The journalist Martin Short, who has died aged 76 of cancer, investigated and reported for television for over 40 years. He will be remembered for his work uncovering police corruption in London and exposing the secret world of Freemasonry. He also chronicled the history of organised crime on both sides of the Atlantic in television series and books.
Between 1969 and 1984 he worked for Thames TV’s This Week and Granada’s World in Action as a researcher and then, on screen, as a reporter, with The London Programme at London Weekend Television and Thames TV’s Thames Report.
During his time on This Week he researched an early profile of the Rev Ian Paisley as Northern Ireland began to dominate the headlines. He later investigated the Kent State University killings, in 1970, by the US national guard in Ohio. Most of the guard, he discovered, had joined up to avoid the draft for Vietnam. The students they shot were protesting against that war and the bombing of Cambodia.
The books and the television documentaries were regular. The Fall of Scotland Yard (1977), co-authored with Barry Cox and John Shirley, was shattering in its revelations of corruption in the Metropolitan Police. In 1984 Martin co-produced and wrote the book of the Thames TV series Crime Inc on the history of organised crime in the US.
Inside the Brotherhood (1989), was a TV series and book on the Freemasons. The exposure of the influence of Freemasonry on our major institutions – especially the police force – was explosive. He appeared on countless television and radio programmes and was an expert witness to the parliamentary select committee on Freemasonry in the police and the judiciary in 1996.
There were several books on British crime and the people involved with the Kray brothers. Lundy: The Destruction of Scotland Yard’s Finest Detective came out in 1991, and the following year Martin produced The Last Days of Aldo Moro about terrorism and subversion in Italy. The Times called it “a near perfect documentary”.
The youngest of three children, Martin was born in Wookey, Somerset, to George Short, an aircraft engineer, and Hazel (nee Johnson), a nurse. The family later moved to London, where Martin attended St Dunstan’s college in Catford, before going to Cambridge in 1962 to read history. His thespian talents soon led him to the Footlights Revue. There were also Shakespeare plays and a theatrical tour of Germany with the university’s drama society – Miriam Margolyes recalled that his “smiling face and passion about everything made him the perfect Falstaff”.
He travelled and did freelance work for the BBC in the Middle East before he arrived at Thames TV. The Middle East fascinated Martin. He wrote a booklet for the Minority Rights Group on the Kurds in the 70s that shone an early light on to their situation. A research trip to the Lebanon in the early 70s led him to the house of the Saidi family – a leading liberal Shia family. They asked that Martin take a letter to their daughter, Sana, who was then studying child psychology in London.
Their first meeting was with a chaperone, but the relationship grew over the following years and they were married in Beirut in 1974 by a Lebanese-Iranian imam, Musa al-Sadr (later kidnapped to Gaddafi’s Libya and never seen again).
Martin got to know more about Arab politics and the Palestinian issue much earlier than most of us. He produced and narrated the documentary Lebanon: A Family at War, about his wife’s family, for Yorkshire TV in 1985.
In 1995, Martin helped found the pressure group the International Campaign for Jerusalem with the British Palestinian activist Ghada Karmi. The group held public meetings, lobbied British politicians and produced the book Jerusalem Today. The monthly newsletter Jerusalem File continued until 2001, when the organisation folded through lack of funds – though no lack of will. Martin joined the board of the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding in 2007 and served until 2012, striving to impress on the political class the realities of the dispossessed and militarily occupied Palestinians.
Martin loved jazz, wrote songs and was a keen gardener. First diagnosed with cancer four years ago, he retained his humour and geniality throughout his treatment, as those of us who met with him for World in Action reunions can confirm. He was, typically, writing about his experience all the time.
He is survived by Sana and their children, Ramsay, Alexander and Jumaan, two grandchildren, Lamia and Sami, his brother, Terry, and sister, Micaela.
• Martin John Short, journalist, born 22 September 1943; died 27 August 2020• This article was amended on 24 September 2020 to note that Musa al-Sadr was a Lebanese-Iranian imam, rather than an Iranian sheikh as an earlier version stated, and to revise details of Martin Short’s time at This Week.
