Sad to report the deaths of two journalists from the days of Fleet Street and Gray's Inn Road - Roderick Mann and Murray Sayle.
Mann, who died in California aged 87, wrote a showbusiness column for the Sunday Express in days when it was possible for journalists to be the friends of movie stars.
Among his celebrity pals were Cary Grant, David Niven and Grace Kelly. He was even briefly engaged to a star, Kim Novak.
The debonair Mann, who was born in Birmingham, worked for the Sunday Express for 30 years until 1980. After moving to California in 1978 he worked for the Los Angeles Times until his retirement in 1988.
Sayle, who died in Australia aged 84, was a very different kind of journalist. During his years at the Sunday Times he was regarded as an outstanding reporter.
As The Times's excellent obituary records today, he climbed Everest, sailed single-handed across the Atlantic, hunted for Che Guevara in the jungles of South America and covered wars in Vietnam and the Middle East.
He worked first for the Sydney Daily Telegraph in his native Australia, arriving in London in 1952. He worked first for The People , acting as leg man for its celebrated crime reporter Duncan Webb.
The experience lead him to write a superb novel about journalism, A Crooked Sixpence that was withdrawn soon after being published due to a legal action.
I carried several extracts on this blog a couple of years ago and the book was recently republished.*
In 1964, Sayle joined the Sunday Times, then edited by Harry Evans who realised Sayle's strength was in being a lone operator. Over the following eight years, he won several awards for his adventurous reporting.
The Times obit recalls that his Sunday Times days were "effectively ended by Bloody Sunday, in January 1972, when British paratroopers opened fire on civilians after a civil rights march in Derry."
Sayle established that the soldiers had faced no fire from those they shot and also concluded that the killings had followed a predetermined plan.
"His colleagues in London found his file asserting this some way short of the evidence needed and persuaded Evans not to publish it. Sayle was heartbroken, and, to the end of his days, remained convinced he was correct." [He was somewhat vindicated by the recent
Sayle later went to live in Japan, staying for almost 30 years. He freelanced for magazines prepared to run lengthy pieces, including The Spectator, the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books.
In 2004, due to the onset of Parkinson's disease, he went back to Sydney, and in May 2007 was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Sydney. The citation described him as "a witness to history in the classic tradition of journalism and foreign correspondence".
