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This is taken from The Times:
DAVID LOMAX
Last updated at 7:30PM, September 11 2014
Fearless BBC reporter who did not shy away from difficult questions in his encounters with tyrants
In the days before 24-hour news programmes and instant communications, broadcast journalists would be dispatched by their editors to a distant country and forgotten about until they returned with a story.
As a reporter on Panorama in the Seventies, David Lomax was often entrusted with the toughest assignments and returned with precious reels of film. He once fronted up the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin who was at the apogee of his reign of terror.
The 1978 encounter has gone down in the annals of television news reporting because Lomax put it to Amin on several occasions in a clear, even tone that he had murdered his opponents. Amin was enthroned at a Nile-side mansion, surrounded by sinister North Korean security advisers. Unhappy at Lomax’s direct and unflinching line of questioning, Amin’s eyes bored into him threateningly while he said: “Tell me, are you not afraid to be talking to the conquerer of the British Empire?” to which Lomas responded: “I’m only asking you these things because that’s what our listeners want to hear your responses to.”
As Lomax’s crew started to wonder if they would get out alive, the interviewer changed tack and asked Amin a light question about something completely different. Amin glowered at his personal retinue who were tightening their grip on their Uzis. However, the defusing tactic worked and Amin answered the question. At the end of the interview Lomax felt his knuckles squeeze together under the force of Amin’s handshake as the leader said: “It seems to me the people of Great Britain are getting smaller and smaller”.
Lomax had several similar encounters, notably with Robert Mugabe, when again he was unafraid to ask questions about the fate of political opponents. On his next visit to Zimbabwe, Lomax and his crew were imprisoned for a week.
In Lebanon he and his team took refuge from sniper fire in a trench and on assignment in Bolivia to interview a drugs baron, he hired a plane to take him to the remote location for their meeting. The pilot got lost, the plane ran out of fuel, and Lomax ended up taking control of the aeroplane and finding an airstrip to make an emergency landing.
“He was brave, tenacious and intelligent,” said his former editor on Panorama, Peter Ibbotson. “He was a very good storyteller and as an editor I knew that I could rely on him to go to the most difficult places, knowing that he would dig in and get the story.”
Lomax was made redundant by the BBC in 1985 — using his payoff to buy a yacht, Cloudwalker — but returned as a freelance to work on Panorama and filed a particularly damning report on the Eurofighter project that had become mired in technical problems as well as cost and time overruns.
Lomax planned a follow-up report and his colleague at the time Mark Dowd remembers researching the story with Lomax by gaining entry to the Dubai airshow where the as yet unfinished Eurofighter was only manifested in replica form. In typically brazen fashion, Lomax strode into the British Aerospace hospitality tent despite the fact that his first Panorama report had only recently been aired. “I have never seen a corporate PR machine go into meltdown as much as it did when we showed our faces. They were simply terrified of him,” said Dowd.
The week before transmission of the follow up programme on Eurofighter, BAe engaged leading lawyers and went directly to the BBC director-general John Birt in an attempt to have it blocked. Changes were made to the piece, but Lomax’s film was still broadcast. “They [BAe] threw everything at us, but David never lost his nerve, nor his fighting spirit,” Dowd said.
The African adventures made Lomax’s reputation at the BBC, but he was far too much of a maverick for a comfortable and highly paid studio job, and he established himself as an acclaimed interviewer of business tycoons, including Bill Gates and Gianni Agnelli. The notoriously prickly Steve Jobs walked out on him during their interview when Lomax deviated from the list of agreed questions.
David Richard Lomax was born in Normanby, North Yorkshire in 1938. Bright, personable and good looking, he talked his way into a traineeship as a presenter at the BBC and worked his way up to London-based current affairs programmes, such as Nationwide, by the late 1960s.
In recent years he lived with his wife Judy, a writer, on Dartmoor, where they ran a holiday lettings business. He often turned up with his wife at friends’ houses on a motorbike, clad in leather and bearing a pot of honey from his own beehive. They celebrated their golden wedding anniversary in 2012. She survives him along with his two sons, Alistair, a charity CEO, and Michael, an electronics engineer, and three daughters, Jane, a teacher, Megan, a designer, and Emily, a manager at Voluntary Service Overseas. Lomax is also survived by two foster daughters, Alicia, a freelance journalist, and Laura, who works in PR. On his death his stoical wife said: “Well, at least I know where he is now.”
Colleagues loved being on foreign assignments with Lomax and in paying tribute to him fellow journalists and crew members told anecdotes of his posing as a sausage skin salesman in Prague in order to talk to a Russian military leader, challenging a stunned Yasser Arafat to a game of chess, and fashioning a white tie out of toilet paper to gain entry to an African colonial club.
After making a documentary about the gambling tycoon John Aspinall in the early Seventies, he was invited to the launch party of Aspinall’s country house zoo in Sussex. Lomax was a keen amateur pilot who did his national service in the RAF and flew aeroplanes when he should have been studying history at Brasenose College, Oxford — which accounted for his third-class degree.
Lomax had spotted that there was a wartime airstrip in the grounds of Aspinall’s estate, hired a plane and duly landed, forcing MPs, gossip columnists, actresses, bishops and louche hangers-on enjoying a summer evening on the lawn, to make a run for it. He disembarked, gulped down a glass of champagne, and in front of the astonished glitterati climbed back into the plane and took off.
David Lomax, journalist, was born on May 18, 1938. He died on September 5, 2014, aged 76
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