This was John Forsyth's eulogy to Hugh at the funeral:


It's 29 years ago this month that Hugh and I were rather thrown together when we joined the production staff of the long running award winning BBC Radio 4 current affairs strand, File on 4. There was already a distinguished group of long standing, award winning reporters and producers in place who in subtle ways let us know that WE wouldn't be working with any of THEM.

Hugh took that as a compliment. He said he smelled fear.

To be honest, the subject we chose for our first investigation was pretty unspectacular. Something about Building Societies.

For anyone here under the age of Thatcherism building societies used to be the main source of finance if you wanted to buy a house. They were based on a Victorian mutual model, owned by their members. Thrift AND democracy in harness. Ripe for 1980s picking.

After our first day of interviewing in glamourous Halifax we arranged to meet for supper to discuss progress. When I arrived Hugh was busily working on A SCHEME. He said this Victorian model is broken and that it would take a remarkably small group of determined individuals – by which he meant us and a few

handpicked friends – to successfully highjack a small to middle sized building society and find ourselves in control of £100 million pounds worth of property and pay ourselves enormous salaries. Wouldn't that be fun.

I was to discover there was potential for A SCHEME at some point in virtually every programme we ever began and that my responsibilities as producer therefore included reminding Hugh from time to time that we actually did have a programme to make and, ideally, if possible, keeping Hugh out of gaol.

We did disagree about something or other from time to time but I can say we never had an argument.
Hugh could dig his heels in about unexpected matters at unexpected times.

We had finished recording material for a File on 4 in Hong Kong and, for once, had ample time to get to the airport. So ample in fact that Hugh decided we should jump out of our taxi and have lunch on the way.

Hugh ordered a portion of wind dried duck. 'Are you sure that's wise', I enquired rhetorically, 'ahead of a 12 hour flight?'

Hugh was so sure he ordered a second wind dried duck to be brought to the table.

By this time ample was no longer accurate to describe the time we had to check in. AND we were told ours would be the last flight out ahead of an approaching typhoon.

The runaway for the old Hong Kong airport was built on a causeway into the bay and because of the wind direction our take-off would be from the bay towards the city.

As it picked up speed our jumbo jet was rolling from side to side, buffeted by the wind. I looked out of the window through the driving rain UP at people having their lunch in apartments by the airport.

The typhoon was getting stronger. Hugh was not.

It was an interesting journey but the programme went out as scheduled after the Archers the next Tuesday.
File on 4 was assembled in Manchester and I met Hugh, Robin and Angela's parents when we dropped in on them usually hopelessly early in the morning as we were coming or going with a bag full of tapes and heads full of ideas and fatigue. It was a comfortable kitchen to be in as breakfast was scrambled together.

Hugh explained to me his parents represented the distinctive lines of his heritage – Irish – incorrigibly romantic on his mother's side merging with Welsh on his father's. Hugh described that as the 'Oh 'eck' tradition, always confident that disaster must follow shortly. Hugh and Robin went to Downside school in Somerset. I see from the school website that they offer what they call a Benedictine education.

They define 8 aspects of their approach:
Welcome and hospitality
Careful, active listening
Reverence
Humility
Teaching and learning
Personal discipline
Concern for the individuals and
The stewardship of gifts, from the natural environment to human abilities

Reviewing his career and life in these terms I reckon Hugh would say 6 out of 8 isn't bad.  I do think they left their mark.

Many of you will know David Levy's account of Hugh’s interview with Cardinal Sin, Archbishop of Manila, and reluctant leader of the people's movement in 1986. The Cardinal was surprised to find a BBC interviewer able to trade quotes with him from Thomas Aquinas on the extent to which catholic doctrine requires the church hierarchy to stand up to a tyrant. The brothers of Downside would have ticked a box there.

Perhaps fewer of you will know David's account of another programme they made in South Korea. They had an interview with the President of Hyundai who then insisted David and Hugh should accept his – er – hospitality that evening at – er – a karaoke bar in downtown Seoul.

Hugh was interested in many activities but I'm pretty certain karaoke wasn't among them.

I spoke to the archivist at Downside this week who said Hugh had expressed an interest at school in joining the foreign office. Sometimes I think he thought he actually had. Apparently his diplomatic skills were called on that evening to sing their way out of trouble.

We all know that Hugh was frighteningly clever.

He certainly knew about politics ... and the middle east ... and medieval heraldry ... and hedge funds ... and pollarding trees ... and Clausewitz ... and archaeology ... and Ukraine ... and the United States Neo Cons ... and common and uncommon ailments of sheep ...

Whatever the subject he always seemed to know one more fact than you.  But he wore his erudition lightly.

His First at Oxford and his postgraduate degree in African studies were tools that he was able to apply in his professional life in print first with West Africa magazine, then as a contributor to the African Service of the BBC World Service and then as one of the anchors of the live, thrice daily news sequence, 24 Hours. Benny Ammar reminds us that inside the programme it was known as 24 Horrors.

That was new stuff, made possible by the new communications technology that allowed live contributions that you could actually hear from all parts of the globe. Hugh was in his element not only interviewing and presenting but loving it when all the screens suddenly went blank and he was on his own with only a few million people listening.

Mike Popham, colleague at the World Service says: “Hugh was a natural at the mic, able to chat with African politicians as well as with an uexpected guest like Mohammed Ali...although Hugh was at heart a serious intellectual, he had the common touch, an infectious sense of humour and an ease of manner that endeared him to all with whom he came in contact ... .”

But even these fine attributes were still only tools to be employed for a purpose.

Hugh disliked bullies and the abuses of authority.

He disliked individuals and institutions who consolidate their grip on events by sowing ignorance and cultivating helplessness.

His view was that a journalist's job is to challenge and test and always to be a sceptic of the prevailing narrative. If you aren't doing that you're not really a journalist.

Another former colleague wrote this week, “Hugh was a brilliant and tough presenter and taught me much about how careful journalists must be in what they presume and how they categorise those they talk to. Even when interviewing some of the most vilified people in history he would say, let’s try and talk to them on their own terms, and try and understand - or at least hear - their point of view; why he or she thinks as they do. It was not always the easiest approach to take but often the most revealing.”

Hugh was very good at it.

The bruising strain of the 24 Hours schedule took its toll and Hugh had to stand down from it in 1999.
But with a range of other television journalists during the 1990s and ultimately with his friends who set up a company called Television Network International Hugh pursued a number of exotic stories. If it wasn't that they were often seriously perilous it would sound like they'd been dreamed up by Blue Peter.

There's some anthrax in Norway. Let's go and get some.
We hear there's a man in Murmansk with some SS20 missiles in his garage. Why don't we buy one?

David Ridd says, “He was wonderful at dealing with complete lunatics and prima donnas. Always very keen on minor details like evidence and facts, increasingly unfashionable today.”

And all the while there was Manor Farm, acquired in 1980, and with Ingrid, a labour of love and thatching for many years.  Hugh wasn't afraid of hard physical work, lifting heavy things, moving them about and putting them down again, knocking things down and building new things up.

Manor Farm became a place of hospitality for a host of interesting people he discovered had retired or relocated or were just hiding in the area. Good food was accompanied by high flown conversation and low gossip and always much laughter.

There were some activities Hugh wasn't interested in.

Sport.  The Downside archive is remarkably silent on sport.  I only ever saw Hugh run once. But I've already told you about the wind dried duck.

The way you could tell that Hugh was feeling a sense of urgency was the slight increase in interval between the clack of the steel tipped heels of his brogues as he lengthened his stride.

Hugh was an enthusiast for conspiracy theories. He had many. And always a good chance there'd be another one along in a minute.  It was an occasional delight to him when now and again one of them would turn out to be true. As far as the others were concerned Hugh blamed the declining general calibre of the world's conspirators. No stamina.

Hugh knew a lot. But not everything. And there were some things he really ought to have known better.
I'm referring, of course, to his relationship with the motor car. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, Hugh could resist anything except the glint of a new set of ignition keys.

He picked me up once from Bristol Airport in his gas-powered Bentley. Both he and the car were purring. The last time I'd seen so much wood panelling in one place was my local furniture warehouse. Though my local furniture warehouse had slightly more utility.

When his mother was resident at her nursing home in Lyme Regis in the early 2000s Hugh enjoyed swooping up on a summer afternoon in a red Alfa Spyder convertible. He told me how pleased she was for the other residents to observe her stylish departure and that she'd urge him to go faster down the narrow Dorset lanes.  This was quite touching. I think in the hundreds of thousands of miles he had driven in his dozens of vehicles and among his hundreds of passengers no-one had ever previously asked him to go faster.

Alas the red alfa spyder didn't make it

Hugh was a deeply loving man as well as much loved. He stood shoulder to shoulder with his friends – including me – in times of difficulty. He was generous with his time.

He was quite loud. It wasn't hard to distinguish between Hugh and an empty room.  But he could listen – number 2 on that Downside list.

Hugh loved his family and his nephews and nieces. He loved terriers and he loved his many god children. In general the latter were more biddable than the former.  The good folk of Stoke Abbott must have known when Hugh was out with the dogs. The hills were alive with the sound of OTTER and the aggrieved GENGHI, COME HERE NOW.

And of course, from time to time, the recognisable clash of steel spade against stone as one terrier or other had to be dug out after a few day's absence, rear feet first, often bleeding from an underground battle with a fox or a badger.  The trouble with terriers is they don't think things through.

Brian Walker, the editor who first put us together, wrote to me last week that he considered Hugh to be a cavalier while I was a roundhead. Well he was right about Hugh. Not just a Cavalier. Those e mails from former colleagues and friends have variously described Hugh as a radical, an anarchist, a Jacobin, a Jacobite, a musketeer and even a Gladstonian Liberal – and Hugh wouldn't have demurred from any of them.

I like 'musketeer' best. Although he was charismatic and led from the front I know he loved being in a team be it the two man pairings of File on 4 and Analysis or the group effort required to get Newshour on the air.  I have been struck but not surprised by the number of e mails I've seen from fellow correspondents, producers, editors and broadcast assistants alike recording their fond memories of working with Hugh.

I don't want to use a cliche by saying that Hugh was A character. Of course he was. But to me, Hugh WAS and IS character.

Hugh was MY oldest and best friend, But there's quite a community of us who can say the same – some here today and others who could not get here.

We're all desolate that Hugh has left our lives. But we are proud and immensely privileged that he was ever in them.

I regret I can't end with anything Welsh but I do have some lines that Robert Burns wrote on the death of a friend. I think they fit:

“The friend of man, the friend of truth,
The friend of age, and guide of youth:
Few hearts like his, with virtue warm'd,
Few heads with knowledge so inform'd;
If there's another world, he lives in bliss;
If there is none, he made the best of this”

John Forsyth 19th August 2015