Roland Dallas

Belatedly I would like to add a tribute to Roland Dallas, one of those stalwarts of the 1950s/early 1960s generation of largely unsung Reuters correspondents who helped create the climate of respect for the company name from which we slightly younger folk benefited as we moved in to join them. I was posted to Mexico City from Moscow in January 1970 and worked alongside Roland for nearly six months as he organised installations and prepared the cover for the first Football World Cup there that year. Roland and his wife Rita could not have been more helpful in easing the change for myself and my first-time pregnant wife from the solid certainties of life in the Soviet Union to the unpredictable and chaotic nature of existence of the country in which our first daughter was to be born. It could have been a difficult relationship - Roland was extending his stay after a term as bureau chief to devote himself to the World Cup while I was supposed to be succeeding him as the local Jefe in an arrangement that could have been, without his disarming friendliness and subtle steering, a recipe for conflict. Later, in Rio, I found he and Rita had left equally happy memories.

Roland had certainly taken the opportunity to travel around Mexico and those parts of the Caribbean - Haiti, the Dominican Republic - and Central America which then fell under Mexico City’s responsibility. Uli Schmetzer, who shared with us that handover period as the number two in the bureau, has already reported in his tribute on Roland’s efforts in 1969 to find the stringer in Port Au Prince. Before leaving in mid-1970, Roland had also told me about his effort to track the gentleman down and the slightly macabre result. He had also recounted some rather bloodcurdling scenes involving the Tontons Macoutes that he had witnessed. Consequently, when I arrived in the Haitian capital in April 1971 - on urgent instructions from No. 85 where news of rumours of the illness of Papa Doc Duvalier had finally penetrated two months after AP and AFP had set up a permanent death-watch presence - I was somewhat reluctant to stray far from base in my hotel, especially as the opposition had decamped homeward a few days earlier after running out of cash and there was no-one left in town with whom to share the perceived risk of, judging by the stories, being found headless by the roadside. However, the morning after my arrival local radio, following an hour of funereal music, announced that the dictator had died and was being replaced by his son, Jean Claude. Over the next few days, after a formal introduction to the tubby young man at the National Palace for the press corps (they all flooded back on that first afternoon plane from Miami) and a stream of other events during which the new authorities put on a good-boy show for the outsiders, I totally forgot about the dead stringer, even though Roland had asked me to try to find his grave and pay respects if I ever went there. I filed my snap on Papa Doc’s death and all the subsequent cover by phone to Washington and 10 days later returned to Mexico City. There I found waiting a note from Washington bureau with a copy of a short cablegram in French they had received some 12 hours after the Haitian radio announcement. It was signed off by our long dead stringer. Zombies, anyone? ■