Not cut out for academia he did not attend university but knew he needed to get his education at the “University of Life. At age 17, after answering an ad in The Times for a trainee tea and tobacco estate manager in Nyasaland, he was off to what British media described as “darkest” Central Africa.
Two days after his arrival in Nyasaland the only newspaper in the country, The Nyasaland Times, advertised for a trainee reporter. His introduction to journalism was not parish-pump stuff – weddings, funerals and town hall politics- but emerging black African nationalism and white resistance to it.
Within a year he was reporting from Central Africa for not only his own newspaper but, as a stringer correspondent, for all but one of Britain’s national newspapers and the three main international news agencies – Reuters, Associated Press and UPI.
His honest reporting made him an enemy of President-in-waiting Banda. Shortly before white colonial rule ended Alan was declared persona non-grata and thrown out of the country with his wife and a month-old son. He was given 48 hours to sell-up and leave.
Back in England he got a job with the Daily Telegraph. He was the youngest ever reporter to have a staff job in Fleet Street, but within a month, bored out of his mind he decided to get into television.
He became International Television News’s (ITN) chief foreign correspondent covering wars and conflicts wherever they were happening in the world. While at ITN he was credited with pioneering the “as live” style of reporting by doing his commentaries live into the microphone as events were happening. It was a style of reporting that helped ITN’s 30-minute News-at-Ten (in its pioneering days) attract and hold big audiences, often double the size of those for the BBC’s main news
It was in Vietnam, observing America spending six million dollars a minute destroying two countries in a war it could not win and should not have fought, that he first started to ask himself questions about why things are as they are in the world.
While reporting in India he was offered a job as BBC’s flagship current affairs programme Panorama (a weekly 60-minute slot).
In his tv reporting days he was celebrated within the industry for my scoops and my special relationships with leaders on both sides of the many conflicts I covered.
I think I must be, for example, the only person on Planet Earth who enjoyed intimate access to, and on the human level friendship with, arguably the two greatest opposites in all of human history – Golda Meir, Mother Israel, and Yasser Arafat, Father Palestine.
In pre-Likud Israel he was known as “Golda’s boyfriend” on account of the red roses he sent. In pre-Likud Israel he knew pretty all of Israel’s leaders including its Directors of Military Intelligence.
On the Arab side, in addition to Arafat, who he rote a book about, he enjoyed special relations and private conversations with Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal (He was the first Western correspondent to interview him on film – great story to this), Jordan’s King Hussein and Egyptian Presidents Nasser and Sadat.
In Iran he enjoyed the friendship and confidence of Empress Farah, the wife of the Shah. As was recently revealed in dc-classified British Government papers and an interview he gave to BBC radio, he assisted Farah to try to educate her husband about what was going wrong their country.
How was it that a lad from the bottom of the UK’s working class heap became a friend and confident of world leaders?
Two reasons, “I think. One is that I don’t give a damn about being white and British. I’m a citizen of the world, period; a true believer in one common humanity. Empathizing with people on the human level came and comes easily to me, says Alan.” Main reason was the advice given to me my ITN’s legendary editor, Geoffrey Cox, when I joined his reporting staff. He said: “You’ll be engaging with prime ministers and presidents, kings and queens. Never forget that leaders are the most lonely people in the world because they are surrounded by sycophants who only tell them what they want to hear. They, leaders, are crying out for honest conversation.” “I became a visitor with whom leaders could have honest conversations in private, said Alan ”
At a point Alan’s understanding of what a mess our leaders had made of managing Planet Earth caused him to be frustrated and angered with the media’s superficiality and refusal to come to grips with some of the major issues of our time.
He set up my own independent production company and, on the strength of his international reputation at the time, raised £1 million sterling (a lot in 1973) from international development agencies and some governments to make the first ever and to date only documentary on the full and true reality of everyday global poverty and its implications for all.
The end product, a two-hour film titled FIVE MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT, had its world premiere, hosted by Secretary General Kurt Waldheim, at the formal opening of the 7th Special session of the UN General Assembly, (called to discuss the need for a New World Economic Order); was screened on television in most countries of the North; was versioned for schools in many countries; and became something of a standard work of reference
Alan is a fiercely independent thinker. He hates all labels and isms and has never been a member of any political party or group. He prefers to judge issues on their merits.
Today, Alan is an author who writes about the Middle East.
Please visit:
www.AlanHart.net
At the age of 7 he knew he wanted to be a reporter for BBC. First in his working class family to have a secondary education he attended the best Grammar School in the country.
