George Vine's personal kindness

Just one example of George's personal kindness: 

In 1959 I was a know-nothing trainee in the Bonn office struggling through my first weeks in Reuters. With no-one more qualified around, the then bureau chief Gerald Long sent me to cover a complicated Anglo-West German negotiation about the rules covering the stationing of UK forces in Germany and their costs.

Sitting through the briefings given by both sides I dismally realised that I simply did not understand the issues under review. George, then already an old Bonn hand and correspondent of the London News Chronicle, spotted my despair, invited me to an afternoon coffee, and painstakingly briefed me on the whole UK forces saga. In fact he pretty much wrote my story for me.

A dozen or so years later when I took over as Bonn bureau chief and George was our star correspondent I tried to remind him of that earlier episode and renew my thanks. He professed to know nothing about it. But his eyes twinkled. ■