Obituary: Ronald Farquhar

A Scot from Glasgow who joined Reuters in 1952, he drove over 500 miles in fog on crumbling roads from Warsaw to Budapest in October 1956 to be on the spot to break the news when the Soviet Army put down Hungary’s anti-communist uprising.

Over several days he dodged bullets amid fierce fighting on the streets, filing stories with the help of a trio of women who worked as telephonists in his hotel and once from an ancient telex machine in a rebel command post.

Forced to take refuge in the British embassy when the Soviet command imposed a 24-hour curfew, he still managed to stay on in Budapest until January 1957, becoming one of the last Western reporters to leave when the new authorities ordered him out.

A trooper in the British Army during World War Two, Farquhar survived the destruction of his tank by a German shell in Tunisia, suffering serious facial burns.

When he joined Reuters after six years with local newspapers in Scotland and England, the burns effectively decided his career path after a doctor decreed that he should not expose his face to strong sun and must never have a tropical posting.

A German-speaker, he was first sent to Frankfurt and then in 1955 to Czechoslovakia where he met his future wife Vera, an editorial assistant in the Reuters office in Prague.

Like many Cold War romances between Westerners and East Europeans at the time, theirs ran foul of the communist bureaucracy. They were not allowed to marry and Vera was refused an exit visa when he was transferred to Warsaw in 1956.

For five years they carried on a long-distance relationship, including during the two years he was in Beijing from 1958-60. Finally, the Czechoslovak authorities relented and they were married in Prague in 1960.

In Beijing, he reported on the gradual estrangement between Communist China and the Soviet Union and the flaring of a border dispute with India. “It was a great place to be at the time, totally different to anything else I had known,” he once said.

After Beijing, now with Vera, he went to Belgrade for four years, tracking not only Marshal Josip Broz Tito’s improving relationship with Moscow but also the decline of the “liberal” Yugoslav version of communism.

Over the following years he was in Geneva, specialising in disarmament issues, again in Warsaw and the West German capital Bonn and then back to Geneva from 1973 to 1980.

His last posting before retiring in 1983 was to Vienna where he followed the decline of the Soviet empire and the economies of the Eastern European countries, training many young Reuters journalists whom he infected with his love for the region.

He and Vera, who died in 2008, settled in Geneva, and he worked part-time for Reuters until 1992. He is survived by the couple’s two daughters, Helen and Katarina. ■