In memory of David Haworth

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It is with great sadness that we report the death in Brussels (18/5/23) of one of the AEJ’s veteran members, David Haworth, whose long career went back to the Daily Sketch. Later he was London Observer correspondent in Brussels, and for a time also European Commission spokesman in Washington. He was from the 1970s on, a correspondent among others for the International Herald Tribune, the Irish Times, and for a Finnish paper.

His typically well-informed 2007 article https://www.politico.eu/article/will-europe-follow-finnish-trends/ about the Finnish press was written at a time when he was, briefly, founder and editor of the quirky, brilliant, and witty but alas short-lived Continental quarterly. His partner in the enterprise was his friend Pat Humphreys, our new Treasurer, author and long-time Helsinki correspondent.

The funeral ceremony will be at Brussels crematorium in Uccle, next Friday at 12:00-12:30. Pat is overseeing David’s wish to have his ashes scattered over one of his favourite places, the huge Lake Saimaa in Finland’s south-eastern lakeland. This will beat the beginning of July.

The AEJ’s honorary president, Otmar Lahodynsky, writes from Bangkok airport:

I will miss David Haworth as a long-time friend. He was a fine journalist who not only reported on Europe from Brussels, most recently for the Irish Times.

David was a humorous, clever,and well-read man. He was also an active member of the British section of AEJ, which he helped to establish in the late 1960s. He deeply regretted Brexit and was furious about his colleague in Brussels at the time, one Boris Johnson, for his fake news reports. When Johnson’s predecessor as correspondent for the Daily Telegraph visited his British colleagues in Brussels, David remembered, Boris invited everyone to a pub and then suddenly had no money. His colleagues had to pay.

I always enjoyed seeing David in Brussels at his favourite Italian restaurant in Rue
Archimède and also in his favourite Viennese café, Alt Wien. together with his lovely Austrian partner Ulli Braun. Both were thinking of settling for their retirement in their nice house in Brunn am Gebirge, near Vienna. It was not to be.

I learned of his death during my trip through Bhutan. Yesterday I climbed up to the rock monastery Tiger’s Nest at 3000 metres above sea-level. In the temples I said Buddhist prayers for the dead, which a monk recited to me. He told me that David had already reached eternity. Farewell, my friend.

Our colleague in America, Llewellyn King, also has fond memories of David

David was unique, acerbic, kind and supremely generous — generous in ways that are not common: He shared his friends and his institutions. I have to thank him for bringing me into the European fold many years after I left Europe.

He first shared his Brussels contacts with me. Once I was writing a story about the potential impact of Europe on America and had an assignment to talk to everyone who might know. The many who knew or who might know were in David’s Rolodex. David opened his sources to me and I toured interviewing ambassadors and politicians, some in high office. I think few colleagues, if any, would have been as open with their sources.

He introduced me to Finland and his family of friends there; to Ireland and the wonders of the Humbert Summer School at which Linda and I participated for over 20 years; and to the Association of European Journalists which has become important to us for its work and the friendships that have flowed from it.

As to David’s background as a journalist; I know he worked at the Daily Sketch and that he wrote for the International Herald Tribune, I think the Observer, and several Irish newspapers. He was an exceptional writer, and his classical education always showed. He went to Westminister and he went to uni, but I’m not sure which one.

His work at the European Commission took him to Washington where I met him — for me, a blessed event. He freelanced for one of my newsletters on the food and beverage industry.

He was a film buff.

Superb company, David added to the wealth of his friends in real and spiritual ways.

Edward Steen, who also knew David well in Brussels, writes:

David was such a good, unusual fellow, witty and mischievous, with great patience about the various sadnesses inflicted on him during his life. Above all he had a poet’s sense of what really matters – wine and laughter and the love of friends. His eyes would ligfht up on beingintroduced to new people or to new experiences. It was such a shame David was not with us for one last round at the AEJ conference in Greece last October.My profound sympathies to his son and charming daughter, and especially Ulli, who has been such a brick and amazing pal to David through thick and thin.