David Smeeton
BBC radio veteran known as ‘Tiger’ who reported from Tokyo and Germany in the Cold War
DAVID SMEETON, who has died aged 83, spent more than 30 years with the BBC as a radio reporter at home and abroad, and became the Corporation’s first Tokyo correspondent before a spell in Germany at the height of the Cold War.
Curly-haired, clipped of diction, and invariably known as “Tiger”, Smeeton was an old-style journalistic operator with a background in provincial newspapers. He earned a reputation for prodigious energy, partly to compensate for a minor heart condition.
Covering student riots in Seoul, for example, he was said to have filed so many reports in a single day that he broke BBC records. Smeeton also covered the antivietnam War demonstration outside the American embassy in London in July 1968, when protesters pelted police and their horses with marbles and other missiles.
Appointed the BBC’S first resident correspondent in Japan in 1973, he covered the wider Far East region, including China, Korea and Vietnam, and in 1975 reported from the American base on the Pacific island of Guam, where thousands of evacuated Vietnamese war refugees were being processed before being resettled in the US.
In 1977 he covered the Labour Foreign Secretary Anthony Crosland’s first visit to China, accompanying him on his homebound flight via Smeeton’s base in Tokyo.
Smeeton found the Chinese “much less uptight” than the Japanese, more human and sensitive than he had expected.
For the World Service, and for domestic outlets such as From Our Own Correspondent on Radio 4, Smeeton reported from Japan on what was then, in Britain, still a comparatively unknown country. Nor did he confine himself to the sweep of great events; in one dispatch he covered the plight of the Japanese underclass known as the Burakumin
– slaughtermen, rubbish handlers and drain cleaners – who lived in ghettoes and faced widespread discrimination.
After a stint reporting from Northern Ireland, Smeeton was posted to Bonn as Germany correspondent in 1981, covering a range of Cold War stories including spy swaps and escapes across the Berlin Wall.
The elder of two children, David Smeeton was born on September 16 1936 at Gillingham, Kent, into a distinguished naval family. Two uncles were vice-admirals: his mother’s brother, Sir Ronald Brockman, became wartime secretary to Lord Mountbatten, the First Sea Lord, and later Mountbatten’s right-hand man when he was Viceroy of India. David’s other uncle, Sir Richard Smeeton, became Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic during the Cold War.
In June 1940, when David was three, his father, Lt-cdr Donald Smeeton, was lost at sea following the sinking of HMS Glorious and her two escort vessels off Narvik in the Norway campaign. With his sister Jane, born two months later, David lived with his grandparents at Devonport dockyard, but when it was bombed in February 1941 the children were evacuated to York.
Educated at Malvern, which his father and uncle had attended, David hoped to follow them into the Navy, but on account of his heart complaint he failed the medical for the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, and chose journalism instead, joining the Western Morning News as a reporter in 1956.
Moving to the BBC’S Plymouth newsroom in 1960, Smeeton became a regional reporter, and in July 1962 made a live radio broadcast from Goonhilly Downs in
Cornwall for the switch-on of the Telstar satellite, realising that it would revolutionise the dissemination of news.
In 1963 he moved to the BBC in London as a general news reporter. In 1968 he became the BBC’S first education correspondent.
He won a Winston Churchill travelling fellowship to North America and studied techniques in educational broadcasting in the US and Canada. In 1970 he was made home affairs correspondent for BBC News, and three years later went to Japan.
After five years in Tokyo, Smeeton returned to London to take up his old brief as education correspondent. His posting to Bonn ended in 1986, but while he was packing to move to Singapore to head the BBC’S Asian office his wife, Diana, discovered she had cancer, requiring urgent treatment in London.
In Britain Smeeton was appointed the Corporation’s West of England correspondent, based in Plymouth. He retired from the BBC in 1994.
In 2010 he moved to Mandurah in Western Australia, where he became prominent in local life and an accomplished exponent of croquet.
He married, in 1959, Diana Pitts; she died in 2014, and he is survived by his partner Sheila Twine and by a daughter of his marriage. His son Jonathan was killed in a walking accident in Scotland in 1987.