From AEJ member Michael Lake:
Our long-standing colleague and great friend, Robert Elphick (Bob to his many friends) has just died, aged 89.
We may mourn his death but we can also rejoice in such a full, fulfilled and happy life, steeped in a heady variety of foreign and home assignments for Reuters and the BBC and an official career with the European Commission, all grounded in a close family life.
Bob began his journalistic life working on and off for the Watford Observer when at school and at Cambridge.
He graduated BA (Hons) and worked for the Biggleswade Chronicle and the Wisbech Advertiser before joining Reuters in 1955.
By 1957 he had his Cambridge MA (Hons) and after only three years at Reuters was sent to Moscow, for the last two years as bureau chief.
His 20-year career with the BBC took him to Vienna as Central European Correspondent, interrupted by assignments to Saigon, Prague (ring any bells?) from where he was expelled, Paris, Amman, Northern Ireland, and then to Bonn as the BBC’s first BBC TV Europe correspondent reporting throughout Europe for the next five years.
In 1977 he became a spokesman at the European Commission in Brussels.
He ended his career Head of Media and Information in London from 1986 to 1995 when he retired at 65; by then he was deputy Head of the Commission’s London Office.
He was Secretary General of ELEC, the British section of the European League for Economic Cooperation.
Eve, who was posted with him everywhere since their marriage in 1957, meanwhile brought up three children in a variety of languages.
Bob’s funeral was at Mortlake Crematorium at noon on Thursday, September 26, followed (indeed commanded by Bob himself) by a wake nearby.
Please also see this obituary.
