By Olivier Holmes
(Reuters) -In his first job interview with Reuters, Anthony Gray was asked why he wanted to cover international news. Be involved in important events, he said.
His wish would come true… to a ruinous extent.
Three years later, in 1967, Gray, by then the agency’s Beijing correspondent, became a pawn in a protracted dispute between China and the United Kingdom. After the crown colony of Hong Kong arrested communist journalists, Chinese authorities retaliated by placing Gray under house arrest.
The Briton’s ordeal would last about 26 months and would make him famous throughout the world.
Finally released in October 1969, he told the press: “I felt very, very depressed many times. But I did not despair.”
Gray would go on to work for the BBC, write several popular novels, and set up a charity to help other state hostages.
He felt no resentment toward his former captors. However, the trauma of solitary confinement persisted throughout his life.
Grey, who suffered from Parkinson’s disease, died on October 11 in Norwich, England, his daughters Lucy and Clarissa Gray told Reuters. He was 87 years old.
A RESTLESS CHILD
Anthony Keith Gray was born on 5 July 1938 in Norwich, the second son of driver Alfred Gray and shopkeeper Agnes (née Bullent).
Raised by Agnes after his parents’ divorce, Gray was estranged from his father for most of his life. An athletic student who excelled in English, a friend’s mother once described him as “fidgety.” He wore the epithet with pride.
After leaving school at 16, he did national service in the air force in Glasgow. Concern that he would eventually need glasses prevented him from becoming a pilot.
Gray harbored another hope: writing fiction. But he felt that first he had to learn more about life. He chose journalism.
In 1960 he joined the Eastern Daily Press newspaper in Norwich, where he met Frederick Forsyth, who died earlier this year. Both reporters later joined Reuters, before writing novels.
The news agency first sent Gray to East Berlin, before which he took German lessons in London with a teacher named Shirley McGuinn. She would eventually become his wife.
From his base in Berlin, Gray traveled to Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Poland. On several occasions he was followed and interrogated by Soviet agents, he said. Among his accomplishments: Breaking the news that a prisoner exchange was being prepared to free Gerald Brooke, a British professor held captive in Russia, years before the exchange finally took place.
‘THE DREAM OF A CORRESPONDENT’
One night in January 1967, a Reuters executive called him to ask if he would go to Peking, as Beijing was then known.
“It was a correspondent’s dream,” Gray recalled in his 1970 book “Hostage in Peking.” The capital of China, then convulsed by the Cultural Revolution, generated a torrent of headlines, but only hosted four Western journalists.
“I made a conscious effort to contain the enthusiasm of my response. I was twenty-eight years old. I didn’t want to be seen as overzealous and unreliable. Yes, I quite liked the idea.”
Gray had no special knowledge of China. All I had was 18 months of experience covering another communist part of the world: Eastern Europe.
As he departed, he was advised to assess the state of the country from his train seat by taking into account whether smoke was rising from factory chimneys and rice sprouts from rice paddies, “a measure of the ignorance that existed among outsiders about conditions in China at the time,” he later commented.
One of his first reports debunked a Russian news bulletin that claimed there was famine in southern China. A few weeks later, while covering May Day celebrations, Mao Zedong passed within a few meters of him. Caught in the commotion of the crowd, Gray failed to film the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party.
‘HANG GRAY!’
Grey’s relative freedom of movement ended abruptly on July 21, 1967. That day, a Foreign Office 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 home. He protested in vain that his British employer was independent of the British state.
Of his house arrest, Gray wrote in his diary that night: “The novelty kept me from feeling depressed; I have a small sense of how unfair the measure is.”
Four weeks of relative normality followed at Reuters’ two-story residence on the outskirts of the Forbidden City. That all changed on August 18.
That night, the Red Guards broke into the house, sprayed him with paint, and dragged him into the yard, his arms twisted behind his back and his head down, an agonizing position known as gliding.
The intruders killed their cat, Ming Ming, and shouted, “Hang Grey! Hang Grey!”
Around midnight they finally left. “My whole body ached and I was short of breath, and I did not sit down for a long time,” Gray wrote in his diary.
After that, the conditions of his detention became much harsher. The guards confined Gray to a small room, the walls covered in Maoist propaganda.
A pen was his only consolation. With it he secretly kept a diary, wrote stories and compiled crossword puzzles. “I occupied the void of time thinking of clichés and colloquial phrases and inventing as clues what I thought were clever or groan-inducing puns,” he wrote in the foreword to his 1975 collection “Peking Crosswords.”
Among his favorites: “The law of graffiti?” Tantalizingly, he declined to give readers the four-word answer.
‘TRAPPED IN A FACE BATTLE’
The British government insisted on calm negotiations with China. But as that approach proved unsuccessful, Grey’s colleagues launched a much more public campaign to secure his release. The tall, thin reporter became a regular fixture on the 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 Beijing cared desperately about Hong Kong media workers,” Gray later wrote. “I was simply caught in a head-to-head battle between two intransigent governments.”
Readjusting to society proved challenging, especially as Britain had changed so much during his captivity. Recreational drugs, miniskirts, long-haired men and, with the musical “Hair,” onstage nudity, abounded.
His status had also changed. “The old hound, accustomed to hunting safely alongside the press, had been separated, had become the fox, the hunted,” he wrote decades later in his book “The Hostage Handbook.”
He then presented a current affairs program on BBC radio and wrote several thrillers. But the unexplained death in Cairo of journalist David Holden in 1977 – a chilling real-life incident of the kind Gray had lightly imagined in his novels – turned him away from the genre.
After that, he wrote extensive historical fiction set in China, Vietnam, and Japan. His best-selling work was “Saigon.”
‘I’M GOING TO THE EXTREMES’
Gray would have a few more flirtations with journalism. In 1983, he wrote “The Prime Minister Was a Spy,” a book that alleged that Australian Harold Holt, who is believed to have drowned at sea in 1967, had actually fled the country on a Chinese submarine.
The stridently anti-communist Holt had spied on behalf of Beijing for 38 years, Gray wrote.
Holt’s biographer Tim Frame called the theory “a complete fabrication.” Relying on a former Australian naval officer who claimed to have Chinese informants, Gray himself wrote of his account: “I cannot guarantee that it is true.”
A 1996 BBC radio documentary about unidentified flying objects led him to even more unorthodox views. “At the end of my own investigation, I am personally sure that we are being visited by extraterrestrial ships,” he concluded in the broadcast.
After that, Gray became a follower of Rael, a Frenchman who said that humanity had been created by extraterrestrial scientists. Their movement, Raelism, defines itself as an atheistic religion. A French parliamentary investigation 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 devour his finances, his reputation and his mental health, the latter already largely affected by his experiences in Beijing.
Four decades into his captivity, Gray, drifting in and out of depression, finally saw a psychiatrist. He was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
In brighter moments, he laughed with Lucy at how much he identified with Billy Joel’s lyrics: “Honey, I don’t know why I go to extremes / Too high or too low, there’s no in between.”
Gray had an open but troubled mind. He could also be “wonderfully silly,” Clarissa said.
Both daughters are journalists. They survive him, as do Lucy’s sons, Eddie and Oscar.
‘THE GRAFFITI LAW?’
In preaching forgiveness, Gray put aside any resentment toward the British and Chinese authorities, as well as his fellow journalists, who had pressured him to publish articles even in his worst moments. He founded several charities, including Hostage Action Worldwide and Planet of Forgiveness.
Sitting at home in England’s South Downs listening to John Williams’ “Cavatina” with a Chivas Regal in hand was his idea of ​​happiness.
He was married to Shirley for 22 years. After their separation and before his death from cancer in 1995, they remained close friends. He visited her every week to solve a crossword puzzle together.
It turned out that the answer to his own clue, “Graffiti Law?”, was “Write on the Wall.”
Conceived while in detention half a century ago, with the four walls of his cell covered in Maoist mantras, the pun made him smile.
(Editing by Andrew HeavensArchival research by Rory Carruthers and Susan Ponsonby)