Early Life and Education
The son of a furrier, Forsyth was born in Ashford, Kent. He was educated at Tonbridge School and later attended the University of Granada in Spain. Before becoming a journalist, he joined the RAF and was a jet fighter pilot. He joined Reuters in 1961 and later the BBC in 1965, where he served as an assistant diplomatic correspondent.
In A BBC Documentary on the Nigerian Civil War, Forsyth reported on his early activities as a journalist. His early career was spent covering French affairs and the attempted assassination of Charles De Gaulle. He had never been to what he termed "black Africa" until he was made BBC correspondent reporting on the Nigerian Civil War between Biafra and Nigeria as a BBC correspondent. He was there for the first six months of 1967, but few expected the war to last very long considering the poor weaponry and preparation of the Biafrans when compared to the British-armed Nigerians. After his six months were over, however, Forsyth - eager to carry on reporting - approached the BBC to ask if he could have more time there. He noted their response:
"I was told quite bluntly, then, 'it is not our policy to cover this war.' This was a period when the Vietnam War was front-page headlines almost every day, regarded broadly as an American c**k-up, and this particularly British c**k-up in Nigeria was not going to be covered. I smelt news management. I don't like news management. So I made a private vow to myself: 'you may, gentlemen, not be covering it, but I'm going to cover it.' So I quit and flew out there, and stayed there for most of the next two years."
He thus returned to Biafra as a freelance reporter, writing his first book The Biafra Story, in 1969.
Read more about this topic: Frederick Forsyth
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“Early education can only promise to help make the third and fourth and fifth years of life good ones. It cannot insure without fail that any tomorrow will be successful. Nothing “fixes” a child for life, no matter what happens next. But exciting, pleasing early experiences are seldom sloughed off. They go with the child, on into first grade, on into the child’s long life ahead.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)
“Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“Major [William] McKinley visited me. He is on a stumping tour.... I criticized the bloody-shirt course of the canvass. It seems to me to be bad “politics,” and of no use.... It is a stale issue. An increasing number of people are interested in good relations with the South.... Two ways are open to succeed in the South: 1. A division of the white voters. 2. Education of the ignorant. Bloody-shirt utterances prevent division.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)