OBITUARY

The Telegraph reporter who always got it right

By PAT PRENTICE

It is time, again, to recall another esteemed Fleet Street colleague: R Barry O'Brien, who died in early December aged 94.

Barry joined The Daily Telegraph when he was 28 in 1958 and left in 1995 after a career as a distinguished reporter.

A tall, forbidding figure with the demeanour of an austere clergyman, Barry was known by colleagues as a reporter who always got it right.

In the Telegraph newsroom it was written in stone that "No one sues Barry O'Brien".

When Johnny Edgecombe (now deceased), fired a pistol at the Wimpole Mews door of Stephen Ward in 1962, he set off a scandal known as the Profumo affair that led to the fall of Harold Macmillan's Conservative government.

Barry led the pack in reporting the monumental event, encountering Johnny, his rival Lucky Gordon, Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies.

The saga included high society parties, good-time girls, Russian spying, adultery, trials, and lies to Parliament. An affair that demanded the highest standard of reporting.

When a vulnerable and disgraced Ward committed suicide, he left a letter to Barry, a person he trusted to relay the truth.

Tony Benn, an unlikely admirer of the right-wing press, also publicly declared his respect for Barry as a fair and honest scribe.

To a young sub learning the style of the Telegraph, Barry's intros were an example of how it was done. Never racy, but always solid and informative.

His copy hardly needed anything more than a tick-up.

As the years passed, I got to know him as a kind, diligent, and scrupulously fair, committed Catholic.

He modestly commented with a benevolent smile that he marginally favoured the character of the Jamaican jazz singer Gordon over the Antiguan Edgecombe, and spoke of his involvement in exposing the Profumo events without a hint of braggadocio.

Throughout his career, Barry's dogged diligence and tenacity left many an officious mandarin and State lackey bruised and exposed.

If only such characters as Barry could be encountered in our diminishing trade today, without any rush to genuflect to the false gods of fame and advertising fakes.

Richard Barry O'Brien. Feb 23 1930, Dec 4 2024. RIP.

1 January 2025