Obituary: Patrick Massey

An ace reporter and a masterly writer, Massey covered some of the momentous events of the post World War II years, first for The Associated Press and then Reuters, starting with the Congo crisis in the 1960s.

He was a star London-based fireman, always on call to fly out to world troublespots whenever a sure hand was needed. He revelled in the description - as did his ex-AP colleague Granville (Bob) Watts - and was never known to turn down such an assignment.

He reported the 1967 and 1973 Middle East wars, the Greek military coup, troubles in Cyprus and the fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War. Later he was bureau chief in Tel Aviv and Cairo in turn. Following his double duty in the Middle East Massey was Chief Correspondent in Tokyo from 1983 to 1986 before returning to the World Desk in London.

Throughout his fireman stints he never seemed particularly worried about the dangers he faced as long as he was part of the international press corps, had access to the action, communications and a few beers at the end of the day.

If you wanted to know what it was really like to be there, Massey was your man. The approach of the Massey lope and half smile was welcomed in many a hard-pressed bureau: reinforcements had arrived and head office had sent the best.

Massey began his half century-plus in news in Fleet Street, as a 16-year-old Daily Sketch copy boy. After army service and a spell as a caption writer at Kemsley Newspapers (later acquired by Thomson, now Thomson Reuters), he moved to the AP in 1953, again writing captions. Six months later he was on the British desk before becoming a correspondent and covering a wide range of assignments from the Congo to Paris, Geneva, Brussels, Cyprus and Libya.

In 1965 Massey and others among the AP’s British stalwarts in London including Ron Sly, George Short and Ron Thomson concluded they would always lack the status and financial rewards of their U.S.-based brethren assigned to the UK. Many of them agreed to move from Farringdon Road around the corner to 85 Fleet Street, followed in succeeding years by waves of others.

Massey and Thomson were close friends from boyhood in south-east London. As teenagers they were fire wardens during the blitz and told great tales of spotting the blazes from the roof of either, depending on the telling, St Bride’s Church or the adjacent Reuters building. To hear them recount it, they saw the flames leaping around St Paul’s Cathedral. The dramatic detail may have been apocryphal, but they spun rattling good yarns.

At the time many of the AP’s Brits crossed over, Reuters was setting up the World Desk to replace the old Central Desk and North American editorial ideas were sought after. It turned out to be a good deal for the Baron.

Massey made the London Bureau his base of operations and his bright writing touch soon lit up the file. One of the stories he loved covering in the 1970s was the disappearance of Lord Lucan after the murder of his children's nanny.

He was always a keen aviation writer and made sure he was in at the beginning of the Concorde story, getting a press seat on the supersonic airliner’s inaugural flight and most significant flights thereafter. His last story for Reuters appeared on the file more than a decade after his retirement - a personal piece following a Concorde crash on take-off from Charles de Gaulle airport in July 2000 (reproduced below).

Massey had retired early in February 1989 as International Quality Editor (General News), responsible for shaping the file and providing detailed daily feedback to correspondents including how they fared against the competition.

Throughout the three years of that head office desk job he yearned to return the thick of the action.

Even in retirement his byline couldn’t be kept off the file. In 1994, five years after leaving the payroll, Massey was back. He returned to Belfast for the first time in 18 years and loved every minute of it. One memorable byliner under the headline “From bartender to British bogeyman in 25 years of troubles” began thus:

BELFAST, Aug 12 (Reuter) - The young bartender poured me a pint of Guinness and offered his opinion on the rioting that had ripped Belfast apart the night before.

"Four dead," he observed. "You know if it had been 200 dead they might all have kept quiet for another 10 years."

That was in July, 1970, a time widely regarded as pivotal in the 25 years of the Northern Ireland struggles. Since then the conflict has killed about 3,500 people.

The bartender, named Gerry Adams, was soon to leave his job at the Duke of York pub in central Belfast. It was not for another year or so that police named him as a leader of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) …

After some happy years in retirement in Orpington, Kent, Massey suffered a severe stroke five years ago but was able to attend a few pensioners' lunches and other events though confined to a wheelchair, with Helen - always the perfect go-anywhere foreign correspondent's partner - at his side.

After 35 years as a wire agency journalist, he took up freelance travel writing, sometimes job-sharing with Helen.

The cause of death was pneumonia and congestive heart failure.

Everyone who knew Massey had a favourite tale to tell. A selection:

Ron Sly: I have a very clear recollection of first meeting Pat when I joined AP. The thrusting gait, the gleam in the eye, the half smile and, of course, the vitality made a big impression on me. Characteristically, he was about to dash off to Paris to quell a riot or something. He had a flair for bringing stories to life, however routine, in my opinion and I learnt a great deal from him, especially when news editing in London Bureau.

On a more personal note, we enjoyed Pat and Helen's hospitality when they were based in Tel Aviv and during the visit Morag and I took off for a few days around Aqaba. We were out of contact for this time but when we landed back in Tel Aviv Pat was waiting for us. He had been following our tracks since we left, just an example of his thoroughness.

Pat played a big part in my move from AP to Reuters and I never regretted it. He, along with Ron Thomson, George Short, Wag (Richard Wagstaff), and others no longer with us were great company and, for a copytaster, a pleasure to see on the old skeds. One 'phone call and they could be back on the desk in no time.

Cy Fox: I first got to know Pat when, as a Canadian Press correspondent, I was periodically covering the murder and mayhem gathering pace in Northern Ireland around 1970. Pat, who I think had already come through Black September in Jordan, would lope around the perilous streets of West Belfast and the Derry Bogside with all the justified bravado of a crack Reuter fireman.

One Saturday morning he took me, a greenhorn, along on a mission to cover a secret IRA press conference at the notorious Divis Flats in Belfast. On entering and leaving the place we had to brave stairways lined with massed, pistol-brandishing boyos. Inside the Flats he and I joined a TV crew from the Irish Republic to view a young British army cadet who had been captured by the gunmen. 

Irish television broadcast the proceedings that night, and the next day at the officers’ mess of the Green Jackets Regiment we were verbally assailed by the British brass, who had spotted Messrs Massey and Fox on hand for the televised prisoner display. The Brits threatened to cancel our scheduled presence that day on an army Land Rover patrol of central Belfast. But Pat, oblivious to army displeasure and also brazenly asserting the rights of a free press, stared and argued them down - right there in their own mess - and off we duly went on the patrol. There was no stopping Massey!

Allan Barker: He had a distinctive writing style that got to the heart of the story very quickly and was noted for its short lead paras. He was never a formula agency writer. Sub-editors soon learned that it was not wise to tamper with the Massey style. A few who were unwise enough to do so usually found an angry Pat loping across the 4th floor at 85 Fleet Street to their desk ready for a testy exchange.

When I had the privilege of working with Pat and George Short in the bureau from 1974 to 1976, we covered unprecedented Irish violence including the notorious Birmingham and Guildford pub bombings as well as a fragile political situation in which Harold Wilson and Ted Heath vied for supremacy. Heath lost an election he called in 1974 after declaring a three-day work-week due to an unrelenting miners' strike and then Wilson suddenly quit in 1976. The British economy, then as now, was under considerable strain.

Pat usually waded through masses of copy from the Press Association to hone his version of the top UK stories, as long as it was tacitly agreed he was not to be called into action between the hours of 1:00 pm and 3:00 pm. He was one of a bevy of Fleet Streeters at that time that liked to have a lunchtime noggin or two. It never seemed to affect his work after his return to the bureau and fitted in well with Parliament's then mid-afternoon statements and PM's Questions.

Barry May: One of Pat’s fireman stints was the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war. He turned up in Rawalpindi to reinforce the one-man bureau (me) with a Beretta he had acquired for personal protection on the trek through the perilous wilds of the North West Frontier, then as now a lawless badland hazardous to outsiders.

The pistol looked and felt real enough and was stamped “Made in Italy”. But it was fabricated by one of the back street gunsmiths in the frontier village of Dara Adam Khel who forged weaponry ranging from Lugers and other assorted handguns to Kalashnikovs, Lee Enfield rifles and RPGs. They were clever copies and certainly cheap but they were notoriously unreliable - as likely to jam or blow up in the hands of anyone who fired them as to cause harm from the business end of the barrel.

Pat knew he would never get out with his souvenir in his baggage when he returned to London so he left it with me as the resident correspondent. Wishing to keep all my fingers intact for typing, I never dared discharge the damned thing and eventually handed it over to my successor as an unauthorised item of bureau kit.

Brian Creighton: I worked with Pat Massey in the London Bureau from 1971 to 1973. If ever the word “genius” applied to a Reuter journalist, it applied to Pat. He had an uncanny knack of bending the traditional Reuters writing style without ever breaking it, and the results were always exceptional. I was constantly amazed at the talent of the man.

Nick Carter: In the last few weeks before the fall of Saigon in 1975, Pat agreed to go in as the bureau's last fireman, though the briefing on the local situation, which I gave him at Singapore Airport on his last lap, left him seething. Everything was hand to mouth, and the foreign currency he took in with him was very informally transferred from funds brought out of Saigon only hours before by Colin McIntyre. Saigon was on its last legs. Bernard Edinger, who had a French passport, was flown in specially to hole up in the French Embassy ready for when our bureau was evacuated. Pat, Jeremy Toye, David Laulicht and Pham Ngoc Dinh kept a graphic file going through the last days till on April 29th their quarterspeed wire finally spelt out the word "scramble". Pat, Jeremy and David reached the American Embassy roof and boarded the helicopters to the US Navy ship Mobile. Edinger got out the following month, but Dinh was stuck for the next five years.

David Nicholson: I'm pretty sure that Israel was his favourite posting and he often spoke fondly of his time there and the friendships he had formed. He once told me about answering a phone in the bureau one day and hearing the caller say: “Mr Massey, this is Menachem Begin. I have a correction for your readers. I gave you some wrong information in our interview yesterday and I want to correct that...”

Rodney Pinder: I’ll never forget that “heather-louping” stride of Pat's as he swept into the story or the newsroom, full of energy and get-going. He was a first class reporter and writer, thoroughly professional.

On the lighter side, literally, he was the champion lamp post climber at the annual Ron Thomson Christmas party in Orleans Road, Crystal Palace.

As the evening progressed, and the libations took hold, a small group of the more daring, or daft, would go out into the street to see which of us could climb the fastest to the top of the lamp post opposite. Pat was champ. I don't think Ron ever made it to the top.

Patricia Betts: I fondly remember Pat arriving at many Reuter parties over the years with his flashing multi-coloured headband and his broad smile. At some stage during the evening he would entertain us by singing his special rendition of “The Mountains of Mourne” and encouraging us to join in the chorus.

The funeral will be on Monday 6 April at 12:00 noon at Beckenham Crematorium, Elmers End Road, Beckenham, Kent BR3 4TD, followed by a reception at Dulwich and Sydenham Golf Club, Grange Lane, College Road, London SE21 7LH.

Patrick Massey’s last story on Reuters’ news file in 2000:

First reporter on Concorde recalls serene flight

By Patrick Massey

LONDON, July 26 (Reuters) - As the first reporter to fly on Concorde, I was slightly disappointed by its serene transition across the sound barrier.

Brought up on movies in which pilots battled fearsome judder to enter supersonic flight, I was expecting something of that sort aboard Prototype 002 as it flew from Fairford in England to Toulouse in France in May 1971.

But the voice in my headphone droned on laconically: "Mach 0.8...Mach 0.9...Mach 1...Mach 1.1." That was it. We were supersonic. No battle.

Casting aside a tentative judder story on my typewriter, I wrote instead: "Flying through the sound barrier on Concorde is like crossing the equator: you don't know it's happening unless somebody tells you."

On subsequent flights, I did notice the push in your back that accompanies the engagement of afterburners to propel the aircraft through Mach 1. But that day I had been looking for something more dramatic.

Most of the cabin on that flight was occupied by Dalek-type machines monitoring the intricacies of Concorde's performance.

There were only two other passengers, a BBC cameraman and the managing director of British Aircraft Corporation.

We knew that 55,000 feet below us, Atlantic waters were being buffeted by our mighty sonic boom.

But in the cabin, we felt only the normal hum of aircraft noise and a feeling of great pride at taking part in this magic moment.

How did I manage to be there? British Aircraft Corporation had learned that its French counterpart, Aerospatiale, intended to carry a reporter that day on a Concorde flight with President Georges Pompidou. The British company decided to do the same.

And with room for only one reporter, they chose Reuters.

I flew three more times on Concorde - a proving flight with passengers to Tehran and flights inaugurating services to Bahrain and Washington.

All were memorable experiences, but none could match the exhilaration of the time when we pioneered that path through the sound barrier.

I boarded Prototype 002 again only last year. By then it was in an aviation museum at Yeovil in southwestern England, forever safe from the kind of tragedy that struck on Tuesday at Charles de Gaulle Airport. ■