By Olivier Holmey
. It will be included in important events, he said.
His wish will come true – to a devastating degree.
Three years later, in 1967, Gray – at that time Beijing’s liaison officer – became a pawn in the tug of war between China and the United Kingdom. After the Hong Kong crown column was arrested by Communist journalists, the Chinese authorities returned the gray placement under house arrest.
The Briton’s ordeal would last 26 months – and make him world famous.
They were finally released in October 1969, he told the press: “I felt very low, but I did not despair.”
Gray would go on to work for the BBC, write several popular novels and start donating to help other hostages of the Empire.
He bore no bitterness towards his former captors. The trauma of solitary confinement lasted for the rest of his life.
Gray, who suffered from Parkinson’s disease, died on October 11 in Norwich, England, his daughters Lucy and Clarissa Gray told Reuters. He was 87 years old.
A restless child
Anthony Keith Gray was born on July 5, 1938, in Norwich, the second child of driver Alfred Gray and Shopleeper agnes (née Flensent).
Raised by Agnes after her parents divorced, Gray was estranged from his father for the rest of his life. A sports student who excelled in English, he was once described by a friend’s mother as “blind”. He wore the epithet with pride.
After leaving school at 16, he did National Service in Glasgow. He worries that he will eventually need glasses to prevent him from becoming a pilot.
Gray held another hope: to write fiction. But he realized that he must first find out more about life. He chose journalism.
In 1960 he joined the Norwich Daily Press, where he was covered by Frederick Fortsth, who died earlier this year. Both journalists later joined Reuters, before writing novels.
The news agency began to expand gray to East Berlin, before which he took German lessons in London with a teacher called Shirley McGuinn. In the end she would eventually become his wife.
From his base in Berlin, Gray traveled to Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Poland. Many times he was followed and followed, interrogated, by Soviet agents, he said. Among his achievements: Breaking the news of the exchange of prisoners who were in the works to Free Gerald Brolooke, a British teacher who was kidnapped in Russia, years before he was exchanged.
‘Text Dream’
One night in January 1967 the Reuters Executive started asking if he would go to Peking, as Beijing was known.
“It was a writer’s dream,” recalled Gray in his 1970 book “Peking”. China’s capital, then undergoing a cultural revolution, was creating a flood of headlines, but it could not be stirred up in the four corners of the west.
“I made a conscious effort to restrain the enthusiasm of my answer. I was twenty-eight years old. I didn’t want to be thought of—I’m happy and honest.”
Gray had no special knowledge of China. All he had was an 18-month experience covering another communist part of the world: Eastern Europe.
When he left, he was ordered to fight the situation in the seat of his train even if the steam came from the fields of the factory – “A measure of the ignorance that appears among the conditions of Paddy at that time”, he later commented.
One of his first reports drew the attention of the Russian News Bulletin seeking famine in southern China. A few weeks later, while covering the day’s festivities, Mao Zedong passed a few meters from him. They found a mob riot, the gray failed to hide the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party.
‘Go grey!’
The gray relative’s freedom of movement ended immediately on July 21, 1967. On the same day, a foreign service official told him that, in view of the “illegal persecution” and “Fascist persecution” in Hong Kong, he would no longer be allowed to leave his house. He pointed out that his British employer was independent from the British State, to no avail.
Of his arrest, gray wrote in his diary that night: “The sadness of it prevents me from feeling depressed; I feel a little sense of how unskilled he is on average.”
There continued four weeks of routine for the Reuters staff, a two-story apartment on the edge of the forbidden city. That all changed on August 18.
That night, the red guards entered the house, groped him and dragged him across the yard, his arms behind his back and his head down – a tense position known as jet-planing.
The intruders killed his cat, ming ming, and shouted: “Go gray! Hang gray!”
Around midnight, they finally left. “I was in pain all over and out of breath, and I didn’t last long,” he wrote in his diary.
After that, the conditions of his arrest became more severe. The guards are locked in a gray single room, the walls of which are plastered with Maoist propaganda.
The pen was the only one. With it he privately commented, wrote short stories and put together crossword puzzles. “I always spend time thinking of cliches and catchphrases and making what I think are clever puns or groans like his collection”.
Among the favorites: “Graffiti law?” Ironically, he refused to give students a four-word answer.
‘Caught in the War’
The British government insisted on quiet talks with China. But since that approach proved fruitless to his peers, Gray launched a massive public campaign to defend his release. The tall, lanky reporter became a thing on the front pages.
When his wait was over, a Chinese official told him that he owed his freedom to the release of Communist journalists.
“I don’t think Beijing is worried about the media workers in Hong Kong themselves,” Gray later said. “I was just caught in a face-to-face battle between two central governments.”
A social adjustment proved to be the case, especially since Britain had changed so much during his exile. Recreational drugs proliferated, as did midiskirts, men with long hair and – with musical hair “- stage nudity.
His mood had changed. “The former youth, he got used to hunting safely in numbers with CORPS bodies, he was isolated – he had become a tap,” he wrote in his book, “says the decoration of books”
He went on to host a current affairs program on BBC radio and wrote several threes. But the unexplained death in Cairo of journalist David Hellen in 1977 – a real-life incident of the kind that was easily targeted by novos – put it hard.
After that he wrote strong historical arguments in China, Vietnam and Japan. His best selling work is “Saigon”.
‘I go too far’
Gray would have a few journalism majors. In 1983, he wrote “The Prime Minister was a spy”, a book that alleged that Australian Harold Holt, who is believed to have done it at sea in 1967, had actually fled to China.
Holt anti-slavery Holt had been aiming on behalf of Beijing for 38 years, gray.
Holt Biographer Tim Frame called it a “total stretch” theory. Relying on an Australian naval officer who had Chinese students, the grays themselves wrote about his account: “I can’t confirm that it’s true.”
A 1996 BBC radio documentary about UFOs led him to countless sightings. “At the end of my investigation, I feel certain that this religious art is visiting us,” concluded the radio station.
After that, gray became a follower of Rayeli, a Frenchman who claimed that humanity was created by humanistic scientists. His movement – raelism – is self-described atheism. He investigates the Frail Parliament calling it a religion.
Gray’s faith, which led him to write the basis of Rael’s 2005 book “Design Intelligent Design”, became a long-term, all-consuming one. It threatened to cost his money, his reputation and his mental health, the past having already been reversed by his experience in Beijing.
Forty years from captivity, gray, who fell and came out of depression, finally saw a psychiatrist. She was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
In lighter moments, he laughed with Lucy about how much he points to Billy Joel’s songs: “I know why I went too high or too low there’s nothing inside.”
Gray was open-minded but worried. He would be “wonderful”, said Clarissa.
Both daughters are journalists. They survive her, as do Lucy’s children Eddie and Oscar.
‘Graffiti law?’
Preaching forgiveness, the gray is away from any resentment of the British and Chinese authorities, as well as those of his colleagues and fellow journalists, who had oppressed him with news even on the ground. He founded several organizations, including the global and planetary search for forgiveness.
Sitting at home in South England’s Listening to John Williams’ “Cavatina” with a Chivas Regal in his hand.
He was married to Shirley for 22 years. After their separation, and before he died on the job in 1995, they remained close friends. He visited her every week to make a name for himself.
The answer to his clue, “Graffiti law?”, it turned out, was “writing on the wall”.
Being held in a cell half a century ago, all four walls of his cell covered in Maoist mantras, the pun brought a smile to his face.
(Editing by Andrew Steilensarcival Research by Rory Carruthers and Susan Ponsonby)
