When Gerald Butt arrived in Beirut in early 1983 as the BBC’s Middle East correspondent, those supposedly in the know assured him and his wife, Lynne, that the civil war was over: that the Israelis were unwinding their 1982 Lebanon invasion-occupation; that western armies were there to keep the antagonists apart and to hold Syria and its allies at bay; and that the PLO and its fighters had left town. Nothing could possibly go wrong.
The Butts had been misinformed (as Gerald no doubt intuited). All those elements and more fused to reignite the civil war. Within weeks Gerald and his family were in the midst of renewed street warfare and inter-suburban shelling. In April 1983 an Islamist suicide bomber blew up the US embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people; six months later another jihadist killed 241 American servicemen at the US Marines’ base on the southern shores of Beirut, and 58 French servicemen died when their barracks in the city were similarly bombed. Hezbollah was in the making.
For his brave and expert coverage of this, and of Yasser Arafat’s final departure from Lebanon, chased by the Syrians and their militias, in late 1983, Gerald, who has died of cancer aged 72, won the Sony radio reporter of the year award in 1984.
Beirut and Lebanon in meltdown soon became too dangerous a home for the Butts. In February 1984 Gerald’s BBC TV colleague Chris Drake rescued Lynne and her two children, a toddler and a five-month old baby, from the family’s apartment amid the surrounding battles, driving past roadblocks and gunmen and taking them to relative safety at the BBC office at the Commodore hotel. Days later they were in an RAF helicopter headed for Cyprus. Gerald soon rebased the BBC bureau there.
Gerald was a Middle Easterner to the core. He was born in Tehran, to Archie Butt, manager of the British Bank of the Middle East in Iran, and his wife, Muriel (nee McGeever). The family moved to Jordan, where there would be tea on the lawn with General John Glubb, “Glubb Pasha”, commander of the Jordanian Arab Legion, and then on to Bahrain. Gerald absorbed the Arabic all around him, and the region moulded him, providing the insights that would inform his later reporting and writing.
He was educated as a boarder, from the age of seven, at King’s college, Taunton, and then went to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where he graduated in 1972. After a spell with the Middle East Economic Digest, a weekly English-language magazine, he joined the BBC graduate trainee scheme in 1974.
It was inevitable that Gerald would win the Middle East posting, and, after Beirut and Nicosia, in 1987 he and his family were posted to Jerusalem, where almost on arrival he was plunged into the first Palestinian intifada (uprising), from 1987 to 1993, bringing his erudition and empathy to that vital episode in the Palestinian struggle.
In 1990 he returned to Cyprus and a freelance partnership with his BBC colleague Jim Muir. The Gulf war was imminent. I recall both these Arabists trying to make sense of Saddam Hussein’s ramblings from Baghdad before the allied invasion began in January 1991.
Back in London from 1994, he edited a BBC Arabic Service political weekly, worked as a consultant and wrote books, one of them, The Lion in the Sand (1995), also a BBC radio series, about the British in the Middle East, drawing on his Levantine memories.
In 1999 he returned to Cyprus to edit (for the next nine years) the influential oil, energy and political weekly Middle East Economic Survey. From the late 2000s until his death he wrote books, founded a consultancy and acted as a risk analyst. He was also Middle East correspondent of the Church Times.
Gerald was an assiduous journalist, reticent in manner, economical in style. In his social life he was almost withdrawn, but he was a lover of the rumbustious life of the foreign correspondent, even if sometimes, it seemed, from the edge. When stories broke, in Beirut, Jerusalem or Nicosia, there he would be, transistor radio to his ear, picking up the latest from Voix du Liban, Kol Israel or Cairo Radio.
Gerald married Lynne Angus in 1979; they divorced in 1997. He is survived by his second wife, Tabitha (nee Morgan), whom he married in 1999, and their son, Edward; and by the three children, Amelia, Miranda and Marcus, from his marriage to Lynne.
• Gerald Arthur Butt, journalist, born 5 December 1949; died 15 September 2022
