Ronald Farquhar

Ronnie Farquhar brought me into Reuters’ Geneva office in 1975 after I left the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation, so I owe him a debt of gratitude for opening up a path trodden by many others.=

I remember most strongly that it was impossible to get him to glorify his amazing past. He would let slip a joke every now and then: in Prague the local prison put up a banner for a Party Congress saying something like “Prague’s Prison welcomes all members of the Czechoslovak Communist Party”.

He also taught me the most shocking Hungarian swear-word, which I was able to check on the ground during a mission for the United Nations in 1984. Ronnie was right. He made Geneva the second most productive office after Washington with its coverage of any meetings and events that could interest the world outside Fleet Street. I don’t know how many years he worked for Reuters but since he put in twice as many hours as anybody else in the bureau, we should really double that in our homage to him.

But his most proud achievement in Geneva was his imitation of the peacocks who make their home in the grounds of the Palais des Nations. With one gurgling cry he could bring almost any male peacock eagerly to the window below the Reuter office, a feat no-one else could equal, despite continual efforts by others to match his ability.

Like a number of Reuter journalists of his generation and the one after, Ronnie’s impeccable accuracy and unrelenting efforts to “get the story out” first made Reuters’ reputation with younger journalists as the only credible news source, and inspired others to fight to keep to those standards. Of course, this was given voice in the self-mocking motto I first heard from Adrienne Farrell (Peter Jackson’s wife): “We may be last but we are always wrong.”

I’m sure lots of journalists have embraced this philosophy as a result of Ronnie’s example. And of course Ronnie seemed always to be first and never wrong. ■