Robert Elphick obituary

My friend of more than half a century, Robert Elphick, who has died aged 89, was for 20 years a distinguished foreign correspondent for the Reuters news agency and the BBC.

His first posting for Reuters, in 1958, was in Moscow, where during four years he met the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev many times, and Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, and covered the U2 spy plane crisis that wrecked an important cold war summit between Khrushchev and the US president Dwight D Eisenhower.

After the Soviets refused Bob a visa to become the BBC’s Moscow correspondent in 1966, he was sent instead to Vienna, from where he covered central and eastern Europe.

When Britain joined the then Common Market, now the European Union in 1973, he was appointed BBC Television’s first Europe correspondent, based in Bonn. Four years later he was recruited to the staff of the European commission, where he stayed for the next 18 years until his retirement in 1995 as head of media and communications and deputy head of its London office.

Born in Biggleswade, a market town in Bedfordshire, Bob was the son of Vera (nee Rutherford) and her husband, Edward Elphick. His father was the owner of Charles Elphick Ltd, which published the Biggleswade Chronicle. Bob would deliver the paper locally as a school boy.

He was at Bedford school during the second world war and well remembered the blackout, searchlights and occasional German bombers flying overhead. He graduated from Peterhouse, Cambridge University, in 1952, having switched from modern languages to law, and started his career as a cub reporter on the family newspaper.

Much of his BBC reporting covered the governance, politics and economics of the countries he regularly visited across Europe. But like many foreign correspondents he was regularly bundled off overnight to hotspots: in 1968 he was sent from home in Vienna to Saigon “soonest”; then immediately to Paris to cover “les manifestations”; then most notably to Prague to broadcast about the growth democracy there until the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia that August. He was there for nine months during which time a Soviet tank crushed his BBC car; he was finally expelled on instructions from Moscow.

In 1970 he was ordered to Amman, Jordan, to report on Black September and then it was into Belfast for the collapse of Stormont, and the months of riots, assassinations, explosions, petrol bombings and a curfew that ollowed. From his last posting in Bonn he was sent to cover the civil war in Lebanon twice. On most if not all of these jobs Bob was accompanied by a film crew sent from somewhere else.

Somewhere else was where Bob found himself on all three occasions when his wife, Eve, gave birth to their children in three different capitals. His recruitment to the European commission in 1977 brought a greater degree of stability; there was plenty of travel but it was all marked in advance on the kitchen calendar. He always remained congenial, warm-hearted and fun.

He is survived by Eve (nee Blake), whom he married in 1957, and their children, Sarah, Charles and Amelia, and six grandchildren, Alexander, Freddie, Max, Amelia, Jasmine and Thea.