Michael Nelson-Unsung Architect of a Mighty Reuters

A modest and even shy man, Mike Nelson was certainly the major, largely unsung architect of the mighty Reuters of the 1980s and 1990s.

But much of his achievement over the years was obscured by the shadow of Managing Director Gerald Long, a dominating personality not too inclined to share credit when it was due. 

In his 2011 autobiography, Castro and Stockmaster: A Life in Reuters, Mike shared something of his frustration over their fraught relationship, recounting how, in the 1960s, he was sent with Long -- then assistant General Manager -- to negotiate new contracts with the Swedish and Finnish news agencies. "Long had a need to dominate and continually tried to put me down before the heads of the agencies." he wrote.

That, in my experience from Mike's visits to Paris and Moscow when I was bureau chief in those places, was not his style at all. In Paris, where he certainly knew the situation under President Francois Mitterrand better than I did, he would listen attentively when I was unhappily trotted out, more than once, by the cantankerous manager for France, John Stephens, to deliver a lecture on French politics. Afterwards, Mike – who had a long connection with France and knowledge of its politics -- unfailingly thanked me and made it sound as though he meant it. 

In Moscow , after his retirement from Reuters and in the relaxed Gorbachev era, I arranged meetings with newspaper editors, foreign ministry officials, and also former dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov. On each occasion, Mike deferred to me to the extent that our interviewees probably felt that he was just tagging along for the ride.

But he would discreetly inject questions relating to Cold War broadcasting, part of research for his 1997 book, War of the Black Heavens. 

Although he could be stern, Mike was unfailingly polite. My wife, who had plenty of experience hosting a range of Reuter executives, found him "always a gentleman." 

"Reuter wives," he told me once, "don't get enough appreciation from the company." When he could, he offered some.

After a particularly heavy business discussion with John Stephens in Paris. he took me and my Deputy Editor Humphrey Hudson to the renowned Maxims restaurant, and insisted that our wives come too. "Over the years they must have spent a lot of time waiting for you," he told us.

His autobiography revealed that in his early teens he had suffered from an acute stammer which could have limited his career prospects -- perhaps related to his childhood experience of the wartime bombing of London. 

A brilliant doctor, he wrote, cured him in two weeks. In 2011, long after he retired from Reuters, he was invited to a first night of The King's Speech a film about King George VI's struggle with his own stammer.  But he didn't go, he wrote, "because a (cured) stammerer always has the fear that the affliction will come back."

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