War anchor and face of News At Ten

INTREPID and unflappable journalist Sandy Gall was on the ground in Vietnam, covered wars in the Middle East and the Suez Crisis and was even jailed and held in an execution cell in Uganda by brutal despot Idi Amin.

- Sandy Gall

Yet Gall always survived to tell the tale, during a six-decade career which saw him report from some of the world's most dangerous places.

Henderson Alexander Gall, known as Sandy, was born in Penang, in present-day Malaysia.

His father, also called Henderson, was the manager of a rubber plantation with his mother Jean. They returned to Scotland when Sandy was four and he was sent to boarding school aged six.

After national service with the RAF, Gall studied French and German at Aberdeen University, then worked on a local newspaper, before international news agency Reuters took him on as a trainee.