My starving white-knuckle ride with Donald Forbes

I first knew Don when he was working for the AP in Brussels back in the early 1970s, when the UK was joining the then European Communities (Common Market) along with Ireland and Denmark.

Don was a tough competitor with a good eye for a news story hiding in all the verbiage pumped out by the EC Commission press department daily.  There was a bar in the press room where the Commission held its daily noon briefing. The tipple of choice was Campari soda, a bitter brew which the cognoscenti drank to impress.  Don, a  tough Scot of relatively few words, was not; he did not suffer fools. 

Later, during the violent break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s,  Don was the Reuters bureau chief in Belgrade, where I visited on several occasions as Europe News Editor. He ran a tight ship on a shoestring budget and got the best from his talented local staff.  

This was a time when Reuters was still relatively inexperienced in multi-media journalism.  Don had to deal with the enormous challenges of producing a competitive news file while handling the sometimes competing requirements of the pictures and television services, all the while keeping his staff safe in a highly dangerous war situation.  He was respected as a strong and fair bureau chief who understood the complex Yugoslavia breakup story, wrote it well and backed his staff. 

During one Belgrade visit, Don and his wife put on a little party for me to meet the staff. There was a delicious buffet with juicy baby beef, a speciality of the region. The next day Don drove me to Zagreb, capital of Croatia and arch enemy of Serbia at the time. The road between Belgrade and Zagreb was closed so Don took a detour through Hungary, driving like the wind.  No time to stop for a bite to eat, we got to Zagreb in the late afternoon after a white-knuckle drive, starving but in one piece. At which point Don remembered the baby beef sandwiches his wife had made for us to eat en-route.  ■