My friend David Willey, who has died aged 93, was a longstanding BBC foreign correspondent and the author of three books on the Vatican and Italy – where he spent more than half his life.
He never really retired, and was still sending the occasional dispatch on Rome to the BBC into his 90s. He wrote his last book, The Promise of Francis: The Man, the Pope and the Challenge of Change, in 2015, when he was in his 80s.
David was born in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, to Douglas, a teacher, and his Italian-born wife, Rita (nee Caine). After attending Sir William Borlase’s grammar school in Marlow he went to Queens’ College, Cambridge, to study modern languages, where, he said, he returned to his rooms one day to find a dishevelled, penniless young Ted Hughes roasting a duck over the open fire – caught that morning on the River Cam.
After university David joined Reuters as a trainee reporter, covering the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957 before joining the BBC in the 1960s and becoming the corporation’s east Africa correspondent in 1964. Based in Nairobi, he would file any urgent copy by heading to the departures terminal at the city’s airport, where he would wave a sealed envelope in the air, asking if any passengers who were taking the next flight back to London might deliver his article to the newsroom.
From 1969 to 1971 he served as the BBC’s assistant diplomatic correspondent, and then its Rome correspondent from 1972, spending the next 50 years in that role. Covering the papacies of five popes, he witnessed the evolution of the Vatican from Pope John Paul II, with whom he travelled on more than 40 official visits, to Pope Francis, about whom he wrote his final book. He was made MBE for services to broadcast journalism in 2003.
Until his death David lived in the lakeside town of Trevignano Romano, 30 miles north of Rome, where, over his morning coffee at a local bar, he would regale fellow customers with remarkable stories from his work around the world.
He was well aware that he had lived an extraordinary life in extraordinary times, and was a brilliant raconteur – incisive, humble, full of wonder, and with a great eye for absurdity. He was also kind and gentle, taking an interest in young journalists and lending them his quiet encouragement.
He is survived by his partner, Judith Harris, a journalist and author whom he met in the mid-80s, and a daughter, Cecilia, from a marriage to Marie-Claire, which ended in divorce.
