From her early days running the Afghan Aid office in Peshawar, through her years as a journalist, and right up to the end she never lost her passionate conviction that she could make a difference to the world, while having a good time along the way. When Rory Peck,  her second husband, died she helped to found a Trust in his name, designed to help the families of freelance cameramen who died violently. Juliet always supported the aims of the Trust, although she detached herself from direct contact; she said she became rather fed up of being introduced to potential donors as ‘the widow’. Even after cancer returned in recent years, she helped to set up Conflicts Forum, a group committed to finding a negotiated solution to the problems of the Middle East.

Juliet first moved to Afghanistan in 1986, initially for three weeks, extended to  three months, and then full time. She soon married Dominique Vergos, a glamorous French fashion photographer, who had come out to get a taste of war photography, and was recruited as a spy.  He was shot dead in front of her on Christmas Day 1988, as they were walking into their house in Peshawar.

By now, Rory Peck was living in Peshawar and had set up an agency with Peter Jouvenal and others – the beginning of a partnership that would develop into Frontline TV news. He married Juliet in 1991, just before setting off to Baghdad to work for the BBC. The day after he left, Juliet fell horse-riding and broke her back; she had to fly home to England for several weeks to recuperate.

Ideas of moving to India to set up home were shelved when the Moscow coup drew Rory to Russia instead. He chronicled the fall of communist order, and found his way to a dacha that had once belonged to Boris Pasternak. A Russian friend, Vladimir Snegirev, says approvingly that Rory spent money like a Russian. It went on caviar, whisky, the dacha in the woods. By now they had a daughter of their own, Lettice, as well as Fin, Juliet’s son from her first marriage, and they would go on holiday to places like Mongolia, sometimes joined by Rory’s other sons, Jamie and Alexander.

Juliet would travel to wars in the region with Rory when he was working, and helped to run the business and sell the pictures –  the Moscow branch of Frontline TV news, while Vaughan Smith set up the main agency in London.

When Rory was shot dead outside the Moscow TV station during a failed counter- coup, Juliet returned to live in England. She continued to work as a journalist, as well as being elected to the local council, and campaigning to save fox-hunting.

A visit to her North Yorkshire home, past a sign proclaiming an ‘EU-free zone’, and then through an obstacle course of rescued greyhounds and hunt puppies, was rewarded by the most entertaining conversation imaginable, all wrapped in a waspish wit.

Before going   on a long trip into Afghanistan, Rory wrote this in his diary:”Am I worried about death? Not really. Always when going into this sort of situation there is a question mark with the grim reaper propped against it. I have seen enough deaths around the world to look at it in the face and accept its inevitability, however I have no wish to die. Years of not really caring have slipped past, now I am looking forwards to a gloriously happy future with Julie who I wish to love and look after for the rest of my days.

I am concerned about a remark of hers last night, not to worry if I am wounded as she would enjoy pushing me around in wheelchair. I refuse to pander to her charitable views and asked if she regarded me as a potential lame duck. She came back quick as lightening ‘Certainly not I think of you as a particularly vicious gander.'”

Objets trouvés, bits of wrecked cameras, looted street signs and something which turns out to be Mo Amin’s prosthetic arm gleam out from glass cases around the walls. Only Frontline, you feel, would put the false arm of a now-dead cameraman on display. But time has passed, the world has changed, and those who choose to document its weirder and more dangerous aspects have to adapt to new ways of doing things.

Television news is different from the way it was in the 1980s and 1990s, and wars – Frontline’s greatest stock-in-trade – are different too. They have become even more dangerous for the adventurous freelance cameraman or camerawoman to cover, and the old sense of protection which you used to get from owning a press-card and sticking the initials ‘TV’ in gaffer-tape on the windscreen of your car has long since evaporated.

Cameramen no longer have the flimsy security of being regarded as neutral onlookers. Nowadays they, and the reporters who work with them, are treated as though they have taken sides. Wars have become primarily a matter for propaganda, for spin, for twisting the facts.

The glory days of Frontline, the days which David Loyn has chronicled so well and so affectionately in this book, now have a feeling almost of innocence about them: or, if innocence isn’t exactly the word that springs to mind when you think of people like Peter Jouvenal, Rory Peck and Vaughan Smith, then there is unquestionably a feeling of straight-dealing, of honourable behaviour, of a long tradition of decent reporting.

The American journalist Martha Gellhorn, who died in 1998 a few days short of her 90th birthday, used to love it when I told her stories about Frontline, and she said to me, ‘They sound just like the kind of people I used to work with in the War.’ It was an accolade to be relished; Martha, who worked alongside Capa and Ernie Pyle, and shamed her husband Ernest Hemingway into leaving his fishing in Cuba to come to Europe in time for D-Day, approved greatly of people like Peter and Vaughan and Rory: real journalists, she called them.

The group they formed in Peshawar during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan had real glamour. They might be adventurers, but they were gentlemen and you could trust them. If a Frontline cameraman promised to go with you, he would stay with you whatever happened. If a Frontline cameraman sold you video, it would be precisely what he said it was. There was nothing questionable, nothing dodgy, about Frontline footage.

The provenance alone was a sufficient guarantee of quality: and this in an area where so many spooks and crooks and weirdos were operating. If you were good enough for Frontline to take you on, then you could be trusted. Some of the best times of my professional life were spent working with people like Rory, Vaughan and Peter, and I suspect the same is true for David Loyn.

To read about their lives and careers in this excellent, well-researched book is a considerable pleasure; and I am proud to be a bit-part player on one or two of the pages that follow.

My guess is that, partly thanks to the fact that David has written the definitive account of them and of all the other brave and charming people who worked for the organization over the years, Frontline will be remembered as one of the high peaks of journalism. Martha Gellhorn certainly thought so, and she was a pretty good judge.

Frontline:The True Story of  the  British Mavericks Who Changed the Face of War Reporting

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