John Bryant
Veteran newspaperman with a passion for running who helped bring Zola Budd to Britain
JOHN BRYANT, who has died aged 76, was a respected and muchliked journalist, author and editor who effectively launched the barefoot runner Zola Budd in Britain; his career culminated in a stint of a little over a year as editor-in-chief of the Telegraph titles, including 11 months as acting editor of The Daily Telegraph, from 2005 to 2006.
A quietly spoken West Countryman who had milked cows in his youth and retained a mild West Country burr, Bryant helped to manage the media group’s move from offices in Canary Wharf to new premises in Victoria.
Fair-haired, with a runner’s lean physique and looking younger than his years, he was previously best known for his achievements in the field of athletics. Passionate about running, he had been an Oxford blue and captained the university’s cross-country team.
While at the Daily Mail in 1984, under its editor David English, he discovered the South African runner Zola Budd, persuaded her to come to Britain and helped the paper to launch a successful campaign to secure her a British passport, aided by the fact that she had a British grandfather. The campaign was not free of controversy and a headline in the Daily Express bellowed: “Zola, Go Home!”
In August 1984 Bryant accompanied her to Los Angeles for the Olympic Games, in which, in the final of the 3,000 metres, she famously and inadvertently tripped up the lead runner, the much-fancied American Mary Decker, just after the half-way mark, before finishing seventh to the boos of the partisan crowd.
Bryant was also involved with Chris Brasher in promoting the London Marathon during its first year, 1981. He ran in the inaugural event, leading the field for a while and finishing in a creditable 2hr 45min. He ran in 29 marathons, many after he had been hit by a car during training and told by doctors that he would never run again; later he served as chairman of the London Marathon Charitable Trust. Bryant wrote a history of the race, The London Marathon (2005), as well
as The Marathon Makers (2008) and
Chris Brasher: the man who made the London Marathon (2012). Earlier he
had published Jogging (1979), and in 2004 he published an acclaimed account of Roger Bannister’s quest to break the four-minute mile.
John William Bryant was born in the village of Haselbury Plucknett, Somerset, on April 25 1944, the son of James Bryant and his wife Mollie. His skills as a runner developed as a child when he would catch up with the school bus as it drove through the village. From Sexey’s School, Bruton, he went up to Queen’s College, Oxford, graduating in Law in 1966.
Bryant began his career at the Edinburgh Evening News in 1967 and moved to the Daily Mail four years later. He remained with the paper for the next 15 years. Features were his strength and he was known for giving writers clear and structured briefs; in 1980 he was made executive editor.
He joined The Times in 1986 as managing editor and then deputy editor, before brief spells editing the near moribund Sunday Correspondent (1990) and The European (1991), where he instilled a greater sense of direction but was sharp enough to sense that things would not last.
Some weeks after the mysterious demise of the paper’s owner Robert Maxwell at sea, the fact, and then the enormity, of his financial difficulties and his looting of the pension fund came to light and the money ran out.
Bryant returned to his old job at The Times, where he also wrote a regular column on sport, but eventually parted company with the editor, Peter Stothard, and in 2000 found a berth as consultant editor at his old paper, the Daily Mail.
He was appointed to the newly created post of editor-in-chief of the Telegraph titles in November 2005 by the chief executive at the time, Murdoch Maclennan. With Bryant’s wealth of experience in the industry, his role was foreseen as being an editorial elder statesman, an avuncular adviser to the group’s editors as well as a steady pair of hands who would pilot the Telegraph into a new era at Victoria.
Catapulted into the editor’s chair days after his appointment – The Daily Telegraph’s editor, Martin Newland, having resigned – in an interview early in 2006 Bryant set out his ambition to reinforce traditional Telegraph virtues, including its high news-story count and “an underlying sense of quirkiness, which is to be encouraged. It appeals to middle England, but it travels way beyond the M25.”
His tenure was overshadowed, though, by a series of high-profile redundancies and resignations. Though Bryant was never the driving force behind the changes, he soon found himself in the firing line and his time at the group did not last long after Will Lewis was appointed to replace him in the editor’s chair in October 2006.
After retiring from the Telegraph, where he had enjoyed “a great time” among the journalists, he became chairman of the Press Association Trust in 2008.
In 1968 he married Carol Leffman. She survives him with their two sons.
John Bryant, born April 25 1944, died April 30 2020