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Derek Wilson (Read 9340 times)
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Derek Wilson
Apr 21st, 2007, 7:49am
 
This is taken from The Times, April 20, 2007:

Derek Wilson
Hard-living reporter who covered the world’s bloodiest wars before retiring to report on life in Rome


For 20 years Derek Wilson was a frontline reporter who covered the disintegration of Aden, the Vietnam War and the Argentine junta, initially for Agence France Press (AFP) before switching to the BBC World Service.

After that long stint covering troublespots, he resigned from broadcasting in his mid-fifties, retired to a rooftop apartment near the Colosseum in Rome and chronicled the ebb and flow of life in the city for the English-language weekly Wanted in Rome.

Derek John Wilson was born in 1932 and brought up in the North of England. He won a scholarship to study languages at Oxford. Called up for National Service in the late 1940s, he was recruited by military intelligence and spent 18 months debriefing suspected communist spies and former Nazi officials in occupied Germany. “I felt like a character in The Third Man,” he recalled.

Already fluent in German, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, he found a post with Reuters. He did well, learnt what he could and moved to Paris, joining AFP.

He soon got his wish to be a war correspondent when AFP made him its chief English-speaking troubleshooter. He was posted to Aden in the mid1960s to report on the British being harried out of the colony. He thrived on the camaraderie of the foreign press corps and fellow newsmen such as Don Wise, Stanley Bonnett and John Osman.

By then the slim, self-effacing Wilson had matured into a rumbustious character at ease with being gay. He was a devotee of late-night parties and low-life bars, consuming two or more packs of cigarettes a day washed down with red wine, followed by whisky chasers.

From Aden, AFP posted him to Saigon. He was living in a small flat on Tu Do Street when the 1968 Tet offensive pushed the US military almost to the limit. By then he was also reporting occasionally for The Times, as well as having many bylined AFP stories in the main international dailies with his eyewitness accounts of battles all over South Vietnam.

The Wilson of the late 1960s in Indo-China was addicted to danger, acknowledging that he wanted to test himself no matter what the risk. Two decades on, he believed that period was the high point of his life. But he was always the professional reporter, coolly appraising the carnage, and enjoying what he called “the exhilaration of war”.

When the Vietnam war spread to Cambodia in 1970, the BBC’s appetite for coverage grew, and Wilson took his first steps in broadcasting. He never found it easy — those cigarettes could be an impediment some days. But he persevered, and the quality of his reporting shone through, however husky the tones reaching Bush House from his studio in Radio Saigon.

He came into his own in 1975 when South Vietnam collapsed to an armoured column from Hanoi. By then he was the SouthEast Asia correspondent of the BBC World Service and, like the handful of BBC journalists still in Saigon, he ignored instructions from the BBC Governors in London that everyone had to evacuate.

His coverage was near-legendary, filing a mix of the straightforwardly dramatic and political analysis of America’s lost crusade. He saw the lead North Vietnamese tanks sweep into Saigon and smash through the gates of the presidential palace.

So, at 43, Wilson had made it, and the world opened up to him. A grateful BBC made him Latin America correspondent, 1975-81, and he was based in Buenos Aires during the nastiest years of the military junta.

From there he went to Ma-drid, staying until 1984 as the postFranco nation found its feet. Wilson remained something of an enigma to many in the BBC: a foreign correspondent who hated spending time in head office and had no interest in the musical chairs of careers and foreign postings.

Finally, he felt he had done enough and took himself off to Rome. In a quiet way he was famous there; by reputation he was “il giornalista inglese” — a courtly English gent with a weakness for dyeing his silver locks a reddish-brown — a great bon vivant and an authority on the best eateries and late-night dives in the centro stori-co. Frascati was his daily tipple, and water rarely passed his lips.

Typically, he engineered his own sardonic swansong — a valedictory article for Wanted in Rome entitled “Ashes to ashes”, a guide to cremation in the Eternal City. It appeared two days after his death.

Derek Wilson, foreign correspondent, was born on March 15, 1932. He died of heart failure on March 17, 2007, aged 75
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