JOHN (JACK) ARMSTRONG BEVERLEY January 20, 1928-July 26, 2024
Jack Beverley was one of my unforgettable characters. We were friends and newspaper colleagues on three continents for 60 years. I liked him. I enjoyed his company. I learned much from him.
We met in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1962 when Jack was managing editor of the Sunday Nation and I was a junior sub-editor on its sister paper, the Daily Nation. Both papers had been funded by Prince Karim, the Aga Khan, leader of Shia Ismaili Muslims around the world, including a large community in Kenya.
Sixty years later I can clearly recall the memorable collection of newspapermen (and one or two women) drawn to that unlikely place at an historic time. People like John Bierman, a former Royal Marine who was editor of the Daily Nation; news editor David Barnett, an Australian, who years later was Press Secretary to Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser; Jack’s deputy Gerry Loughran, a sociable, talented “Geordie” from Newcastle upon Tyne; and, of course, the high-energy Scot, Jack Beverley himself.
Loughran said that Jack ran the Sunday Nation with “extraordinary vigour and a stream of innovative ideas”. One of these (by way of example) was both imaginative and innovative.
It happened after some technical issue had prevented the transmission to Nairobi of the first news agency pictures of the moon’s surface. With a deadline looming and an empty front page, Jack used a close-up of a Ryvita biscuit he had spotted on a cheese plate at a restaurant near the office. The image on the front page of the Sunday Nation was infinitely sharper than the blurred lunar pictures used by the rest of the world!
Then there was the Beverley solution to a surprising marketing problem. The Sunday Nation had been used to launch a packaged soap powder but a week later sales of the new product all but collapsed. The managing editor investigated and found the powder was useless in the streams where much village washing was done. The soap suds simply floated away. Jack’s solution was a special offer of a plastic bucket to Sunday Nation readers.
Jack Beverley: helped set up the China Daily.
Before Nairobi Jack had worked in London’s Fleet Street, but I didn’t find out about one of his earliest jobs in journalism until much later. As a junior, during the closing days of World War II, he had written for the unique newspaper Good Morning. It was published for the Royal Navy’s submarine service and was a mixture of cartoons, quizzes, news and family stories. Numbered rather than dated, bundled copies of the newspaper were placed in a submarine’s safe before it left on patrol. Once a day when conditions permitted, the appropriate edition of Good Morning would be distributed among the crew, putting them in touch, briefly, with news of home.
After Kenya independence in 1963, Jack returned to the UK and when I saw him in London soon after he was night news editor of The Daily Mail. By the early 1970s, he was managing editor of the Westminster Press regional newspaper group and I was back in the UK as London bureau manager of The Age. One of my agreeable tasks was to assist in the emigration to Melbourne of Jack (and his wife, Sue) after he had been hired by David Syme & Company, publisher of The Age.
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