John O'Callaghan
Martin Wainwright
Friday April 6, 2007
The Guardian
John O'Callaghan, who has died aged 72, was a vivid and graceful writer for the Guardian throughout the 1960s; he resigned on an issue of principle, a very unusual course of action for one of the paper's journalists. In common with some outside the office, he felt that the scale of injustice in Northern Ireland was underestimated and the nature of Irish republicanism misunderstood. The paper's traditions and collegiate handling of internal debate failed to reassure him that his copy would survive unscathed. He gave up a job he loved and it was a loss to both sides.
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O'Callaghan had proud Irish roots. His father was from Cork and his mother from county Clare. But he was born in Croydon, south London, and brought up in a thoroughly English manner, which later gave him a sense of being too Irish for England and too much of a Brit to be at home in the Ireland of the time. His parents had both suffered from the Black and Tans, his father having seen the lawless volunteers burn St Patrick's Street in Cork, but they became loyal servants of the crown.
While John excelled at the local John Fisher school in Purley, his father, who had volunteered for the RAF at the end of the first world war, worked for HM Customs. His mother was an administrator in the Inland Revenue until compulsory retirement on pregnancy, after which she devoted herself to bringing up three sons. John won a place to Trinity College, Cambridge, but opted to do his national service first.
This was one of several significant experiences, bringing a posting to the Suez canal a year before the 1956 crisis, but also a stubborn reaction against authority. He even renounced smoking because it was the done thing in the army.
Somehow avoiding court martial, he was discharged early and hitchhiked back to Britain and Cambridge, where he studied English literature under FR Leavis. He then took a job with Turner and Newall, where the corporate equivalent of sergeant majors saw him resign within a month. It was journalism's gain; he found a job on the Croydon Advertiser and then, in 1960, at the Guardian's office in Manchester, where he was central to a young and lively team. He moved to London in 1967.
His decade's work on the paper was widely admired, taking him all over Britain in search of oddities such as the gold-tapped Goslett Conversation bath, designed to take two people. He also reported widely overseas and was one of a succession of Guardian motoring correspondents who disliked cars, earning reproofs from manufacturers who considered his criticisms unpatriotic.
He was also a keen cyclist, motorcyclist and pilot, talking his way into Cambridge University air squadron despite being just under their minimum height requirement of 5ft 4in. On one occasion he found himself over King's College with aviation fuel streaming from his wing after he had forgotten to screw back the fuel cap, but landed safely.
Another turning point came when he covered the Biafran war in Nigeria in the late 1960s. He found himself powerless, amid circumstances which were clearly leading towards carnage. A significant article describes his frustration at being unable to persuade the rebel leader Odumegwu Ojukwu to change policies during an interview, as if a British reporter could single-handedly alter the course of events.
John's strong sense of injustice was similarly outraged by Northern Ireland, where he also felt a personal stake. Although the friendliest of colleagues, whose many personal links to the paper survived until his death, he felt increasingly unhappy at work. He was a leading critic of Guardian management in the National Union of Journalists and successive crises in that field coincided with the arguments about Ireland. In 1972 he chose to go, sacrificing a comfortable salary and his best job.
His move to the Irish Free Press led to encounters with prejudice on the other side of Northern Ireland's bitter controversies which upset him every bit as much. He was happier at Radio Telefis Eireann, first in Belfast and then most successfully in London where his Anglo-Irishness came into its own. Colleagues and rivals have many stories of his generosity with stories and contacts, as well as vigorous religious debates; he was a lifelong supporter of traditional Catholicism, bereft at the loss of Latin and once hiring a train to take fellow enthusiasts to celebrate Tridentine Mass.
Before retiring in 1986 to restore a watermill near Bordeaux, where he enjoyed cycling and free electricity after installing a turbine, O'Callaghan freelanced for a range of media, still hunting down injustices and pressing for remedies. He never lost a restlessness, which later took him to London, Bath and York, where he died after fracturing his skull in a fall at home. Gregarious and much-loved, he had an inner shyness, and as he never married, there was no one to help. He leaves his brothers Gerald and Vincent.
· John O'Callaghan, journalist, born December 3 1934; died March 23 2007
