To war with Preston

SIR – Your excellent obituary of Peter Preston, the former editor of The Guardian (January 8), omitted only to mention his brave work as a foreign correspondent, despite his disabilities from his childhood polio.

I knew him as a friendly competitor from The Guardian when I was The Daily Telegraph’s Middle East Correspondent in the Fifties and Sixties; and later as a BBC foreign correspondent.

Occasionally I would give him a lift when he asked me for help. One memorable occasion sticks in my mind from the time we found ourselves in Pakistan covering from that side the 1965 “Rann of Kutch” War between India and Pakistan.

Together we made a hairy journey of several hundred miles by car across the Punjab and the Sind desert, from Lahore to Karachi, in order to tell the world that Lahore had not fallen to India as a news agency had wrongly reported from New Delhi.

Those of course were before the days of the mobile telephone.

Witney, Oxfordshire John Osman