In memory of David Gardner, friend and colleague
David and I were not just colleagues but enduring friends over more than five decades from when we first started at Stonyhurst College aged thirteen. Those were formative years educationally with the Jesuits giving as a sense of human solidarity and openness to the world and the need to be active participants.
He was always ahead of me intellectually and I followed his early teenage recommendation for expanding my learning. He was reading Orwell as an example of English essay writing and political consciousness from his mid teems and together we absorbed the writings of Gerald Manley Hopkins, and Shakespeare.
We both applied for Oxford-he got in, and I settled for University College, London and then LSE . When not meeting up in London, I would regularly visit him and enjoy very social evenings with our respective girl-friends.
In student days, he was very openly involved in Marxist politics, and we engaged theologically on the encounter of Christian Socialism, a theme that David shared in a friendly circle that included Tony Blair, and a spiritual mentor among his group, the anglican priest Peter Thomson.
Part of our common landscape was Latin America and particular the Chilean diaspora that had refugees from several coups descending on Oxford and London and from where emerged David’s first marriage to Maite who had fled with her sister and brother-in-law from Pinochet’s brutality.
After uni we both pursued a career in journalism, which had us coinciding at an early stage at the FT.- David went to live as a stringer in Bilbao and later Barcelona with Maite, and their daughter. Daniela. I , newly married to Kidge who had known David as long as I had , reported for the FT from Lisbon, taking turns with David to back -up the Madrid office .
It was the end of the dictatorships and transition to democracy on the Iberian peninsula. David was deeply involved with Basque politics, denouncing human rights violations., and seeking to understand sympathetically what had fuelled Basque and Catalan nationalism during the Franco era.
In the 1980’s we coincided again, in Latin America-he was posted to Mexico, and I to Buenos Aires. Colleagues like John Carlin , Robert Graham , and Hugh O’Shaughnessy became part of a shared experience of the continent.
David became increasingly committed to his profession, covering with great courage and thoughtfulness the corruption of Mexican politics, a major earthquake in Mexico City, and reporting heroically on the civil war in Central America.
We later both ended up in FT HQ in London, with David taking an increasing role writing about the Middle East, along with colleagues like Roula Khalaf, an area he came to know and understand and explain better than anyone I know. I recall with fondness a week or so David and I spent together in Cairo putting together with Mark Huband a special FT supplement on Egypt , one of the many countries which David knew well.
We fell out over Blair’s intervention in the Iraq war, a subject that became deeply personal for David when his second wife Samia was badly injured during a controversial US military strike on a building that had various media organisations working in it.
David did not suffer fools easily ,and could be visceral when attacking or dismissing those whose politics he disagreed or whose journalism he thought fake . But he loved good drink and good food, (as well as cricket and golf which he played well) , and was great and fun company whether in the Boot & Flogger wine bar in Southwark or some pinchos bar in Leiketio, or a shared Mezza, in the presence of those he trusted, and displayed a huge generosity of spirit and loyalty to those he felt deserved it. He always had a clear perception of who was right and wrong and what represented a just cause.
He found true love and companionship with Samia, another courageous journalist and Mid East expert with whom he had two more children and whose wedding in London was a lovely occasion, celebrated by several FT colleagues.
The fact that Samia came from Lebanon brought David’s engagement with her full emotional circle back to his childhood days when his father was posted by the Foreign Office during an earlier time Beirut was engulfed in violence. David and Samia both lived and worked out of Beirut during troubled recent years before deciding , as the city imploded, to move as family to the relative peace of Dubai-the ongoing and unresolved divisions , intolerance, and violence of the Middle East, still an enduring subject of concern and interest to both of them as journalists.
David was deeply affected , growing up knowing up that his father during WW2 had been tortured in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. His childhood was overshadowed by a bitter parental divorce and an unhappy experience in his early school days with the Christian Brothers at Mount St Mary’s before he moved to Stonyhurst. It formed part of his anger against all forms of injustice and the commitment he felt to expose and denounce glaring wrongs. His writing flowed beautifully, with an Orwellian command of the English language and deep, original and thought provoking, well researched, insightful and clearly analysed and argued, on complex subjects from Palestine to the Vatican.
Dear David, amigo, you were my schoolboy mentor, a much valued colleague, and a friend through rough and smooth .I know how dearly you were also held and how deeply you will be missed by many others for whom you were often a light in the dark, showing us the way or as St Ignatius would put it, ‘discernment.’
Que en Paz Descanses.
