This appeared in the Toronto Globe and Mail following the death of John Bierman, former BBC reporter.


A tough, iconoclastic journalist who reported from stakeouts, civil wars and bloody demonstrations, John Bierman was an action figure, who looked the part. With a face that seemed to have been moulded out of the side of a mountain and a manner to match, he was a formidable character who filled every room he entered.

"I met him in Nicosia during a hijacking in 1976," said journalist Christopher Hitchens. "He was cool under pressure, humorous, very willing to share information and compare notes -- all the things you want in a journalistic colleague -- and good company when the story was over and one could finally have dinner." That first impression turned out to be a lasting one. "He continued to be generous with his time and very generous to younger reporters."

The two men exchanged research notes in the late 1970s when Mr. Bierman was working on Righteous Gentile: The Story of Raoul Wallenberg, Missing Hero of the Holocaust (about the Swedish diplomat who rescued many Hungarian Jews from the Nazis, only to fall victim himself to the Soviets), the book that made his reputation as a writer of popular history and biography.

"I thought that was a very effective piece of both detective and human-rights work and good writing too. It was very prescient and it foreshadowed the end of and the discredit of the Soviet system," said Mr. Hitchens. More than that, of course, Mr. Bierman's book kick-started the international campaign to find out what had happened to Mr. Wallenberg after the Soviets moved into Budapest in 1945.

"John was one of the last of the rugged writers of English -- no punches pulled, tough and straight forward, but at the same time his elegant use of language was distinctive," said Scott Griffin, founder of the Griffin poetry prize and a long-standing friend. "As he wrote so, too, did he live."

John David Bierman was born in London between the wars and within the sound of Bow bells. He was the only child of Richard Bierman, an antique dealer, and his wife Beatrice. John had a tough childhood, raised mostly by relatives, and learned to rely on himself from a very early age. "He was not loved so he didn't expect to be loved, and he had no self pity about that," his widow Hilary Brown, herself a distinguished foreign correspondent, said yesterday from their home in Cyprus.

At 11, he was evacuated to the countryside during the Blitz. Being separated from parents and friends was traumatic for many children. "For John, it was a wonderful adventure," said Ms. Brown. The country kids disliked the interlopers from the city and so fistfights were a daily event -- but so were square meals. "He had to fight his way to school and fight his way back, and he learned to survive."

Even though he went to about 15 different schools, he received quite a good general education because he loved to read and had a prodigious memory. Too young for combat in the Second World War, he joined the military at 18 and served his obligatory two years of national service as a Royal Marine -- good training for a foreign correspondent in the world's hot spots.

After the Royal Marines, he learned his trade as a print journalist on small local papers in unappealing cities in the north of England and then he went to the colonies, finding a job on the Winnipeg Free Press where he met and married his first wife, Alice, when he was 24. (They had three children and were together until the early 1970s). From there, Mr. Bierman went to the Windsor Star and the now-defunct Toronto Telegram.

Having served his apprenticeship, he landed a job on the Daily Express on Fleet Street in London. About 1960, when he was in his early 30s, he was hired by the Aga Khan to start up a newspaper called The Nation in Nairobi, Kenya. He was there for four years, until Kenya was granted its independence from Britain in 1963. "Professionally, it was probably one of the happiest times of his life," said Ms. Brown. From there he went to Trinidad to manage a chain of newspapers for the Thomson Corporation.

In the mid 1960s, he was hired by the BBC, which was setting up a team of TV reporters. At the time, he wondered if going in front of the cameras was a good career move. In his audition, he declared, "I'm not just an ugly face, I have a brain, too." Of course, his craggy face and direct delivery made his reputation as a foreign correspondent.

He was sent to Londonderry in Northern Ireland one Sunday in 1972 to cover what was supposed to be a civil-rights demonstration, but turned into Bloody Sunday when the bullets started flying and 14 people were killed. "It happened right in front of him and [the BBC] was so close to airtime that they put the raw film on the air and he ad-libbed the commentary for 13 minutes," Ms. Brown recalled yesterday. The BBC later submitted the news clip to the Cannes Festival where it won an award.

Mr. Bierman and Ms. Brown met "one enchanted morning across a crowded press conference" in Rawalpindi, just before the outbreak of the Indo-Pakistani war in Dec., 1971. A reporter who wanted to be a foreign correspondent, Ms. Brown had gone to Pakistan as a freelance journalist. He hired her to carry his news film up the Khyber Pass through the Kabul Gorge to Afghanistan to ship it to the outside world, as had to be done in the days before satellites. After she came back down, they would occasionally meet at the border and "he would recite Kipling all the way back to Rawalpindi."

They bought a "falling-down" farmhouse in a village on Cyprus during a Christmas vacation in 1973 and gradually renovated it. "I always wanted a house overlooking the Mediterranean," said Ms. Brown and we wanted a place where we could meet because we were often apart [because of work]. They married in 1976 and their son Jonathan was born in 1979.

They continued to travel the world reporting from hot spots and danger zones -- she for ABC and he for the BBC -- until they settled in Toronto in 1984 where she had accepted a job as anchor for the local CBC Television newscast. About this time, Mr. Bierman went to Maclean's as foreign editor.

"What he brought to journalism was a real grasp of history and of the forces that shape the world we live in, not just from an academic or theoretical background, but from being on the ground in many of the major conflicts that shaped our age," said Kevin Doyle, who was editor of the magazine at the time.

"He was exceptionally well travelled and connected and he knew his briefs on international affairs in a manner that it would be hard to think that anybody else on the magazine could approach," said Anthony Wilson-Smith, another former Maclean's editor, who opened the magazine's Moscow bureau during Mr. Bierman's tenure.

Before Mr. Wilson-Smith left for Moscow, Mr. Bierman took him out for a drink and told him that he thought opening the bureau was a mistake. Nevertheless, he proved to be an extremely supportive editor who was willing to "go to bat for you" to make sure you got a later deadline or a more expensive production run. And, later he "had the grace to say he had made a mistake" about the bureau. He "wasn't always a pleasure to work with, but he was a consummate professional."

His tenure at Maclean's was a transition time for Mr. Bierman from daily or weekly journalism to becoming a full time writer of books. He was known to get up at four in the morning, in a writing pattern established years earlier by Peter Newman, and work on his books. That's how he wrote Dark Safari: The Life Behind the Legend of Henry Morton Stanley and Napoleon III and his Carnival Empire.

Mr. Bierman continued to write books after he, Ms. Brown and their son left Toronto in the late 1980s for Cyprus. In all, he wrote 10 books, including Hero of the Holocaust; Fire in the Night (with Colin Smith); Alamein: War Without Hate (also with Colin Smith); and The Secret Life of Laszlo Almasy: The Real English Patient.

The past few years were not kind to him. He had kidney failure on a visit to Toronto and, in 2002, had a kidney transplant from his son. He suffered two heart attacks and a heart bypass in 2004, a prostate operation last year and ended up with a nerve ailment that left him in constant pain. None of it was enough to stop him working on yet another book. "Writing was his life," said Ms. Brown.

John David Bierman was born in London on Jan. 26, 1929. He died on Jan. 4, 2006, in Paphos, Cyprus, after suffering a massive stroke on New Year's Day. He was 76. He is survived by his wifeHilary Brown and their son Jonathan. He also leaves his former wife Alice, their three children, three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

And this appeared in the Daily Telegraph on January 13th

John Bierman
(Filed: 13/01/2006)

John Bierman, who has died aged 76, made his name with a brilliant on-the-ground report on Bloody Sunday in 1972; he later became a successful author of historical and biographical books on subjects from Napoleon III to Alamein.

Hired as a reporter by the BBC in the 1960s, Bierman already had some experience as a foreign correspondent when he was ordered to Bogside in Londonderry to cover what was supposed to be a Catholic civil rights demonstration.

Despite being ordered to get out, Bierman and his crew stayed. "Minutes later," he recalled, "we and other TV crews were incapacitated by CS gas, fired by the security forces during a tense confrontation with demonstrators throwing stones and insults.

Police water cannons opened up, putting the demonstrators to flight - knocking out of action all TV cameras but our own.

"Then into view, crouching low and waving a blood-soaked white handkerchief, came a dog-collared priest, Father Daly, who later became Bishop of Derry. Behind him were two men carrying a third - a youth, whose chest was covered in blood. I had little doubt he was mortally wounded."

Bierman filed a 13-minute report live to camera in the midst of the bloodshed. It later won an award at the Cannes film festival.

John Bierman was born on January 26 1929 into an East End Jewish family, the only child of Richard Bierman, an antique dealer, and his wife Beatrice. They took little interest in him, so young John was brought up by his grandparents.

At the age of 11 he was evacuated to the countryside during the Blitz, an experience which he saw as a wonderful adventure. Despite an erratic education (he attended some 15 schools), he acquired a love of reading.

Following National Service with the Royal Marines, Bierman became a print journalist, and after a spell on a provincial newspaper in Stoke on Trent, he took passage on a cattle boat to Canada, where he was to spend two years working on newspapers.

Returning to London in the mid 1950s, he married his first wife, Alice, with whom he had two children. He worked for a time for the Daily Express, but, restless in London, took up an offer to set up and edit The Nation, a newspaper owned by the Aga Khan which was based in Kenya.

In the early 1960s he moved to Trinidad to manage a chain of newpapers for the Thomson Corporation.

On returning to London he joined the BBC and soon built a reputation as a rough diamond, decked out in a sheepskin jacket or wrinkled safari suit, reporting from trouble-spots around the world: Northern Ireland, Biafra, Israel (the Yom Kippur War) and Pakistan (the Indo-Pakistan war).

In Rawalpindi he met and fell in love with Hilary Brown, a reporter from Canada, who was once described by a colleague as "a lady journalist who looks like Aphrodite and talks like Ernest Hemingway".

They later married, and Bierman successfully ran a World Service bureau in Tehran until he offended the Shah, who expelled him.

Abandoning the life of a foreign correspondent, Bierman had more time to concentrate on his book-writing ambitions. His first great success was the best-selling biography of the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved up to 100,000 Hungarian Jews in Budapest in 1945.

After a spell as foreign editor of Macleans magazine in Canada, where his wife became an established TV anchorwoman, the pair moved to Cyprus, using it as a base from which to patrol the Middle East.

Bierman wrote well-received biographies of Napoleon III and Henry Stanley, the African explorer. More recently, in collaboration with Colin Smith, another Cyprus-based veteran correspondent, he published Alamein and Fire in the Night, the story of General Wingate.

Failing health dogged Bierman's later years. After suffering kidney failure he was saved from death or life on a dialysis machine by his son, then a student at Durham university, who donated one of his kidneys to save his father in 2002.

Bierman, who died on January 4 in Paphos, Cyprus, is survived by his wife, their son and a daughter and a son from his first marriage.

Dear John. For that's how I remember him. When my wife Kathryn and I were seeking solace from our postings in Cairo (I for the BBC, she for the Guardian) we used to slip across to Cyprus and be assured of a warm Bierman welcome from John and Hilary. This involved much alcoholic encouragement to "stick with it" despite the horrors of Egypt.
My fondest memory of them both is of John lounging on a beach near Paphos, and recognising his wife's ability to organise most things down to the last detail, ordering her to "move that cloud" when it temporarily obscured the Cypriot sunshine. He was a great and good man.
Jack Thompson

A memorial service for John Bierman, radio and television correspondent and author, who died in Cyprus in January, will be held at St. James Norlands Church, St. James Gardens, London W11 on Tuesday June 13 at 3.30 pm.

It will be led by John Exelby, formerly of TV News and World Service News, now Lay Reader in the Diocese of Gloucester.