Red pen Rick

Rick was one of my mentors in the London Bureau of the late 1960s, along with such legends as Jim Flannery and the late Peter Mosley, Pat Massey and Sean Maynes. Our paths crossed again in the early 1980s, when we returned from a longish stint in various European bureaux and briefly became near neighbours in Dulwich, southeast London. Rick's wife, the equally legendary Mary, became a kind of universal aunt for first our eldest son Andrew and then all four boys when they were at boarding school in London and we were away again in Africa and Latin America. 

Rick then played a key role in the training of our second son Nicholas, who takes up the story: 

Me and my fellow Reuters grads used to call him "red pen Rick" because he mercilessly covered our mock stories with red marker pen wherever we had made slightest Reuters style or substance mistake. On one particularly bad/ruthless day he actually scribbled and underlined so hard on one of my stories that he punctured and ripped the paper - it was a bit of a massacre, but I'm sure I deserved it. ■