Obituary: Jack Gee

He died on 29 July after a long illness, aged 85. His family announced the death in a notice in Le Monde today.

Jack covered France more or less for 60 years. His autobiography, published last year, was entitled A Passion for Paris.

After Reuters Jack worked in the French capital for such British newspapers as the Daily and Sunday Express, the Daily and Sunday Mirror, The Sunday Times and The Sun. He was Paris correspondent for Independent Television News (ITN) for over a decade. He was also correspondent in France for the Jerusalem Post. His daughter Francesca worked for Reuters in Paris for about a decade in the 1980s.

An Oxford graduate, Jack dated his passion for France to a visit to his British boarding school during the Second World War by Charles de Gaulle. Jack, like former Reuters editor Jonathan Fenby who wrote a highly successful recent biography of the general, and legendary Paris bureau chief Harold King who the general famously once addressed during a news conference as “Mon cher King”, was fascinated by the late French leader. (So was I. Before joining Reuters, I was a member of a Gaullist militia later disbanded by the French government under socialist President François Mitterrand.)

Jack adored France and the French, some of them anyway. In his memoirs he recalled that one of his first assignments in Paris was to attend a news conference by Geneviève de Galard, a young army nurse who was the only woman at Dien Bien Phu, a French garrison in Vietnam whose fall in 1954 spelled the end to France’s presence in Indochina. Jack recalled that he fell headlong in love with Mlle de Galard at the news conference. He bombarded her with love letters for months afterwards, none of which ever received a reply. Jack was also self-admittedly besotted by film actress Brigitte Bardot.

He was extremely interested in aviation and was the author of Mirage, Warplane of the World, a successful book​ about the Mirage line of French combat aircraft produced by tycoon Marcel Dassault. It was published in Britain, France, Switzerland and Italy.

In his memoirs, Jack recalled how he “triggered fury (leading to expulsion) among the Chinese leadership for his critical reporting” during his brief assignment to China when he said he was the only Western correspondent there who was not a member of a Communist party. He added that “Reuters was anxious, too. The agency feared it could lose huge contracts for the supply of business news to Peking.” As the French saying goes: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

I first met Jack in the early 1970s, and the more I knew him the more I was impressed by his quick mind, his amazingly broad culture and his plain kindness. In the past few years, he was confined to his home by painful health problems. No one who knew him is likely to forget him. He was just an extraordinarily nice man. ■