Abstract
They don’t make them like Louis Heren any more. Here was an ill-educated youth from a poor East End family who progressed from messenger boy at The Times to foreign correspondent and later, deputy editor. His early career was interrupted by the Second World War but he was appointed a foreign correspondent after his demob. Thus, he records in this riveting book, he “lived and worked abroad for nearly a quarter of a century and saw the world on an expense account”. He often also saw the world at its worst, with a rare clarity.
Heren dealt with other aspects of his background in No Hail, No Farewell (the presidency of Lyndon Johnson) and Growing Up Poor in London (life after his Times printer father died when Louis was just four). In this second bout of growing up he recalled the drama, the danger and, yes, the glamour of journalistic life on the many roads he travelled.
His first foreign posting in 1947 was to New Delhi on the eve of India’s independence and the horrors unleashed by partition, from where he watched “the collapse of the Indian Empire and, worse, the collapse of everything which is supposed to separate men and women from animals”.
He married in 1948, effectively dropping in for the ceremony en route from India to Haifa, where he was being relocated to witness the war-torn birth of Israel. After that abandonment, his wife Pat accompanied him on most of his postings, pausing occasionally only to give birth to their four children.
Before setting off for Haifa, he was taken to lunch by Ralph Deakin, Times foreign news editor, during which they talked about everything except his new assignment. Outside, Deakin, “fiddling with his umbrella, and carefully avoiding my eye, said ‘Be decent to those chaps, Heren’.” It was, writes Heren, “the only editorial direction I ever received in all my years with The Times.”
The death of Times Korean War correspondent Ian Morrison when his Jeep detonated a mine dictated Heren’s next port of call: Taegu (now spelled Daegu) in south-eastern Korea. General Douglas MacArthur, who led the United Nations forces at the start of the conflict, assured Heren he would be home by Christmas. Heren was unconvinced and not surprised when the disastrous campaign of the bumptious general – “too big for his well-polished shoes” – saw President Truman sack him from his command.
In 1951, Heren was again uprooted, this time to a Singapore base “and a parish that covered Indochina, Indonesia, Sarawak, and Thailand, as well as Malaya”. Pat rejoined him but neither of them was attracted by Singapore’s social life. Noel Coward’s description of a first-rate place for second-rate people is almost accurately recalled. Drinking and womanising were prevalent, he noted without comment. Louis dealt with the high humidity by wearing a sarong much of the time, swimming two or three times a day, and mixing drinks in the built-in bar on the verandah each evening. A bottle of Scotch was ever in his travel bag and dry martinis always within reach.
Forays into Burma and Indochina convinced him that political independence was the only solution: “Apart from the failure of the Rangoon government to maintain law and order, its half-baked socialist policies – I write as a man who could not vote Tory – had quickly ruined the economy. Indochina’s economy was in no less a shambles…”
On returning to India, with Heren keen to see if India and Pakistan had “made a go” of independence, his three-year-old son Patrick was diagnosed with polio, so the family returned to London. Still only in his mid-thirties, Heren took stock: We had set off to cover if not conquer the world together, and now we were in full retreat carrying our wounded.”
Five months later, Louis was posted to Germany as chief correspondent and then, at the age of 41, was offered chief correspondent in Washington. These were the days when relocated journalists and their families travelled first class, this time on Cunard’s Saxonia. “The first-class dining room was half empty,” he remembered, “and I seemed to eat about half a kilo of caviar every day.” He may have had less money in the bank than when leaving the army, but with a new, young president in place, Washington was the place to report from for the next 10 years.
In 1970, Heren accepted promotion to deputy editor in London. “I had no illusions about Britain,” he wrote. “I also knew the country was going down the drain…After living abroad for so long, the class presumptions of the Tories and class hatred of the Labour left were incomprehensible.”
This cockney – long since parted from the accent, a rare YouTube clip reveals – Roman Catholic, self-confessed snob, a thinker who fought inbred prejudice, and a passionate supporter of an unfettered press remained true to his own talents. He didn’t think of himself as a journalist – he’d been a “scribbling chap” all his adult life before his executive role.
“I was intensely curious,” he wrote. “If I had not taken to journalism, I would have been arrested for peeping through keyholes.” Instead, he peeped at the most tumultuous points in many countries’ histories. Heren died at the age of 75 in 1995, leaving this remarkable book for print journalists, but especially scribbling chaps, to enjoy.
