Penny-A-Line Man

The popular image of journalistic life in days gone by may well be of the heaving newsroom, populated by harassed men with press passes stuck in the bands of their trilbies, but what of the life of the roving freelancer, scribing under his own steam? Orphaned Reg Shay began working life in Fleet Street during the second world war as a messenger before moving up to the news desk and later becoming a South London court reporter. He subsequently moved to Rhodesia for family health reasons where he became a respected and sought-after international war and political correspondent writing for, amongst others, the Evening Standard, Time, Life, and the Mirror; broadcasting regularly on America's ABC News (radio) and ITN's News at Ten. From death-defying excursions up the crocodile-infested Zambezi river (he survived a croc attack), to becoming one country's 'most wanted man' for untrue alleged espionage activities; he was directly responsible for saving many children's lives by discovering a Rhodesian concentration camp and then forcing its immediate closure. He covered four African civil wars over an nineteen-year period, from the Congo to Mozambique, Rhodesia and Angola. During the latter, Henry Kissinger relied solely on Shay's Associated Press reports. This is the story of a life, filmic in its intensity and excitement and uncompromising in honesty and principles (he twice resigned in a personal battle against media censorship), rendered all the more amazing for the fact that Shay appears to have more lives than a clowder of cats.