Michael Nicholson
Redoubtable ITN foreign correspondent who covered wars in Vietnam, the Falklands and Iraq
MICHAEL NICHOLSON, who has died aged 79, reported as a war correspondent for Independent Television News (ITN) for 40 years, covering conflicts ranging from Vietnam in the 1970s to the Falklands campaign in 1982.
A self-confessed Essex boy with a “very aggressive” streak, Nicholson invariably displayed an uncompromising toughness in his quest for the story, and survived several dangerous scrapes. Among the dramatic moments he covered was the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad at the end of the Iraq War, but perhaps his closest call was the panic-stricken evacuation of the South Vietnamese capital Saigon on the final day of the Vietnam War in April 1975.
With his cameraman and sound recordist, Nicholson had to fight his way over the high wall of the American embassy and into the hands of US Marines who were hauling only Westerners over the top to safety while “booting down the rest” – mainly Vietnamese mothers and children – and lunging at them with bayonets and rifle-butts.
It was, Nicholson later recalled, “America’s ignoble Dunkirk”. “No one who was there can feel anything but shame at what they did and what they allowed to happen to others around them,” he recorded in his 1991 memoir A Measure of Danger.
Airlifted out of the embassy compound, Nicholson and his camera crew dropped on to the deck of a waiting warship of the US Seventh Fleet lying off-shore, ducking beneath the whirling blades of the rescue helicopter to run to the ship’s rail where an enormous black Marine sergeant ordered them to bend over and drop their trousers before searching them for hidden drugs with a condom-sheathed finger.
“Man,” the soldier remarked, “you’ve got a tight arse.” “Sergeant,” Nicholson replied, “if you’d been through what I’ve been through today, you’d have a tight arse too.”
Nicholson learnt his trade from the camera crews he worked with in his early days as an on-screen reporter in the mid-1960s. On his first assignment as a war reporter, in Nigeria during the civil war with Biafra in 1968, Nicholson and his film crew witnessed a Nigerian Marine officer shooting dead a captured Ibo prisoner out of hand and at point blank range.
Convinced that he and his crew would be next to die, Nicholson was astonished when the officer allowed them to leave, but when their film of this blatant war crime in defiance of the Geneva Convention was broadcast worldwide, the Nigerian Marine commander threatened the ITN men with a public whipping and attacked Nicholson himself with a baseball bat. He and his colleagues were forced to film the subsequent execution of the errant officer by firing squad.
On another occasion, filming under heavy artillery fire as the Indian army invaded neighbouring Pakistan in 1971, Nicholson fled in panic as the advance faltered but later (having reached the safety of his hotel room in the devastated Bangladeshi capital, Dacca) drew some satisfaction from having held his nerve in spite of the imminent danger.
“Now that I was out of it,” he recalled, “I forgot my fear, as I would forget my promises never to do it again. It had all been washed away with the adrenaline, leaving only the filtered recollection of others’ fear and others’ deaths.” Once in Dacca he selected an abandoned vehicle from the dozens littering the streets and requisitioned it as a camera car, hotwiring the starter.
Nicholson next covered the Yom Kippur war between Israel and Egypt in 1973, finding and filming an Israeli armoured column en route to counterattack the advancing Egyptians and dashing more than 100 miles back to Tel Aviv, in time for his film to be cut and sent by satellite to London, where it carried an “exclusive” tag on that night’s News At Ten.
A few days later, he was knocked unconscious when his ITN camera car left the road at 80mph and somersaulted before crashing on to its roof. Fitted in hospital with a neck brace, Nicholson insisted on returning to the war without delay, although his devotion to duty failed to impress his editor, Nigel Ryan, who cabled: “Either the neck brace comes off the screen or you do.”
During News At Ten’s heyday in the 1970s, Nicholson was one of the star ITN journalists allowed a higher profile than BBC rivals. During the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, he applauded paratroopers dropping out of the sky on to Turkish soil, greeting them with the words: “I’m Michael Nicholson, ITN. Welcome to Cyprus.”
As for his editors watching the incoming pictures in the comfort of their offices in London, Nicholson developed a jaundiced view of their highly selective approach to the inevitable bloody and gruesome images on the screens. “Fascinated by it themselves,” he wrote, “[they] filter out what they consider viewers should not see. They contrive a surrogate war, where much of the suffering is deleted. They help to sanitise war; they almost make it acceptable.”
The son of a Thames lighterman, Michael Thomas Nicholson was born on January 9 1937 at Romford, Essex. Evacuated to Somerset because of the wartime bombing raids on the nearby London docks, he attended the village school at Theale before being moved again after the war when his father, by then an officer in the Royal Engineers, was posted to Emden in Germany and Michael boarded at the Prince Rupert school at Wilhelmshaven.
In September 1952, when he was 15, he was at the Farnborough Airshow when a de Havilland DH110 crashed, killing the test pilot John Derry, his onboard flight test observer and 29 spectators on the ground. Nicholson’s love of flying propelled him into the RAF for his National Service, working in air traffic control during the Suez crisis of 1956.
His first journalistic job was on Shoe and Leather News, followed by work with the brewers Charrington’s, after which he drove a greengrocer’s van and worked as a nursing auxiliary at Ilford Isolation Hospital while studying for A-levels at Walthamstow Technical College.
In 1959, as a mature student of 22, he started a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Leicester University, edited the student newspaper, and on graduating went to work in the London office of DC Thomson, publishers of the Sunday Post and Beano comic in Scotland.
When invited for an interview with ITN in 1963, he was hired by the editor, Geoffrey Cox, in the mistaken belief that he was employed by Thomson Newspapers, publishers of The Sunday Times. Nicholson started on the news desk, writing links for the on-screen newscasters, and later scripting film reports, some of which he voiced himself. Appointed news editor in 1965 and war correspondent three years later, he spent four years based in Johannesburg as ITN’s South Africa correspondent before returning to London in 1981.
Scrambled from a family holiday in the Lake District in April 1982, Nicholson was despatched at short notice with the British task force heading for the south Atlantic following the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands. Rapidly discovering the suspicious view of the media held by the military, who believed that because (like Vietnam) the conflict was a television war and would therefore (like Vietnam) be lost, Nicholson battled against censors and minders to make sense of events, finally sending a radio message to ITN in exasperation telling them that his reports were being censored and to make this clear when they were broadcast.
His censor deleted the word “censored” from his message, turning it into gobbledegook.
As the conflict wore on, Nicholson found himself in disgrace when the commander-in-chief, Admiral Sir John Fieldhouse, accused him of revealing secret ship movements in one of his – duly censored – ITN reports. Summoned before the task force commander Admiral “Sandy” Woodward, who threatened to “sack” him and send him home, Nicholson advised him to read the transcript of his piece, when he would see that what he had said was harmless. Woodward eventually did so, but offered Nicholson no apology, and nothing more was said.
On his return from the Falklands Nicholson endured an unhappy four years as a studio-bound newscaster. For a year he was Washington correspondent for Channel 4 News before returning to ITN as senior foreign correspondent in 1991, remaining in that post for seven years. Between 1998 and 2009 he was a reporter and presenter on ITV’s Tonight programme.
His books included three political thrillers, The Partridge Kite (1976), Red Joker (1978) and December Ultimatum (1981), and Pilgrims Rest (1983), set in 19th century Africa. In his account of Natasha’s Story (1993), he related bringing a young orphan from wartorn Bosnia back to Britain. The story attracted enormous attention at the time and was made into the Hollywood film, Welcome to Sarajevo, in 1997.
As well as A Measure of Danger, he also wrote A State of War Exists (2012), a study of six war correspondents from the Crimean War to Vietnam.
Nicholson was appointed OBE in 1992 for his reporting of the Gulf War. His numerous professional awards included a Broadcasting Guild Award for his coverage of the Cyprus war in 1974; and a Bafta for coverage of the Falklands campaign in 1982. He was the Royal Television Society’s journalist of the year in 1978, 1982 and 1991.
He married, in 1967, Diana Slater, who survives him with their two sons and two daughters.