Jon Snow - Shooting History: A Personal Journey

William Collins

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This edition published by Harper Perennial 2005

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2004

Copyright Jon Snow 2004

PS section copyright Louise Tucker 2005, except Signposting History by Jon Snow
Jon Snow 2005

PS is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

Jon Snow asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Lines from On the Pulse of Morning by Maya Angelou reproduced by permission of Time Warner Book Group UK

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Source ISBN: 9780007171859

Ebook Edition MAY 2017 ISBN: 9780008258047

Version: 2017-05-04

From the reviews of Shooting History:

Snow is the closest we have to a modern-day George Orwell A vivid, accurate, honest guide to the key world events from 1975

Independent

Pacy, candid and anecdote-laden, Snows account of a childhood spent in awe of his father is a delight

Daily Mail

Shooting History is among my favourite memoirs this year. Snow is a thinker and a generous writer who has done incredible things and has views on them

MATTHEW PARRIS, The Times, Books of the Year

Snow charts his own growth with self-deprecation and a lightness of touch A fascinating insight into a world in flux

Time Out

Will inspire anyone who wants to know what television is like at the uncomfortable end of the camera when the bullets are flying

Guardian

[Snow is a] witty, mildly eccentric and utterly engaging writer He cleverly uses his own personal experiences and insights gained while being present at some of the major events in modern world history to argue a particular point His anecdotes on the likes of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Idi Amin are spot on

Birmingham Post

Opinionated, eloquent As one mans take on the history of the past 30 years this is an impressive piece of work. Snow is good at teasing out the often terrible ironies of our times A well-written, engrossing and surprisingly passionate piece of work

Sunday Herald

Hugely entertaining and makes you think

Manchester Evening News

Fascinating this book puts history into startling clarity

Irish Examiner

To Madeleine, Leila and Freya

CONTENTS

(Photographs are from the authors collection)

General Tom, my twice-knighted grandfather, who hung above the mantel and seemed to have inspected every boiled egg I ever ate.

War wedding. My father and mother met and married in a matter of weeks.

My fathers Hudson Terraplane Eight configured as a wartime fire-tender.

The damage caused by a Second World War bomb on the lawns of Charterhouse School; my fathers one moment of action.

A sunny Sussex childhood. Growing up in the aftermath of war.

No particular talent. Following childhood encounters with Harold Macmillan, my earliest ambition was to be a Tory MP.

My father with Macmillan at Ardingly. Do you know what a Prime Minister is? he asked me. Are you married to the Queen? I responded.

With Tom and Nick in the Terraplane; a happy contrast to the dining-table warfare.

The Queen visiting Ardingly. My mother had been to Harrods to buy a pair of Crown Derby cups and saucers from which the royal lips could sip their afternoon tea.

As a chorister at Winchester Cathedral in 1958.

My father, every inch a Bishop eight feet tall in his mitre.

Back from Uganda. VSO had radicalised me, and one reason I wanted to become a journalist was in order to return there.

India in the summer of 1969, singing Hey Jude in the Liverpool University close-part harmony Beatle band.

Pre-mobile-phone reporting for LBC in 1973, on a clunky old Motorola two-way radio.

An exchange with Ugandan dictator Idi Amin on the 1974 trip with Jim Callaghan to rescue Denis Hills.

Vietnamese boat people below decks on the refugee boat on which we found ourselves stranded in the South China Sea in 1976.

The shell of the Vietnamese refugee boat beached in Malaysia.

Interviewing the Somali President Siad Barre, a grumpy Moscow-educated ideologue running a classic Cold War Russian client state, in 1976.

With Mohinder Dhillon in Somalia. Mystified British viewers were treated to a travelogue in which an excitable white man jumped up and down talking about the threat to world peace.

Back to Uganda again in 1977, this time for ITN armed with Edward Heaths book.

Interviewing US President Jimmy Carter and Prime Minister Jim Callaghan outside Lancaster House in London, 1977.

Preparing to conduct the first ever English-language interview with a Pope, aboard John Paul IIs plane in January 1979.

Afghanistan, 1980. With the Mujahidin in mountains above Herat in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet invasion.

Filming with Charlie Morgan at Desert One in Iran in April 1980 amid the wreckage of Jimmy Carters catastrophic attempt to rescue the American hostages.

The IranIraq War in 1981. Wearing no body armour and no flak jacket, I was less than well prepared to survive the conflagration in which I was caught.

With President Reagan in the White House, February 1985.

Interviewing Nelson Mandela the day he became South Africas first democratically elected President in 1994.

On the line in northern Ghana, exploring the Greenwich meridian in a classic Yendi smock in 2000.

With cameraman Ken McCallum in Baghdad, November 2003.

Advertising Channel Four News, with trusty steed on Euston station.

I want to thank: Heli Sivunen for researching and checking my efforts; my agent Jonny Geller for provoking me to write a book at all and for helping me to arrive at what I wanted to write; my publisher Caroline Michel, who took the risk and believed in it; my friend and colleague Lindsey Hilsum for her wise comments on what I had written; my friends Helena Kennedy, Angelica Mitchell, Felicity Spector, Katie Razzall and my friend and PA Deirdre Dean for reading and reacting so constructively to the manuscript. My friend and erstwhile neighbour Kathy Graham-Harrison made invaluable corrections for this paperback edition.

Some of the key chapters were written in and around the Wellfleet homes of the wonderful Jocelyn Baltzell and her daughter Justina. Jocelyns expertise as a literary critic was invaluable; very sadly she died from cancer while I was writing, and I miss her very much.

I also want to thank a few of those who enabled me to make this journey at all, above all my partner Madeleine Colvin and my editors at LBC Marshall Stewart, at ITN Nigel Ryan, David Nicholas, Stewart Purvis, Richard Tait, and my foreign editor John Mahoney. I owe an enormous debt to the many crews I worked with, particularly the late Alan Downes, Don Warren, Mohinder Dhillon, Sebastian Rich, Malcolm Hicks and Ken McCallum. Im grateful too to some of the journalists on the road who educated and inspired me Michael White, Ed Boyle, Victoria Brittan, Philip Jacobson and Raymond Bonner. My editor at Channel Four News, Jim Gray, has been more understanding, tolerant and supportive than I deserve.