TILLEY

Robert James Tilley

 

Robert James (Bob) Tilley, elder son of Marion (Andrews) and Edward James Tilley, was born in Bristol, England, on 12 June 1938. He was educated at Bristol Grammar School and the historic Crewkerne Grammar School (founded in 1499.)

 

He began his journalistic career as an indentured cub reporter on the weekly Western Gazette in Yeovil, Somerset. When his four-year apprenticeship ended he boarded a plane at London’s Heathrow Airport for the 24-hour flight to Ndola, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), where he joined the daily Northern News as a reporter.

 

He landed in the middle of a Central African crisis, exchanging within days his Somerset routine of flower shows and church fetes for a riskier job of covering a civil war in the newly-independent Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly the Belgian Congo, and unrest in Northern Rhodesia’s northern provinces.

 

Belgium had just given independence to the Congo, which promptly collapsed into chaos. The neighbouring Congolese region of Katanga declared its own independence, and Bob’s beat involved visits to Katanga’s capital, Elisabethville (now Lumumbashi). In Ndola, he helped overworked local officials handle a flow of refugees, mostly European farmers and missionaries who arrived with harrowing stories of murder and rape.

 

When Fleet Street’s “heavyweights” — veterans like Donald Wise and George Gale — moved in to cover the story, Bob decided to move back to Britain and kickstart his career there. He left Ndola too soon — while the Swedish cargo ship carrying him from Cape Town to Gothenburg was ploughing through the South Atlantic news arrived over the vessel’s radio that United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskyoeld had died when the aircraft flying him on a peacemaking mission in the region crashed in Ndola.

 

After failing to get the job he wanted in London, Bob returned to Africa, to apartheid-wracked South Africa, where he joined the liberal Durban evening newspaper, The Natal Daily News. Frustrated by the limitations and censorship imposed by the apartheid regime, Bob involved himself in the multiracial arts scene, writing a daily page of arts and entertainment news. In his spare time, he studied at the University of Natal (now the University of KwaZulu) for a BA degree in Zulu, graduating in 1965.

 

In 1966, Bob decided to return to Britain and joined the Bristol Evening Post as a sub-editor and then the Press Association in London. In 1968, he moved to Germany, to join Radio Free Europe as a copy editor. He began to travel for the radio, mostly to Yugoslavia to cover the post-Tito years. He managed the radio’s reporting team at the Sarajevo Winter Olympics and circumvented a ban initiated by the Soviet Union on the radio’s accreditation by turning hotel rooms into offices and a studio and sending reporters to cover the games with tickets bought on the open market.

 

Bob began to freelance for the Daily Telegraph in 1974. His first scoop was a front-page story reporting on the “poisoned umbrella” attack on his Bulgarian colleague Georgy Markov. The Telegraph paid him a 100 pounds sterling bonus for the scoop.

 

When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 Bob covered the story for the Telegraph from a border town south of the formerly divided city. He left Radio Free Europe and embarked on a freelance career, establishing with a colleague a small Munich-based news agency, Central Europe Communications. Among its first major stories was the outbreak of civil war in Yugoslavia, which Bob covered for the Telegraph at the outset from Slovenia — declining an assignment in Belgrade because of his Radio Free Europe background.

 

In 2000, he went east, joining the financial monthly Asia-Inc in Bangkok as senior correspondent, a job that sent him on assignment throughout the region. He moved to Chiang Mai in 2002 to edit an English-language Burmese exile magazine, The Irrawaddy. In 2003, he founded The Writers Club & Wine Bar, which rapidly became Chiang Mai’s unofficial press club.

  

Bob died on 5 March 2015 in Chiang Mai, Thailand. He leaves a wife, Hilde, six children, Simon, Luke, Justin, Imogen, Nicola and Emanuel, and 12 grandchildren.