obituaries ANDREW WIARD


to a new life and a new career. Although he had trained as a sculptor, after one look through the camera’s viewfinder – “it was magical,” he later said – he never saw the world the same way again. But how to make it pay? A typical New Yorker, he just walked through closed doors with nothing but a tale about all his pictures – yet to arrive from the States. He tried this one on Times picture editor


Norman Hall, who said “you’re lying!” But he then gave him hundreds of rolls of film, telling him not to return for a year. When Larry did, commissions followed. He had broken into national papers. He was someone who could face the pressure


Larry Herman


Larry Herman, the New York-born documentary photographer and union activist, has died at the age of 79. Vietnam drove Larry to our shores. He arrived in 1968 as a principled draft resister fleeing arrest with his partner, the writer Barbara Rees,


and even danger on the streets. He once told me that when being shown around Londonderry at night by a ‘republican’, a shot rang out – and the man’s brains were on his shoulder. But a life of derring-do held no interest for him, nor the ‘news’ nor the picture of the day. All ephemera. His concern was with the human condition, the daily lives and struggles of working people, driven by the moral certainty you might expect from the son of a rabbi. He scraped a living off grants and sales of


prints to museums and private collectors. Beholden to no one, he was free to do what he was born for.


His first long-term project was a labour of love


about Glasgow and Glaswegians, resulting in the exhibition Clydeside 1974-76 and his work going


on permanent display in the National Galleries of Scotland.


Larry belonged to that great documentary tradition epitomised by Lewis Hine, an early 20th century social reformer and photographer, who declared: “There were two things I wanted to do. I wanted to show the things that had to be corrected. I wanted to show the things that had to be appreciated.” But Larry was determined to correct things himself, and so to yet another life. A revolutionary socialist, comrade Larry was sent underground to organise the working class – literally, on tube trains – then on to be a welder in Sheffield. He took no pictures for 12 years. Some might call that a waste of his talents. Not


Larry. To him, it was all one. When finally returning to what he did best, he simultaneously supported his multiple causes, such as Cuba Solidarity. Those on the receiving end will attest that he was an extremely vocal member of London Freelance Branch. Over the next 30 years, his projects included


British Jamaicans, the low paid in London, the working people of Cuba and, finally, the garment workers of Bangladesh – an extraordinary photographic legacy. He is survived by daughter Melissa Rees


Herman, son-in-law Pablo and grandchildren Daniel and Noa.


Andrew Wiard


during the attacks that his vocal cords never fully recovered. His father managed to get visas and train tickets and they left. On his first morning in the UK, Horst and his mother had slept in a Leicester police cell, and he woke to the smell of frying bacon. The kindly sergeant asked the hungry boy his name. The reply, “Horst, sir”, prompted the response: “What sort of name is that?” Over his first bacon breakfast, Izbicki and the policeman talked, and John emerged both fully committed to bacon and to renaming himself John after the sergeant’s son. The Izbickis settled in Manchester, where John


John Izbicki


John Izbicki, a journalist with the Telegraph for 30 years, covering the City, education and then Paris, has died aged 92. A Jewish refugee from Nazism, he arrived in


Britain aged nine on September 3 1939, the day the UK declared war on Germany. He had been born Horst Izbicki in Berlin, the son of Selma and Leonard Izbicki, who had moved to Berlin from Kolberg (now Kołobrzeg in Poland) after the First World War. His father’s haberdashery store was one of 7,500 Jewish businesses attacked in 1938 on Kristallnacht. He always said that he shouted himself so hoarse


24 | theJournalist


went to North Manchester grammar. He left at 16, did national service with the Royal Army Service Corps, read French and German at the University of Nottingham, went into journalism in Manchester and, in 1959, joined the then Daily Telegraph. At the Telegraph, until the city editor insisted on using Izbicki, he was given no byline or bylined John Howard, the Anglicised version of his mother’s maiden name. His own name was deemed inappropriate for its readership. “It would frighten the colonels,” as he put it. His background gave him a lifelong desire to


help all refugees. He was regularly involved in the Jewish community, providing witness evidence and helped organise Holocaust memorials, including speaking at Westminster Abbey.


His autobiography Between the Lines (2013)


recalls his Fleet Street days, including a friendship with Margaret Thatcher which began when she was education secretary after he rescued her from a drunken journalist at a headteachers’ conference by asking her to dance. He enjoyed warm relations with the teaching unions, notably the National Association of Head Teachers and National Union of Teachers, and performed regular comedy turns at their conferences. John, a campaigner for educational reform,


left the Daily Telegraph in 1989 to become public affairs director at the Committee of Directors of Polytechnics and played a leading role in the campaign for polytechnics to become universities. He then became communications director at one, the University of North London. We became friends in the 1990s when I was editing Guardian Education and he was looking for a school with refugee pupils for a Royal Albert Hall concert. My husband, Terry Farrell, was then head of a comprehensive in Haringey where 90 per cent of pupils were black. There were many refugees and a gospel choir. He is survived by his second wife June, son Paul, grandchildren Tyler and Chloe and stepchildren Patrick and Anna.


Anne McHardy


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