Robert Evans
Ronald Farquhar
Saturday 24 December 2011
At this Festive Season, I thought I would share with you, and the many colleagues who contributed to the tributes read at Ronnie Farquhar’s funeral in Geneva earlier this year or wrote appreciations for The Baron, the following note just received from his daughter Katia.
It was so good to have all those kind words from Reuter colleagues on my father’s death. It is going to be my first Xmas without him. I miss him a lot. We brought his ashes to Scotland in September and scattered them over Loch Morar the day of his 89th birthday. We had a very moving ceremony with the people he knew in Morar. A piper played a tune for him and it was a beautiful sunny day. I am sure he approved. I wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy New Year.
Kind regards
Katia
Bob Evans
nbnbn
It was so good to have all those kind words from Reuter colleagues on my father’s death. It is going to be my first Xmas without him. I miss him a lot. We brought his ashes to Scotland in September and scattered them over Loch Morar the day of his 89th birthday. We had a very moving ceremony with the people he knew in Morar. A piper played a tune for him and it was a beautiful sunny day. I am sure he approved. I wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy New Year.
Kind regards
Katia
Bob Evans
nbnbn
Robert Eksuzyan
Sunday 25 September 2011
How very sad that dear Robert has died [● Obituary: Robert Eksuzyan]. Like Bob Evans I was in the Moscow bureau when he joined us as our third translator. He proved to be worth his weight in gold.
He and I were alone in the office at Sad Sam one quiet morning in about 1971, probably a Sunday. The telephone rang. Robert picked up the receiver, listened for a moment, then became more incandescent than ever I saw him before or since. It was his sister on the line from Gagra alerting him to his daughter’s elopement with a young Russian on the overnight train to Moscow. The language that ensued flew in the face of everything we had ever learned about the friendship of peoples.
All was not lost, for life itself teaches us that trains take their time to reach Moscow from the Caucasus. Robert was at the station to meet it.
No more was heard until a few months later he invited Patricia and me to his daughter’s wedding in Gagra. Apart from being a great honour, it was also a rare opportunity to see part of life in the USSR that was usually hidden from us. The appropriate authorities were somehow squared; there were no Kafkaesque foreign ministry shenanigans. On the appointed day we took the plane to Adler.
Armenian weddings, we were told, last for three days, though we were not expected to stay the whole course. We visited Robert’s widowed mother in a fine traditional house that stood before a grove of orange trees. We stayed with his sister, who worked for the Interior Ministry (not sure whether Soviet, Georgian or Abkhaz) and lived in a fairly substantial block of flats. In her second floor apartment cold water was stored in the bath to ensure continuous supply.
The wedding, at an outdoor restaurant, was a lavish affair attended by every kind of nationality to be found in a place like Gagra, Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Abkhazes, Jews and of course Armenians.
The groom was Armenian.
The tamada had to last the course for three days, and to boost his staying power he interspersed his toasts with tumbler-sized chasers of the brine in which you conserve gherkins. There was plenty of vigorous dancing, and it was much to Robert’s embarrassment when his boss from Moscow accepted an invitation to join in.
While we were there Robert took us on a trip to Pitsunda on the regular local bus. He forewarned us that it might get held up at some point because the Abkhazes had a great tendency to fall out with one another and start a fight. As he so often was at work in Moscow, Robert was spot on. Fortunately the fight was at a bus stop, not on the vehicle.
After the fall of communism he paid one or two visits to London, where he was shocked at the variety of foodstuffs available in the shops for pet animals.
When Jacquie and I spent a week in Moscow in 2000, on our way eastwards to Kamchatka and the US, Robert entertained us in his home and took us to the Great Patriotic War Memorial which had appeared out along Kutuzovsky since my days as a Moscow correspondent. It was a great opportunity to learn more of his life history. We had known that his father was the Aeroflot representative in Gagra, but Robert told me his grandfather had been the priest at an Armenian parish somewhere in the hills behind Gagra. When the church was reconsecrated in the 1990s, Robert said he was invited to attend and was feted by the Armenian parishioners. He only went to church once a year himself and showed us the Russian Orthodox Church near his flat where he went each Easter. He was visibly shocked when I told him that one of his former Reuters bosses was an atheist.
As a teenager he recalled that he and a couple of mates found an unexploded artillery shell on the Black Sea shore and were pelting it with stones, or hammering at it with some other implement. Fortunately they were apprehended in time, or none of us would ever have had the benefit of his wisdom and humour. After this incident his father had him sent away to a boarding school. Robert said this was the making of him.
With treasured memories of a well-loved colleague.
Andrew Waller
nbnbn
He and I were alone in the office at Sad Sam one quiet morning in about 1971, probably a Sunday. The telephone rang. Robert picked up the receiver, listened for a moment, then became more incandescent than ever I saw him before or since. It was his sister on the line from Gagra alerting him to his daughter’s elopement with a young Russian on the overnight train to Moscow. The language that ensued flew in the face of everything we had ever learned about the friendship of peoples.
All was not lost, for life itself teaches us that trains take their time to reach Moscow from the Caucasus. Robert was at the station to meet it.
No more was heard until a few months later he invited Patricia and me to his daughter’s wedding in Gagra. Apart from being a great honour, it was also a rare opportunity to see part of life in the USSR that was usually hidden from us. The appropriate authorities were somehow squared; there were no Kafkaesque foreign ministry shenanigans. On the appointed day we took the plane to Adler.
Armenian weddings, we were told, last for three days, though we were not expected to stay the whole course. We visited Robert’s widowed mother in a fine traditional house that stood before a grove of orange trees. We stayed with his sister, who worked for the Interior Ministry (not sure whether Soviet, Georgian or Abkhaz) and lived in a fairly substantial block of flats. In her second floor apartment cold water was stored in the bath to ensure continuous supply.
The wedding, at an outdoor restaurant, was a lavish affair attended by every kind of nationality to be found in a place like Gagra, Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Abkhazes, Jews and of course Armenians.
The groom was Armenian.
The tamada had to last the course for three days, and to boost his staying power he interspersed his toasts with tumbler-sized chasers of the brine in which you conserve gherkins. There was plenty of vigorous dancing, and it was much to Robert’s embarrassment when his boss from Moscow accepted an invitation to join in.
While we were there Robert took us on a trip to Pitsunda on the regular local bus. He forewarned us that it might get held up at some point because the Abkhazes had a great tendency to fall out with one another and start a fight. As he so often was at work in Moscow, Robert was spot on. Fortunately the fight was at a bus stop, not on the vehicle.
After the fall of communism he paid one or two visits to London, where he was shocked at the variety of foodstuffs available in the shops for pet animals.
When Jacquie and I spent a week in Moscow in 2000, on our way eastwards to Kamchatka and the US, Robert entertained us in his home and took us to the Great Patriotic War Memorial which had appeared out along Kutuzovsky since my days as a Moscow correspondent. It was a great opportunity to learn more of his life history. We had known that his father was the Aeroflot representative in Gagra, but Robert told me his grandfather had been the priest at an Armenian parish somewhere in the hills behind Gagra. When the church was reconsecrated in the 1990s, Robert said he was invited to attend and was feted by the Armenian parishioners. He only went to church once a year himself and showed us the Russian Orthodox Church near his flat where he went each Easter. He was visibly shocked when I told him that one of his former Reuters bosses was an atheist.
As a teenager he recalled that he and a couple of mates found an unexploded artillery shell on the Black Sea shore and were pelting it with stones, or hammering at it with some other implement. Fortunately they were apprehended in time, or none of us would ever have had the benefit of his wisdom and humour. After this incident his father had him sent away to a boarding school. Robert said this was the making of him.
With treasured memories of a well-loved colleague.
Andrew Waller
nbnbn
Robert Eksuzyan
Sunday 25 September 2011
Robert [● Obituary: Robert Eksuzyan] was very proud of his Gagra garden – around his mother Tamara Alexandrovna’s house where he took Doodie and I down to stay for a few days in the mid-1970s – and of course of the mandarins he grew there, hundreds of which he would lug back to Moscow after trips down there for all of us and our children.
It was after our Gagra visit that he was put on the carpet by UPDK, told he was too friendly with the capitalist hacks, and instructed to tell me that he no longer wanted to work for Reuters. Which he did, very uncomfortably, but begging me not to make an issue of it. He told me the story, and some others about the pressures he and all our other Soviet staff were subjected to, only in the late Gorbachev period and even then out on the Sad Sam balcony.
Bob Evans
Bob Evans’ children also remember Robert Eksuzyan.
Daughter Taina, who spent much of her childhood in Moscow where the family lived in the bureau chief's apartment a floor above the Sad Sam office, writes: I still think of Robert every year when the tangerines show up in the shops here. I remember him regularly turning up at home not long before Christmas with a massive bag that was bigger than I was!
Son Beren writes: I have fond memories of Robert chasing me out of the office when he thought I might distract my father from working. But when it was quiet he used to take me down to the office kitchen and tell me stories about Soviet footballers.
Daughter Kyla writes: Growing up in Moscow in the 70s, and living just above the Reuter office, Robert was quite a part of our lives. I have an abiding picture of him at his desk in the office, behind a stack of newspapers, cutting out articles.
Christmas wouldn’t have been Christmas without Robert. Every year, he brought us a huge bag of tangerines, one of which would find its way into our Christmas stockings. I still think of them here in Brussels when the tangerine season starts.
On his first trip out of the USSR, my father brought him to visit me at Oxford university. We went into Hall for a formal dinner – and I remember how much he enjoyed dressing up in the gown and carrying a mortar board, and even standing up for the grace.
nbnbn
It was after our Gagra visit that he was put on the carpet by UPDK, told he was too friendly with the capitalist hacks, and instructed to tell me that he no longer wanted to work for Reuters. Which he did, very uncomfortably, but begging me not to make an issue of it. He told me the story, and some others about the pressures he and all our other Soviet staff were subjected to, only in the late Gorbachev period and even then out on the Sad Sam balcony.
Bob Evans
Bob Evans’ children also remember Robert Eksuzyan.
Daughter Taina, who spent much of her childhood in Moscow where the family lived in the bureau chief's apartment a floor above the Sad Sam office, writes: I still think of Robert every year when the tangerines show up in the shops here. I remember him regularly turning up at home not long before Christmas with a massive bag that was bigger than I was!
Son Beren writes: I have fond memories of Robert chasing me out of the office when he thought I might distract my father from working. But when it was quiet he used to take me down to the office kitchen and tell me stories about Soviet footballers.
Daughter Kyla writes: Growing up in Moscow in the 70s, and living just above the Reuter office, Robert was quite a part of our lives. I have an abiding picture of him at his desk in the office, behind a stack of newspapers, cutting out articles.
Christmas wouldn’t have been Christmas without Robert. Every year, he brought us a huge bag of tangerines, one of which would find its way into our Christmas stockings. I still think of them here in Brussels when the tangerine season starts.
On his first trip out of the USSR, my father brought him to visit me at Oxford university. We went into Hall for a formal dinner – and I remember how much he enjoyed dressing up in the gown and carrying a mortar board, and even standing up for the grace.
nbnbn
Clare McDermott
Friday 08 July 2011
I was really sad to learn of the death of Clare.
I was the Moscow bureau chief and the Moscow-end Olympic Games Reuter advance organiser in 1980 when he brought his team out, only to have a strike declared in London at the end of the first week which NUJ members were all supposed to join. As far as I remember, it was in support of the Guild in a dispute with management in New York. Although an NUJ member, Clare was given union dispensation as an executive to continue working, and he worked himself into the ground over the final week of the Games. Dave Nicholson and Ron Cooper, one or two others in the Olympics team, and the Moscow bureau staff were also all given the nod by the union to carry on.
Despite the pressures of trying to cover the Games with only about 10 people, I saw Clare only twice show a glimpse of his famous temper – the first when Soviet security guards made him take his belt off at the entrance to the Press Centre one morning. These were days long before this became a common occurrence at airports. The second was when a couple of Soviet journalists came round to the Reuter office asking why our strikers were aiding the British government’s campaign to undermine the Games – Margaret Thatcher had wanted the British Olympic Committee to boycott Moscow together with the US Committee and others over the invasion of Afghanistan the previous year. Clare, towering over them and glowering, gave the Soviet reporters short shrift. “Where’s your working class solidarity?” he demanded, not totally in jest.
“We don't take orders from any government.” The Soviet reporters retreated. But it didn’t stop them writing that Reuters reporters had succumbed to pressure from “the banks of the Thames” to stop writing about the Games.
In the event, despite the reduced team, I think we came out alright, largely because of Clare’s determination to make sure we did.
Bob Evans
vbnbnbn
I was the Moscow bureau chief and the Moscow-end Olympic Games Reuter advance organiser in 1980 when he brought his team out, only to have a strike declared in London at the end of the first week which NUJ members were all supposed to join. As far as I remember, it was in support of the Guild in a dispute with management in New York. Although an NUJ member, Clare was given union dispensation as an executive to continue working, and he worked himself into the ground over the final week of the Games. Dave Nicholson and Ron Cooper, one or two others in the Olympics team, and the Moscow bureau staff were also all given the nod by the union to carry on.
Despite the pressures of trying to cover the Games with only about 10 people, I saw Clare only twice show a glimpse of his famous temper – the first when Soviet security guards made him take his belt off at the entrance to the Press Centre one morning. These were days long before this became a common occurrence at airports. The second was when a couple of Soviet journalists came round to the Reuter office asking why our strikers were aiding the British government’s campaign to undermine the Games – Margaret Thatcher had wanted the British Olympic Committee to boycott Moscow together with the US Committee and others over the invasion of Afghanistan the previous year. Clare, towering over them and glowering, gave the Soviet reporters short shrift. “Where’s your working class solidarity?” he demanded, not totally in jest.
“We don't take orders from any government.” The Soviet reporters retreated. But it didn’t stop them writing that Reuters reporters had succumbed to pressure from “the banks of the Thames” to stop writing about the Games.
In the event, despite the reduced team, I think we came out alright, largely because of Clare’s determination to make sure we did.
Bob Evans
vbnbnbn
David Nicholson
Monday 03 August 2009
Dave had the knack of being able to keep us correspondents feeling like the real experts on our countries we always thought we were while at the same time gently hinting that there might be a slightly different line on a story than the one we were following. I am sure colleagues in other places had similar experiences but in Moscow I was always amazed by the depth and breadth of his knowledge of things Soviet, though at that time he had never been to the country. Until the last few weeks he kept me on my Kremlinological toes, forwarding comments on Putinisation from a variety of publications for my perusal and reaction. I last saw him at the Reuter Society meeting in June when he greeted me with: "What d'you think Obama's going to get out of the Russians?" I wish I'd had more time to talk to him. But then don't we all wish we'd spent more time with wise and kind people like Dave when it's too late.
Bob Evans
Bob Evans
