Sir Geoffrey Sanford Cox

The world was his newsroom

HELEN McNEISH

CLOSE TO HISTORY: Sir Geoffrey Cox, who became a foreign correspondent in the Spanish Civil War.

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Sir Geoffrey Sanford Cox, journalist. Born Palmerston North, April 7, 1910; died April 2, 2008, aged 97.
Geoff Cox, the founder of Britain's pioneering News at Ten on ITN in 1967, was a New Zealander with an notable career in journalism and the military before he rose to eminence in British television.

He had an impressive career: a Rhodes scholar, he became a foreign correspondent for the News Chronicle in the Spanish Civil War. As a Daily Express reporter, he covered the Anschluss in Austria in 1938 and the Soviet-Finnish War and was in Czechoslovakia as Hitler took over the Sudetenland. He was one of the last reporters to leave Paris before the Germans arrived.

During World War II he was chief intelligence officer to General Bernard Freyberg in the New Zealand Division and was twice mentioned in dispatches. He served in Greece, Crete, Libya and Cassino. For a while in 1943 he was New Zealand's First Secretary in Washington and took part in the Pacific War Council, attended by Churchill and Roosevelt. After the war he was lobby correspondent for the News Chronicle. The summit of his career was as editor and chief executive of ITN from 1956-68.

Sir Geoffrey interrupted his newspaper career to serve in the 2nd New Zealand Division in World War II. He served in North Africa and the Mediterranean, finishing the war as chief intelligence officer for General Freyberg, commander of Allied forces in Greece.

After covering the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s for British newspapers, Sir Geoffrey enlisted in 1940.

He regarded himself as lucky to have survived World War II, as he was among New Zealand troops fighting a losing battle against Germany in Crete in 1941.

"My first reaction was, 'I might be dead by tonight, but by God, I've seen the first airborne invasion in history'," he told NZPA in 2001.

German paratroopers flew in gliders crammed with elite soldiers. With no confidence in his service revolver, he ran to the armoury to get a .303 rifle.

"I was engaged in trying to get the grease out of this bloody thing, when I looked up . . . here was a glider coming in and the German infantry sitting in it bolt upright with their rifles on their knees, like they were on a bus.

"I thought, 'Well, this is chips for me', but they hit the hillside. There were no survivors from that one, and the two others nearby."

As the Germans gained control of Crete, he found himself part of an exhausting retreat through the White Mountains to Sfakia, where the defeated were to be evacuated. He led a party that included New Zealand war artist Peter McIntyre.

Sir Geoffrey, whose Rhodes Scholarship took him to Oxford University from 1932 to 1935, created the Crete News for New Zealand soldiers, at the request of General Freyberg, who thought it would be good for morale. Given two weeks to get it going, he turned out four issues, before the Germans brought production to a halt.

"Pukka papers they were, they even had racing results."

He was particularly proud of the third issue, published two days after the Germans attacked. "I wrote a short editorial on the front page, which was one of the best things I ever wrote. It said the eyes of the world are on us. What we are doing now is the news, not what is happening outside. Good stuff it was, even if I do say it myself."

Sir Geoffrey sealed his place in history when he translated a crucial captured German operation order in General Freyberg's dugout. He was set on the path to rapid promotion. He became an intelligence officer, was then taken out of the army and transferred to Washington DC in 1942, when it was feared the Japanese would blockade New Zealand.

He worked under deputy prime minister Walter Nash at a hastily set-up embassy trying to persuade the Americans to risk ships keeping open shipping routes to New Zealand. For 15 months he was first secretary in Washington, an "extraordinary experience", sitting on the Pacific War Council as the New Zealand representative.

Geoff Cox spent his early years in Invercargill. After Southland High School he took an MA at Otago University and went on to Oriel College, Oxford. He joined London's News Chronicle in 1935.

Cox was quick to identify the menaces of Nazism and Stalinist communism. In 1932 he travelled through the Soviet Union and gained a lasting impression of what he called harsh political authoritarianism and the conviction that he would see another major war in his lifetime.

In 1934 a German acquaintance at Oxford invited him to join his family in Nuremberg to watch the parade at the annual Nazi Party rally. Cox found himself with a grandstand view of the historic rally, studying Hitler's face barely 50 metres away and seeing Leni Riefenstahl making her propaganda film, Triumph of the Will.

In 1936 the News Chronicle sent Cox to Spain to cover the civil war. It was a lucky break. He filed vivid reports of life among a civil population being bombed on Franco's orders. Cox's reports caught the eye of Daily Express editor Arthur Christiansen and in 1938 he was assigned to Vienna for the Express and soon afterward to the plum posting of Paris correspondent.

Cox turned down an invitation from his employer, Lord Beaverbrook, to become an Express leader writer. Writing about his decision later, he said: "I had not become a journalist in order to tell other people what they should do. I was . . . not a preacher or advocate. I wanted to tell other people what was happening in the world about them and leave them to make up their own minds."

One of his best pieces of writing was his description of the lassitude in Paris during a beautiful spring as they heard the far-off sound of German artillery.

He recalled being briefed with other correspondents by the minister of information, who gave assurances that the government would not leave Paris. As the minister was speaking, two porters entered the room and carried away a filing cabinet, announcing to the minister that the government was moving to Tours.

Cox planned a line of escape for Daily Express staff in Paris. They bought a large Renault and a 100-litre drum of petrol, stocked the car with maps, pate and wine, and joined the refugee exodus south. He joined an overcrowded P&O liner diverted to the Gironde.

Though Cox was asked to become a war correspondent for the Express he declined. He felt that now war had come he should fight in it.

After the war Cox was political correspondent for the News Chronicle and made a name for himself as a broadcaster on the BBC. He took over as editor and chief executive of ITN in 1956, a year after the birth of independent television in Britain. At the time ITV was on the verge of collapse. Aidan Crawley, ITN's first editor, had resigned in a row over budget cuts, and journalistic talent was drifting to the BBC.

Cox soon began to prove himself as a pioneer in developing TV news in Britain. His achievement was to spot the appeal of a news service that would present complex issues in a fair and balanced way.

Perhaps the biggest impact of ITN on British broadcasting was the development of challenging interviewing. There was to be no list of questions in advance, no dry runs. In 1956 former United States president Harry Truman came to Oxford to receive an honorary degree. A don campaigned to block the honour because Truman had ordered the dropping of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atom bombs.

Robin Day, for ITN, opened his interview by asking Truman whether he knew that a woman in Oxford was trying to block his award? Truman did not.

Day then asked: "Mr president, do you regret having authorised the dropping of the bomb?"

In the broadcasting climate of that time, this was an iconoclastic way to start an interview. Truman replied: "No, I do not. I made the decision on the information available at the time and I would make the same decision on the same information again." He then gave his reasons why. It was powerful and unprecedented television.

The satellite age of news gathering dawned in 1962. It was rudimentary, with a transmission slot of two to 20 minutes.

Cox was determined to use ITN's 20 minutes for hard-news reporting: he brought in live coverage of a UN row over the Congo; a Martin Luther King protest in Georgia; and a powerful live interview with a woman in Arizona who had taken thalidomide and been refused an abortion by the courts.

In his final years in ITN, Cox's energy was devoted to convincing a resistant ITV that the time was ripe for a half-hour news programme in prime time in place of the skimpy, traditional, 14-minute bulletin.

Eventually the Independent Television Authority gave its support and a 13-week experiment for News at Ten started on July 3, 1967.

Cox left lTN in 1968 to become deputy chairman of Yorkshire Television when it was founded. He later became chairman of Tyne Tees Television, and of LBC, the London commercial radio station, and of UPITN, the international news film agency. He was a life member of the Garrick Club.

Cox was knighted in 1966, and in 2000 he was appointed a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit. His wife, Cecily, died in 1993. She wrote a series of stories about life in wartime New Zealand, and Cox published them in 1997. He is survived by two sons and twin daughters.

- The Times and NZPA