So Who Was Sir Geoffrey Cox?
In my reply to a comment on yesterday’s post on The Loser in NZ Film, I asked the question: “How many people reading this blog for example know who Sir Geoffrey Cox was—and the amazing things he did—without having to go and look him up?”
Anyway, having asked the “question rhetorical”, I thought I should perhaps answer it today—and even if you do already know all about Sir Geoffrey Cox, I think he lived such an amazing life that it’s worth mentioning who he was and what he did anyway. So here’s what I know:
Geoffrey Cox was a New Zealander and a graduate of the University of Otago who went to Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar in the early 1930s. During his time as a student he visited the then Soviet Union—and was not impressed by what he saw. He also visited Germany during the 1933-4 period, including attending a Nuremberg rally, and was chilled by the implications of what he experienced and its implications for European peace. Cox became a journalist in 1935 and covered the Spanish civil war, breaking the story of the fall of Madrid to nationalist forces. He also broke the 1939 story of British troops arriving in France at the beginning of the Second World War, and a short time after reported on the Winter War in Finland.
Later, Cox joined the NZ Army, in Intelligence, and served in Crete, North Africa and Italy, and also spent time at the NZ embassy in Washington. After the war he returned to journalism and was involved with ITN (Independent Television News) as a news editor from its beginnings in the mid 1950s. As I understand it, he is credited with having introduced film footage as an integral part of the news service during the Suez Crisis. In 1967 he started the News at Ten programme, beinging news reporting into peak television time on a mass audience channel.
Geoffrey Cox was knighted in 1966 for services to journalism and went on to co-found Yorkshire Television and hold a number of other prominent television and related news roles before retiring in 1982. He also wrote a number of books, mainly based around his war reporting experiences. He died in 2008, an outstanding New Zealander whose life included both amazing achievements and a legacy in terms of journalism and news reporting that continues to influence our lives today.
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I’ve done this ‘off the cuff’,’ but my prior sources of information about Sir Geoffrey Cox include:
— A University of Otago Library exhibition on NZ Rhodes Scholars, including Cox;
— The Obituaries for Sir Geoffrey Cox printed in The Times and Guardian newspapers;
— Dance of the Peacocks by James McNeish (2003, Vintage, Random House, New Zealand);
— And of course, Wikipedia!