John Le Carre invited few people to Tregiffian Cottage, his isolated home on the clifftops of Cornwall where he wrote Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Smiley’s People and The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. Yet Le Carre, (real name David Cornwall) let Olga Craig interview him at his sanctuary. After wrapping up formalities in time for a good lunch, they talked through the afternoon and way into the night, sharing memories, opinions and the best part of a bottle of whisky. Mrs Le Carre had to make up a bed for Olga since she had missed the last train to Truro.
That Olga had huge amounts of Northern Irish charm and wit about her, undoubtedly eased the interview process. But what really made her an outstanding journalist with such extraordinary range and depth, was that she always asked the right questions. She would gently and persistently peel back the layers until she got to the heart of the story before hitting the keys of what became known as ‘Olga’s Golden Typewriter’. At great speed and often under intense pressure, she would always produce immaculate copy whether profiling a celebrity, picking through the aftermath of a bombing or writing up a report in the less-than-ideal conditions of a foreign conflict.
Olga’s interviewing and reporting were legendary and the products of her fierce intelligence, lack of prejudice, immense curiosity, an innate sense of fairness and compulsion to tell the story as it was. She was never in awe of anyone and had a special sort of courage that was both physically daring and moral. As a rebellious schoolgirl, Olga would cheekily outwit the headmaster, then in a career in newspapers that lasted more than forty years, she would neatly side-step a publicist’s demands with the same self-assurance that got her past the gunmen of Northern Ireland and Iraq.
She grew up and learned her trade during ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland
Olga was born in 1957, in County Tyrone in Northern Ireland and grew up in the little village of Gortin (pronounced Gorchin) before the family moved to a Protestant housing estate in Omagh. Her dad Ernie was a bus conductor, an Ulster Loyalist who kept a photograph of Ian Paisley on his wall. Her mum, Jean, trained as a bookkeeper and worked for a hospital in Omagh. Olga went to the local academy and her brother Tom, just two years her senior, recalls teenage years of having to haul his “wee sister” out of pub dances and shepherding her safely home.
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Olga’s upbringing offered no obvious middle-class shortcuts into the world of journalism. Rather, the family she adored all her life, gave her an unshakable belief in her own abilities. If this spilled over into stubbornness, then she was quickly forgiven. Like Kenneth Branagh, she grew up with, and was immersed in, the poetry and drama of everyday Northern Ireland. An inspirational teacher of English, Kate Hinds, fostered her love of language and literature at school while her dad mesmerised her with stories of his time as a teenage Spitfire pilot during the Second World War. Her mother simply assumed there was nothing Olga couldn’t achieve if she applied herself. But then there was also the growing up in a socially conservative country that became engulfed in violence. Olga was just 11 years old when The Troubles began and like others of that generation, spent her adolescence and twenties, learning how to ‘read’ a room and be watchful on the streets.
Secretarial college at 18 after A levels was clearly a means to an end and Olga soon after became a trainee journalist with the Derry Journal, whose masthead in gothic font still boasts “news you can trust since 1772”. From there, she went to the Belfast News Letter perhaps lured by its one-upmanship of “news you can trust since 1737”. Still in circulation, it is the oldest daily English language newspaper in the world. It was there that Olga found her feet and her journalistic voice. She learned her craft by passing proper journalism exams and pounding the streets on ‘doorknocks’, police calls, fires and council meetings, all of which had added meaning in the Belfast of the times.
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She practised how to write longer pieces that did their best to explain the human motives and tragedy behind horror of the atrocities. But she also championed the achievements and plight of the ordinary reader and did so with with the same zeal that she defended herself and fellow journalists in NUJ meetings. Olga became the News Letter’s ‘Tuesday Girl’, running a weekly column that began tentatively and grew into a powerful voice for feminism and equality. For all this, she and her colleagues earned many awards.
Contract with Daily Mail followed her coverage of Kitty Phair case
A turning point came in the late 1989, when Olga learned about a young Belfast woman Kitty Phair who had been brutally raped and as a result had ended up in a wheelchair. Olga wrote about this with a fury, at first about the attack, and then about the language and tactics used in court by the defence barristers. Olga’s outrage at how the legal system had heaped more misery on the poor woman produced a series of electric news features that were noticed by the editors of the Daily Mail in London who gave her a six-month contract. By then, she had had a decade as a journalist in the toughest of ‘patches’ and thirty years working out what made people ‘tick.’ Little wonder that she was then poached by the Daily Express and then, Today.
Olga’s arrival in 1990 at Today’s Vauxhall Bridge Road offices caused an immediate stir. She was a tiny woman with neat, coppery hair, a well-cut maroon suit and a gentle but authoritative Irish lilt. Olga was immediately identified as a star, a ‘grown up’ who had clearly not been hired to do case histories, endless vox pops or ‘top ten’ lists. The then editor, David Montgomery, also from Ulster, put Olga on a complicated three-part series in her first week. While he was not a man readily given to feelings of awe, Olga quickly won Montgomery’s trust and admiration and she became the ‘go to’ reporter for every big news ‘backgrounder’ on any natural or man-made disaster, missing child, murder or scandal which required elegant, factually accurate and humane copy written at great speed.
Pestered David Montgomery to cover 1991 Iraq war
Yet such were the gender-based conventions of the time, even Olga had to pester Montgomery for weeks before she was allowed to join the roster of war correspondents sent to the first Iraq conflict in 1991. Over time, Olga built a deserved reputation as a cool-headed and courageous war correspondent. But her career near the front line almost spluttered to a halt at Amman in Jordan where her Irish charm failed for many weeks to obtain a visa. Desperate to get to the action, she nevertheless saw the funny side and had a tee-shirt made up, emblazoned with the closing lines of a John Milton sonnet, “They also serve who only stand and wait”. If there was a joke to be told, Olga would tell it, often against herself. To Olga, any anything could be humorous, except when it was deadly serious, and then you daren’t cross the line.
After Today closed in 1995, Olga perfected the art of the long newspaper essay during her years at The Sunday Times and The Sunday Telegraph where she built a reputation as a war correspondent. Undoubtedly, the Northern Ireland years shaped her reporting of foreign conflict as she was drawn to the human cost of war rather than the military strategy and hardware. Years after the Bosnian conflict, Olga was still in touch with a young refugee from Macedonia whose family she helped save. Similarly, she tracked down a young woman from Kosovo whom she’d met and was still, after ten years, a refugee looking for a permanent home.
Rescued by the SAS after being wounded in Bosnia
Olga was certainly fearless and in the second Gulf conflict of 2003, was one of the first to get to the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr and Basra before being medically evacuated back to the UK when a virus eroded the cornea of one eye. Seven years earlier, she had been hit by shrapnel at Mostar in Bosnia and was rescued by the SAS. She made light of both.
Olga always wrote graphically and never histrionically, always conscious of the suffering of civilians and the dignity that should be afforded them. But she could also step back and analyse the geopolitics of war. As she told the Press Gazette in April 2003: “The British and American forces had expected this would be rather an old-fashioned war, where our troops wore uniforms and their troops wore uniforms and everyone knew who everyone was. Instead, we had Iraqis in civilian clothes, carrying a white flag and they would just open up with a Kalashnikov.”
Perhaps the most emotionally challenging conflict story was from her return in 1998 to her home town of Omagh to pick through the horror and devastation of the Real IRA bombing which had killed 29 people. Olga knew the dissident tribes and their offshoots by heart, especially those who opposed the Good Friday agreement. Two years later when another car bomb went off outside the BBC’s London headquarters, Olga headed not for Broadcasting House but to a South Armagh republican pub where they were yelling “F*** you, Gerry (Adams). We’re not beat yet, you Provo cowards”.
She charmed criminals and tricky celebrities
Olga was probably unique in that she was a war correspondent and essayist who was also a dab hand at celebrity interviews and was particularly good at winning the respect of jaded, difficult men, some with particular notoriety. The armed robber Charles Bronson whom she interviewed at the category A HMP Woodhill, was particularly taken with Olga’s write-up. He sent her a self-portrait with the words “I always thought journalists were liars until I met Olga Craig”. This, she had framed and kept in her downstairs bathroom as any of her dinner party guests would later testify. Then there was John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten), the ageing enfant terrible of punk, whom she charmed into giving her a very revealing interview that was both hilarious and moving. They got on so well, Olga delayed her flight by a week after he insisted she be guest of honour at one of his Hollywood parties.
These interviews (and there were many over the years) were not about Olga taking it easy in middle age. They were, in their way, every bit as challenging as the war reporting because they required an ethical rather than physical courage. And Olga had that in spades. She was never weighed down by a middle-class hesitation about asking difficult questions nor could she be distracted by a hovering publicist or deluded into thinking she was a celebrity’s friend. She was a journalist there to do a job and would not be leaving until she had what she judged to be enough for an honest and penetrating profile.
Olga’s final staff job before retirement was at The Mail on Sunday where she joined the features department as an assistant editor and would often be found on a Friday night cheerfully running up silk purses from sows’ ears. With yet another world exclusive saved, Olga would trot off to the pub with her closest confidantes muttering that it would have been easier if she had been the interviewer in the first place. All there were forced to agree that she was right.
Trusted because of her reputation for fairness
With all these journalistic achievements and many beside, it would be easy for Olga to have been grand. But not a bit of it. “Honey, I’m just a humble, old hack”, she would say with a twinkle in her eye. She was a star who knew how to be a good team player and for that, she was loved and admired in equal measure. She was trusted by editors who knew she had squeezed the last drop out of a story and her copy would be pin sharp. She was trusted by interviewees and agents because of her reputation for fairness. And she was trusted by her colleagues because they knew she would defend them with the same fair-minded ferocity that she used to stand up for herself.
When news emerged of Olga’s death after a short stay in hospital at the ‘rock star’ age of 67, there was a spontaneous and heartfelt cry of anguish from stunned friends and colleagues around the world who re-told stories of her brilliance, her little acts of kindness, her self-deprecating humour and, of course, the many hilarious, gossipy nights out in the pub. It was generally agreed that Olga was excellent company, happy to hold court and regale the company of how she’d paid a £2500 vet’s fees on the wrong stray cat or got hopelessly lost in Berkshire on her way to the Hungerford shooting.
Other memories were more private. To many an unnamed reporter involved in some misdemeanour on the road, she was a ‘big sister’ quietly smoothing things over with the news editor. To others, she was that increasingly rare person in newspapers, a lifelong mentor who taught by example, without being overtly conscious of it.
It would be tempting to conclude on an upbeat note about imagining Olga sitting in that great bar in the skies, cigarette in one hand, sauvignon blanc in the other, gossiping with other dearly departed journalists. Yet even now, it’s possible to feel a tap on the shoulder and hear Olga whispering in that unmistakable throaty Belfast lilt: “Now then, doll face. That’s a bit of a tired old cliché, isn’t it. Shall we just leave it out.?”. Olga was invariably right.
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