Michael Nicholson

Despite his calm demeanour, the battle-hardened Nicholson was deeply affected by the suffering he witnessed and particularly its effect on children. He adopted two girls: Natasha, who was nine and sheltering from the Serbian bombing of Sarajevo in 1992, and Ana, who was in need of medical attention when he rescued her from the streets of São Paulo in Brazil four years later.

Critics accused him of making himself the story — particularly in the case of Natasha, whose tale was turned into a book, Natasha’s Story, and later a film, Welcome to Sarajevo (directed by Michael Winterbottom). However, Nicholson was unapologetic. “ITN let me go on air and say, ‘For Christ’s sake, why don’t we do something? The kids are dying here’.” His adoption of Ana was less of a success and received far less publicity. Again he ignored professional protocol and flew her to Britain at his own expense, but in her late teens the relationship broke down. Nicholson, who never suffered fools gladly, admitted that he was not the easiest person to work with. Of Stephen Dillane’s portrayal of him in the film, Nicholson said: “He played me to perfection. Bad-tempered and uncooperative.”

Michael Thomas Nicholson was born in Romford, Essex, in January 1937, the son of Allan, a lighterman on the Thames who served as a major with the Royal Engineers during the Second World War, and his wife Doris (née Reid); he had two older brothers and a younger sister. In summer 1942 the ginger-haired “Essex scamp” became an evacuee and was sent to live with a farming family in Somerset. He described the parting from his mother, who he did not see for another three years, as the Great Deception. “Every mother played her part to save us and themselves the grief of tearful goodbyes,” he said. After the war the family “reassembled very much as strangers, and strangers we remained”.

He was nine when his father, now involved in rebuilding Germany, took the family to Emden. “On one occasion he had to organise the exhumation of a mass grave of British soldiers,” Nicholson recalled. “For some reason he took me, and I remember seeing all this human debris, and the stench as they were coming up . . . I suppose that was my first war, really.”

At the Farnborough air show in 1952 he witnessed the crash of a de Havilland DH 110, killing John Derry, the pilot, as well as the rest of the crew and 29 spectators. It did not deter him from flying and he spent his National Service with the RAF. This was followed by a variety of jobs, including journalism on Shoe and Leather News, before he read politics, philosophy and economics at the University of Leicester, where he edited the student newspaper.

Nicholson joined ITN in 1963 and three years later covered his first major story, the Aberfan disaster in which 144 people died, 116 of them children. “All the [TV] crew were crying and I wasn’t,” he said. “I used to think, ‘You hard-hearted bastard’.” The arrival of his own children softened his approach.

Despite a lack of training — camera crews provided him with the most useful tips — his first coverage of a conflict was in 1968 during the civil war in Nigeria. The same year he married Diana Slater; they had met as students at Leicester where she was studying industrial textile design and he drove her around in his open-topped Jeep. They had two sons — Tom, a combat cameraman who has worked in Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq, and William — as well as their adopted daughters.

During the Yom Kippur war in 1973 he was knocked unconscious when his car left the road and landed on its roof. He was determined to continue reporting, although his producers insisted that his neck brace should not be seen on screen. Two years later he covered the fall of Saigon — which he described as “America’s Dunkirk” — and managed to make his way into the US embassy compound and board one of the helicopters that was evacuating westerners. On landing on a US aircraft carrier he was searched intimately for drugs by an enormous American sergeant who commented that he had “a tight arse”. Nicholson replied: “If you’d been through what I’ve been through today you’d have a tight arse too.”

ITN sent him to Johannesburg in 1976. His Angolan ordeal began after he and his crew visited the country to interview Jonas Savimbi, the rebel leader, but found themselves pursued by Cuban mercenaries working for the communist government. When his posting ended Nicholson drove his family 14,000 miles from Johannesburg to London in their Range Rover, through sandstorms, torrential rain and worse, writing about the six-month adventure in Across the Limpopo (1986).

He was on holiday when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in April 1982. He joined British forces on board HMS Hermes sailing from Portsmouth, but was soon in a conflict of his own over the censorship British authorities applied to his dispatches and at one point Admiral Sandy Woodward threatened to have him “sacked”. Nevertheless, The Times of May 22, 1982, carried in a pooled dispatch his account of the British landings in the South Atlantic: “The Union Jack flies again on the Falkland Islands. They did it by moonlight, silently and successfully. They landed in their thousands.”

Back on terra firma he presented the ITV evening news, but his heart was not in it and after a series of blunders — including calling the Duke of York “yucky” instead of “lucky” — he was happy to move on.

The man who always took his own chopsticks on assignment served as Washington correspondent for Channel 4 News before returning to the frontline as ITN’s chief correspondent from 1989 to 1999, covering the first Gulf war and the Balkan war. His later assignments included “shock and awe”, the US-led invasion of Baghdad in 2003. He was at pains to point out that war on the TV screens was a highly sanitised version of reality. “Because of editorial censorship so much of the world’s atrocities are well-kept secrets,” he wrote in The Times in 1998.

Home for Nicholson was a delightful Georgian farmhouse in Surrey shared with an assortment of dogs, cats, donkeys and doves, with a swimming pool and a 30-acre garden that he enjoyed tending. As he said: “If you go away to somewhere really grotty like Rwanda — or in the old days, Bosnia — it’s just wonderful to come back to a well-manicured garden.”

Michael Nicholson, OBE, was born on January 9, 1937. He died while on a cruise on December 11, 2016, aged 79