John Simpson (journalist)

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John Simpson

Book signing in London, February 2006
Born John Cody Fidler-Simpson
(1944-08-09) 9 August 1944
London, England
Ethnicity British
Occupation Journalist
Notable credit(s) BBC News
"BBC News: The Editors"
Spouse(s) Diane Jean Petteys (1965-1995)
Adele Kruger (1996-present)
John Simpson's voice
from the BBC programme From Our Own Correspondent, 12 July 2013.[1]

John Cody Fidler-Simpson[2] CBE (born 9 August 1944) is an English foreign correspondent. He is world affairs editor of BBC News.[3] He has spent all his working life at the BBC. He has reported from more than 120 countries, including thirty war zones, and has interviewed many world leaders.

Early life and education

Simpson was born in London, the son of Joyce Lela Vivian (Whittall) and Roy Simpson Fidler.[4] He stated in his autobiography that his father was an anarchist.[5] He was educated at Dulwich College Preparatory School and St Paul's School, followed by Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he read English and was editor of Granta magazine. In 1965 he was a member of the Magdalene University Challenge team. A year later Simpson started as a trainee sub-editor at BBC radio news.

Career

Simpson became a BBC reporter in 1970. He describes in his autobiography how on his very first day, the then-prime minister Harold Wilson, angered by what he saw as the sudden and impudent appearance of the novice's microphone, punched him in the stomach.[citation needed]

Simpson was the BBC's political editor from 1980 until 1981. He presented the Nine O'Clock News from 1981 until 1982 and became diplomatic editor in 1982. He had also served as a correspondent in South Africa, Brussels and Dublin. He became BBC world affairs editor in 1988. Simpson also presents the occasional current affairs programme Simpson's World.

Simpson's reporting career includes the following episodes:

  • In November 1969 he interviewed the exiled King of Buganda, Mutesa II, hours before death in his London flat from alcohol poisoning. The official cause was suicide but some suspected assassination. Simpson told the police the following day that the king, a fellow-graduate of Magdalene College, Cambridge, had been sober and in good spirits, but this line of enquiry was not pursued.
  • He travelled back from Paris to Tehran with the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini on 1 February 1979, a return that heralded the Iranian Revolution, as millions lined the streets of the capital.
  • Simpson reported the fall of Ceauşescu regime in Bucharest later that year.
  • Simpson reported from Belgrade during the Kosovo War of 1999, where he was one of a handful of journalists to remain in the Yugoslav capital after the authorities, at the start of the conflict, expelled those from NATO countries.
  • Two years later, he was one of the first reporters to enter Afghanistan in 2001, famously disguising himself by wearing a burqa, and subsequently Kabul in the US-led invasion of Afghanistan.[6]
  • He was the first BBC journalist to answer questions in a war zone from internet users via BBC News Online.
  • While reporting on a non-embedded basis from Northern Iraq in the 2003 Iraq war, Simpson was injured in a friendly fire incident when a U.S. warplane bombed the convoy of American and Kurdish forces he was with. The attack was caught on film: a member of Simpson's crew was killed and he himself was left deaf in one ear.[7]
Simpson being questioned about his career by fellow-journalists at London's Frontline Club, October 2007

Simpson has freely admitted to experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs offered to him by locals in various jungles of the world. This prompted jibes from other panellists when Simpson appeared on BBC Television's topical quiz show Have I Got News For You. On his first appearance, Simpson revealed that one hallucination involved a six-foot goldfish putting its flipper round his shoulders while wearing dark glasses and a straw hat.

In 2008-9 Simpson took part in a BBC programme called Top Dogs: Adventures in War, Sea and Ice. It saw Simpson unite with fellow Britons Sir Ranulph Fiennes, the adventurer, and Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, the round-the-world yachtsman. The team went on three trips, each experiencing each other's adventure field. The first episode, aired on 27 March 2009, saw Simpson, Fiennes and Knox-Johnston go on a news-gathering trip to Afghanistan. The team reported from the legendary Khyber Pass and infamous Tora Bora mountain complex. The three also undertook a voyage around Cape Horn and an expedition hauling sledges across the deep-frozen Frobisher Bay in the far north of Canada.

During the 2011 Libyan civil war, Simpson travelled with the rebels during their westward offensive, reporting on the war from the front lines and coming under fire on several occasions.[8]

Awards

Simpson has received various awards, including a CBE in the Gulf War honours list in 1991, an International Emmy for his report for the BBC Ten O'Clock News on the fall of Kabul, the Golden Nymph at the Cannes Film Festival, a Peabody award in the US, and three Baftas. He was appointed an honorary fellow of his old college at Cambridge, Magdalene, in 2000, and became the first Chancellor of Roehampton University in 2005. Various universities have awarded him honorary doctorates: De Montfort, Suffolk College at the University of East Anglia, Nottingham, Dundee, Southampton, St Andrews, and Leeds. He has received the Ischia International Journalism Award and the Bayeux Prize for war reporting. In June 2011 he was made a Freeman of the City of London. John Simpson was honoured by the City of Westminster at a Marylebone tree planting ceremony in May 2012.[9][10]

Personal life

Simpson has two daughters, Julia and Eleanor, by his first marriage to American Diane Petteys. He married Dee (Adele) Kruger, a South African television producer, in 1996. They had a son, Rafe, in January 2006.[11] Simpson, whose grandmother was born in Ireland, holds British and Irish citizenship; he moved back to London in 2005 after living in Ireland for several years.[12] In an interview with the Irish Independent, Simpson admitted to using a legal tax avoidance scheme to purchase his London home in 2004, but stated that he would abandon the scheme and pay all applicable domestic taxes on its sale.[13]

Further back in John Simpson's family history, his great grandmother, Elizabeth Mary King (née Elizabeth Mary Davis) left her husband Edward King and took up with the American wild west showman and famous aviation pioneer, Samuel Franklin Cowdery (later known as Samuel Franklin Cody) in the early 1890s. They lived together as man and wife until Cody's death in 1913 even though Cody's marriage to his American wife had never been legally dissolved. Elizabeth and her sons featured in Cody's daring show demonstrations of horse riding, shooting and lassoing. The family all considered themselves part of the Cody family for many years, even though they were not directly related.[14]

Books

Simpson has written several books, including the following autobiographical volumes:

  • Despatches from the Barricades (1990);
  • Strange Places, Questionable People (1998);
  • A Mad World, My Masters (2000);
  • News From No Man's Land (2002);
  • The Wars Against Saddam: Taking the Hard Road to Baghdad (2004);
  • Days from a Different World: A Memoir of Childhood (2005);
  • Not Quite World's End: A Traveller's Tales (2007);
  • Twenty Tales From The War Zone (2007);
  • Unreliable Sources (2010).

References

  1. ↑ "John Simpson". From Our Own Correspondent. 12 July 2013. BBC Radio 4. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qjlq. Retrieved 18 January 2014.
  2. ↑ [http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp59352/john-simpson-john-cody-fidler-simpson "John Simpson" (1944-), Broadcaster and journalist; World Affairs Editor at BBC and presenter of the monthly "BBC News: The Editors",, National Portrait Gallery
  3. ↑ "John Simpson: 'The Iraq memories I can't rid myself of'". BBC. 19 March 2013. Retrieved 7 September 2013. 
  4. ↑ http://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/treeview/tree_view.php?&&tree_id=24425
  5. ↑ Strange Places, Questionable People, Pan, London, 1999, p35
  6. ↑ "The journalist - John Simpson, the BBC's world affairs editor, recently disguised himself as a Pathan woman to get round the Taliban's refusal to allow foreign journalists into Afghanistan"
  7. ↑ "'This is just a scene from hell'". BBC (London). 6 April 2003. Retrieved 6 April 2003. 
  8. ↑ "Bin Jawad: First real test in Libya's fighting". BBC News. 7 March 2011. 
  9. ↑ Veteran BBC reporter plants 500th tree of Marylebone ecology project, Ham&High available on http://www.hamhigh.co.uk/news/veteran_bbc_reporter_plants_500th_tree_of_marylebone_ecology_project_1_1387713 accessed 29 May 2012
  10. ↑ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1fCNFj8of8 John Simpson plants Initiative’s 500th tree in Marylebone accessed 7 July 2012
  11. ↑ "Simpson becomes a father aged 61". BBC (London). 16 January 2006. Retrieved 16 January 2006. 
  12. ↑ Barber, Lynn (24 February 2002). "Travels with Auntie". The Observer (London). Retrieved 24 February 2002. 
  13. ↑ Furness, Hannah (3 July 2012). "BBC broadcaster John Simpson admits tax avoidance". Irish Independent (Dublin). Retrieved 3 July 2012. 
  14. ↑ John Simpson family tree

External links

Media offices
Preceded by
David Holmes		 Political Editor: BBC News
1980 - 1981 		Succeeded by
John Cole
Authority control
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