David Capper

Former BBC Northern Ireland Correspondent David Capper has died aged 91.

He nearly didn't become a journalist at all.  Born in Belfast, he went to Campbell College, not far from Stormont, as a boarder. After school, he “hung about for a while” at home in Newtownards, and toyed with the idea of going into the Merchant Navy or becoming a tree surgeon. Billy Doggart, editor of the Newtownards Chronicle, came calling to interview his mother, as Lady Captain of Donaghadee Golf Club, and not long afterwards, in Autumn 1949, David was a junior reporter. 

One big story under his byline was the sinking of the Stranraer/Larne roll-on/roll-off ferry, the Princess Victoria, with the loss of 135 lives. He then spent a few years working in Vancouver and in local papers around Niagara Falls, returning to Northern Ireland to be the first editor of a revived Portadown Times in 1957, aged 23, and launch editor of the Ulster Star, Lisburn.  Then came a move to the Belfast Telegraph and finally the BBC, after several attempts, in 1962. 

At the BBC he was first a 'regional journalist', and then one of a team of reporters for the regional opt-out, morphing from "The Six O'Clock" to "Scene Around Six" at the start of The Troubles in 1968.  By the time of Bloody Sunday in 1972 he was a Uher-carrying Ireland correspondent for national radio, and his taped report of gunfire provided part of his evidence to the Saville Inquiry in 2001. 

He loved radio, after early freelance work in Canada; his daughter remembers him 'on-site mixing' a report in which he wanted to hear a marching band passing. He sat in his car recording with the window open, then closing it as he started to read his script into the mike. 

During the Falklands War, he was sent to beef up cover in Buenos Aires. He left the BBC shortly after reporting the Enniskillen bomb in 1987. 

After that came a few years travelling and teaching journalism in places such as Mauritius, Seychelles and Cameroon before home and an agreement to become Donaghadee Correspondent of the Co Down Spectator with a by-line every week and a full page of news: “It was a licence to be nosy, but also to try to do something for the town”. 

Apart from travel, his passions included golf, narrow gauge steam railways and jazz - Ottilie Patterson in particular, but other favourites included Bessie Smith, Bunny Berigan, Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke and locally Ken Smylie and the Apex Jazz Band.