With a career spanning over 6 decades, Sandy Gall has witnessed the evolution of the media as a way of communicating news in its simplest form with pen and paper to what it is today, with all the tools of a sophisticated communications industry.Now aged 82, he shares some insights and experiences.  

To me, journalism was a profession worth doing because I thought it was important for people to know what was going on: to find out what was happening and then report it in a proper way – so that’s what led me to journalism in the 1950s. I was in my mid-twenties by this stage, having spent 4 years at Aberdeen University as well as two and a half years’ national service in the RAF. Reuters was an ideal place to start because, as an organization which had outlets worldwide, it attached great importance to impartiality. For instance one of the first wars I covered was the Suez War. Since Reuters’ news coverage could be read anywhere – even in Egypt – we weren’t allowed to call anybody ‘the enemy’, and so we were brought up to think in terms of reporting the facts only and no comment. I felt that was a good career to have, to tell people honestly what the situation was without fear or favour.

In those days journalists had less prestige than they do today?  

They didn’t recruit from universities at all in those days. I was one of the first graduates to be taken on by Reuters. Generally, everybody had come up the hard way by starting on a provincial newspaper. Technically, reporting was also very basic. We had telex and the ordinary telephone and, having never learnt shorthand, I wrote in very fast longhand. Mostly, we were considered a miserable sort of ‘scribbler’. But things changed with Northern Ireland, and the British Army realized that they could in fact make allies out of the press. I do remember at the time of the Vietnam War, there was a big difference/comparison between how the Americans treated the press and the British. In 1965, after being in Vietnam I went to visit British troops in Borneo. It was at the time of ‘Confrontasie’ when we were helping the Malaysians against the Indonesians. The British Commander had banned all the press from the main headquarters. This was just such a total contrast to Vietnam, where I’d just come from, where, provided you had accreditation, everything was open to you and you had access to everyone. But the British Army was quite the reverse. It turned out that the CO had been furious at an article in the Daily Mirror and so he had banned all the press. Imagine if you did that today!

Was there ever a time when you felt there were things you couldn’t report?  

One was moved by the things one saw, I remember in Vietnam going to an orphanage where a little girl had just come back from Britain after being given an artificial leg and she was walking about on it in the orphanage and she was so thrilled. But internally you do cut off your emotions, partly because you’re so busy trying to get the story. I remember on another occasion, going to Cambodia and thinking it might have been a million miles away because it was just so beautiful. At that stage it was still untouched by war, and I thought that Vietnam must have been like this before it was ruined by war – the bombing was so terrible. All journalists are moved by war but you do feel you have a duty to report – there was nothing you wouldn’t report because it was so ghastly but you wouldn’t rub peoples’ noses in it. So, I never felt I couldn’t report something because it upset me too much.

The way journalists communicate has obviously changed significantly since you first began your career in the 1950s – do you feel this has been for the better?  

At the end of my period with ITN, for example, covering the 1st Gulf War, which was one of the last things I did – I found that you were always at the end of the line from London, wanting this, that and the other – I began to wonder how people had the time to get the story when they were always being asked to talk to the producer! It was an added strain on them. The fact that you’ve got a satellite or a mobile means that the producer can always get you at any time, and so you are less of an independent spirit.

In the 1980s, you were one of the first television journalists to report on the war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union?  

Yes, in total, I reported on Afghanistan for nearly twenty years. I remember, one of the big stories was the fall of Kabul to the mujahedeen (freedom fighters) in 1992. It was very exciting after the long struggle against the Soviet Union. We drove into the city with the Tajik resistance leader, Ahmad Shah Massoud and his convoy. Just as the city of Kabul came in sight, it was dusk and they all got out of their vehicles and knelt on the road and prayed – it was very moving after all that had gone before.

By this time you had set up your charity – Sandy Gall’s Afghanistan Appeal. That is quite unusual for a journalist, isn’t it?  

Setting up the charity really happened by chance. There were two things which happened: one day I was with Massoud. There had been a Soviet offensive in the Panjshir valley and we were sitting in a side valley and one of his senior commanders, Abdul Wahid, came into the hut where we were sitting. He had a peg leg and Massoud said that he would like me to help him get an artificial leg. Although I told them there was a place in Roehampton, I am afraid when I got back to England I rather forgot about it. Sometime later, my wife Eleanor got a phone call from Abdul Wahid who had arrived in Sweden for a conference, and, through an interpreter, he was asking ‘What has Mr Gall done about my new leg?’ She was rather surprised, but he came to England and we did manage to get the money for him to get an artificial leg. He was thrilled to bits. That was the first thing.

The other thing which happened was that I had written a book about my first journey into Afghanistan, called Behind Russian Lines. It was the publicity woman at Sidgwick and Jackson who said ‘why don’t you start an appeal?’ My response was that I didn’t think journalists should start appeals because it could detract from one’s impartiality by perhaps appearing to favour one side. But she was so persuasive – and after the experience with Abdul Wahid – I agreed and the charity was set up to help the thousands of Afghans who had lost their limbs because of all the anti-personnel mines which the Soviets had dropped. We started with a clinic in Peshawar, and then, when the Soviets left Afghanistan, we opened one in Jalalabad. Just before the Taliban took Kabul in 1996 we opened another clinic in Kabul but the European Union withdrew the funding, the argument being that by giving money to charities working in Taliban areas, it allowed the Taliban to spend resources on other things, i.e. on military equipment. So with no funding we had to hand over the Kabul clinic to the Taliban who ran it on a shoestring. But the clinic in Jalalabad did continue and anyone who came to the clinic was treated, regardless of who they were. We have now provided artificial limbs for over 20,000 patients and physiotherapy treatment for over 50,000. The clinics also provide treatment for club foot which is prevalent in Afghanistan. Over the past three years, over 600 children have been successfully treated. And so I am very glad that I was, in a way, pushed into setting up the charity!

Visit http://www.sandygallsafghanistanappeal.org to learn more about what Sandy Gall’s appeal does.