Where do war journalists go to unwind? The Frontline Club, in London, gives moral support and even helps them deal with the scenes they have witnessed. Max McGuinnessmeets its founder
Vaughan Smith set up the Frontline Club because he found he only ever met his friends at memorial services. Just inside its entrance, near Paddington Station in London, hang photographs of eight colleagues who died while filming in war zones for Frontline Television News, a co-operative of freelance cameramen that Smith helped to found during the revolution in Romania in 1989. Frontline cameramen were legendary for the risks they took to get stories in what he calls "arguably the most dangerous part of the news industry". Vaughan, who describes himself as an army dropout, impersonated a British officer to film the only independent footage of the ground assault in the Gulf War, in 1991.
A decade or so later, the market for freelance images had dried up, as Reuters and other big news agencies sent in their own staff. "It is one thing," says Vaughan, "to ask people to risk their lives, but not when I couldn't make any f**king money for [ them]." So Vaughan wound up Frontline Television News, took out a mortgage and, in 2003, founded the Frontline Club as a "meeting place for well-travelled people" that would provide moral support to beleaguered freelancers.
Housed in an elegant Victorian building in a still-scruffy part of central London, the club has a restaurant that is open to the public, a members' room, two bedrooms and a conference room where, most nights, the future of the profession is hammered out in a series of public debates, screenings and forums.
These animated discussions are the club's reason for existence. Recently about 60 people packed into the conference room to hear Anthony Feinstein, a Canadian neuropsychiatrist, talk about the effects on war correspondents of post-traumatic stress disorder. Feinstein, who is a professor at the University of Toronto and the author of Journalists Under Fire: The Psychological Hazards of Covering War, identifies a tendency for traumatised journalists to return compulsively to the war zone where the trauma happened, which he calls a "real mistake".
When the moderator, Allan Little of the BBC, asked whether Feinstein's findings reflected the experience of audience members, 13 raised their hands. A BBC producer, Anthony Massey, said some managers in news organisations exploited the conflict obsession of some colleagues, repeatedly sending the same volunteers to Iraq even though it "would perhaps be better for them not to go back". Speaking of his own experiences as a reporter, Massey said there had been a number of times when, he now feels, his bosses "shouldn't have let me go".
In 1998, when Vaughan was covering the war in Kosovo, he was shot by a sniper. The bullet hit his mobile phone, a cigarette packet and a wad of Deutschmarks. He thought he had been struck by a stone and didn't realise he had, miraculously, escaped being wounded until he took his phone from his pocket to make a call.
Vaughan describes conflict as fascinating and exciting and believes that "it is wrong to say that one doesn't enjoy it if one does". He adds that war reporting is attractive not so much for the adrenaline surge it brings as for allowing people "to live life at a faster pace".
Vaughan says he resented taking orders during his eight years in the Grenadier Guards. He also grew frustrated at being in Northern Ireland and on other postings where he was cut off from locals. "We didn't know anything about the place," he says, adding that he and his fellow soldiers were shocked that people didn't like them. Journalism has an important social role, according to Smith, because "societies that are better informed make better decisions".
The killing of a colleague in Baghdad in 2003 was instrumental in Vaughan's decision to shut down the agency and open the club. Richard Wild, a 24-year-old Cambridge graduate, had been a member of Frontline for only a few weeks when he was killed by a single bullet to the head. He had been standing in a crowd in broad daylight when he was killed in a seemingly targeted but unexplained attack.
Assassinations have become a bigger problem than crossfire for modern journalism: only last autumn the Russian investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead in a lift in the Moscow apartment building where she lived. Vaughan says the Frontline Club, which now has 900 members, will support independent journalism in Russia through a series of forums and debates to begin shortly.
In a world where few newspapers are prepared to pay for proper foreign reporting, and where television news can be influenced more by deadlines than by a mission to report the truth, Frontline is a place where people who have seen and care about what's happening in Iraq or Afghanistan can share a beer and feel appreciated.
The club's website is www.frontlineclub.com