Noel Clark died on December 3, 2004. He was 79 and just months from celebrating his 80th birthday.

Noel was the BBC correspondent in Central Europe and North Africa before becoming Head of the Central Europe Service at Bush House. He retired in 1985.

A memorial service was held at St Osmund's Catholic Church in Barnes, on Friday, 25th February, 2005.

Peter Udell delivered this eulogy:

‘Will you do an interview with Ceausescu for us?’ A question put by East European Service head Peter Fraenkel and me to the BBC’s Central Europe correspondent on a visit to London: my first encounter, nearly thirty years ago, with Noel Clark.

Noel’s enthusiasm for our request was, as I remember it, less than total. Not, I suspect, because he had any objection to experiencing at first hand the dictator’s megalomania. Nor because of the protocol nightmares of such an interview. Simply, I’m sure, because as a total professional he was concerned with substance rather than show, and knew that Ceausescu would do no more than recite what he’d already said ad nauseam.

In his long and distinguished career as a foreign correspondent - that rare breed in the journalistic family of which there’s at least one former member, Bob Elphick, here today - Noel could, so Ken Brazier - Editor of Bush House’s Newsroom - recalls, always be relied on, whether in Aden, North Africa, Latin America or Central Europe, for highly professional news coverage and for thoughtful in-depth analysis. He was, says Ken, much respected for his intelligent journalism not only in Bush House but throughout the BBC - which was, I guess, no mean achievement.

As Central Europe correspondent, Noel was, for those of us broadcasting across the Iron Curtain, many of whom are here today, a programme maker’s delight. When we knew a Clark dispatch was coming up from Warsaw, Prague or Budapest, Bucharest, Belgrade or Sofia - or his Vienna base - we knew we’d have a good story for that evening. Detailed yet clear. Analytical, elegantly argued, authoritative yet colourful. With great sensitivity to a country’s predicament yet wholly objective.

In the mid-seventies, when Noel came in from the cold to join the Central European Service, first as Marie Anthony’s deputy, then as service head until he retired twenty years ago, he exchanged the rigours of reporting for the very different - though, perhaps, no less demanding - rigours of Bush House.

In some of the work he had to do, Noel wasn’t, I’m sure, batting on his home ground. Negotiations for bigger budgets, more cost-effective rotas, more flexible short-term contracts: these failed miserably to excite him. He was not by nature, as his deputy Laszlo Jotischky puts it, an administrator. And as Kris Pszenicki, who ran the Polish broadcasts under Noel, tells me, he was too much of a gentleman to be a bureaucratic infighter.

But what Noel brought to the job - as I realised when I succeeded him - were qualities it would be an understatement to describe as outstanding. He was deeply concerned with the honesty and integrity of the BBC’s journalism, and took great pains with the scripts he had to edit to ensure that nothing that wasn’t wholly accurate, nothing that wasn’t backed up with evidence, was broadcast. And after Martial Law was imposed on Poland, he read much of the Polish Section’s output - not in English translation, but, as you’d expect of him, in the original.

Noel had, as well, a deep concern for the BBC’s independence from government. He had, among British diplomats, some good friends. There’s a former Foreign Office Permanent Secretary - an even rarer breed than a foreign correspondent - with us now. But he saw the Foreign Office and its embassies as having quite different priorities from the priorities of the BBC and its journalism, and did his best to keep himself at arm’s length - if not, whenever he was able, at a much safer distance.

Noel was part of the Bush House family for less than a decade - much less than many of us here who were lifetime residents. But he quickly became enormously respected - and not just for his reporting, not just for his unrivalled knowledge. I can’t tell you how much I admired that extraordinary modesty, that quiet but sometimes highly irreverent and mischievous sense of humour, and, I think above all, his being so deeply, deeply civilized. I feel fortunate indeed to have worked with him, and perhaps in this, among us here today, I’m far from being alone.

And that interview with Ceausescu? It never happened. In this, as in so much else in his BBC career, Noel got it just right.