Sandy Gall - my predecessor in Budapest

In 1988 I succeeded Sandy Gall as the first Reuters foreign correspondent for 30 years to be resident in Budapest. Until then I'd travelled regularly to Hungary on reporting forays from Vienna, but I was instructed to move there and open a bureau as political reforms  accelerated.

Vienna bureau chief Colin McIntyre and I spent two days in Budapest's Danube-side Forum Hotel interviewing candidates to become my assistant. The most eager was Ilona Gazdag, who remembered Sandy fondly from assisting him between 1956, when Soviet tanks rolled in to suppress the Hungarian Rising, and 1958, when the office was closed.

As Hungary's reforms accelerated further, unimpeded by Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow, we eventually employed Ilona as my second assistant on an hourly rate, so that my first assistant could abide by Hungarian employment laws and go home after a long day in the office. (No such laws applied to me!)

Eight years ago, when I was writing Made in Hungary, the third of my unpublished novels, I rang Sandy to hear about his experiences in Budapest. Speaking from his home in Penshurst, Kent, Sandy recalled working from a telex machine in the since demolished Duna Hotel as one of only two Western journalists then resident in the city. Ilona worked for Sandy as his interpreter; her husband Laszlo Baross for the AP correspondent. Sandy remembered Ilona vividly and asked for news of her. Alas, neither I nor the then Reuters staff could track her down. (If still alive, she would now be 102.)

I deeply regret not having invited Sandy to the opening of my little office, which was attended by Colin, Austrian manager Bjorn Schallehn and then Europe Editor Mark Wood.


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