Jeremy Harris writes:

ANY reader of the Church Times who has enjoyed even a sprinkling of the 600 articles Gerald Butt penned for the paper over four decades will have encountered some of the distinguishing characteristics not only of his craft but also of the man.

It is there in the calm, measured, deceptively straight-forward style of his writing. And in the reassuring confidence that you are in the presence of someone who really knows what he is talking about. Those qualities were also deeply rooted in the Gerald Butt I knew for nearly half a century.

We first met as news trainees at the BBC in 1974. There were eight of us in all, mostly straight out of university, and privately (or in some cases noisily) convinced that we were God’s gift to journalism. We were quite full of ourselves.

Gerald was different. Charming, wry, debonair, somewhat reserved, a sense of something held back. He already seemed (and was) more mature. An adult among ingénues.

He was also extremely handsome: tall, slim, dark-haired, with arresting eyes and an irresistible smile. It was no surprise to learn in later years that he was regarded by female colleagues as the best-looking man in BBC News. He certainly made an impression on the assistant to the head of our training scheme: Lynne Angus became his wife, and mother to their three children.

Gerald was also different from the rest of us in that he already knew what he wanted from a career in journalism. Few Middle East correspondents have been better equipped for that demanding post.

Born in Teheran, one of four children of a British banker, Archie Butt, and his wife, Muriel, Gerald’s early childhood years were spent in the Middle East. After boarding school in Somerset, he studied at SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He spoke Arabic, not a qualification to which every correspondent in the region could lay claim. Even before joining the BBC, Gerald was already working for a London-based magazine specialising in the Middle East. There was a sense of inevitability about what would follow.

But not even Gerald’s outstanding journalistic credentials and careful preparation can have readied him fully for the chaos, violence, and constant danger that greeted the new BBC correspondent on arrival in Beirut in 1983, as the dormant civil war in Lebanon reignited with appalling ferocity.

Predictably, Gerald rose to the occasion with distinction. His reporting of the conflict, and of the spiralling and deadly shock waves it sent across the region, was remarkable both for its quality and for the personal courage, in the face of extreme danger, that made it possible. He was rightly named Sony Radio Reporter of the year in 1984.

Reporting from Beirut was difficult enough; raising a young family there, simply impossible. After a nerve-shredding escape through the battle-zone, Lynne and their two small daughters were air-lifted to Cyprus. Gerald joined them, rebasing the BBC office in Nicosia.

It was the beginning of a deep love affair with Cyprus, which continued to exercise a magnetic pull on Gerald for the rest of his life. Unsurprising then, that he should return to the island on completing another challenging posting for the BBC. This time it was to Jerusalem in 1987, where once again his extraordinary sense of journalistic timing came into play; his arrival pretty much coinciding with the start of the Palestinian Intifada. And again, in another highly testing environment, the hallmarks of his journalism were deployed to the full: the measured, balanced clarity of observation, the quiet wisdom, and the sense of a wider perspective.

Back in Cyprus in 1990, Gerald embarked on a new stage in his career, forming a freelance partnership with Jim Muir, another distinguished Middle-East hand. The freelance life offered exciting new scope for Gerald’s skill and expertise, and he was much in demand as an author, analyst, consultant, columnist, and commentator. The Church Times was an enduring beneficiary of this new and expanded position.

It was also in Cyprus that another great passion of Gerald’s life found expression: flying. Having obtained his pilot’s licence, some of his most-rewarding hours were spent far away from the raucous strife of the region, in the clear blue skies above the Eastern Mediterranean. It was undoubtedly a passion that helped to inspire one of his most original books: History in the Arab Skies traces the previously uncharted impact of aviation on the Middle East.

If flying gave him fresh perspectives on the world to which he devoted his professional life, it also helped in his quest for inner peace. It spoke strongly to his sense of the spiritual and the immanence of God. Flying was akin to a religious retreat, a space where he could explore and test his faith and his doubt. In his last days, as illness consumed him, that experience helped to sustain him.

He did not do that alone. Cyprus had also wrought other changes, chiefly in the shape of his second wife, Tabitha Morgan, a fellow journalist. They eventually moved back to the UK, settling in Malvern and raising a son.

Gerald continued to travel regularly to the Middle East, his interest undimmed, his knowledge ever more encyclopaedic. He was planning another visit when his fatal illness was diagnosed.

Paul Handley adds: Of the jewels bequeathed to me by my predecessor as editor, John Whale, one of the brightest was Gerald Butt, whose journalism allowed the Church Times to cover one of the most complex periods in the history of a region that generates complexity.

Without his expertise, the paper would have struggled to represent accurately the shifting and often confrontational relationship between the Israelis and the Palestinians. His frequent visits to the West Bank and Gaza provided overwhelming evidence of the oppression of the Palestinians, but he had no illusions about the Palestinian leadership, and the uneasy position of the small (and diminishing) Christian community was the focus of many of his stories.

He was always scrupulously fair in his coverage of Israeli politics, though his Arabist roots made him a figure of concern to certain factions within the Israeli government, even after he had left the BBC. I was once invited to breakfast by someone from the Israeli embassy to discuss, I assumed, tourism in the Holy Land. It became clear that Gerald’s work for the paper was the real topic of conversation. It was a short breakfast.

Later on, Gerald’s grasp of languages enabled him to test the waters around the region during the Arab Spring, comparing what the Western press said about the flourishing democracy movements with more local, more cautious, and, eventually, more accurate opinions of its likelihood of survival.

Throughout his decades with the paper, he performed for the paper one of the most valuable services of a specialist: warning us when something being widely reported was not really worth covering. This meant that when he did write something, it was always worth reading.

Gerald Arthur Butt died in Banbury, Oxfordshire, on 15 September, aged 72.