The memorial service for the fearless and imaginative reporter Sue Lloyd-Roberts, who died from myeloid leukemia in October at 64, was a grand broadcasting event, appropriate for the career of one of the bravest and best of her generation.
It was held at All Souls church, by the BBC’s front door in Langham Place. The crowd that belted out Onward Christian Soldiers – a hymn so provocative in its sentiments that the Anglican church doesn’t use it any more, and the vicar felt obliged to excuse anyone who couldn’t stomach its militaristic message from singing – was studded with faces familiar from the telly.
I never knew Sue well, but I did know her for a long time. We were the same generation, and I watched her career as it grew from conventional success, on the News at Ten, to something dauntingly intrepid.
By the time she was in her 40s, secret filming had become routine. Disguises, fake identities and a gobsmacking impudence in the face of danger were the stock-in-trade of her commitment to give – as the BBC director general, Tony Hall, said in his tribute – a voice to the voiceless.
She was annoyingly, tiresomely, enviably, admirable. Daughters, listen, please. She never acknowledged the apparent limitations that many of the rest of us allowed to constrain us. She was brave and determined and clear-sighted right from the start. She never appeared to doubt herself, or sit about moaning about what she couldn’t do.
She knew what she wanted, and she got it. She had lots of advantages. But even then, back in the early 1970s, most women from her background (posh) and with her education (Oxford) set off on a predictable career in banking or law. Instead, she went to ITN in the days when the television reporters were only ever men.
Fed up with being followed round when she was reporting on foreign assignments by two large blokes with a camera and sound recording kit and a big phallic microphone, she pioneered the use of a lightweight video camera herself.
Like me, she had two children. But where I eased up on work, she seemed to carry on flat out. I comforted myself (in the evil and unsisterly way of humankind) with the thought that her children must be feeling her absence. This is a commonplace observation: let’s not pretend, women too often just can’t wait to do down the choices of other women, particularly when they’re more successful. And maybe the children did miss their mother; maybe there were tough times. But at the memorial service, what was on show were two exceptional people.
Her daughter Sarah gave an unforgettable, perfectly judged eulogy, in which she spoke with pride of her mother’s career but also conjured up a childhood growing up in a family and a household rich in warmth and generosity.
There were moments in that address that let in little glimpses of how much Sue gave up to do the job that she had decided to do. Here’s one: wherever she was, Tibet or Burma or Syria, she called home whenever she possibly could. At an early age, her daughter learned never to risk her mother’s cover to the eavesdropper, whose presence had to be assumed, by asking her about the story. Instead, she was encouraged to do most of the talking herself. Unbidden, there was an image of Sue, probably longing for a shower, a glass of wine and a warm bed, perhaps a bit lonely, maybe a bit scared, taking comfort from her daughter’s gossip.
It was her children’s decision that her legacy should be an annual scholarship for a woman from a disadvantaged background to do a postgraduate degree at Cardiff School of Journalism, that made me reflect on what an extraordinary role model she will be.
OK, I would still put money on her sometime being a pain to live with. But what a glorious piece of work she made of her life. Who dares, wins.
