When Sandy Gall was marched to an execution cell splattered with blood

The Herald Scotland

30-06-2025

Died: June 29, 2025
Sandy Gall, who has died aged 97, was a Scottish journalist and author who became known to millions for his war reports and as an ITN news anchorman.
Gall's career spanned six decades. He was present at the British withdrawal from Suez, the fall of Saigon, reported from both Gulf Wars and issued the first bulletins from a liberated Kuwait, but he was best known for his reports from Afghanistan, where he travelled with Mujahideen rebels fighting Russian occupation.
While undoubtedly an intrepid figure with a taste for adventure, Gall was also grounded (a father of four, he was very much a part of his Kent village community) and had a deep sense of humanity, setting up a medical charity in Afghanistan.
Born Henderson Alexander Gall in Malaya to Scottish parents (his father was a rubber planter), he spent his first four years in Penang, an experience he credited with giving him his love of foreign places. He then returned to Scotland to live with relatives in chilly Aberdeenshire, which remained his home after his father retired to Banchory. Gall boarded at what is now called Glenalmond College (then Trinity College, Glenalmond) before studying modern languages at Aberdeen University, graduating in 1952.
He applied to a Reuters training course for foreign correspondents while still a student and was turned down for it, but, undeterred, tried again the following year after a few months spent working at the Press & Journal. This time, he was successful. He was posted to Berlin, then Aden and Hungary in 1957, where he met his wife-to-be, Eleanor, who was working at the British Embassy.
During his 10 years at Reuters, he had some of his riskiest assignments, including a visit to Congo in 1960, when he and two other journalists were surrounded by an angry mob in a military camp and told they were to be shot as spies. It took UN negotiators to arrange their release.
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In 1963, Gall moved to ITN where he worked until 1992. For 20 years he was co-presenter of News At Ten, but also continued reporting from overseas, covering three Arab-Israeli wars and the Lebanese civil war. In 1972, he was sent to Uganda, which was under the control of the savage and capricious Idi Amin. After detailing Amin's atrocities, Gall was rounded up with other journalists and marched to what he later learned was an execution cell – a hut spattered with blood from which he was lucky to emerge alive. He was deported three days later, remarking afterwards that he had never been so glad to leave the ground.
He visited Afghanistan for the first time in 1982, the year of the Russian occupation, and was struck immediately by what he saw as the similarity between the mujahideen and the proud, independent Scottish clans of the 17th and 18th centuries.
Gall addressed British audiences from among the mujahideen in the mountains, reporting on attacks against Russian forces by Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Lion of the Panjsher, whom he described as 'the most able and the most moderate' of the rebel leaders. His stories of the freedom fighters harrying the great military power captured viewers' imagination. That initial visit was followed by further assignments in 1984 and 1986.
Gall set up Sandy Gall's Afghanistan Appeal in 1983, to help those whose lives he had seen blighted by war. To do this, he had to overcome his scruples, as he later explained, knowing that there would be times when objectivity in his reporting would become impossible if he was to avoid reprisals against the clinic.
The charity was established to help soldiers and civilians who had lost limbs to landmines, and also children born with club feet or hip displacement. It came to be called the Kabul Orthopaedic Organisation, processing more than 8,000 people a year.
In 2010, Gall was awarded the Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George in recognition of his charity work in Afghanistan. He also wrote three books on the country.
Gall remarked in 2012 that he did not miss being a war correspondent, being all too aware of the very real dangers it entailed. As well as Afghanistan, he wrote on other subjects, producing The Bushmen of Southern Africa, a book about indigenous people forced into reservations by the Botswana government.
He was a keen golfer and family man. Brought up in the Church of Scotland, he said aged 76 that he was not a very devout Christian, but appreciated tradition, remarking that a service in the village church in Penshurst, Kent, would be 'a nice way to go'.
He hoped his funeral would be a celebration, adding: 'There would be good claret and Chardonnay, but I can't specify right now what they will be, as I don't want to raise people's expectations.' Above all, he hoped his charity in Afghanistan would live on after him – as indeed it has.
Gall was predeceased by his wife Eleanor Smyth, who died in 2018, and is survived by his son, Alexander, and three daughters, Carlotta, Fiona and Michaela.