In 1972 I started at ITN as one of Sandy Gall’s scriptwriters on News at Ten. In 1992 I was his Editor and organised his farewell party. As I discovered over those twenty years and since he was a truly remarkable man. I have written this tribute to Sandy in a newsletter for former ITN staff.

I was in the ITN Newsroom on the afternoon of 24 February 1991 the day the ground war began to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s occupying forces. So far not a frame of film or video had appeared from any source. The phone rang and the switchboard said “It’s Sandy Gall for you”. Moments later a familiar voice was telling me, ever so calmly, that he had just crossed the border into Kuwait with Saudi forces, he had pictures of tanks crossing the border and the first Iraqi prisoners. His report would be ready in a few minutes. I told him that none of the bright young men and women reporters embedded with Coalition troops had filed. Which meant that this wily old fox, operating solo with his crew, possibly the oldest man on the battlefield at 64, had a world exclusive. “Oh good’; he replied modestly. All very Sandy.

I had first worked with him in 1972. I was in awe of him and the more I learned about Henderson Alexander Gall the more remarkable he became. In contrast with the calm, relaxed, elder statesman dashing off occasionally from the News at Ten desk to obtain an exclusive or two I found that he had once been an impatient and frustrated reporter constantly contrasting ITN unfavourably with his previous employers Reuters. “Although I knew all about being a foreign correspondent”, he later wrote, “I knew nothing about television’ when he joined ITN in 1963 aged 36. Compared to Reuters ITN was a ‘babe in arms’. 

He was shocked by how rarely and how late ITN sent on foreign trips and could be angered by cables from the Foreign Desk: “Bloody Boy Scouts. It irritated me beyond measure that men who were much inferior in experience should be dictating to me.”. On another trip he got angry about a particular microphone he was forced to take. “The idea of carrying this great lump of metal into battle was obviously absurd”. The crew ‘lost it’. 

It was in Vietnam where Sandy began to love television and ITN in particular. When in 1965 the Americans began bombing raids against North Vietnam he ‘cornered’ the Editor Geoffrey Cox but was initially told “I’m not convinced”. A week later he became the first ITN correspondent to report the Vietnam war and ten years later he would be the last as the Americans withdrew. Along the way there were some brilliant eye-witness dispatches from the jungle front line but he also found time for some rounds at the Saigon Golf Club . Excellent food and wine was consumed as high level contacts were entertained at restaurants. Sandy himself told the story of how he once cabled ITN asking for £300 to pay his hotel bill. The amount came out at the ITN end as £3,000, Sandy said the Saigon Post Office accidentally added a nought. The then Editor, Nigel Ryan, cabled back: ‘Your request for more funds. You supposed to be reporting Vietnam, not buying it’.” But another legendary story annoyed him, yes it was true that Sandy was given the keys to the British Club when the UK Consul left Saigon but he didn’t help himself to the wine in the Consul’s cellar.

What I learned about Sandy over the years was that he was partly driven by political views forged in his news agency days. In 1958 he was the only Western correspondent in Budapest when Imre Nagy, the leader of the Hungarian anti-Soviet uprising two years earlier, was executed. “As a Reuter man you’re supposed to be impartial and one was impartial in one’s reporting but one’s own private feelings were that this was a dreadful system that could behave in this sort of way”. In 1982 he set off to Afghanistan with a documentary crew: “I had seen Soviet power at its worst you might say, I wondered what was going to happen there”.

The veteran foreign correspondent, back in the saddle literally, accompanied by mujahideen fighters, traversed the mountainsides of the Hindu Kush. There was a message to go with the stunning pictures, Sandy had met Ahmed Shah Massoud, a mujahideen leader fighting the Russians, who he saw as ‘the second Tito’ leading his partisans against the foreign oppressors. Sandy’s friendship with President Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan delivered a series of exclusives to ITN about Massoud’s men. Sandy walked into my office in 1989 with news that he secured a deal to take a satellite dish from Pakistan into mujahideen areas of Afghanistan and transmit live back to London. It caused a TV sensation, a BBC foreign editor once told me they ‘really hurt’ at our success. In 2012, long after we had both left ITN, I interviewed Sandy for a BBC radio programme called ‘When Reporters Cross the Line’. I wondered if he, indeed we, had done exactly that with our positive coverage of Massoud and our non-coverage of how deeply Margaret Thatcher’s Government was involved. Sandy was unapologetic. “I don’t feel at all guilty about it, I didn’t think I’d overstepped my area of journalistic impartiality”.

Nobody can ever doubt Sandy Gall’s bravery in so many places such as ‘C19’, Idi Amin’s favourite execution cell during Sandy’s time in detention in Uganda. He also had a passion for humanitarian commitment creating a charity which fitted 20,000 Afghans with artificial limbs. His wife Eleanor, who he met while they were both working in Hungary, helped run the charity until her death in 2018. So did his daughter Carlotta, now a senior correspondent with the New York Times, who approved of the title of her paper’s obituary;‘Sandy Gall,War Correspondent Without Swagger, Dies at 97’.