Obituary: Ross Sayers

By PAT BOOTH

Editor. Died aged 85.

He was always going to be a journalist. At seven, he produced his first newspaper. It had a press run of one and circulated in his family. Later, his newspaper expanded. He produced an edition to sell for threepence to boys who travelled with him by train to school.

At 10, he blew some of his savings to pay an old-fashioned five shillings (50c) for a 10-minute flight with pioneering pilot Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, then barnstorming around New Zealand after his epic flight across the Pacific in the Southern Cross.

Ross Charles Sayers was still proudly recounting these significant events in his life in the weeks before his death on March 17.

In the years between, the excited 10 year-old who flew with Smithy went on to fly 2000 hours of operations between 1940 and 1945 as a Royal Air Force bomber pilot, a flight lieutenant, in World War 11.

He flew with No 38 Squadron and then No 221 Squadron in the Middle East attacking convoys supplying Rommel before El Alamein.

On a second tour of duty, with Coastal Command in Britain, he was twice mentioned in dispatches, featuring in the surrender of a German u-boat - circling the stricken craft until a surface vessel arrived. He and his crew also hunted down another u-boat which was using the then-new snorkel system, allowing it to run its diesel engines while submerged.

In the years after the war, the schoolboy paper magnate became not only the journalist he had always dreamed of being but was accepted by journalists who worked with him, for him and against him as being the finest newsroom editor of his generation.

He sidestepped his first failure to get into journalism - no vacancies on the tiny Waikato Independent - and instead got in the side door as a printer's apprentice.

One day a reporter called in sick and he rushed home to wash his hands, change his clothes and head off on his first assignment, which was to be the first of many, at the Independent, on to the Waikato Times, in Fleet St for the Daily Telegraph and the Evening News after his war service, and then on to the Auckland Star when he came home with his bride, Annette, whom he met while she was an RAF motor transport driver.

Quickly appointed chief reporter of the Auckland Star, he set about transforming its prewar methods.

Awarded a Neiman fellowship to study at Harvard in 1952, he came back with new vigour and ideas. He was a mover and a shaker decades before the cliche industry invented that description.

The first obvious target was the woodwork on the editorial floor. The corridors and separate departmental offices disappeared overnight and the Star had the country's first big American-style newsroom.

The change was more than cosmetic. The big room with general, racing, sports, financial and feature writers and subeditors gave the staff and the paper a new intimacy and atmosphere of teamwork.

When he was appointed assistant editor in 1954, the room got another significant feature. He didn't vanish into mahogany row, the editorial offices. He spent much of his day at a working desk at the heart of the big newsroom, literally calling the shots. Sayers became the Star's editor in 1965. The paper bore his mark every day, as did New Zealand journalism as a profession.

Sayers saw the paper as more than simply headlines. Under his direction it included New Zealand's first arts page with author, and later professor, Antony Alpers, biographer of Katherine Mansfield, as one of its early editors.


Another professor, John Reid, set new standards reviewing films for the Star.

Music critic Dorothea Turner was one of the two benchmarks on musical excellence in the city - the other was the Herald's Lin Saunders. When Turner recognised the exceptional voice of Auckland soprano Mina Foley it was the Sayers Star which raised money to send her to study in Italy, just as it sponsored an annual piano concerto competition.

Sayers recognised the wide potential and responsibilities involved in great editing. Under him, the Star was the first New Zealand paper to move on from the handy- hints women's-page approach. Its very different Midweek for Women section stretched the boundaries both in topics and approach. The Star test kitchen under the redoubtable Tui Flower was both a trendsetter and a national institution.

When the first Sunday papers appeared, the Sayers Star moved to pre-empt them with the country's first 18-page weekend magazine section, Weekender.

When TV loomed as a threat, the Star set up the first daily television page to ride on the coat tails of the new medium.

Unfortunately, there were world trends which the Star could not escape, including the drift from home deliveries and evening newspaper reading.

The battle was not helped by the Brierley takeover of NZ News. The Star, like the whole group, did not survive much beyond Sayers' retirement as executive editor and from the NZ News board.

Ross Sayers was at various times a director of the NZ Press Association, its representative on Australian Associated Press and a director of Reuters in London.

He took pride from his role with the Commonwealth Press Union, chaired its editors' committee and was finally a CPU life member.

Newspapers were his life and he was the life of newspapers he was involved in.

He is survived by his wife, Annette, and children Jackie and John.