TIMOTHY BURTSend a message to

TIMOTHY BURT

TIMOTHY BURT

From Tim Burt Financial Times, 1988-2005 At the Financial Times, Nobby Clarke symbolised the integrity that was core to the newspaper. He was, for many years, a mainstay of the FT’s foreign editing team. He handled with skill and patience both foreign correspondents and their copy, which were often irrational and opaque in equal measure. Nobby was an expert in the government machinations and policies of all manner of far-flung places, saving many reporters from making basic mistakes on deadline. More important, he was kind. Even when a piece of copy was execrable, Nobby would let the writer know without humiliating them. But he was also tough. He would not stand for sloppiness in the FT. So as an editor, he was trusted totally to edit, headline and lay out pages that were models of FT precision. The traits that made him a great editor also made him a great person. He nurtured and encouraged other journalists, reminding eager would-be foreign correspondents to play the long game. He helped countless others navigate the oddities of the FT newsrooms, including the ‘Blue Lagoon’ that was the beating heart of Bracken House or the ‘U-bend of power’ at Southwark Bridge. To many, he was simply a mentor for journalistic progress. Together with his desk partner Chris Ennis, Nobby was part of a formidable page-editing double-act that marshalled FT coverage of great events from the fall of the Berlin Wall to Tiananmen Square. Despite the seriousness of the subject matter, Nobby did not take himself seriously. And he loved the FT’s memorable snafus. These included, in one edition, publishing a huge picture of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake alongside a long feature about the rebuilding of war-torn Germany. Another was the legendary picture caption on a story about John Selwyn Gummer, then minister of agriculture, visiting a country show at the height of the BSE crisis. The picture showed Gummer and his wife standing either side of a prize-winning cow and was thus captioned ‘Mr and Mrs Gummer at the east of England showground’. Regrettably, a miscommunication between caption-writer and picture desk left the real Mrs Gummer cropped from the photo when it appeared in the next day’s newspaper…. Best of all, Nobby adored the internal memo when the FT began printing in America, instructing sub-editors to avoid the phrase ‘beating off’ in headlines about companies trying to thwart hostile bids. Nobby’s rare combination of patience, integrity, kindness and his sense of fun extended outside the newsroom. Hosting colleagues at home in Brockley, he would regale them with tales of scrapes as a young reporter in the Middle East or the numerous misunderstandings with neighbours at his beloved cottage in northern France. He was devoted to Hilary and his daughters Jo and Kate, whom he loved dearly, taking pride in their own careers and their wider families. He invested the same pride, care and affection in retirement in Dorset, becoming a mainstay of the community just as he was at the FT. Nobby will be missed sorely by all those lucky enough to have worked with him.

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