At the end of April 1975, North Vietnamese tanks were approaching Saigon, and journalists reporting the war had to decide whether to accept the invitation to leave by helicopter from the US embassy. Max Hastings, there for the London Evening Standard, encountered Martin Woollacott, correspondent for the Guardian, and the paper’s future foreign editor. Martin told him that, while his own resolve to remain had not changed, he anticipated the next 24 hours might be “extremely unpleasant”.
Hastings regarded Martin as being both “a superb wordsmith” and “‘exceptionally cool and steady”. He recalled that “if Martin, of all people, is feeling apprehensive then I’m bloody terrified”, and shortly after scrambled over the embassy wall to leave.
Martin, who has died aged 81 after suffering from lung cancer, had been covering the Vietnam war off and on for the previous four years. The quality of his dispatches since the start, five weeks before, of what became the last communist offensive won him the international reporter of the year prize in the British Press Awards.
While by no means a war junkie, if the story warranted it he would take a calculated risk. The fall of Saigon and the end of Vietnam’s 30 years of war was the kind of historic moment that was an obvious candidate. What concerned Martin was what might occur in the hours between the last helicopter leaving the US embassy roof and the arrival thereabouts of the first Soviet-made tank.
I was there for the Observer (then unrelated to the Guardian), and we had already tasted the anarchy that could ensue during this kind of hiatus at Da Nang, when the outer defences of South Vietnam’s second biggest city collapsed overnight like an old tent. Hysterical crowds gathered at the airport, which started to come under rocket fire. The lucky ones, plus some military and media, escaped in horrendously overloaded civilian planes. Later we learned that as ours took off, an abandoned rearguard had pursued us down the runway bowling grenades at the wheels to puncture them before we got airborne.
Martin was always convinced that, as long as we survived this sort of thing, Hanoi would prefer to exploit rather than liquidate any lingering traces of the Saigon press pack, of whom about 90 out of 1,000 remained. On the other hand, the remnants of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam – betrayed, as some of them saw it, by a western media that had constantly undermined their cause – might well turn on us. We changed hotels to one with a single entrance judged easier to control.
In the event, abandoned soldiers did not run riot. Most fought until their commanders ordered them to surrender, and a few zealots beyond that. Snipers in the vicinity of the redbrick Catholic cathedral surprised us, not to speak of their targets, by shooting at some North Vietnamese close to the Reuters building, giving most of us our first close-up glimpse of the other side in action.
“An instantaneous and almost balletic rearrangement,” Martin wrote. “Soldiers who had been lounging and smoking a minute before were suddenly prone and judiciously returning fire.” Yet before long, off duty and often unarmed, pairs of North Vietnamese sightseers were everywhere. Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City (except to the majority of its citizens) and we paid $100 each to board an elderly Soviet Ilyushin, which flew us to Laos on the first leg of our various journeys home.
Then in his mid-30s, Martin was based in Hong Kong with his wife, Mori (Morvarid) Faruha, an Iranian-born doctor, and their infant daughter, Katy. Martin had a great interest in things culinary: he once astonished his friend the Sunday Times reporter Jon Swain by declining a nightcap because he was eager to finish reading a cookery book. Once the family were back in Hampstead, north London, he and Mori loved to entertain. “High politics, reminiscences and gossip,” recalled the Guardian’s former diplomatic editor Hella Pick. “Never a dull moment. Martin had a singular gift for longstanding friendship and I was one of the lucky beneficiaries.”
Born in Manchester, Martin had two younger sisters, Susan and Janet. His father, Victor, served in the RAF during the second world war as a motorcycle dispatch rider and physical training instructor until he could resume peacetime teaching and ultimately a deputy headship. His mother, Mabel (nee Thompson), was the daughter of a confectioner, which may have accounted for Martin’s sweet tooth.
He grew up in the outer city suburb of Blackley (pronounced Blakely) without, like most people, a TV, a fridge, a telephone or a car. But the family had books, hundreds of them, public libraries and the Manchester Guardian. Apart from cinema newsreels, their only other source of information and entertainment was BBC radio. Both parents voted Labour.
In 1950 Martin won a scholarship to Manchester grammar school, and in 1961 left Merton College, Oxford, with a BA in history. By this time he had been introduced to Mori, a Manchester medical student to whom his parents had rented his old bedroom; they married in 1967. On graduating he almost immediately started his career on the Warrington Guardian, a venerable Lancashire weekly. By the time he joined the Guardian as a London-based staff reporter in December 1968, he had worked for the Oldham Evening Chronicle, the English-language section of Agence France-Presse in Paris and the broadsheet Sun, which was the successor of the old socialist Daily Herald until Rupert Murdoch changed everything but its name.
His career as a foreign correspondent did not start well. Sent to cover the strategic arms limitation talks in Helsinki in 1969 he got as far as Heathrow when he discovered he was without his passport and the next flight was in two days and fully booked. For a moment he wondered if he could get away with making some careful calls to Finland and filing a story from an airport hotel. Then he decided he might as well try to persuade passport control to let him board his flight on his press card. It worked. “Heathrow let me go and the Finns let me in,” he wrote some years later.
After serving as a Nicosia-based Middle East correspondent mostly covering the Lebanese civil war and the Iranian revolution, in 1985 he became foreign editor for six years. Pick noted that, though it was quite obvious he would much rather be doing the writing than the editing, he was popular in the post and “coped fairly with the foibles of his writers”. As the paper’s chief international affairs commentator from 1991, he displayed the qualities observed by the Guardian’s former Middle East correspondent David Hirst: “Martin the veritable polymath, Martin the observer, so extraordinarily swift and sure in his ability to grasp the essentials of any situation and then expound them.”
As a columnist he was sometimes able to visit the places he was writing about. In April 1991, a few weeks after the end of the Gulf war, he produced what Paul Webster, then on the Guardian foreign desk and now editor of the Observer, called “the finest piece of reporting ever to cross my desk”.
After the ceasefire agreement that followed the ejection of Iraqi troops from Kuwait, all Saddam Hussein’s fixed-wing aircraft were grounded; but a loophole allowed him to fly his helicopters, which he used to bomb and strafe the Kurds of northern Iraq. They had risen up against him and were fleeing for the Turkish border while the American-led coalition insisted the war was over and there were no legal grounds for intervention.
“A monstrous crime is being perpetrated in Kurdistan,” wrote Martin, who with other journalists had trekked miles into the foothills to report from the Kurdish side of the border. “They are and will be subject not only to the effects of a war waged without restraint or morality but to the reimposition of Saddam Hussein’s brutal rule ... Why this sudden excess of legalism, this prating about internal affairs?”
His reporting from Kurdistan, which won him a James Cameron award, undoubtedly made a major contribution to the UN resolution that permitted Anglo-American forces to intervene.
In 2004, having reached the then pensionable age of 65, he retired from the Guardian, though continued to contribute articles and book reviews, and in 2015 a memorable 40th-anniversary piece on the fall of Saigon. In 2006, the 50th anniversary of the ill-fated Anglo-French intervention at Suez, he also published his only book, After Suez: Adrift in the American Century, a brilliant summary of most western attempts at military intervention during the second half of the 20th century. Until 2016 he contributed to the paper without a byline, as a foreign policy leader writer.
He is survived by Mori and Katy.
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