Sandy Gall

Career

In 1952 Gall began his journalistic career as a trainee sub-editor at the Aberdeen Press and Journal. Gall applied to work as a trainee foreign correspondent for the Reuters international news agency and this was accepted in May 1953. He remained at the agency until 1963. Gall covered events in the Congo, East Africa, Germany, Hungary and South Africa. In September 1960, along with the BBC's Richard Williams and the Daily Express's George Gale, he was arrested in Bakwanga in the breakaway province of Kasai whilst reporting on the Congo Crisis on suspicion of being a Belgian spy and for not having official Congolese documentation. The three journalists were released into the custody of Tunisian soldiers attached to the United Nations Operation in the Congo.

Gall joined Independent Television News (ITN) in 1963 as a foreign reporter and troubleshooter, working in Afghanistan, Africa, China, the Far East, the Middle East and Vietnam. He began working as a newsreader on News at Ten in 1970. In 1972 he was arrested in Uganda on the orders of the dictator Idi Amin. Gall was the presenter of the Thames Television programme A Place in Europe from 1975 to 1977 and of the programme Freeze in 1975, examining the aspects of freezers and the foods to store in them. In January 1976 he and a camera operator were briefly detained by the police in Madrid after filming outside a strike-affected Chrysler car factory. Gall narrated the ITV documentary Journey's End on the Vietnamese boat people who had settled at the Thorney Island camp near Portsmouth in 1980.

He reported on the 1980 United States presidential election from the American Embassy in London, and the Wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer from Knightsbridge Barracks in July 1981. In November 1982 he presented the one-hour documentary Afghanistan: Behind Enemy Lines that took two months to produce as he and a film crew covered Afghanistan under the Soviet occupation. Gall was the subject of This is Your Life on 30 March 1983. The following year, he was a contestant on the Channel 4 travel-based quiz programme Where in the World. Gall reported on the Soviet–Afghan War in the documentary Allah Against the Gunships that was broadcast that October.

He was a team captain on the quiz show Television Scrabble in 1985. In the year after, Gall narrated an ITN programme on Sarah, Duchess of York, entitled A Royal Romance, and spent three months filming the documentary Afghanistan; Agony of a Nation that was broadcast in November 1986 because he believed the Soviet-Afghan war was not being reported on correctly. In 1988 he participated in BBC2's International Pro-Celebrity Golf competition, and in the following year, presented the 1989 ITV documentary George Adamson: Lord of the Lions in which he interviewed the conservationist George Adamson.

Gall made his final appearance as a newsreader on News at Ten on 4 January 1991; he returned to a special reporting role in the same month, covering Afghanistan, Africa, the Middle East and Pakistan. He made the decision to retire from ITN in late 1992. He continued working in a freelance capacity in television and writing from 1993 onwards. In 1995 Gall wrote and presented the ITV documentary Network First: The Man Who Saved the Animals that profiled the conservationist Richard Leakey. That same year, he signed up to present the BBC Radio 4 travel programme Breakaway, and the following year, he presented the BBC2 programme The Empty Quarter in which he toured the world's largest sand desert, the Rub' al Khali.

In late 2002, Gall was signed by Channel 5 to present a week of special four-minute reports from Afghanistan on attempts to restore the Buddhas of Bamiyan that were destroyed by the Taliban. He presented a documentary examining the history of Afghanistan from Alexander the Great to the Taliban in the 2004 History Channel documentary Afghanistan: War Without End. Gall was the rector of the University of Aberdeen from 1978 to 1981, and in 1986 he and his wife founded Sandy Gall's Afghanistan Appeal charity to assist in the training of Afghan officials in the provision of artificial limbs and physiotherapy treatment to children and other Afghan civil war victims. He became the World Affairs Expert on the London-based LBC radio station in January 2003.

Personal life and death

Gall met the Foreign Office employee Eleanor Smyth in Budapest in 1956 while he was reporting on the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. They married on 29 August 1958. Eleanor died on 9 September 2018. They had four children, one of whom, Carlotta, is also a journalist.

They separated while he had a two-year affair with a younger woman but they later reconciled.

In June 1972, Gall was injured in a car accident in Bromley, Kent, and suffered facial cuts because he fell asleep while driving. He was fined £25 plus £1 costs.

Gall died at his home in Penshurst, Kent, on 29 June 2025, at the age of 97.

Honours and awards

In 1981, he was made an honorary Doctor of Law by the University of Aberdeen. Gall was awarded the Sitara-e-Pakistan in 1985 and the Lawrence of Arabia Memorial Medal in 1986. He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1987. He was appointed Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) in the 2011 New Year Honours for services to the people of Afghanistan.