The extreme price of the pursuit of truth (From Bradford Telegraph and Argus)

The extreme price of the pursuit of truth

11:45am Monday 26th March 2007

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I met Ian Wooldridge only once. He turned up in the Press box at Valley Parade for Bradford City's all-important match against Ipswich Town the season the team just missed promotion to what was then Division One.

Standing next to City's then-chairman Jack Tordoff, the famed Daily Mail sports writer and commentator looked out across then ground to the urban panorama beyond the old Midland Road cowshed.

"It's all marvellous…the cotton mills," he said, endeavouring to wax lyrical about unfashionable City's phoenix-like rise from the ashes of the fire disaster of 1985 to the prospect of room in the top division.
If I didn't correct him then - cotton mills belong to Manchester - it's too late to do so now because Ian Wooldridge died recently.

He passed away after long illness and confinement to a wheelchair - unlike the 1,000 journalists and support staff worldwide reportedly killed in the line of duty in the past ten years.

Shot by snipers, blown up by landmines or, like Ireland's Veronica Guerin and Russia's Anna Politkovskaya, targeted and assassinated by gunmen.
As a past recipient of threats by extremists of one stripe or another - shaken but not stirred, I might add - I can only admire those dedicated souls whose pursuit of the truth in extremis reminds us that performing a public service sometimes has a high cost.

There are people in the media who would regard the pursuit of anything other than self-interest to be a bizarre preoccupation.

Ian Wooldridge lived long enough to regret the passing of the kind of journalism that threw up (sometimes literally) a bevy of characters who risked all for the sake of a good tale and had a damn good laugh at the same time.