Ronald Farquhar, 'Jock Zero'

Being wayward in my contacts with The Baron, I read only a few days ago of the passing of Ronnie Farquhar last April. I have to get on the record what Ronnie meant to me.

I was posted to Geneva in 1976 and Ronnie was the chief corr. My dear friend Peter Hulm (who had given me my first overseas job seven years earlier at the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation) made up the trio of correspondents.

Ronnie and I both being Scots, we addressed each other as “Jock Zero” (Ronnie) and “Jock One” (me). Having fought in the war - his face was badly burnt from a tank battle, but he never ventured to talk about it and I never dared to ask - Ronnie was to be respected. “Don’t be long,” he’d say, with that ironic frowny-smiley thing, when I asked if I could nip down the corridor for a coffee (the Press Bar at the Geneva Palais des Nations). When he realised I was hanging out with the dreaded opposition (a UPI correspondent called Arlette Baudet whose office was two doors down (only TASS and the Swiss news agency ATS were between us, as I recall), he’d give me that look - twinkly-eyed, though - as though I was fraternising with the enemy.

As it turned out, he was instrumental in convincing Arlette that, although I wasn’t a quarter the journalist I liked to think I was, and I was a Jock, marrying me wouldn’t be a total disaster. (Whether he was right or not is a matter of debate but we did marry and Arlette remains the love of my life).

Ronnie and Vera were mentors to Arlette and me and our visits to their home, or meals together by the lake, are vivid memories.

I can see, as though “live” and in HD, Ronnie walking up the corridors of the Palais - maybe coming from “Human Frights” (officially known as the UN Commission on Human Rights) - shuffling his wee feet like a ballet dancer, then putting up his fists as though he wanted to spar. 

Workaholic: he, Peter and I could be in the office into the wee hours. Funny to think of it now, since, to be honest, nothing ever happened in the Palais. Arlette and her chief corr at UPI, John Callcott, would be out of the office and in the Press Bar at 6.

Lovely man, Ronnie. War hero. And God knows what I’d have become without watching, listening and learning from him.

Miss you, Jock Zero. 

Don’t be long... ■