By Olivier Holmey
(Reuters) -In his first job interview with Reuters, Anthony Grey was asked why he wanted to cover international news. To be mixed up in important events, he said.
His wish would come true – to a ruinous degree.
Three years later, in 1967, Grey – by then the agency’s Beijing correspondent – became a pawn in a drawn-out feud between China and the United Kingdom. After the crown colony of Hong Kong arrested communist reporters, Chinese authorities retaliated by placing Grey under house arrest.
The Briton’s ordeal would last some 26 months – and make him famous around the world.
Finally set free in October 1969, he told the press: “I felt very, very low many times. But I didn’t despair.”
Grey would go on to work for the BBC, write several popular novels and set up a charity to assist other state hostages.
He held no bitterness towards his former captors. The trauma of solitary confinement nonetheless lingered his entire life.
Grey, who had Parkinson’s disease, died on October 11 in Norwich, England, his daughters Lucy and Clarissa Grey told Reuters. He was 87 years old.
A RESTLESS CHILD
Anthony Keith Grey was born on July 5, 1938, in Norwich, the second child of driver Alfred Grey and shopkeeper Agnes (née Bullent).
Raised by Agnes after his parents’ divorce, Grey was estranged from his father for most of his life. An athletic pupil who excelled in English, he was once described by a friend’s mother as “restless”. He wore the epithet with pride.
After leaving school at 16, he did national service with the air force in Glasgow. Concerns that he would eventually require glasses prevented him from becoming a pilot.
Grey harboured another hope: to write fiction. But he sensed that he should first find out more about life. He chose journalism.
In 1960 he joined Norwich’s Eastern Daily Press newspaper, where he overlapped with Frederick Forsyth, who died earlier this year. Both reporters later joined Reuters, before writing novels.
The news agency first posted Grey to East Berlin, ahead of which he took German lessons in London with a teacher called Shirley McGuinn. She would eventually become his wife.
From his base in Berlin, Grey travelled to Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Poland. On several occasions he was followed, and questioned, by Soviet agents, he said. Among his accomplishments: breaking the news that a prisoner exchange was in the works to free Gerald Brooke, a British lecturer held captive in Russia, years before the exchange finally took place.
‘A CORRESPONDENT’S DREAM’
One night in January 1967 a Reuters executive rang to ask whether he would go to Peking, as Beijing was then known.
“It was a correspondent’s dream,” Grey recalled in his 1970 book “Hostage in Peking”. China’s capital city, then convulsed by the Cultural Revolution, was generating a torrent of headlines, but was host to just four Western reporters.
“I made a conscious effort to restrain the enthusiasm of my reply. I was twenty-eight. I didn’t want to be thought over-eager and unreliable. Yes, I quite liked the idea.”
Grey had no special knowledge of China. All he had was 18 months’ experience covering another communist part of the world: Eastern Europe.
As he set off, he was advised to gauge the state of the country from his train seat by whether smoke rose from the factory chimneys and rice shoots from the paddy fields – “a measure of the ignorance existing among outsiders of conditions in China at that time”, he later remarked.
One of his first reports debunked a Russian news bulletin claiming a famine in South China. A few weeks later, while he was covering May Day celebrations, Mao Zedong passed within a few feet of him. Caught up in the crowd’s commotion, Grey failed to film the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party.
‘HANG GREY!’
Grey’s relative freedom of movement ended abruptly on July 21, 1967. That day, a foreign ministry official told him that, in view of the “illegal persecution” and “fascist atrocities” in Hong Kong against Chinese correspondents, he would no longer be allowed to leave his house. He protested that his British employer was independent from the British state, to no avail.
Of his house arrest, Grey wrote in his diary that evening: “The novelty of it prevented me feeling depressed; I feel a small sense of how unjust the measure.”
There ensued four weeks of relative normality in Reuters’ staffed, two-storey residence on the edge of the Forbidden City. That all changed on August 18.
That night, Red Guards burst into the house, daubed paint on him and dragged him into the yard, his arms wrenched behind his back and his head forced down – an agonising position known as jet-planing.
The intruders killed his cat, Ming Ming, and shouted: “Hang Grey! Hang Grey!”
Around midnight, they finally left. “I was aching all over and out of breath, and didn’t sit down for a long time,” Grey wrote in his diary.
After that, the conditions of his detention became much starker. Guards confined Grey to one tiny room, its walls plastered with Maoist propaganda.
A pen was his only solace. With it he secretly journaled, wrote short stories and compiled crossword puzzles. “I would occupy the emptiness of time by thinking of cliches and colloquial phrases and making up what I thought were smart or groan-provoking puns as clues,” he wrote in the foreword to his 1975 collection “Crosswords from Peking”.
Among his favourite ones: “The law of graffiti?” Tantalisingly, he declined to give readers the four-word answer.
‘CAUGHT UP IN A BATTLE OF FACE’
The British government insisted on quiet negotiations with China. But as that approach proved fruitless, Grey’s peers launched a far more public campaign to secure his release. The tall, slender reporter became a fixture on front pages.
When his wait was finally over, a Chinese official told him that he owed his freedom to the release of the communist reporters.
“I don’t think Peking cared desperately about the news workers in Hong Kong in themselves,” Grey later wrote. “I was simply caught up in a battle of face between two intransigent governments.”
Readjusting to society proved a challenge, especially as Britain had changed so much during his captivity. Recreational drugs abounded, as did miniskirts, long-haired men and – with the musical “Hair” – on-stage nudity.
His status too had changed. “The former newshound, accustomed to hunting safely in numbers with the press corps pack, had been separated out – had become the fox, the hunted one,” he wrote in his book “The Hostage Handbook” decades later.
He went on to host a current affairs programme on BBC radio and write several thrillers. But the unexplained death in Cairo of journalist David Holden in 1977 – a chilling real-life incident of the sort Grey had lightly imagined in his novels – put him off the genre.
After that he wrote sprawling historical fiction set in China, Vietnam and Japan. His best-selling work was “Saigon”.
‘I GO TO EXTREMES’
Grey would have a few more dalliances with journalism. In 1983, he wrote “The Prime Minister Was a Spy”, a book which alleged that Australia’s Harold Holt, who is widely believed to have drowned at sea in 1967, had in fact fled the country in a Chinese submarine.
The stridently anti-communist Holt had spied on Beijing’s behalf for 38 years, Grey wrote.
Holt biographer Tim Frame called the theory “a complete fabrication”. Relying on a former Australian naval officer who claimed to have Chinese informants, Grey himself wrote of his account: “I can’t guarantee that it is true.”
A 1996 BBC radio documentary about unidentified flying objects led him to yet more unorthodox views. “At the end of my own investigation, I personally feel sure that extraterrestrial craft are visiting us,” he concluded in the broadcast.
After that, Grey became a follower of Rael, a Frenchman who said that humanity had been created by alien scientists. His movement – Raelism – defines itself as an atheist religion. A French parliamentary inquiry called it a cult.
Grey’s faith, which led him to write the foreword to Rael’s 2005 book “Intelligent Design”, became, for a time, all-consuming. It threatened to engulf his finances, reputation and mental health, the latter already largely hobbled by his experiences in Beijing.
Four decades on from captivity, Grey, who fell in and out of depression, finally saw a psychiatrist. He was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
In brighter moments, he would laugh with Lucy about how much he identified with Billy Joel’s lyrics: “Darling I don’t know why I go to extremes / Too high or too low there ain’t no in-betweens.”
Grey had an open yet troubled mind. He could also be “wonderfully silly”, Clarissa said.
Both daughters are journalists. They survive him, as do Lucy’s children Eddie and Oscar.
‘THE LAW OF GRAFFITI?’
Preaching forgiveness, Grey let go of any resentment towards the British and Chinese authorities, as well as towards his fellow journalists, who had pressed him for stories even at his lowest. He founded several charities, including Hostage Action Worldwide and Planet of Forgiveness.
Sitting at home in England’s South Downs listening to John Williams’s “Cavatina” with a Chivas Regal in hand was his idea of bliss.
He was married to Shirley for 22 years. Following their separation, and before her death from cancer in 1995, they remained close friends. He would visit her every week to tackle a crossword together.
The answer to his own clue, “The law of graffiti?”, it turned out, was “Writing on the wall”.
Conceived in detention half a century ago, all four walls of his cell covered in Maoist mantras, the pun brought a smile to his face.
(Editing by Andrew HeavensArchival research by Rory Carruthers and Susan Ponsonby)