, his 20,000-word account of the effects of the bombing of Hiroshima was given an entire issue of The New Yorker.

His expenses were legendary. After buying some cord to tie up a yacht, he put in a claim marked "Money for old rope".

I was in the Saigon office at the outset of the Everest saga. Murray had walked in and asked if there were any messages for him. There was one. He read through it with some slight amazement. The service message, so far as I recall, was terse and to the point: prosayle exgiles (the sunday times) proceed immediately yak and yeti kathmandu and up everest. Murray was on the next flight out of Saigon heading up Everest. He was not a member of the actual climbing team, but I believe he holds the record of being the journalist who got the highest up the mountain on assignment.

There is also the story of a visit by Murray, accompanied by the great photographer Don McCullin, on an assignment to Papua New Guinea. New interesting faces were not that frequent in Port Moresby at the time, and they were promptly invited to a party that evening. A woman approached Murray and started chatting to him. Finally Murray told her: "Madam, you seem to know an awful lot about me, but who are you?" "But Murray," she exclaimed, "I was your first wife." The story was true, he told me. ■