Ronald Farquhar's funeral

Representing past and present Reuters colleagues were former general manager Michael Nelson, Geneva acting bureau chief and one-time Farquhar trainee Stephanie Nebehay, and former senior correspondent, Switzerland Bob Evans. From the UN’s European headquarters at the Palais des Nations came veterans Gordon Martin, a Reuters correspondent in the late 1950s and 1960s, and Laurent Mossu, formerly of Le Figaro and now reporting for Radio France International. Many other Reuterians had wanted to come but the ceremony had to be organised just two days after his death on Tuesday 19 April to avoid the long delay over Easter. 

Katia Farquhar read an account of his life, which she said had been dictated by her father when he was first taken to hospital in November last year, with strict instructions that it was all she should say about him at his funeral. It noted that Ronnie, whose own father was a journalist, wanted to go to university after school but World War II intervened so he went to work in a munitions factory. In 1942 he joined a tank regiment and served as a radio operator in North Africa, Italy, Greece and Austria. He survived a torpedo attack on his troop ship in the Mediterranean, a shelling of his tank in Tunisia when his burns put him in hospital for six months, and in Sicily the bombing of a house alongside the camp where he was billeted, putting him in hospital again. Demobbed in 1947, he ignored his father’s advice not to follow him into journalism, joined a civil service course for shorthand and typing aimed at training secretaries on which he was the only man, then went to work for the Lennox Herald in Dumbarton. In 1949, he moved south of the border to the Lincoln Evening News and then back again the next year to the Glasgow Evening Citizen, before joining Reuters in 1952.

“He travelled the world, met famous politicians, and (Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei) Gromyko even recommended him for a salary rise. But he wanted to be remembered as ‘a young man from Reuters whose name I forget’ – a reference to him in a book on the 1956 Hungarian uprising, Window Onto Hungary, by Dora Scarlett,” was his own summary of his Reuters career.

Nelson told mourners he had enjoyed the privilege of knowing Ronnie for 50 years since calling on his help in Belgrade where Ronnie was chief correspondent to renegotiate Reuters’ contract with the Yugoslav news agency Tanjug. Just before going to Yugoslavia, recalled Nelson, Ronnie had shown just how tough – and selfless – he could be when he went on record as telling the then top Reuters management that it should protest to the Chinese authorities over the arrest in Peking – after he had left – of one of his translators.

Referring to the effective expulsion of his Peking predecessor Jack Gee three years earlier, Ronnie wrote in a letter still in the Reuters archives: “Reuters didn’t gain any prestige or face with the Chinese by pulling Jack out without demur as soon as they were asked to. That,” said Nelson, “was a courageous thing to do for a relatively young Reuter journalist hoping to develop his career. It showed his dedication to principle.”

Evans recalled that when he joined Reuters in 1962 he was told by a senior editor: “If you ever want to become a correspondent behind the Iron Curtain, sonny boy, you’d better start reading the stories Ronnie Farquhar and Sidney Weiland file.” Both, though of totally different styles and personalities, said Evans, created their own informal schools of Cold War reporting, over two decades turning young journalists assigned to their bureaux into the reporters who staffed Reuters offices in the communist countries through the 1970s and 1980s as the Soviet empire slid into decline. Evans then read some of the tributes sent to Ronnie’s family by many of his former trainees.

PHOTO: Michael Nelson, Gordon Martin and Stephanie Nebehay. ■