Obituary-Anthony Grey, correspondent imprisoned for two years by Maoist Red Guards

His family said Grey had died peacefully on Oct. 11 in his hometown of Norwich, England. He became a successful novelist after leaving Reuters.

Grey joined the agency in 1964 from the Eastern Daily Press in Norwich where he became friends with the author Frederick Forsyth, who later preceded him as correspondent in East Berlin after they both joined Reuters.

Grey also reported from Prague, Warsaw, Sofia and Budapest during the Cold War before being posted in 1967 as the sole correspondent in Beijing, to cover the violent turmoil of China’s Cultural Revolution.

At midnight on August 18, 1967, around 200 Red Guards stormed into the Reuters house and dragged him outside to face an angry crowd. He was “jet-planed” – a stress position forcing his head down to the ground with his arms stretched up behind him.

Grey was held in solitary confinement in the basement of the Reuters house and office for nearly 27 months, accused of being a spy. It appeared his detention was in retaliation for the imprisonment of pro-Chinese journalists in the then British colony of Hong Kong for breaking emergency regulations.

The Red Guards wrecked the house and hanged his cat in front of him, leaving the corpse on his bed as part of a campaign of physical and mental pressure. Maoist slogans were daubed all over the house.

He was released in October 1969 and later criticised the British Foreign Office for advising UK media, including Reuters, that publicity would not help his case. After 18 months this strategy was abandoned and a flood of publicity helped win his release.

On his return to Britain, he was awarded the OBE, a prestigious state honour, and named UK journalist of the Year.

He left Reuters in 1970 and worked as a presenter on the BBC World Service as well as writing for several magazines and producing television documentaries. He became a novelist, publishing 10 successful works of fiction – the most prominent being Saigon --as well as two accounts of his ordeal.

The first, “Hostage in Peking”, was written within six weeks of his release. In 2009 he published a diary secretly kept during his captivity, when he also compiled crossword puzzles and wrote poems and short stories.

He said later he had suffered bouts of depression since his captivity but reading and preparing the diary for publication had brought on PTSD. He considered himself “the first modern international hostage of this era.”

Vergil Berger, who preceded Grey as correspondent in Beijing and had lived in the same house, said in a review when the diary was published:

“Grey emerges from these pages as a man of extraordinary courage, resilience, and strength of character, but also of remarkable modesty. He describes how just the disciplined act of writing a diary became an important tool for keeping himself on an even keel, and in the reflections even attributes to his ordeal some of his own subsequent positive personal development, plus on the dark side some battles with depression even in recent years.”

Grey leaves daughters Lucy and Clarissa, companion Sally Bromley and grandsons Eddie and Oscar. ■