Гарольд Якоб: Жизнь писателя и военного корреспондента.

English writer and journalist

Harold Alaric Jacob (8 June 1909 – 26 January 1995) was an English writer and journalist. He was a Reuters correspondent in Washington in the 1930s and a war correspondent during World War II in North Africa, Burma and Moscow.

Alaric Jacob was the son of Ellen Hoyer, the daughter of a Danish missionary, and Lieutenant Colonel Harold Fenton Jacob, a member of the Indian Army and former political agent in Aden. Jacob was born in Edinburgh and brought up in Scotland. As a child, he spent time in India and Arabia, but was educated in England. He was a childhood friend of Soviet spy Kim Philby. Jacob developed a stammer, which he believed came from his association with Philby. This was managed over time by singing lessons. Like several other promising children from Anglo Indian or military families, Jacob attended St Cyprian's School for reduced fees. English novelist George Orwell left the school the year before Jacob started, and was presented as an inspiration to the students. For Jacob it was "an age of friendships, of excitement on the cricket fields and in school plays, of singing to a receptive audience at concerts, of having a sonnet printed in the school magazine, of winning the Townsend Warner History Prize." Jacob struggled with the classics and did not enter for a scholarship to public school. He instead studied at The King's School, Canterbury; however, unimpressed with what he was learning, he left school and moved to France to pursue a career in journalism.

While in France, Jacob began writing, returning to England after the General Strike. When he was seventeen, his first play was produced in Plymouth, where he started his career as a journalist on the Western Morning News. His second play, The Compleat Cynic, was produced in Plymouth the following year. In 1930, Seventeen, his first novel was published. It is a fictionalized account of his school days in Canterbury. By then, he had become a close friend of Margot Asquith, forty years his senior, who became his mentor and literary influence. She introduced him to editors and important literary figures, including Sir Roderick Jones, the head of Reuters, and was offered a position as diplomatic correspondent for Reuters in London. She was a historical novelist and journalist for The Observer and the Yorkshire Post. Early in their marriage, they bonded amidst the Great Depression and hunger marches. This period stirred up socialist sentiments in the couple. After Christmas leave in England in 1943, Jacob and Iris sailed to the Soviet Union in January 1944 on board a ship of the Arctic Convoy. They spent the remainder of the war in Moscow, covering the advances of the Red Army in Odessa, the Crimea, and through Vitebsk, Minsk, Poland, and on to the fall of Berlin. He published A Window in Moscow in 1945. His experiences made him sympathetic towards the Soviet regime and he stayed in the Soviet Union, on and off, until the start of the cold war in late 1947. Iris had become a Communist and her ideas strongly influenced him. He suspected that her membership of the Communist Party worked against him even when they were separated, and that he was blacklisted by the BBC and put on their "Christmas tree" list of potential political subversives as a result. In 1949, Jacob published Scenes from a Bourgeois Life, a semi autobiographical novel and an apologia for the paradoxes and anomalies of his career.

In August 1948, Jacob joined the BBC monitoring service in Caversham, Reading, but in February 1951 he was "suddenly refused establishment rights, which meant he would receive no pension". Jacob's establishment and pension rights were restored shortly after Iris (also on Orwell's list) died in 1953. By the time he retired in 1972, Jacob had become a senior editor at Bush House, then the base of the BBC World Service. In 1971, Jacob published Eminent Nonentities, a book of short stories about the unknown characters he encountered as a war correspondent.

After Iris died in 1953, Jacob married British actress Kathleen Byron. He had one daughter with Iris Morley, and a son and daughter with Byron. Journalist Paul Hogarth described Jacob in his obituary as the quintessential English journalist; urbane yet modest, with a bone dry sense of humor and a razor intelligence. "He possessed the grand manner of an Edwardian foreign correspondent with an Alan Clark like taste for vintage claret, a good cigar and fine brandy". Jacob died in Lambeth, London, aged 85 on 26 January 1995. Byron survived him; she died in January 2009.