Forum for former BBC staff

Forum for former BBC staff
http://www.ex-bbc.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl >> Notices, obituaries and tributes >> John Jockel http://www.ex-bbc.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?num=1170889244 Message started by Forum Admin on Feb 7^th, 2007, 11:01pm

Title: John Jockel
Post by Forum Admin on Feb 7^th, 2007, 11:01pm

This is taken from Ariel:

Obituary: John Jockel
tribute by: Mike Broadbent

John Jockel, who has died at the age of 68, will be remembered by his colleagues in tv news, personally as a bluff, always cheerful man and professionally as an accomplished cameraman, especially for the historic images he and cameraman Bernard Hesketh captured during the Falklands War. But I suspect that he'd prefer to be remembered for the clinic in Kenya for which he and his wife Maggie worked so hard over the years.

John joined the BBC as a studio lighting engineer and took the traditional tv news career path of electrician, soundman and cameraman.

As a programme editor, I rarely went on the road, but I did spend a week filming in Israel with John and Bernard. They made it seem so easy that it was like being on holiday - no fuss, no arguments, except with correspondent Keith Graves.

That was five years before the big one - the Falklands War. Brian Hanrahan, then a young reporter, went with John and Bernard and spoke about the experience at John's funeral service: 'I didn't know John very well when we set off, but for the next three months we lived in each other's pockets - sharing fear and delight, despondency and relief - and got wet, cold and exhausted. What I found was a friend of great warmth, generosity and sincerity, a man without a bad bone in his body. I don't remember a single argument - and I had plenty with everyone else, but John was always the peacemaker.

'He had to lug around one of the early video recorders, a great dead weight, and I saw him carting it everywhere; dangling from a helicopter, climbing a rope ladder from a small boat in a stormy sea, and never complaining. And he kept it all working.

'Then there were the distractions; the fighter aircraft that tried to strafe the camera team and digging slit trenches in the middle of an artillery barrage. I remember one standing on a fully-loaded ammunition ship in the middle of San Carlos Water - Bomb Alley - when two bombs dropped in the water just 20 yards away. John shrugged phlegmatically and said: 'Well, if it's got your name on it...!'

On retirement John and Maggie took on the job of raising money for the Gahaleni Clinic just outside Malindi Town in Kenya. Just over a year ago John was able to see the fruits of all that labour when the clinic opened with twelve rooms, including a delivery ward, a doctor's room and outpatient facilities, with two nurses and a technician there permanently.