John Shirley obituary

Journalist admired for his coverage of the Falklands war who worked for ITV, the Sunday Times, the Observer and the Guardian

The journalist John Shirley, who has died aged 74 after suffering from cancer, was highly effective and versatile in areas calling for an in-depth approach – current affairs television and the Sunday press. His qualities of curiosity, tenacity and an ability to explain clearly first became evident to me in 1968 in the American deep south, when he was the researcher for a documentary for the ITV series This Week, about the populist governor of Alabama, George Wallace. It was during this period that he met Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and Stokely Carmichael – encounters that inspired him throughout his life.

John shared a Reporter of the Year award for his coverage in the Sunday Times of the Brixton riots of 1981, near his home in south London, and the following year won a European award for news photography of the Falklands war, thousands of miles away. One of his most graphic memories was of being asked to take a picture of the marines storming up a Falklands beach: he was suddenly aware that the only human beings behind him were the Argentinian enemy.

John’s conclusions from the Falklands exemplified his fair-minded and thoughtful approach to his work. The officers, he said, he had expected would be effete, upper class and stupid; the men would be stupid too. He found quite the contrary: that the officers were in the main perceptive, the marines just as bright and well aware of their responsibilities. It was a proud, unexpected moment when his work in the Falklands was praised from the pulpit of St Paul’s by Robert Runcie, the archbishop of Canterbury.

The books he contributed to included an investigation into corruption at Scotland Yard and an account of the Jeremy Thorpe scandal. He also showed his steadiness and his commitment to fairness in the grim, dangerous Northern Ireland of the Troubles – and gave evidence at the internment inquiry in 1971.

A man with a hinterland of intellectual curiosity, John was interested in archaeology in Israel, where he went on three digs over the years. He loved both classical music, especially Bruckner and Mahler, and the modern jazz of 1950s New York. He had always been interested in psychiatry and underwent Freudian analysis in the 1970s. In retirement, he undertook an intensive course for a postgraduate diploma in Jungian psychodynamic theory and practice. By the time he was awarded his diploma he was already counselling patients, work he found intellectually fascinating and spiritually rewarding.

Born in Ealing, west London, he was the son of Arthur Shirley, a shopkeeper, and his wife, Rosa, a teacher. None of his later interests or achievements could have been easily foreseen when John left Drayton Green secondary modern boys’ school in west London in 1960 aged 16.

“They made it clear,” John wrote years later, “that we were nature’s losers.” The best they could hope for, the head told them, was to get a job either at the Hoover company in Perivale or at G Plan furniture in High Wycombe. The only role models among his predecessors were a comedian and a bank robber, who once beat John up for wearing orange socks, and whose conviction for stealing £1.2m was reversed on appeal. He went to the party. The robber was, John commented, his only inherited contact.

On leaving school he got a job on the local paper, the Middlesex County Times, and soon moved to the Newcastle Evening Chronicle, a big paper with a reputation as a nursery of journalistic talent. He joined This Week in 1965, and his intellectual curiosity was so conspicuous that a number of us on the programme persuaded him that, instead of regretting that he had not been to Oxford, he should go there as a mature student, which he did. He graduated in philosophy, politics and economics from St Peter’s College in 1970.

Then came work as a reporter with some of the most adventurous journalists of his generation on two more commercial TV current affairs programmes, Granada’s World in Action and The London Programme at London Weekend. He joined the Sunday Times in 1979, while Harold Evans was still editor, and in 1983 was appointed chief reporter, domestic and foreign. But in the ethos of a paper owned from 1981 by Rupert Murdoch and edited by Andrew Neil, John was never going to be entirely happy or enthusiastically “on side”.

In 1990 he moved to the Observer as news editor, where he met the journalist Kate Kellaway, and the following year they had a son, Leo. After the relationship ended, and in an atmosphere dominated by office politics about the paper’s ownership, John left the Observer in 1991.

The more regular routine of newspaper production enabled him to devote more time to bringing up his son. His work in various parts of the Guardian included the obituaries desk, where, alongside writing and editing, he applied his zeal to expanding the range of entries to the daily Birthdays. On his departure in 2008 he kept up a part-time involvement with journalism at the Catholic journal The Tablet while embarking on his counselling career.

He is survived by Leo.

• John Arthur Shirley, journalist, born 6 November 1943; died 16 July 2018

Contributor

Godfrey Hodgson

The GuardianTramp

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