Jurek Martin (History, 1960)
Jurek lives in Washington DC, and still writes for the Finanical Times…if it doesn’t interfere with his golf.
I arrived in Hertford in 1960 as a Meeke Scholar, an award which was supposed to go to the sons of indigent clergymen in Worcestershire but which could, if none were available, go to some other child of the county. I was not a typical Oxbridge candidate. I grew up in the city without a father, a Spitfire pilot on the celebrated Polish squadrons of the RAF killed shortly after I was born, and with a single working mother, who ran the midwife services in the city and later the county. My conversion on the road to Damascus came in the A level years, when I fell under the spell the crusty old history teacher of my in a modest provincial grammar school. He taught me how to think and how to love history, as well as how to prepare for exams. As I recall, six of his nine students got into Oxbridge, including me.
I arrived at Hertford, an opening batsman and left arm spinner, unversed, as many were, in the ways of the world, but ahead of my contemporaries, even those from elite public schools, in how to approach the subject at hand, which was, naturally, history. My main tutor was already a legend in his own time, FMH Markham, known to all as Felix, the Napoleonic scholar. The weekly sessions with him, generally concluding with sherry after we’d read our essays, were a minor art form, as he lisped ever more wetly, leaning further back in his chair until we all wondered when it would finally tip over, which it never did. The late Gerry Fowler was a bit more disciplined and demanding. The weekly essay was also useful training, if I did not know it at the time, for what would become my later career. And, of course, there were the friendships made, on the cricket field and in the Turf, many of which still endure as a hard core in my life.
I went straight from Oxford to California because I was 21 and wanted to get out of England. In three years there, I was, successively, a school teacher, encyclopedia salesman and bartender but I also started writing and trying to get published articles about all the wonderful things I’d seen and experienced. (it was, after all, California in the mid-60s, sex, drugs and rock’n’roll and much more besides). One, for my old home town newspaper, the Berrows Worcester Journal, proved pivotal to my future life.
It was about comparing baseball, to which, in two misspent summers in San Francisco, I had become addicted, with cricket, at which I’d been reasonably good, an opening bat and left arm spinner for Hertford. And it was this clipping that Gordon Newton, fearsome editor of the Financial Times, was reading before interviewing me for a vacancy on the foreign desk of his newspaper. He looked up and said “what’s a double play?”. Briefly I thought he was referring to something financial, about which I knew nothing, so I told him what it meant in baseball. He grunted and then asked how a pitcher could make the ball swerve and dip. This was soup and nuts to me, I screwed up a piece of paper and demonstrated assorted grips. At which he said, you’ve no qualifications to join the FT, but you’ve just explained baseball to me better than anybody else, you’re hired, I’ll make you a journalist.
Which I still am 50 years later, though less active than in times past, and all for the same newspaper and still not knowing a fat lot about finance. Two years later, Newton sent me to Washington as the junior correspondent and then to New York as bureau chief, which sounds grand but it was a one man office. Exposure to the 1972 presidential campaign convinced me that my real interest was politics and how government worked. So, after three years running the daily foreign news desk in London, I was back in Washington as head of a real bureau and with a whole country to cover. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, with two more presidential elections to cover and this sense of freedom that left me knowing that happiness equaled the distance from head office.
Next came Tokyo for four years, an unmitigated delight. Japan was feeling its economic oats and opening itself up in ways it never had before. Foreign correspondents there, previously held at arms length, began to enjoy unprecedented access, but that didn’t make the job necessarily easier. Japan is a complex country that demanded an inventive approach to writing about it, a process that made me a much better writer. And I was given licence, sometime I just took it, to delve into the different, like being stuck in a monumental traffic jam, climbing Mt Fuji, the feudal society of sumo wrestling and so on. I suppose it brought me a degree of recognition in the form of two British Press Awards, though nothing like the 15 minutes of fame my wife and I enjoyed in Japan by becoming the first western couple to dance in public with the Crown Prince and Princess, now the Emperor and Empress, who also later became tennis partners.
In 1986, I was appointed foreign editor in London, the only other job, apart from Washington, to which I aspired, the spider in the middle of a marvelous web of well over 100 foreign correspondents and London staff. Those were dramatic years – the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union collapsed, there was the massacre in Tienanmen Square, the first Gulf war broke out to expel Iraq from Kuwait, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini died, the Balkans began dissolving into war. My pleasure was more vicarious, because I was directing reporting not doing it myself, but no less for that. The quality of those who worked with me left an indelible impression.
But I missed writing and head office and London were not my cup of tea so arranged to have myself appointed back to Washington. In 1997, I gave up my day job after 30 years; my wife’s career, in refugee and migration issues, was taking off and DC was the best place to do it; also I’d done the only two I ever wanted and was not interested in getting old and bored doing something that didn’t really grab me. But the paper wanted me to go on writing from America, mostly in the form of a series of columns, generally political but, for a gorgeous 18 months, about sport.
It is not easy picking out highlights in a working life that knew few low ones. There was the odd scoop – revealing that a New York dealer had found a Raphael lost for 50 plus years, a US plan to save the dollar in 1979, obtained by drinking a source into indiscretions –but the greater body of what I did was trying to get things right. I interviewed heads of government (Bill Clinton easily the most engaging) but did not believe in getting too close to the powers-that-be because that can cloud judgment. There were always fellow hacks who taught me a lot, like Joe Rogaly, my first FT bureau chief in Washington, who could be ruthless if necessary, and the incomparable RW (Johnny) Apple Jr of the New York Times, whom I first met as fellow “boy on the bus” in the 1972 campaign and who remained a lifelong pal and travelling companion.
I know I was lucky enough to live in a golden age of newspaper journalism, especially for foreign correspondents, which is on life support today. I am immensely grateful to the FT, an intelligent newspaper with a genuinely catholic range of interests, for having given me the opportunities it did. I am old school in the sense I believe journalism is a craft not a profession. At my best I was a pretty good plumber.