Charles Laurence, Telegraph journalist who ‘yomped’ with the Commandos all the way to Port Stanley – obituary
He reported the Falklands War for the Sunday paper and later became chief New York correspondent for The Daily Telegraph
Charles Laurence, who has died aged 72, was a newspaper correspondent who covered the 1982 Falklands War for The Sunday Telegraph and later became chief New York correspondent for The Daily Telegraph.
He was born in London on July 1 1950, the son of
Peter (later Sir Peter) Laurence, a diplomat, and his wife Elizabeth, née Way, and grew up with childhood memories of postings to Cairo, Berlin and Prague – the last to become the setting of a successful, if controversial, semi-autobiographical thriller which he wrote in retirement.
Charlie was educated at Radley where he rebelled against his establishment upbringing – while in the school cadet corps he painted his boots white so that he would get thrown out.
From the University of Kent he worked on local newspapers, among them the Leatherhead Advertiser where he would roll up every morning on a big motorcycle in leathers and then take them off, Superman-style, to reveal his suit ready for work. Joining the London Evening News later in the 1970s he made his mark as a young reporter at a time of a cut-throat war with the Evening Standard.
Just as the delivery drivers would carve each other up in their effort to reach the news vendors first, so reporters had to race to beat their Fleet Street rivals to the stories. Laurence had an advantage: riding an unusually stylish Italian Laverda motorcycle, he would arrive ahead of the pack at many a breaking news story, be it the discovery of a headless corpse in a south London park, or the spotting of a celebrity in the West End.
One lunchtime in the mid 1970s, he raced off to Scott’s in Mount Street, following a tip-off that Richard Burton and
Elizabeth Taylor were lunching there privately, having recently married for the second time.
As the couple settled down to their meal, in walked the lean, raffish Laurence. Parking his motorbike helmet and grinning broadly, he asked politely for an interview.
Not only was he not thrown out, but he was invited to join the couple at their table. Then as Burton, as was his wont, got stuck into the booze, his wife, sotto voce, reached out to the young reporter: “The trouble is, he can’t get it up any more.”
The line was “cleaned up” for the finished article, but readers were left in no doubt what she meant.
Laurence joined The Sunday Telegraph as a news reporter two years before the Falklands War. He sailed to the South Atlantic in the Canberra with three other Fleet Street men – Max Hastings, Robert Fox and Patrick Bishop – who would find themselves working together at the Daily Telegraph four years later when Hastings was appointed editor. Morale on board, Laurence reported, was “sky high with the ranks ebullient at the prospect of action” but enjoying the “holiday atmosphere” aboard the ocean liner.
Like his rivals, Laurence had a good war: landing at San Carlos Water with the Royal Marine Commandos, he joined them on their gruelling 56-mile hike in full kit “across moorland swept by blizzards and in below freezing temperatures”. Apart from a brief period of “ignominy” when he had to be evacuated for treatment to a septic blister on his foot, he remained with the troops to witness the liberation of Port Stanley.
It was Laurence who introduced the Commandos’ expression “yomping” into the English vernacular, a term he defined as “marching, humping up to 120lb of equipment and all the arms needed for the attack at the far end of the trek”.
Back in London, in November 1982 Laurence attended a regimental dinner at which he was presented with a wall plaque featuring the regimental crest and dedicated to “fond memories of the yomp”. It was given, he was told, as a gesture of the Commandos’ surprise that a “long-haired civvie from The Sunday Telegraph” had been able to “hack it” with them across the ferocious Falklands landscape.
“We didn’t think you would last two days, let alone yomp across the island,” he was told. But as he observed: “The truth is that without their generosity and help I would not have survived.”
After switching from the Sunday to The Daily Telegraph, Laurence was posted to New York to become second-in-command to the illustrious chief correspondent
Ian Ball. Already a dedicated follower of American history and culture (he had read American Studies at university), Laurence fell in love with the city.
Under the wing of the stylish Ball, who was approaching an age at which he was happy for the younger man to hit the road while he manned the bureau, Laurence found himself making road trips to all corners of the US: one day the return of buffalo on the Great Plains, the next a juicy Mob trial in Chicago.
When Ball retired in 1991 there was only one contender and Laurence took on the role with gusto. Whether writing short, sharp reports for the news pages, or “long-form” articles for the Telegraph Magazine, Laurence was in his element.
In 1994 he visited a Michigan Militia “bootcamp”, and came back with stories of them shooting at pumpkins with automatic rifles saying: “Those boys are going to get themselves in real trouble one of these days.” The Oklahoma City bombing took place just five months later; one of the perpetrators turned out to be a Michigan native.
If Laurence could meet any of his journalistic heroes on his travels –
Tom Wolfe,
Hunter S Thompson – so much the better. It was their America he wanted a piece of. Writing about the Beat poets, he once followed Allen Ginsberg into the lavatories at the Whitney Museum of American Art (which was showing a Beats retrospective) to get a quote.
He was a certain kind of Englishman who had to escape the establishment strictures of his background, and New York provided the perfect place to do it. Warm and effusive, he took young Telegraph writers fresh off the tarmac at JFK and relished showing them the ropes, and his favourite bars and restaurants, regaling them with stories, and how the city worked.
At ease in any social circle, Laurence was equally happy in the company of editors, actors, rock stars, Wall Street buccaneers, or ne’er-do-wells. The common theme was whether they were interesting. He was too sophisticated to be impressed by celebrity.
In retirement from the Telegraph, he moved from the city to Woodstock, upstate New York, and continued to write for magazines and journals in the UK.
Laurence had never worked on the Telegraph’s obituaries desk, but, as he recounted in an article in The Sunday Telegraph in 2006, he was surprised to find, hanging on the wall at that year’s Whitney Biennial, “an obituary of Bill Clinton, the former US president, written by me”.
A couple of years before, Laurence had been phoned by Adam McEwen, a former Telegraph obituarist turned artist, who asked him to knock out a 1,500-word obituary of Clinton, written as if he had just died.
The obit, one of several, “printed in old Telegraph-style, down to the headlines and fonts” and blown up to poster-size, “[became] to the New York critics, a ‘conceptual intervention’ which ‘stops time’,” Laurence wrote.
The photograph of Clinton in his “obituary” clearly caught the eye of the art crowd, observed Laurence: “...but then the words, ‘In the end, Clinton’s name will be forever sealed in the national psyche as the president who accepted oral sex in the Oval Office’, seemed to do something to their expectations, too, because viewers stayed and actually read the piece.”
Laurence’s property dealings were legendary: at one stage, he decided to buy a tin-roofed cottage on the beach on Salt Cay, one of the Turks and Caicos islands. Buffeted by storms, constantly cut off from the outside world, it was a typically bold Laurentian experiment and one his beloved wife, Laura Johnson, remained to be convinced by when her husband finally sold it after one hurricane too many.
In 2010, he published The Social Agent: A true intrigue of sex, spies, and heartbreak behind the Iron Curtain, set in 1950s Prague. Semi-autobiographical, it suggested his own mother had been seduced by the notorious Czech double agent, Jiri Mucha. The book was well received, though not by his mother, who was still alive at the time.
Laurence’s sartorial style – leather jacket and black jeans – had a flavour of Steve McQueen, and latterly he favoured linen, and suede loafers.
Looking for a suitable car for his retirement, having handed on his Yamaha bike to his son Luke, he hunted down a stylish red convertible Jaguar XK8 to a classic car dealership in New Jersey. A few weeks before his death from lung cancer he drove it with Luke, heading west to Cedar Falls, Iowa, where he and Laura had just bought a second home. It was to be his last road trip.
When, recently, the artist Adam McEwen contacted Laurence to ask if he would like to do another “obituary”, Laurence replied that he was “out of ribbon” for writing.
He is survived by his wife, Laura Johnson, an arts administrator at New York’s Lincoln Center, and by Luke and Charlotte, his children from a previous marriage to Mia Scammell, a former fashion journalist with the Evening News.
Charles Laurence, born July 1 1950, died October 23 2022
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