August 11, 2009


FINEST HOUR EDITOR EMERITUS

Victoria, B.C., March 9th— I knew Ron Robbins only by letter or over the phone, but on countless occasions for twenty years I was glad to have him there. Ron had observed Churchill as a young reporter in the House of Commons, and knew him intimately, with an intimate appreciation that was never diminished by firsthand experience. Ron was Old School, possessing neither computer nor cell phone. He preferred to send fastidiously typed contributions, rarely corrected with White-Out. For that reason, when FH senior editors began to communicate frequently by email, we bumped him to Editor Emeritus.

He was a dear friend, and even though he made it to 93, it is very sad to know those contributions will end, though a number sent recently remain to be published. His generosity to the magazine was profound, his praise of its editor deeply encouraging. Herewith by kind permission of the Globe and Mail, secured through the offices of Terry Reardon of ICS Canada, a report by someone who knew him well. RML

JOURNALIST AND POET
NICK RUSSELL

Who knew he was a prize-winning swimmer, or a Royal Navy veteran and survivor of a prisoner-of-war camp? Or a poet and a novelist? Ron (Robbie) Robbins was known as a tough and competitive journalist, and later as the founder of a journalism school, but his past lives were intensely private. Even those who knew him well were rarely able to draw him out.

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If pressed he might admit that he was born on a Welsh sheep farm and that his first news story was published in a Welsh daily when he was 9. (He was still writing when he was 90.) After school, he moved to Hertfordshire, became a correspondent for The Times, then joined British United Press on Fleet Street. He loved the urgency of reporting and the drama of watching news unfold, and developed a life-long admiration for Sir Winston Churchill from covering his speeches in the House of Commons.

Robbie volunteered early for the Royal Navy. He told me his 1955 novel, Blood for Breakfast, was closely based on his own experience. Certainly his very occasional references in conversation to the Nazis sinking his ship, his capture, the attempted “mutiny” and subsequent trial for “treason,” his years in POW camp and a 200-mile forced march across Upper Silesia, all occur in the book.

He refused to dwell on the hell of Stalag XXB, preferring to recall creating a secret camp newspaper, News from Nowhere, typed on a Nazi typewriter while officially recording 3000 names for the Red Cross. News items were gathered via a radio stolen from a freight train and hidden in the latrines, which were so filthy, he would gleefully say, that the Germans never ventured there.

After the war, he worked for the Press Association and the BBC. In about 1952, he emigrated to Canada with Kay, who he met in school and to whom he was married for forty-seven years, and joined Canadian Press in Toronto and then the CBC International Service in Montreal. With the explosive postwar growth of television news, he moved to CBC National News in Toronto, eventually becoming national news director. Robbie helped build a young TV news operation into a goliath known for breaking stories and for outstanding election coverage.

After twenty-five years with TV news he retired, and was quickly head-hunted by the University of Regina to found a new journalism school. He rose to the challenge with fierce energy and commitment, designing classes, hiring teachers, setting up scholarships, chairs and internships, and harassing people from coast to coast for donations. The result was a small but respected school that made a significant impact, particularly to Prairie newsrooms.

As a youth, the feisty little Welshman with the amazing eyebrows was a prize-winning swimmer, and kept swimming into his 80s. He and Kay were keen tennis players, and played into their 70s. But perhaps they were happiest fishing together: Robbie once boasted they had caught fish in every Canadian province! He was bereft when she died fifteen years ago.

He disliked cars and I believe he never drove, but despite his war experience he loved the sea—swimming, fishing, sailing—and lived within yards of it in Victoria. As he wrote in a poem titled Land-Locked, “If I can but die within sight of the sea, That old dog-watch death won’t harry me.”

Robbie may have been faintly embarrassed about Blood for Breakfast. (At least, he’d never lend me a copy!) But he was quite comfortable about his poetry, and published an anthology called Out of Solitude, and dozens of other poems over subsequent decades.

It would be fascinating to know when Ronald William Robbins adopted Cynewulf as his middle name. It was a grand gesture, and he seems to have used the name of the Anglo-Saxon bard for all his poetry and writings on Churchill. Answering the phone, he’d simply bark, “Robbins!,” the subtext being, “Don’t waste time, we’ve got stories to tell and deadlines to meet!”

Robbie carried his respect for Churchill into his retirement, and was a frequent contributor to Finest Hour. But despite friends’ encouragement, he refused to write his own memoirs, for the same reason he rejected a funeral for himself, or even a memorial service. “Journalists report the news,” he’d say crisply, with a faint Welsh lilt. “They don’t make the news.” End of discussion.

His instructions regarding life-support at the end were equally pithy: “Pull the plug, old boy. It’s no fun being a vegetable.” Fortunately, when he succumbed at 93, it happened quickly.

While most of his friends and family predeceased him, he always welcomed visitors to his classy retirement home, which he irreverently referred to as “my dump.” He was fully aware of his own mortality, and was more than ready to “go and join Kay” after organizing one last project: He left his entire estate to the School of Journalism at the University of Regina, for a scholarship in Kay’s name. He leaves a cousin and a sister-in-law in England.

Articles by Ron Robbins in Finest Hour

Brendan Bracken: A Journalist’s Recollections,
FH 63, 2nd Quarter, 1989
Sir William Stephenson: “This One is Dear to My Heart,”
FH 67, 2nd Quarter 1990
Reporting Churchill: A Journalist Remembers,
FH 76, 3rd Quarter 1992
Great Contemporaries: Reith of the BBC,
FH 82, 1st Quarter, 1994
The Schooldays of Churchill’s Friends,
FH 86, Spring 1995
Douglas MacArthur: Churchill’s Caesar,
FH 91, Summer 1996
Unswerving Resolution, Glinting Intellect,
FH 97, Winter 1997-98
Churchill as Artist,
FH 100, Autumn 1998
His Genius Had a Philosophical Foundation,
FH 101, Winter 1998-99
The Mission (Poem),
FH 104, Autumn 1999
Sixty Years On: The Atlantic Charter,
FH 112, Autumn 2001
Operation Sea Lion,
FH 134, Spring 2007

THE MISSION
Ron Cynewulf Robbins
Finest Hour 104, Autumn 1999

History’s greedy hands
overcome another
tumultuous century.
Now dawns the
millennium with
this surety: on and below seas
in skies and orbit
and at every rampart
Freedom’s cause will
demand and foster heroes—
new Keepers of the Flame
who must, with our help,
be armed with
knowledge of Churchill’s courage;
their shared and
sacred mission
spans Time itself:
the guardian
shipand the expansion
of Liberty.

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