Jack Hartzman laid to rest among the great

Hartzman, pictured, was one of the top editors – the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse as George Short named them – who ran the London desk and crafted Reuters’ global news file from the early 1970s to the early 1990s. Today he was buried at Highgate Cemetery, north London, where, as Paul Casciato said, he would “rest in fitting company surrounded by some of the finest journalists, writers, philosophers, philanthropists and artists of the last two centuries”.

The twin son of Ukrainian Jews who migrated to Canada, Hartzman died at his London home on 25 December from pancreatic cancer, aged 81. He had been ill for three years.

In the presence of a large gathering of his surviving colleagues in the small Gothic chapel at Highgate, former correspondent and editor Nicholas Moore called him a Reuters lodestar who was renowned in the newsroom as “a martinet of some kind. Yet a martinet about whom no one ever had a bad thing to say.”

The full text of his address is appended below.

David Cutler read an excerpt from Hartzman’s favourite book, J D Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, and Andrew Dobbie read an extract from an interview with his favourite film director, Billy Wilder. The music included his favourite song, Kurt Weill’s September Song sung by Walter Huston.

At the grave, Hartzman’s sister Miriam Sapiro and her husband said the Kaddish. She was the first of many who threw a handful of soil on top of the coffin.

Hartzman’s wife, former features editor Vickie Barrett, told mourners after the burial: “Look around this room and all I feel is love for my husband, who could be a tyrant, a tough bugger, but he loved you all.”

[Editor’s note: This report was corrected on 22 January 2014 to make clear that the Horsemen ran the London desk and crafted Reuters’ global news file from the early 1970s, not from the late 1960s.]

Donations in Jack Hartzman’s memory to Marie Curie Cancer Care www.justgiving.com/jack-hartzman.

Address by Nicholas Moore

I know how moved Vickie was – and Jack’s sister Miriam who mourns him within months of Sam, his twin brother – to see the array of tributes on the alumni web site. Forgive me when I plagiarise. Meanwhile, for a quote, I have an eye on a line to introduce Jack – in his heyday – in the autobiography of his old and dear friend Cy Fox.

Jack Hartzman – “Forthrightly Jewish. A driving editor… A pussy cat in the pub.” Jack was a Kohen. One of the priestly caste. His parents – from the Ukraine – met as immigrants to Canada and were married there. And until he was three Yiddish was the language Jack knew. His parents worked hard – made a home – inspired a resolve to excel. It was as a boy that Jack heard the wartime radio voice of Vera Lynn – and he learned his journalism in Toronto at its Ryerson University. It has for a motto Mente et Artificio. I think this comes out as “with mind and skill”. His was a fine mind. Ryerson honed a consummate skill as a journalist.

When he was in his twenties Jack had a mind to travel and in May of 1956 he began a career of some 35 years on the fourth floor Reuters editorial at 85 Fleet Street. I remark the year: ’56. Suez.

Also the year of Look Back in Anger when John Osborne famously said that there were no good brave causes left to fight. However I form an impression that Jack decided that he had discovered one. I add in a parenthesis – with Karl Marx so near at hand – this was not on the Left. I fancy Jack decided that he’d seen his own good brave cause in the quality and the integrity of the news. Not perhaps that he’d have put it that way himself. I can see him in the pub – over his Bell’s – when, if you got pompous, he’d crack with mischief with a perfect glee. “You are talking through your ***.”

The newsroom folklore had him as a martinet of some kind. Yet a martinet about whom no one ever had a bad thing to say. And it did indeed seem to me that, on duty, he kept that legendary seven-letter A word of his on ice – for an aside now and again as he put down the telephone on the ego of some or another Reuters grandee.

For JH was no respecter of persons. If a sceptic – mind you – never the cynic. There was a lunch once when, with zeal, he went after Lord McGregor of Durris, as I think it was, of the Reuters Trustees. Jack had a suspicion that the bemused eminence of the great and the good did not altogether get it that quality was at one with integrity.

Music was another dimension of Jack’s life. As I say – no respecter of persons. Not so long ago I adventured to him that as I got older I had rediscovered a sense of awe for Billie Holiday. The first Lady of Swing.  Lady Day. “Er, yes, I suppose so,” Jack said. “If only someone had taught her how to hold a tune.”

In the 1960s Reuters subsumed the professionalism of Jack’s North America Desk in a new World Desk and it was no surprise that he was one of a quartet of editors – the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse –  who had a hands-on charge each day of the global news file.

The ‘60s. Carnaby Street. And Jack, as meticulous in his attire as in his copy. The copy desk clerks had him as Dapper Jack. Does anyone else, I wonder, remember the enormous double-breasted blazer. There were also Jolly Jack and Jumping Jack. He had his own chair with Hartzman on it – as if a movie director. For classic film was a passion. His personal best ever movie was Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. I remark how it is very Jack: an epic of the common man against the odds.

His own was absolute integrity. Always the copy. The text to hand. Never mind how exalted the byline. A martinet. I dare say it did hurt sometimes  – that forensic, articulate and never wrong so close a practical criticism of your work.

This was the Jack of course, at the top of his game, who Vickie met at Reuters, and when we came to know her not only as a resolute editor and mother of the chapel, but also as a lovely person enriching and enriched in her marriage with Jack. When she met him she was, as she put it, “smitten, but a bit terrified”. I gather that once it somehow came about that Jack had to dictate some urgent news to her. And she dared to challenge him. For in a rare infelicity he had adverted “a pre-dawn darkness”. Oh, Jack.

But – what years they were – those years from ’56 until Jack retired in ’92. The Cold War. Three Arab Israeli wars. Kennedy. Civil Rights. Vietnam. Man on the Moon. His valedictory big story was to desk a world news beat on the release of Nelson Mandela. A perfect storm, too, inside of Reuters – typewriters to computer editing. A flotation on the exchanges. Nor did a month go by – or so you felt – but that the managers had a new idea to reorganise us. Others’ job titles flew about as if confetti.

A perfect storm. But through it all there – triumphantly there on the London desk – there was Jack. The soul of the place. Day after day. Just doing what Jack did. He saw fit to remind me once that he was never – as he put it – in the action. Except that of course he was – for it was in the field, out among the correspondents, that such a lot of the Hartzman magic did its work. He was also, as I gathered, just as good on the line with anxious Reuters wives left at home.

But you had got in late on the story. The AP had hurt you. You couldn’t see how to dig out. Then Jack – that quiet, precise voice – came on the telephone. Or that unfailingly courteous message. “Er, yes, but you may want to get a line on such-and-such up to the top of the story, and to consider this, or that, and maybe that too.” Jack talked you down on to the wire. And if you attended him and did as he said you had learned a lesson and a world of news was that bit the better for it. Thus did his remarkable influence live on. No good brave causes. Not so. There are wire agency stars. They burn. And then go out. Not Jack. He was an ever fixed mark. A Sirius in our skies. A Reuters lodestar.

He met his final illness – diagnosed in 2010 – and the fact of his mortality with a rare courage. He died at home – not an easy victory, as I know, for his devoted Vickie who nursed him all those long months. ■