Richard West – English journalist and author

Born Chelsea London on July 18, 1930

Died Deal, Kent April 25, 2015

Survived by wife Mary (nee Kenny) and two sons Edward and Patrick

Soon after the quintessentially English journalist Richard West married the Irish journalist Mary Kenny in 1974, he visited South Africa during the build- up to the Soweto Uprising and the final days of apartheid which he wrote about so incisively.

During a drink-in with colleagues at the Hotel Elizabeth opposite The Star in Sauer Street, Johannesburg, an attractive hippy-looking South African girl with waist length dark hair and wearing skin- tight blue jeans asked in a soft and seductive voice if he’d like to attend a party to be held in Hillbrow, the city’s answer to Soho, on April 20.

He could, she explained, meet some white members of the banned ANC and write (for the New Statesman or some other left-leaning British magazine or newspaper) about this secret gathering to commemorate Nelson Mandela’s famous Speech from the Dock in 1964.

West had downed several large whiskies with liberal-minded reporters from The Star, the Rand Daily Mail and the Financial Mail.

Perhaps because of jet lag, or the high altitude, West wrote down the wrong address. With hindsight, perhaps it was the right address because this was the time in South Africa when BOSS delighted in playing jokes on visiting firemen from the UK, a time when ANC agents dressed like City of London bankers and worked for right-wing media outlets in Johannesburg and when BOSS agents bore a strong resemblance to Bob Dylan. Visiting hacks from the English home counties were often taken for painfully embarrassing ideological magical mystery tours.

 A couple of days later, Dick knocked on the door of a seedy flat on the top floor of a building overlooking a night club frequented by members of the city’s mixed race community and multicultural-minded whites.

The door was opened by a huge, sweaty and very drunk man who greeted him in Afrikaans after punching the air with a Nazi salute.

Instead of attending an ANC gathering to honour the long-imprisoned Mandela, Richard West spent the evening downing heavy Stein mugs of beer with members of the small but noisy South African Nazi Party who were marking another momentous April 20 occasion – Adolf Hitler’s birthday.

Later, at my rented cottage in the oddly named Henley-on-Klip, far away from the greediest and most loathsome city in Africa at that time, West said it might make a line or two in a book he was writing about the end of white rule in southern Africa.

I’ve read all his books and can’t find the story anywhere.

Did it register with him as one of the best? It’s hard to say. There were so many.

Legend has it that when he was a young reporter on the Manchester Guardian after attending Malborough as a boy and Magdalene College, Cambridge as a young man he was asked by his news editor to cover a shepherding competition somewhere in Yorkshire. He did so but wrote the story as seen through the eyes of a sheep.

Seeing the world through the eyes of those about to be slaughtered made him special.

Richard Leaf West was born in Chelsea in 1930. His was a wealthy but unconventional family. His maternal great-grandfather was a Victorian man of letters, John Addington Symonds. His maternal grandfather was Walter Leaf, the Chairman of Nat-West and his first cousin was the actor Timothy West. His father had been literary editor of the Daily Mail.

Ink was in Richard’s veins.

After leaving Cambridge where he studied history, West spent his National Service years in Trieste. He learned Serbo-Croat and so started a long love affair with Yugoslavia. His job as an NCO in the Intelligence Corps was to listen, take notes and report back to a fact and rumour - sorting superior somewhere else.

Inevitably, the next stop was journalism.

An interview he conducted with the surviving members of the Black Hand Gang that planned the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in 1914 was published in the New Statesman on the fortieth anniversary of the duke’s death and that earned him a job with The Guardian in Yorkshire.

After a spell at the Daily Mirror as letters editor – he is said to have written many himself including one demanding a teenage pope. He is also said to have placed an advert in the paper saying beaters were needed for a budgie shoot in the West Midlands) - West returned to Sarajevo. Tito’s break from Stalin was in full swing. 

West went freelance.

He wrote a book with the late Anthony Howard about Harold Wilson called The Making of the Prime Minister (1965). It was his most successful book and the money he earned from it enabled him to pay frequent visits to Vietnam, a country he came to respect.

His knack – his genius, rather – was to tell stories that were unpalatable to the American Army’s PR people.

That won him few friends in Washington but many in Britain, where Richard West was seen as a fine example of the post-war middle class media men and women who sided with the wretched, rather than the rich, of the earth.

His swing towards the Right in later years surprised most of his contemporaries.

Beginning as one of the idealistic Oxbridge graduates who mocked and giggled their way through the final days white rule in Africa and American domination in Vietnam, West went on to stand at a slightly odd angle to the rest of the British media – a former self-avowed Young Marxist turned Ageing Rightist.

But more than most of his privileged university contemporaries, he had grasped the consequences of Britain’s speedy withdrawal from Empire and the insanely fast departure by the French and Belgians. He threw a verbal fist at Africa’s new and often corrupt leaders as he had once used his talent to undermine and denounce corrupt white rule in Rhodesia and South Africa.

And he wrote some truly great books including Tito and the Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia, The White Tribes of Africa (later re-issued as The White Tribes Revisited) Hurricane in Nicaragua and a book he considered his best about Daniel Defoe.

In 1974 he married Mary Kenny, the Irish journalist who in her younger days was also a well-known Fleet Street hell-raiser. Both settled down and It was a good marriage. They had two sons, Edward (features editor of the Catholic Herald) and Patrick (freelance and contributor to The Times).

Fellow journalists who worked alongside him in Africa and South East Asia will remember Richard West with huge affection.

And a lot of the world’s largely ignored sheep will go into mourning, too.

His funeral will be held at St Andrew’s Church (Anglo Catholic) in deal, Kent on Friday May 15, 2015 at 11 am (GMT).

Picture courtesy of Mary Kenny