Kentish Express Ashford & District
Loss of journalist who was ‘followed by big stories’
Richard Holland at scene of two terror attacks
A journalist who survived two terrorist attacks in his career has died at the age of 85.
Richard Holland, who was born in River, passed away at the William Harvey Hospital in Ashford earlier this month after a short illness.
Mr Holland was a Fleet Street reporter and was just yards away from a car that blew up outside the Old Bailey in March 1973.
He had casually glanced into the vehicle just a few minutes before.
This was an attack by the IRA and Mr Holland inevitably covered The Troubles in Northern Ireland, also missing being struck by a roadside bomb in Belfast.
Mr Holland was also on holiday in Athens in 1973 when affiliates of the Black September terrorist group opened fire at the airport.
His daughter Jane Holland said: “He sometimes joked that big news stories just seemed to follow him around.”
Richard Holland was born in 1936 and his earliest memory was of sheltering in a pub cellar in Dover in 1940 when the Nazis fired their shells at the town from Calais.
Mr Holland was a pupil at Dover Grammar School for Boys and began his career at the age of 15 as tea boy on the East Kent Mercury in Deal.
He was swiftly promoted to cub reporter before working on the Folkestone Herald.
After his National Service in the RAF, he returned from Germany to a job on the Windsor and Eton Express, followed by a move to the Ilford Pictorial.
He met Sheila Coates, a BBC secretary, at an Ilford meeting of the Young Conservatives, and married her on October 10,1959.
After a spell back in Folkestone, raising their first two children, he became a stringer for the nationals, covering stories in the 1960s such as clashes between mods and rockers on the town’s beach. He shortly afterwards took a job with the Press Association.
Mr Holland eventually joined The Times in 1967 and he rose to chief sub-editor in 1973.
He worked on pages for major stories such as the attempted kidnapping of Princess Anne in March 1974 and false conspiracy theories, from the mid-1970s, that the then British Prime Minister Harold Wilson was a Russian spy.
He left The Times in 1977, moving to the Isle of Man with Sheila, by then a bestselling romantic novelist under the penname Charlotte Lamb.
There, Mr Holland dabbled on the stock market and in later years wrote biographies on two Roman emperors, Nero and Augustus.
In 1983 he founded international finance magazine, Offshore Investments, which he edited and ran from Victory House, Douglas.
Sheila Holland died on October 8, 2000, two days before the couple’s wedding anniversary.
Mr Holland spent 18 months in mourning before going to Nice in 2002 where he met his second wife, Penelope Old, and married her on the Isle of Man in October 2003. The two travelled Europe for the next three years.
They separated in 2010, later divorcing, and Mr Holland moved back to Folkestone, buying an apartment at The Metropole.
Mr Holland eventually met his final partner, Michele O’Reilly. In his last years he enjoyed walking on The Leas, dancing and socialising.
Richard Holland leaves his partner, Michele, children Michael, Sarah, Jane, David and Charlotte, and his grandchildren Kate, Becki, Dylan, Morris and Indigo and great-grandson Ciaran.
The funeral service will be held at St. Paul’s RC Church, in Maison Dieu Road, Dover at 11am, on Tuesday, March 8. All are welcome to attend but are asked to make charitable donations to the homelessness charity Emmaus Dover.