My family members were typical of their generations and backgrounds. They served in the great British and Canadian citizen armies of two world wars, endured the London Blitz, crossed oceans threatened by U-boats and, after final victory, immigrated to new lands. As I grow older, I think of them more and more.
I am a former journalist who worked in print, radio and television in Britain and Canada from the 1960s to the late 1990s.
Assignments took me to places as varied as the Soviet Union, Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, East Asia including secretive North Korea, and the Canadian Arctic. I covered Ireland during the Troubles, a U.S. presidential campaign, shot stories inside the Vatican and at the United Nations. In the 1980s, I was thought to have been the first Western television reporter to file from Albania, at that time one of the world’s least-known and most isolated countries. Among those I did stories on – or with – were Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, then former U.S. President Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, JFK advisor John Kenneth Galbraith, UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Princess Diana, Prince Philip, the Dalai Lama, Sir Edmund Hillary, Nelson Mandela, Bill Gates and Pope John Paul II.
Since retiring I have continued to travel extensively.
