O'DACRE o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-09-15 published
He was first North American reporter to go behind the Bamboo
Curtain
Dispatched to China in the 1950s, he covered the Orient and the
Middle East for two decades with Associated Press, writes Sandra
MARTIN. He ended his career at The Globe and Mail
By Sandra MARTIN,
Page
S11
A triple hitter as a reporter, editor and photographer, David
LANCASHIRE was the Zelig of foreign correspondents. Wherever
trouble brewed, he was there reporting back by telephone, telegraph
or whatever other communications tool he could commandeer, in
prose that was succinct, accurate and sparkling with precise
and evocative detail.
The first North American correspondent to report from mainland
China in the 1950s, he covered the Orient and the Middle East
for Associated Press for two decades.
"David had a certain almost insouciance, which gave his personality
the racy, devil-may-care air of a young boulevardier. At its
best, his writing could be spectacular with the ability to take
the reader along with him on a specific assignment," said Clark
DAVEY, a former managing editor of The Globe and Mail.
"One of his many endearing qualities was his modesty," said Marcus
Eliason, an Associated Press assistant international editor,
"so it took a long time to know that he had scored a huge coup
by getting a visa to go into Red China in the 1950s and produced
a series of stories that was the first look into this closed
society."
The two men worked together in Israel in the small Associated
Press bureau in Tel Aviv from 1972 to 1976. "What I saw in him
was a wonderful reporter, a man of enormous curiosity, a guy
who always found something good to say about whatever culture
he was covering," Mr. Eliason said. "He would go to the most
exotic, strange and even dangerous places, but he always came
back with a little story that brought the people and their lives
alive to you." Speaking of Mr. Lancaster as an editor, he said:
"In his quiet and unimposing way, he made you feel how a story
should work, how to get it right, how to be fair, all the things
that we desperately need [to know.]"
David Miles
LANCASHIRE was born the year after the Wall Street
Crash of 1929, the middle of three sons of Robert Harold
LANCASHIRE
and his wife
Victoria
(CAMPBELL.)
His father held an eclectic
series of jobs from musician to house detective at the Royal
York Hotel and his mother was the daughter of Colin
CAMPBELL,
the city editor of the Toronto Star. By his late teens, he was
bored with school and in love with playing the trombone. There's
a story he liked to tell about spending the afternoon at what
was probably the Victory Burlesque on Spadina Avenue. At the
show's end, the lights came on, Mr.
LANCASHIRE got up from his
seat to leave and spotted his father, also playing hooky, sitting
in the seat behind him. Neither one of them ever told Mrs.
LANCASHIRE
about their clandestine encounter.
Jazz brought him together with artist and musician Michael
SNOW
on a snowy night in 1948, when Mr. Lancaster paid 75 cents to
hear three bands, including Ken Dean's Hot Seven, play at Lansdowne
Hall in Toronto's West End. The two men began playing together
as part of a group - Mr. Snow on the piano and Mr.
LANCASHIRE
on the trombone - at venues such as Balmy Beach, fraternity houses
and the Snow family living room. In 1953, they went separately
to Europe, but kept meeting by chance at clubs in Italy, France
and Belgium. Mr.
SNOW dropped into a club called La Rose Noire
in Brussels and there was Mr.
LANCASHIRE, the only Canadian in
a Belgian combo. Soon, Mr.
SNOW was playing there too. One night,
Quincy Jones, Clifford Brown and a few other players from the
touring Lionel Hampton Orchestra wandered in and jammed with
them. A few days later, in Paris, Mr. Jones wrote and recorded
a song he called La Rose Noire. And so it went for a couple of
carefree years. "There was something very special about him,"
Mr. Snow said. "He was one of my very best Friends."
Wandering around Europe convinced Mr.
LANCASHIRE, a high-school
drop out, that he wanted to become a foreign correspondent, although
he lacked any training - including the ability to type. He came
back to Canada and talked his way into a job on the Quebec Chronicle
Telegraph in 1954. After four months, he transferred to The Montreal
Herald, where he worked as a crime reporter for a year. In 1955,
he returned to Toronto and landed a job as a general reporter
at The Globe and Mail. The late Richard (Dic)
DOYLE remembers
him in his book Hurly Burly as "a quiet gangling fellow" who
was "a jazz nut." He once came across a sale of military drums
in a loft on Yonge Street, and persuaded several of his senior
editors to fit themselves out with drum kits. Mr. Davey still
uses the regimental bass drum he acquired as a coffee table.
Restless from chasing fires and covering press conferences, Mr.
LANCASHIRE
longed to go to China, which had been largely out of bounds to
foreign journalists since the Communist Revolution of 1949 had
brought Mao Zedong to power. In September, 1956, Mr.
LANCASHIRE
wrote a letter to Premier Zhou Enlai asking for a visa. Some
time later, he cornered managing editor Tommy
MUNNS and offered
himself as The Globe's first China correspondent. Mr.
MUNNS declined.
Coincidentally, China announced that it would make visas available
to American correspondents, an overture that triggered an embargo
from the U.S. State Department, denying U.S. citizens the right
to apply for a visa. The next day, Mr.
LANCASHIRE received a
wire from Mr. Zhou saying his application had been accepted.
He quit The Globe, shopped his services to news agencies and
was quickly hired on a freelance contract by the Associated Press
in New York. Mr.
LANCASHIRE flew to Hong Kong and walked across
the bridge into China, the first reporter for any U.S. news organization
on the Chinese mainland since 1949.
Before his two-month visa expired, he travelled more than 8,000 kilometres
and produced a lengthy series of stories on life behind what
was called the Bamboo Curtain. "Red China today is an immense
machine with 600 million moving parts, running at top speed,"
Mr. LANCASHIRE wrote in an eerily prescient Associated Press
story from Hong Kong on December 15, 1956. "Its 600 million individuals
are sacrificing individually at Communist behest in an all-consuming
drive to change a backward, poverty ridden nation into a modern
state.
"China has the largest labour force in the world. And with the
straining sinews of the 600 millions, she is struggling to reach
a fantastic goal - to leave the middle ages behind and equal
the United States in industrial power by the year 2000."
Based on his reportage, he was hired as an Associated Press staff
foreign correspondent, a job he kept for the next two decades,
filing many wire-service stories that ended up in the columns
of his old newspaper. He spent three years in East Asia, reporting
from Japan, Jakarta, Singapore, Bangkok and Saigon and almost
every other country in the region. In 1960, he moved to Beirut
and a new assignment as a roving Middle East correspondent. It
was in Beirut that he met Adrienne (Dédée)
TELDERS, a young woman
from The Hague, Netherlands, who was working as a secretary at
the Dutch embassy. They married in July, 1961. Their son Michael
was born in 1963, followed by Adriaan in 1964.
"Writing for Associated Press meant covering everything from
economics in Tokyo to opium dens in Laos, rigged elections in
Tehran and Investiture of Prince Charles in Wales," Mr.
LANCASHIRE
wrote later. He covered nine wars, including the 1958 civil strife
in Indonesia, the Sino-Indian war of 1962, ongoing Mideast conflict,
the Turkish assault on Cyprus in 1974 and the overthrow of the
Imam of Yemen in 1962. He also reported on Pope Paul VI's visit
to Jerusalem in 1964, and Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in Iran.
In 1968, he transferred to London, but he and his wife missed
the tumult of the of Middle East and he snapped up an opportunity
to move to Israel as news editor for Associated Press in Tel
Aviv in 1972, where he covered the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Selling their London house before
heading back to the Middle East was his only regret, he explained
earlier this year in a conversation about escalating British
house prices.
In the mid-1970s, the
LANCASHIREs decided it was time to "Canadianize"
their teenaged sons. At about the same time, Mrs.
LANCASHIRE
was diagnosed with the early stages of multiple sclerosis, a
chronic, inflammatory disease of the central nervous system.
He quit Associated Press in 1976 and returned to Canada and The
Globe, where he worked as chief feature writer.
"I loved the man," Ed
O'DACRE, the paper's former features editor,
said yesterday. "He could do whatever you asked him to do. Clarity
was his forte. His style was simple, perfect, clear English."
His writing was not hit-of-the-week stuff that called attention
to itself, said Mr.
O'DACRE, but it lasted. "That was his virtuosity
- you didn't notice his skill."
After suffering a heart attack in the newsroom in 1981, Mr.
LANCASHIRE
took time off to recuperate and returned to the newspaper as
an editor. He was 63 when he retired in June, 1994, after The
Globe announced an editorial buyout package. He devoted himself
to caring for his wife and kept up a lively correspondence in
The Globe's letters page, pointing out slips and inconsistencies
in polite but pithy notes. He also reviewed jazz books and wrote
travel articles that were rich in anecdotes and experience.
After the first Persian Gulf war, he wrote a piece about Jordan
reopening its deserts to tourism with a reprise of the lead he
had written 25 years earlier when the country, having lost most
of its tourist attractions during the Six-Day War in 1967, launched
a camel safari as a lure for foreign visitors.
"The tents are folded and the caravan winds into the desert.
The sun pours down like molten brass on a line of lurching camels
and hooded riders. Rifles glint from the saddles."
While much was the same, much had changed between his two trips.
"On our final night in the desert, we had a fireside feast of
mutton and rice eaten with bare hands. Sitting across from the
fire, a gnarled old Bedouin suddenly interrupted the conversation.
One of the Palestinian policemen translated: 'He says, praise
God that tomorrow the rain will fall from the skies again.' "
A wise nomad in tune with the elements, Mr.
LANCASHIRE thought
to himself. Reverting to journalist mode, he asked the Bedouin
how he knew rain was coming. The old man reached into his robe,
pulled something out and silently handed it to Mr.
LANCASHIRE.
"It was a gorgeous little radio - olive-green colour, shaped
like an avocado, and into its side was set a little silver plaque
that read, Pierre Cardin, Paris."
This past summer, he began cleaning out his files and uncovered
a pile of negatives covering his Middle East years. He had the
best of them printed, framed them himself, and had a one man
photography show in Kilgour's, a pub in Toronto's Annex neighbourhood.
He also found the letter that jogged his memory about his 1962
trip to Yemen. It formed the basis for his final Globe article,
about a time there when "there were no hotels, no tourists, not
even a road to the capital, only a rocky track for trucks and
camels."
At the time, Mr.
LANCASHIRE was based in Aden, sharing a room
in the Rock Hotel with the correspondent for The Observer, a
man named Kim Philby - the very same Soviet spy who disappeared
from the Mideast four months later and was uncovered as Britain's
infamous "Third Manitoba" Ever the professional, Mr.
LANCASHIRE
captured the traitor's image on film.
David Miles
LANCASHIRE was born in Toronto on December 30, 1930.
He died of a heart attack at his home on September 10, 2007.
He was 76. He is survived by his wife Dédée, his sons Michael
and Adriaan, his daughter-in-law Mayte, two grandchildren and
extended family.
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