John Bierman, who died earlier this month after a long period of ill-health, was an East End boy who was displaced by the Blitz and never stopped moving.
His career was to take in every aspect of print and broadcast journalism – from provincial newspapers, to Fleet Street sub-editor in the 1950s, to foreign correspondent, to TV news reporter. He was to finish his career as a historical writer, producing hugely readable and respected books on characters as diverse as Henry Stanley, Napoleon III and Holocaust hero Raoul Wallenberg. But it was for 13 minutes of utterly compelling television in 1972 that he will go down in journalistic history.
John Bierman was born on 26 January 1929, into an East End Jewish family. His father, Richard, was an antiques dealer, while mother Beatrice ran a dress shop. Bierman remarked later that neither of them showed much interest in their son – Richard soon disappeared, and at the age of 11, John was evacuated to stay with grandparents in the country during the Blitz. ‘A wonderful adventure,’ he remembered later. It was the start of a peripatetic existence, as he attended 16 schools, acquiring and maintaining throughout a love of the language that was to become his craft.
In the late forties he did his National Service in the Royal Marines and, returning to Civvy Street, learned his trade as a journalist on regional papers. He then took a passage on a cattle boat to Canada, spending two years working on newspapers before returning to London, a new wife and a young family in the mid-fifties. The now-hardened newsman took a job as a sub-editor in Fleet Street, working on the Daily Express and quickly progressing to the back bench – laying out pages and writing headlines.
But his perenially itchy feet led Bierman to accept a job editing The Nation, a Kenyan newspaper established by the Aga Khan. From there he moved to Trinidad to edit papers for the Thomson Corporation. But in the mid-sixties he returned to London once more, making the shift from print to broadcast media. He was soon back on the road, working as a foreign correspondent and reporting from warzones around the planet. He was to cover the conflict in Biafra during the final years of the sixties, the Indo-Pakistan War of 1971. and the Arab-Israeli (Yom Kippur) War of 1973. It was in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, that he met his second wife, Hilary Brown, a Canadian reporter.
But it was a relatively routine assignment to cover a Civil Rights march in Derry (Londonderry) in January 1972 that was to cement John’s place in history. The BBC had sent two camera crews: one covering the march from the point of view of the security forces, with Bierman’s showing it from the demonstrator’s perspective. Caught in the middle of what was to become known as Bloody Sunday, Bierman, cameraman Cyril Cave and his sound recordist soon realised that it wasn’t just rubber bullets and CS Gas canisters … live rounds were being fired.
The crew rushed back to Belfast with film of casualties and interviews with local priest Father Daly and the commander of the British Army in the province. General Ford “seemed to have very little idea about what had actually occurred, which – to say the least – seemed to me surprising,” remembered John later. “Up to now I had been too busy chasing the action to give much thought to the implications of what we had witnessed – live rounds fired and at least three dead bodies. What had happened to turn an initially peaceful civil rights march into this?
“Up to that point nobody in London seemed to realise that there had been a massacre and, as I learned later, high-level consultations went on about how much length and prominence should be given to my report. Without waiting for the official version, which eventually said that 13 civilians had been killed (another died later from his wounds), the BBC powers-that-be sent me word that the bulletin that night would be open-ended and I should let my report run for as long as it needed. This seemed to me at the time – and still does today – stirring affirmation of the confidence the BBC put in its reporters. This was, after all, an extremely sensitive story and one misjudgement might have landed us all in very hot water.”
A final career followed as a writer, penning historical works, often with Colin Smith, and often focusing on the stories and characters behind some of the major military conflicts. In 1981 he did some fine detective work on one of the forgotten heroes of the Holocaust. Righteous Gentile: The Story of Raoul Wallenberg, told the tale of a Swedish diplomat who rescued Hungarian Jews using a mixture of subterfuge, false passports and delicate negoations with the Nazi occupiers. The tragic irony was that the liberating Russians, who entered Budapest in January 1945, promptly arrested Wallenberg as a US spy. He disappeared into the Russian Gulags, never to be seen again.
The history was arguably Bierman’s best work. Military historian Sir John Keegan wrote of Alamein: War Without Hate (written with fellow journalist Colin Smith) “few historians write as fluently as they do; few journalists achieve their standards of accuracy and inclusiveness.” But perhaps the most personal work was yet to come, harking back to the East End childhood where his wanderings began. At the time of his death, John was working on a memoir of the London of his youth – working title Guttersnipes.
Books by John Bierman
Secret Life of Laszlo Almasy: The Real English Patient; Alamein: War Without Hate by John Bierman and Colin Smith; Fire in the Night: Wingate of Burma, Ethiopia and Zion by John Bierman and Colin Smith; Dark Safari: The Life Behind the Legend of Henry Morton Stanley by John Bierman; Napoleon III and His Carnival Empire by John Bierman; Heart’s Grown Brutal (writing as David Brewster).