Further to the Guardian’s obituary on Chris Nawrat, the former Sunday Times sports editor, I must put on record one particular example of his journalistic skills.
I was producing the Sunday Times’s news pages on that awful day in April 1989 when the Hillsborough disaster occurred.
As the details of the tragedy began to emerge, the editor, Andrew Neil, decided it was important to have input from a journalist who knew more than us about football.
He summoned Nawrat, who passed on his sports section responsibilities to his deputy, and then joined us on the back bench to help oversee the news section.
He rose to the occasion. His knowledge and insight, along with an astonishing recall of facts and figures, took our breath away. When the scale of the tragedy became clear, he also exhibited great sensitivity as we debated which photographs we should use. It is fair to say that his input utterly transformed the quality of our output.
It also transformed Nawrat’s standing in the office. In spite of having crossed the Wapping picket lines in 1986, and having been expelled from the communist party for his trouble, some senior executives remained suspicious about him because of his politics.
Perhaps that hostility never went away and it may well have played a part in the controversy surrounding his departure from the paper in 1994 in a dispute over sports books carrying the Sunday Times imprimatur.
But I will never forget that, when the heat was on, Chris Nawrat performed brilliantly. In subsequent conversations, I discovered a man who liked to talk about politics and literature as much as sport.
That’s also the recollection of his friend, Peter Wilson, who has written a wonderful tribute on the Sports Journalists’ Association website.
They met at the Morning Star and Wilson tells how, following the murder of John Lennon, they incorporated the titles of Beatles songs into every headline on their paper’s sports page.
Nawrat spent his last couple of years in Spain and used a wheelchair following a fall. He was pictured in it when marrying his third wife, Angelica Bender, in 2014.
