Obituary: John Earle

He died in hospital in Trieste on 19 September of pneumonia, having been weakened by a fall in May. He had lived in Trieste for 25 years.

As a battalion signals officer with the British Army’s Rifle Brigade in North Africa, Earle was wounded at El Alamein in October 1942, later returning to his brigade until the fall of Tunis, followed by service in Syria and Lebanon.

Late in 1943 he moved to the Yugoslav section of the Special Operations Executive in Cairo with whom he was parachuted in 1944 to the Partisans in Serbia as British Liaison Officer with a radio operator. The operation, Mission Demagogue, was designed to sabotage the Danube but failed.

In a privately printed account for family and friends in 1999, he recounted how he was briefed to move north to near Belgrade and provide a base to which a British naval intelligence officer could be dropped for anti-Danube activities. Instead, soon after arrival with a Partisan unit, they were attacked by Germans, Bulgarians and Četniks, and forced south to the borders of Kosovo. The situation was complicated by the presence of American missions with the Četniks. After inconclusive to-ing and fro-ing he caught malaria and was evacuated by a Soviet aircraft to southern Italy.

Later, at a party for local girls in Trieste, Earle met his future wife Anna Maria Tiziani. They had one son and one daughter, and she died in 2000.

Earle joined Reuters in June 1948 in London. He was successively assistant correspondent in Bonn; correspondent, Belgrade; chief diplomatic correspondent based in London; and chief correspondent, Rome. He then wrote for The Times from Rome before moving to Trieste in 1986.

As a journalist Earle met many leaders of the era including Josip Broz Tito, Archbishop Makarios, Harold Macmillan and John Kennedy.

He was president of the Associazione della Stampa Estera in Italia (Italian Foreign Press Association) in 1978 and 1980.

Recently he had been working on the last of his projects, Trieste Tapestry, in which he wove together a series of stories about local events and notable people in the city’s recent and not so recent past. The book is as yet unpublished. ■