Sandy Gall obituary

The Guardian

2 days ago

Sandy Gall, the foreign correspondent and newscaster, who has died aged 97, reported from the world's trouble spots during a 60-year career first with the Reuters news agency and then with ITN. He was on the ground at Suez in 1956, covered wars in the Middle East and Vietnam, and was jailed by Idi Amin, the Ugandan tyrant. If he had the air of a man who had seen conflict and lived to tell the tale, there was a good reason for it.
When assigned with others to present News at Ten, he did not give up his roving career, but disappeared periodically to report and make documentaries from Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Alexander Gall, always known as Sandy, was born in Penang, in British Malaya (now Malaysia), the son of Henderson Gall, manager of a rubber plantation, and his wife, Jean (nee Begg). The family moved back to Scotland when Sandy was four, and from the age of six he was sent to boarding school. He was educated at Trinity college, Glenalmond (now Glenalmond college), in Perthshire, and studied French and German at Aberdeen University after national service in the RAF, where he reached the rank of corporal.
It appealed to him later in his career to tell obstructive air vice marshals impeding his work to go to hell. He did not suffer authority gladly, on one occasion tempting fate when told by one of Amin's henchmen never to return to Uganda by rashly replying: 'Don't worry. I won't.' It nearly got him thrown back into the jail from which he had just been released.
After university, Gall worked initially on a local paper but was soon writing to the nationals in the hope of recruitment. Only Reuters replied, taking him on as a trainee. He was soon sent to Kenya to cover the end of the Mau Mau rebellion against British colonial rule and was then moved on to report on the 1956 Suez invasion. Postings to Berlin and Budapest followed during the height of the cold war and the aftermath of the Hungarian uprising. Tours of duty to the Congo followed in 1960 to cover the civil war that followed independence from Belgium.
In 1963, he joined ITN as a foreign correspondent, covering the aftermath of the assassination of President John F Kennedy, the six-day and Yom Kippur wars between Israel and its Arab neighbours and the deepening morass of the Vietnam war thereafter.
These were the high days of foreign news reporting: of hiring planes, taking taxis to get to the frontline, carrying portable typewriters and hoping to find working telex machines to get stories out. Reuters was less extravagant than ITN: its managing editor's regular injunction deferring questions of expenses gave Gall the ironic title for his entertaining first book of memoirs, published in 1983: Don't Worry About the Money Now.
In both the Congo and later Uganda, Gall found himself arrested by troops and placed in execution cells with other journalists before being rescued – in the first case by the UN, and in the second, by Amin's change of heart.
In Saigon, in May 1975, as the city fell, departing British consular staff entrusted the keys of the embassy club to Gall so that he and other correspondents could continue to use the swimming pool and bar. In the following month he and ITN's camera crew shot eight hours of film following the Vietcong occupation of the city before they could be evacuated, only to find, when they got back to London, that the company's technicians were on strike. Just 10 minutes of the film was broadcast when ITN returned to air some days later.
Gall was one of News at Ten's early newscasters – giving bulletins a sense of gravitas – alongside Alastair Burnet and Reginald Bosanquet. His foreign assignments continued long after his retirement from ITN at the age of 65 in 1992, following the first Gulf war.
Afghanistan became something of an obsession. He had first visited the country in 1982, trekking on foot for 12 days through the mountains in order to meet and interview the guerrilla leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was leading the fight against the Soviet invading army. He returned many times over the following 30 years, during the Soviet occupation and after the Anglo-American invasion of 2001.
A series of books and documentaries culminated in 2012 in his book War Against the Taliban: Why It All Went Wrong in Afghanistan, which blamed Pakistan for assisting and shielding the insurgents by giving them sanctuary.
'I originally went there with a romantic idea of this small country fighting a vast empire, a kind of David versus Goliath,' he told the Yorkshire Post in 2012. But he became captivated by the beauty of the country and the friendliness of many of its people. 'Afghanistan is very much like Scotland – mountainous, beautiful and the people are hospitable. But unlike Scotland there's no whisky,' he said.
He was also moved by the suffering he witnessed, and in 1983 founded the Sandy Gall Afghanistan Appeal, focusing on help and medical care for those who had lost limbs as a result of land mines.
In 2011 Gall was appointed CMG in recognition of his service to the people of Afghanistan, in addition to CBE in 1988 for his services to journalism.
Gall's other books included further volumes of memoirs, a novel, Gold Scoop (1977), a biography, Lord of the Lions (1991), about the wildlife conservationist George Adamson, The Bushmen of Southern Africa: Slaughter of the Innocent (2001) and a biography of Massoud, Afghan Napoleon (2021).
Gall married Eleanor Smyth in 1958. She died in 2018. He is survived by a son, Alexander, and three daughters, Carlotta, Fiona and Michaela.
Sandy (Henderson Alexander) Gall, journalist, born 1 October 1927; died 29 June 2025