Ernie “Sandy” Sandford (1913–2006) grew up over a grocer’s shop on Main Street and went on to report D-Day from the air, run Reuters’ Paris bureau, and witness the founding of the European Community.
From Main Street to Fleet Street
Born to grocer Joseph Sandford — his mother died of tuberculosis when Ernie was three — he attended Kelly Memorial Primary School alongside future Open golf champion Fred Daly, before Coleraine Academical Institution and a BA from Queen’s University Belfast in 1936. He joined the Northern Constitution as a reporter the same year, writing a locally notorious column, “Stump Press,” dissecting Coleraine-area life and its councillors with real wit. He covered the 1941 Belfast Blitz, including the deaths of all five members of a Portrush-connected family in a direct hit, before moving to Fleet Street as a Daily Telegraph sub-editor.
Reporting D-Day from a bomber
Sandford became the Press Association’s first war correspondent. On D-Day itself, 6 June 1944, he flew as a war correspondent aboard a US Eighth Air Force B-24 Liberator bomber on a mission over the Cherbourg peninsula — twelve Liberators at 15,000 feet, escorted by Mustang fighters, facing no Luftwaffe opposition. On the return flight he reported seeing “a great convoy of several hundred ships” and a double line of invasion barges off the English coast. His portable typewriter was reportedly painted with a red bomb symbol reading “D-Day,” in mock-aircraft style. He went on to cover the Royal Navy’s Walcheren operation before the war’s end.
Reuters, the Sorbonne, and the birth of the EC
Postwar, Sandford became chief reporter at the Sunday Chronicle — then, disillusioned with what he called “popular journalism” in every sense, resigned in 1946 to live in France. He taught English near Paris, studied at the Sorbonne, wrote a travel book about a canoe trip down the Rhône, and became head of Reuters’ Paris office. He later served as a Marshall Plan information officer and was present at the signing of the Treaty of Rome — the founding document of what became the European Community.
Coming home to write the guidebook
Sandford eventually returned to Northern Ireland, holding government press posts before becoming the Northern Ireland Tourist Board’s publicity officer. There he wrote Discover Northern Ireland, a guidebook still remembered as one of the finest of its kind. He retired to Killyleagh, Co. Down, and died in August 2006 aged 93, having donated his body to Queen’s University for medical research — a final act of public service from a man who’d spent a lifetime in it.