Peter Mosley saved my bacon

Peter Mosley was my first overseas buro chief. I arrived in Joburg shortly before the first anniversary of the Soweto riots. We had few contacts in the townships and our coverage was weak. Peter told me my job was to get to know Soweto.

He encouraged me in the work and I learned much from him. South Africa was in turmoil after the riots, and it was one of my most stimulating reporting assignments, building contacts among a brave community determined for change despite the odds.

In December 1978, Peter sent me to Windhoek to cover the first multiracial election in the Pretoria-administrated state of South West Africa (Namibia). It was an attempt to gain international credibility for the rocky South African regime, but the majority black party SWAPO boycotted the process, and the administration locked up its leaders during the campaign.

The detentions, under stringent South African security legislation, captured the headlines and took the gloss off the exercise, to the extent that one afternoon I was called down to my hotel lobby and taken with a BBC correspondent to security police headquarters in Windhoek. There, through the medium of a police colonel, we were allowed to question the detained leaders about their conditions.

Returning to the hotel with what I thought was a useful scoop, I bumped into a colleague in the lobby who said the authorities had just called a press conference to report that a group of journalists had seen the detained leaders, and could confirm they had been treated well.

I rang Peter for advice. He told me to walk straight out of the hotel and down to the SAPA office at the end of town. There I filed my story, coincidentally my first experience with a blind tape punch.

It was a good call. When I eventually returned to the hotel, I learned that the BBC reporter had had a hard time of it in the press conference. People were furious that I hadn’t been there. The evening ended with a much inebriated Ray Kennedy swinging a punch at me, missing, and collapsing on the floor. Oh happy days. 

Decades later, when I left Reuters and started to work for the Foundation, I worked closely with Peter and he helped me take over running his General News Writing Course. We also worked together for some years shortlisting applicants for the Oxford Fellowships. He enjoyed the hunt for a rough diamond and was always on the lookout for a candidate who could tell a good story.

He was a kind and generous man, a real pleasure to work with. We will miss him. ■