Brian Hanrahan:BRIAN HANRAHAN, who has died from cancer aged 61, reported for almost 40 years on many of the world's historic news events for the BBC.
He was in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in June 1989 when the tanks rolled in to quash the demonstration; he was in Berlin when the wall came down a few months later; he reported on the rise and fall of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union; and he covered the struggles of the Solidarity trade union in Poland.
Hanrahan established a reputation as a shrewd analyst, a deep thinker and an authoritative commentator who used an economy of words in the tradition of the best television and radio correspondents.
Former broadcaster Martin Bell described him as respected, admired and “even envied in a positive sort of way”.
The phrase that made him a household name was spoken in 1982 during the Falklands War, upon which the British ministry of defence had imposed reporting restrictions.
Hanrahan was an unlikely choice to be sent on the mission since he was relatively inexperienced, but other more seasoned reporters were unavailable. He rose to the occasion.
When he watched the British Harrier jets taking off from HMS Hermes to launch the first air attack on Port Stanley, he had to comply with the intelligence officer on board that he would not report the numbers.
Hanrahan’s resulting line – “I counted them all out, and I counted them all back” – personalised the account in a succinct way that reassured an anxious nation. Inevitably, it became the title of his book about the Falklands, co-written with the journalist Robert Fox, published later that year.
Though his words became famous, Hanrahan made little of any fame it brought. An unassuming man, he took his work very seriously and shunned any temptation to project his personality too much for fear of interfering with the story he was trying to tell. His ability to use words sparingly was his hallmark.
Commenting on the fall of Erich Hönecker, the man responsible for building the Berlin wall, Brian said: “He dammed up his people, but in the end was damned by them.”
His reports were staple fodder for television journalism training courses. Hanrahan could convey complex aspects of a country or a political issue in the simplest of ways, and often with humour.
Reporting on the reunification of Hong Kong in 1997, he wrote: “Hong Kong demonstrators are a policeman’s dream. Despite the force of their feelings, the protesters are polite, well marshalled and clean up afterwards.
“For their annual demonstration against the Tiananmen massacre they marched to the headquarters of the Chinese news agency to save the Chinese the trouble of sending out photographers.”
Hanrahan was born in London to Thomas and Kathleen Hanrahan. He was educated at St Ignatius College in Stamford Hill, north London. Very bright, he passed his A-levels aged 17 and began studying maths at Essex University before switching to politics. On gaining his degree in 1969 he spent a year with the Voluntary Service Overseas, teaching science at a school in the Gambia.
On his return to Britain, he joined the BBC, initially working as a stills photograph librarian, before joining its prestigious news journalist training scheme, through which he gained experience in regional and national news and at the World Service.
He became a news reporter deployed to cover political stories at home and abroad. He would report regularly on the Troubles in Northern Ireland and would always display coolness while covering the unrest. It was while reporting on the IRA hunger strikes that he met his future wife, the radio producer Honor Wilson. They married in 1986.
Hanrahan was appointed the BBC’s Far East correspondent in 1983 and, in addition to the turbulence in China and Hong Kong, he reported on the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the Indian prime minister, in 1984.
He was the Moscow correspondent from 1986 to 1989, reporting the collapse of Soviet communism with all the repercussions this entailed for its people and for international relations. In 1989, he became diplomatic correspondent based in London, interpreting international affairs – including the war in the Balkans and the Middle East peace process – in his very personal way.
In television, he had an acute sense of the importance of pictures and of the need to build a script around them, always complementing them.
His broad knowledge of international and national affairs, and his ability never to panic under stress, made him an ideal fill-in presenter for BBC's radio programmes such as The World at Oneand The World Tonight. His experiences also made him an entertaining speaker on cruise ships.
Brian Hanrahan was a very private, kind man with a passion for reading political history and for the arts. Indeed, his reaction to being told he required chemotherapy for his bowel cancer was to book tickets for a West End play.
Honor and his daughter, Catherine, survive him.
Brian Hanrahan: born March 22nd, 1949; died December 20th, 2010