The memoirs of too many journalists are written with a superior bravura often, as one should expect, carefully constructed, with some fine writing, even if, frequently, exaggerated truths. There is an occasional nod toward the hypocrisy of our trade, although rarely is this allowed to overshadow the self-importance. Not so in the case of Walter Schwarz, whose honest, warmingly humble if naive reflections on Grub Street come as a refreshing change.
This is an interesting, if unusual, journalist’s memoir dominated by the author’s ambition to become a foreign correspondent, a vision first revealed in a schoolboy essay. Not merely a journalist, but one obsessed with travel and foreign lands, never at ease in one place; a boy born in Vienna, of prosperous Jewish parents, brought to Britain at the age of seven as Hitler marched into Austria in 1938. It was a wanderlust that never left him.
In fact, in that essay, written when he was 13, this son of immigrants was already reaching out beyond the bounds of home in Hampstead. “I didn’t want to be controlled in an office by an editor”, he reflects, “plagued with deadlines but to visit places, ordinary places, and talk to people, ordinary people and build up articles from that.”
The book, somewhat untidy in structure, follows that amiable trajectory as Schwarz struggles toward his objective. He spent most of his career with The Guardian after a circuitous route from uncertain beginnings on the Oxford Mail where his first assignment was covering a local football match – a sport about which he knew little and in which he was even less interested. That after reading history at Queen’s College, Oxford, where a poor degree convinced him that journalism was preferable to an academic career, even if it meant trying to understand soccer.
The prime influence on his future came with national service when he served, as an army officer, in Malaya during the communist uprising. That shaped the rest of his life and, indeed, was the introduction to his dream role of reporting from foreign fields. He landed an introduction to Charles Wintour, editing the Evening Standard, who gave him a job on the Londoner’s Diary. But the old obsession held its grip and, after marriage to Dorothy, they decided to honeymoon in Israel where her father had been born. That was the second major influence on Schwarz’s life, a moment of self-discovery for a child of the Holocaust who began to find his professional feet in the Promised Land.
He fixed a job, through family contacts, on the Jewish Observer and Middle East Review which eventually led to a part-time job with the Jerusalem Post. That in turn opened doors to freelance work for British newspapers, including The Observer and the Daily Herald and also his first book, The Arabs in Israel, which reflected a sympathy with the Arab community and their lack of status in the Israeli state.
Yet Schwarz remained irrepressibly restless and after a brief return to London for a job with a West African magazine, he moved to Nigeria with Dorothy and their children. He worked for The Guardian first as a freelance then as a staff foreign correspondent. He returned to Israel for The Guardian then India and finally Paris. He remained for 17 years with The Guardian before Peter Preston brought him back to become the paper’s religious affairs correspondent. He did that job for 10 years before retiring, an unusual climax to an improbable career as a roving reporter.
Walter Schwarz was a resourceful, conscientious journalist, albeit one without a distinctive flair for political analysis; his politics, when and where required, appear middle of the road liberalish, and without fervour. His chief political commitment was to be a firm British patriot whose hero, from an early age, was Winston Churchill, perhaps reflecting more than he realises his early background. It is a story that leaves the reader with an impression of a talent never quite fulfilled.
