Read at Anthony’s Funeral
I’d like to thank Catherine and Anthony’s family for allowing me to say a few words. For although it is painful to stand before you today, above all else it is a great privilege.
Anthony was a dear friend to many people and I’m proud I was one of them. For me, he was a rare friend too. Someone I’d met as an adult but liked so much I wished I’d known as a child.
Maybe that is just sentimental indulgence. Really I should just be thankful I knew him as long as I did.
We became friends while working at the Daily Express 10 years ago. There were some tremendous characters in the office in those days, and with them came high jinks, playful banter and general devilment. You had to keep your wits about you. More often than not Anthony was at the centre of the mayhem; always razor sharp, always funny – the mischief maker-in-chief.
Some weeks after he joined the paper he found me admiring my first picture byline. I didn’t really know him very well at the time but he took one look at the picture and said: ‘You should have got them to airbrush the double chin.’
That was the only other time he made me cry, even though I’m sure he was simply being ironic. Either way we became great pals soon afterwards and that’s when the put downs – or laser guided missiles as they sometimes felt – got worse. Only Anthony could have got away with them.
Like many of us here today I knew Anthony as an extremely fine journalist. There are many reasons why he was so good, not least because I believe he understood human nature better than any reporter I’ve ever met. I also think he was much more talented than he himself cared to believe – and I remember telling him so on many occasions – but he would always disagree. His natural humility wouldn’t allow it.
He did his best work at the Express while in Macedonia during the Kosovo conflict. He was there for about six weeks and, as well as chronicling the military build-up, filed countless human interest stories from the teeming refugee camps. It seemed to me that he outclassed the opposition every day. When he returned I replaced him – an unenviable task – and inherited his driver, a Serb, and his translator, an Albanian.
They picked me up at the border and I recall clearly that the translator’s first words to me were:
‘Do you know Anthony Mitchell.’
I replied with prudence that I knew him only vaguely. It was often safer that way with Anthony. I needn’t have worried. For the next two hours all I got from the pair of them was :’Anthony is so funny’, ‘Anthony is such a great guy’, ‘Anthony is such a great reporter….’
And all this from two men on opposite sides of a bitter and bloody conflict. It struck me as amusingly ironic that the Serb and Albanian were agreed on one thing at least…the glory of Anthony Mitchell. And this was a side of my friend I hadn’t glimpsed before: Anthony the peacemaker. But surely Anthony must have teased you, I asked the translator. ‘Of course, ‘ he replied laughing. ‘He reminded us every day that he disliked Albanians and Serbs equally.’
I loved Anthony’s sense of fun, his warmth, his kindness, his generosity, his irreverence, his contempt for pretension in all its forms and his adventurous spirit.
Chris spoke of what a wonderful husband, father, son and brother he was. It is something that cannot be stated often enough.
One of my happiest memories of Anthony is of a visit we made to London Zoo with our two sons. We had a great day, although it did seem rather strange, incongruous even, for the two of us to be pushing prams through Regent’s Park. Inevitably we joked about where it had all gone so wrong – when of course the exact opposite was true.
I will never forget that day but I will remember Anthony like this: blazing across the world full of mischief, full of love, making everybody laugh.
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