Pat Smyllie, who died yesterday aged 61 in Loughlinstown Hospital, Co Dublin, was the last of the line of journalistic Smyllies to serve on or lead The Irish Times.
Smyllies have graced the pages of this newspaper since 1919, when Robert Maire Smyllie, then a youth recently released from a prison camp in Germany, where he had been interned during the first World War, was sent by the then editor, John Edward Healy, to cover the Versailles Peace Conference. Certainly the most famous and influential Irish editor of his day, Bertie Smyllie went on to succeed Healy, while his brother, Donald, was chief sub-editor for many years.
It seemed natural, then, that the young Pat Smyllie, who showed all the journalistic abilities of his forebears, should in turn join The Irish Times.
Born in Sale in Cheshire in 1938, where his father, Donald, was then working on the Daily Express, he and his mother and sister came to Ireland while Donald went off to war, where he had a distinguished record in Burma.
The young Pat was educated at St. Andrews and the High School in Dublin, where he got a taste not just for journalism (he contributed to school magazines) but for rugby football. He was later to prove a useful and dashing winger for Palmerstown in the 1950s.
He joined The Irish Times as a junior reporter when he was 18-in 1956. Those were days when news reporters had to be journeymen journalists, able to turn their hands to all sorts of writing; and the young Smyllie went through the often unexciting chores of covering courts, inquests, fire and flood, annual meetings of learned institutions and Masonic dinners. He proved himself a fast, accurate, inventive journalist, unafraid to tackle the big stories as well as the dross that the Night Town or Day Town shifts imposed. It is no secret that he wrote more fluently than his uncle, the great Bertie Smyllie, as a perusal of the old Nichevo columns will show when compared to many of Pat's Pro-Quidnuncs. He left The Irish Times in the late 1960s to join the Argus group of newspapers in the south of England. The louche atmosphere of the Brighton of the sixties suited Pat Smyllie, who always treated daily journalism with a distinct swagger. His diary columns in the local Surrey newspapers were as bright and breezy as his own nature.
Pat Smyllie was too good a newspaperman by this time to miss out on the great story of his day, and he came back to Ireland to join the Irish Press and its staff in Belfast at the height of the Troubles in the North. Once again he distinguished himself by often being "the firstest with the mostest".
His coverage of the North was often undertaken with difficulty, but this never dampened the sunny spirit of the man. The late Donal Foley, believing that The Irish Times should never be without a Smyllie if there was one around, persuaded him back to this newspaper in the 1970s, and he was in turn briefly night town editor and an assistant news editor. In the 1980s he chose to join the burgeoning public relations industry in Dublin, a move seen by his friends as a loss to serious journalism. He briefly returned to writing by contributing a motoring column to the Sunday Tri- bune, and more recently edited or wrote for various Irish publications.
Pat Smyllie married twice. His first marriage to Stephanie Ann Murphy was dissolved; his second was to Gillian Archer by whom he had a daughter, Kim.
He had a son and a daughter, Slade and Tara, by his first marriage. His sister, Geraldine, lives in Dublin. He was a man who made few enemies. In all of his life few people can think of any time when Pat Smyllie had a bad word to say about anyone. He was a happy man, though he had little to celebrate, especially in his last days. His friends will miss him sorely.
Pat Smyllie: born 1938; died, December, 1999.