John Spicer obituary

Distinguished Fleet Street and BBC radio reporter
John Spicer
John Spicer worked his way up from library assistant, always eschewing the hard-bitten, hard-drinking hack culture Public Domain

John Spicer, who has died from cancer at the age of 75, was a distinguished Fleet Street and BBC radio reporter who came to prominence covering the industrial and political strife of the 1970s and 80s. He also covered foreign affairs, from Northern Ireland to Iraq and Iran.

By 1971, BBC radio news was anxious to recruit hard-nosed reporters from national newspapers to a radio newsroom that had become somewhat cosy and academic. John fitted the bill, soon confirming his reputation for a keen news sense, being highly dependable and scrupulously accurate.

He kept apart from the drinking culture and the fiercely competitive atmosphere so prevalent of the era, yet was highly respected. One colleague recalled: "John was one of the few really decent people in a world of chancers, obsessives and nutters."

In fact, he was the antithesis of the hard-bitten, hard-drinking hack. Immensely fit, he was evangelical about cycling, and would take part in 100-mile time trials with his local Willesden Cycling Club in north-west London. He once rode from his north London home to Winchester to visit a subeditor who was recovering from an operation.

John came into his own reporting on the industrial strife of the winter of 1978-79 and subsequent disputes, including the miners' strike of 1984-85 and the riots that accompanied the opening of Rupert Murdoch's newspaper plant at Wapping, in the East End of London, in 1986. John built up solid contacts with leaders of trade unions and employers' organisations.

As a general reporter, he would regularly commute to Belfast to cover the Troubles, bringing his children back mementoes such as rubber bullets and shrapnel. He possessed an invaluable practical sense too. When his tape recorder was accidentally locked inside the boot of a car before an important media conference to be given by the Rev Ian Paisley, he spotted a building site opposite, discovered a crowbar and prised the boot open.

In 1981 he narrowly avoided being shot by rebel forces as he crossed the Gambia river while covering a coup in that country. Later in the decade, he reported on fighting at the disputed town of Khorramshahr during the Iran–Iraq war, and saw missiles zoom past his hotel window during the civil war in Beirut. Thus, by the time the opportunity to take redundancy from the BBC came up in 1987, he had accomplished much of what a reporter could have hoped to.

John was born in Brighton. His family moved to London when he was an infant, and he attended Hendon high school. Though he wanted to stay on there and go to university, his father, a post office worker, insisted that he leave at 16, so John joined the Daily Mail as an assistant in the library. It was there that he first developed ambitions to become a journalist.

He became a trainee reporter on the Hunts Post in Huntingdon. There, while taking a shorthand course in 1957, he met a French woman, Claude. The couple married four years later, after John had moved back to Hendon to work on the Hendon and Finchley Times.

He then took the post of crime reporter on the Bristol Evening World – a good training ground for Fleet Street. Indeed, by 1962 he was back in London working as a reporter on the Daily Herald until it closed in 1964.

However, the Daily Mail immediately recruited him again, this time as a reporter, some 14 years after he had first developed a taste for journalism there. The assistant news editor, Charlie Wilson, had noted John's talents while they were at Bristol together. John covered both national and international news. In August 1968, for example, he witnessed Russian tanks rolling into Czechoslovakia to put down the Prague Spring.

When John left the BBC, he was taken on again by Wilson, by then editor at the Times, as industrial correspondent. However, he did not enjoy the editorial policy of being heavily critical of union leaders with whom he had established long-standing relations.

He returned to the BBC later in 1987 as a freelance reporter and news organiser, and was once again admired for his wealth of experience, always dispensed in a calm and courteous manner. He finally retired in 1998, and is survived by Claude and his sons, Paul and Ian.

Dennis John Spicer, journalist, born 9 September 1934; died 5 July 2010