Sri Lanka

How great to hear from Feizal [Samath]. First Dalton [de Silva], then Dalton and Feizal, then Feizal were the best correspondents we (or any news organisation) ever had in Sri Lanka.

They owned the story and at the most difficult of times were always fair and impartial, always turning in pencil subbable copy. It was an ugly, ugly, ugly story to cover and when people ask me what is the worst thing I ever saw working for Reuters it was in Sri Lanka. I arrived at a village about 30 mins chopper ride from Colombo to see it still smoking and lined up beside an irrigation ditch were 42 bodies (men, women, children, babies, teenagers, elderly) and they had all been disembowelled and had their skulls split open. Pass the whisky.

I am shocked, but shocked I say, that a Reuters Correspondent, nay even a Bureau Chief, would fritter the night away with liquor. But then again if you’ve ever stayed at the Galle Face (when it really was the Galle Face) you’d know on a moonlit night there was nothing better to do than watch the sun come up from the Galle Face terrace.

It always bemused me why I was about the only foreign correspondent who stayed there while everyone else ran off to the Hilton etc at about 10 times the price. I would arrive, be escorted around the hotel suite/rooms picking out a sofa here, an armchair there, a vase here, a dining table there, a large cushion here which within half an hour would all be installed in my own personally designed suite. What a place it was. I guess one of my fondest (of many, many) memories of Reuters Asia was that I had the chance to stay in the Raffles and Galle Face before they became what they are now. They were faded glories by the time I checked in to them but they still left every other hotel I’ve ever stayed in around the world for dead.

While we are on reminiscences I guess you can’t talk about Sri Lanka without recalling one of the great Reuters chairmen state visit stories. I know there are a million of them.

Anyway, Sir Denis Hamilton (a real gentlemen) visited the Sri Lanka office in the company of some of our exalted Asia executives (or maybe even higher). After a splendid lunch Sir Denis and the group went back to the office and the spicy food got him so he had to rush to the “toilet”. The toilet was basically a bucket.

Being a good man, Sir Denis’ only instruction at the end of the visit was that a proper toilet should be installed and working within a week. There was even a rumour he insisted a photo should be sent to him assuring that it had been done.

Those were the days My Friend. You can keep your Pulitzer Prizes. ■