MURRAY SALE:MURRAY SAYLE, who has died aged 84 after suffering from Parkinson's disease, was a journalistic legend, but he was also much more interesting than most of that breed. He was a complex, self-contradictory character, sardonic but warm, cynical but principled, who lived in several avatars and in three very different cultures: Australia, where he grew up and to which he returned in old age; Britain, where he made his reputation as the most forceful of Fleet Street's finest; and Japan, where he spent more than 30 years of his life and did some of his best work. He was an adventurer, an autodidact and a man of many parts, an intellectual who climbed Mount Everest and sailed the Atlantic single-handed.
Sayle’s professional reputation was established by a number of memorable scoops. From a plane he had parlayed himself on to, he spotted Francis Chichester’s globe-girdling yacht as it rounded Cape Horn. He tracked down Che Guevara in the Bolivian jungle. Most memorably of all, having the insight to guess that the communist spy Kim Philby would, ideology notwithstanding, collect his dividend cheques from London at Moscow’s central post office, he waited until he was able to step forward and greet the middle-aged English gent the world’s press was hunting with a Livingstonian “Mr Philby?”.
Large, shrewd and with many of the characteristics of an armoured vehicle, Sayle had plenty of the “rat-like cunning” advocated by his colleague Nick Tomalin when it came to that basic reportorial talent of getting oneself in the right place at the right time. Later he developed a graceful writing style and an instinct for seeking out the larger, less obvious truth.
His work as a war reporter, in Vietnam and in the India-Pakistan war of 1971 was always courageous and colourful. Near the end of his life, he had the belated satisfaction of seeing his documentary novel of life on a Fleet Street Sunday newspaper, A Crooked Sixpence (2008), banned for almost half a century as a result of a libel action, hailed as a classic.
Perhaps his very best work was his reporting of Japan, controversial and original as ever, with the insight that came from living in a small Japanese town, in a Japanese house, where his English wife taught in the Japanese school that their three tall, blond children – two sons and a daughter – attended. His contrarian account of the role of the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima in hastening Japan’s surrender, which took up an entire issue of The New Yorker in 1995, exemplified his passion for detail and his willingness to shock, which it certainly did.
He invented some of the ruling catchphrases of journalistic culture. It was Sayle who first cited a reporter (a fictional version of himself), assigned to expose a prostitution racket, insisting that he “made excuses and left”; it was Sayle, too, who laid down that there were only two basic stories: “We name the guilty man!” and “Arrow points to defective part”.
He was born in the west Sydney suburb of Earlwood, and the aura of middle-class convention, to a railway executive and a keen ballroom dancer.
He studied psychology at Sydney University and edited the university newspaper, the Honi Soit, where he attracted early attention by unmasking a fraudulent poet, an Aussie Ossian called Ern Malley. He left university after two years and became a journalist, first undergoing the stern discipline of a cadetship on the Sydney Daily Telegraph, then writing a column for the Sydney Daily Mirrorand becoming a radio reporter.
In 1952 he left Australia for London. In 1964, Sayle was fixed up by his Australian mate Phillip Knightley with a job on the The Sunday Times, which Harold Evans was then transforming from a staid establishment organ into an aggressive but serious paper.
He left The Sunday Timesafter the Bloody Sunday mass killing in the Bogside area of Derry in January 1972. Sayle reported, correctly, that the British paratroopers had not been fired on by republicans. He also wrote that the whole affair had been the result of deliberate British government policy. Colleagues were outraged and persuaded Evans that he was wrong about that.
Sayle went off to work for Newsweekin Hong Kong, but soon moved to Japan. He contributed affectionate, if unorthodox, interpretations of Japan to publications from the Spectatorto The New York Review of Booksand others in Australia, where in 2004 he moved for medical treatment, and where his children went to university. He is survived by them and by Jenny.
Murray Sayle: born January 1st, 1926; died September 18th, 2010