David Symonds has written this tribute to his friend and former Radio 4 presenter, Eugene Fraser:

The gentleman on the right slipped quietly through the holes of an STC 4038 yesterday afternoon (Thursday) to take his place in the cosmos. Eugene Fraser was more than a friend to me; he was a brother. I have known him longer than I have known my own children. Eugene was born of Fijian royalty but migrated to New Zealand as a boy. In the early 1960s we were working as local radio announcers on opposite coasts of the North Island - he at 2XP New Plymouth and I at 2ZC Napier. We met at an assessment course in Wellington before each being transferred to head office to present network radio & TV.


I arrived back in England in 1965 to take my chances with the BBC. Eugene made the same journey shortly thereafter. His beautiful baritone voice was a godsend in the days when voice quality really mattered. I shall never forger the time when, shortly after his arrival and still unfamiliar with the British road network, Eugene was reading the traffic news and announced a SNAFU on the A11 in Cambridgeshire as 'the ALL'. I was in continuity and had to gently correct him. Somewhere there's a recording of Eugene's telling his technical operator a dirty joke during the pauses in the shipping forecast. The presentation editor of Radio Four, Jim Black, called him Genius.

When I eventually departed London to set up Radio Victory in Portsmouth it was a given that Eugene would come too. His eventual departure from Victory was the stuff of legend and considerably more romantic than my own.

Eugene had fallen for a girl in the sales department, but their relationship turned out to be pear shaped and after a final dénouement at the radio station Eugene appropriated the company car and totalled it, pursued by police, at Southsea seafront. He legged it back to the station with police and the managing director in hot pursuit. He sprinted up the stairs, with the MD leading the chasing pack. Eugene punched him in the face and the MD fell back into three cops who all went sprawling on the floor.

His criminal record is now expunged.

Eugene had three children - Toa, Ben and Aisa. Toa developed chronic asthma when he was very young and his parents shipped him back to New Zealand where he might benefit from cleaner air. Toa is now a successful and sought-after screenwriter and film director. His first film won the Audience Award (World Dramatic) at Robert Redford's Sundance Film Festival.

I will miss Eugene like crazy, but I shall not grieve. He wouldn't want that.

For Eugene Fraser's was a life well lived.

One day we decided to take lunch at Stocks in Hertfordshire which had recently been sold by Playboy's Victor Lownes to cricketers Phil Edmonds and Ian Botham. The luncheon was as fine as expected, and wine was taken. After dessert and cheese the tail-suited waiter asked 'Will there be anything else, gentlemen?'. 'Yes', Eugene replied, 'you may serve us champagne in the jacuzzi.' At that time Stocks's jacuzzi was the largest in the UK.

Well... after a few bottles of Verve Clicquot and the mandatory ogling of Frances Edmonds in an opposite corner we drove (I know, I know) back to London where I was due to read the evening news on WTN. We paused for a couple of sharpeners in Camden Town before making our way to the studio. By that time I was so legless that I couldn't possibly perform. So Eugene stepped up and read it.

Perfectly.