Sir Geoffrey’s TV Legacy

Celebrated New Zealand journalist and soldier Sir Geoffrey Cox has died in Britain, aged 97. As editor-in-chief of Britain’s ITN from 1956 to 1968, Sir Geoffrey built the foundations of 50 years of popular news coverage and, in 1967, founded News at Ten, ITN’s half-hour evening news bulletin. Born in Palmerston North and a student at Otago University, in 1932, after impressing the selection committee with his knowledge of pig-breeding, he won a Rhodes Scholarship. He then covered the Spanish Civil War, the Finnish-Russian conflict, the Anschluss and the German invasion of Belgium and France. A distinguished soldier in the New Zealand Army, while in Crete in 1941, as heavily armed German paratroopers rained down, the journalist in Second Lieutenant Cox was thrilled to be on to a great story. “My first reaction was ‘I might be dead by tonight, but by God, I’ve seen the first airborne invasion in history’,” he told NZPA in 2001. He was appointed MBE in 1945, CBE in 1959 and was knighted in 1966 for services to journalism. In 2000, Sir Geoffrey was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit.

Sir Geoffrey Cox: 7 April 1910 – 2 April 2008