At Green Templeton College in February 2024, with journalist Asad Hussain and Paddy Coulter.
In late October 2024, I happily travelled up to Oxford to chair a panel on the US election, hosted by the Oxford Media Society. It was a wonderful day, but one of my highlights as ever was getting to see the always brilliant and warm Paddy Coulter. Also as ever, he was on fine form, full of energy, enthusiasm, excellent stories – including on this occasion about performing for some aristocrats with the band he was in as a student, Aardvark, the name of which he mischievously observed in his reassuring lilt always got them to the top of any alphabetical billing – and generous with his introductions and praise. We had a good old natter and, as always with hilarious Paddy, a proper laugh. In his typically inclusive way, he suggested after dinner that I stay on in Oxford to spend time with him and investigative journalist Edwin Okoth, who was over from Kenya – my wonderful home for many years – and coming to stay with Paddy at his home the following day. I said that I couldn’t (oh how I wish I had) as I had committed to go to a preview of a new documentary about the 1984 Ethiopian famine and the LiveAid/We Are The World response.
Of course Paddy had something to say about that, having played a critical part in getting the BBC’s team to Korem in Ethiopia to make those iconic reports – a detail that he was characteristically low-key about sharing. I only myself discovered the key role that he had played after reading about it in Michael Buerk’s book, several years after I first met and got to know Paddy. We had a typical Paddy-value-adding conversation about all that and LiveAid and Comic Relief and where everything went and the changing face of aid and other projects in the works, and – after gifting me the perfect opener with which to introduce myself to Michael Buerk the following evening – he dashed off into the night.
I’m so grateful that then-Media Society president Vedanitya Dharwar asked me to come along and chair that panel, as that event turned out to be the last chance I would ever have to see Paddy. Just ten days later, which even now still feels totally impossible, he was gone.
I was lucky enough to first meet Paddy twenty years ago with Rachel O’Brien and Vishesh Srivastava, when we set up the Oxford Media Society as undergraduates. I remember him welcoming us at his office in Norham Gardens, when he was director of the Reuters Journalism Programme – just before he co-founded the great Reuters Institute with its extraordinary and international Fellowship – and feeling less intimidated than I should have been thanks to his warmth and openness.
He came on board as the Society’s founding senior member and gave us huge support and encouragement and generous access to his network. And not just for the Media Society events, but also for the Oxford Forum, a current affairs magazine published by the Society of which I was founding editor. Our roster of non-student contributors was ridiculously ambitious and Paddy helped to give me and the rest of our 19/20/21-year-old team the confidence to approach such big names. As I continued to observe, Paddy really did treat all people – regardless of age or background – with equal respect.
I ended up serving on the board of Oxford Today – Oxford University’s alumni magazine – alongside Paddy for several years in my 20s. The role gave me the opportunity to travel to Oxford most terms for board meetings and usually enjoy a delightful lunch or coffee with Paddy before or after, as well as to watch his masterful and sensitive handling of complex issues and sometimes tricky group dynamics. What an instructive experience it all was for my younger self.
After moving to Nairobi, I sadly saw less of Paddy, but we stayed in touch as my areas of interest became increasingly aligned with his. Humanitarian and human rights journalism, how the media and documentaries frame reporting from low- and middle-income countries and about global majority populations, and communicating around “development” have over time become key areas of focus of my own career. It was only in the context of this awful loss that I came to understand how much Paddy’s intellectual brilliance and foresight on these issues, as well as the impressive values that he consistently embodied and his firm belief in the vital role of a free press, influenced the course of my own work and outlook.
In early 2024, when I mercifully reconnected with Paddy and mercifully then saw a lot of him, he told me how unsure he’d been about taking on the founding senior member role with the Media Society. He said something along these lines as we sat – of course – outside the Rose and Crown: “I was worried it was yet another student society with some briefly enthusiastic undergraduates who would then head off into the world and leave me carrying the can and explaining your unpaid bills to the university. But then I came to your first event [at Modern Art Oxford with Nick Pollard from Sky News] and it was just brilliant and so professional and I was completely sold.”
He went on to repeat these comments several times, but we were the lucky ones – we couldn’t have asked for a more amazing, staunch and joyful supporter. With the Media Society enjoying a significant revival in recent years, celebrated at a 20th anniversary dinner co-hosted in February 2024 by then-Media Soc President Rachel Turner and her amazing team and Hertford College Principal Tom Fletcher (the Society’s latest senior member until he took up his current role as UN Humanitarian Chief), Paddy was again right there by its side, inspiring and encouraging a new generation of students. And of course was a vital and much-loved guest at the dinner too. In our final meeting, I learnt that he had helped foster a deeper connection between the Media Society and Oxford’s Geddes Trust, which I know will continue to fortify both in different ways. Since I wrote an earlier draft of this tribute, I have myself had the joy of being invited to join the board of the Geddes Trust. I will do everything I can to honour Paddy’s own legacy as a Geddes Trustee and as a stalwart supporter of journalism right across in the world, and especially among enthusiastic young people.
At the 20th anniversary dinner of the Oxford Media Society at Hertford College in February 2024, co-founders Vishesh Srivastava, Rachel O’Brien and I thanking Paddy (seated) for his early support of our initiative. Credit: Coco Cottam
Paddy was such a fantastic cheerleader of us all, and I personally witnessed and benefited from very active efforts on his part to support the careers of so many, with his keen understanding that a more diverse media is obviously and simply a better thing for our rich and diverse world.
There are a thousand more questions I want to ask Paddy, a thousand more things I want to discuss with him and ask for his advice on, and a thousand more stories I want to hear and also share with him. But then I always departed a conversation with Paddy wanting more. I’m so grateful to have had the chance to know him as I did and to have had both his gentle kindness and his incisive expertise as guiding forces in my life. I wish I could thank him over and over for all the positivity he brought into my – and our – world.
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To learn more about Paddy’s extraordinary, purpose-filled life, and some of the many significant things he did for our world, here are some beautiful tributes published in UK media and from several institutions in which he played an outsized role:
https://fjawards.com/events/Paddy-Coulter
https://www.gtc.ox.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/paddy-coulter-1946-2024/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/18/paddy-coulter-obituary?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other