Chris Drake

Former BBC correspondent Chris Drake has died at his home in Limassol, aged 76. When Beirut became too hot for most Western journalists, from 1982 on, his freelance pieces from Nicosia were regularly the first BBC take on important Middle East events - but he was a player in big stories well before that.

Chris followed his father, a Daily Express reporter, into journalism, starting at 16 in the Barnstaple offices of the North Devon Journal Herald. London beckoned in the form of the Daily Mirror, and Chris was soon earning enough to own an E-type. 

He seems to have joined the BBC's ranks as a radio reporter in 1969, probably as part of a drive by new editor and former Daily Express man Peter Woon to liven things up. That year,  he interviewed Paul McCartney at his remote Scottish farm, to dispel the gathering 'Paul is dead' rumours, for Radio 4's The World This Weekend.

In 1972, as BBC network radio's man in Northern Ireland, he interviewed a British Army colonel in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, which first floated the idea that 'wanted men' had been victims.

From 1972 to 1974 he was part of the BBC team covering the Watergate scandal. He interviewed Muhammad Ali several times during the comeback fights against Frazier and Quarry.

He moved to Beirut in 1975, and was there at the outbreak of the civil war. He placed a microphone on the office roof to catch the sound of shelling. Like most hacks then, he stayed in the Commodore Hotel next door - and left his grey African parrot Coco as part of the hotel bar's fixtures and fittings for ten years. The parrot could do a good impression of incoming whistling shells, plus the opening notes of the Marseillaise and Beethoven's Ninth. The parrot was snatched by gunmen in 1987; Chris was by then in Cyprus, and offered a ransom, but to no avail. 

During his spell in Beirut, Chris rescued the wife and child of BBC friend and colleague Gerry Butt - Butt was stuck reporting from the Commodore, so Chris drove through the city to the family flat, which was suddenly at the centre of a militia battle, to get them out. He was later awarded the OBE. .