Obituary
Andrew was born Endre Hajos in Budapest, Hungary, on January 24, 1910, when Austro-Hungary was still a dual monarchy.  He was the only child of a Hungarian father and a Hungarian-Austrian mother.  His father, Alfred Hajos, a prosperous architect, had been a double gold medallist in swimming at the first modem Olympics in Athens in 1896 (100 metres and 1200 metres freestyle); his mother's family owned the major news agency in eastern Europe.  His parents wanted him to go into the advertising business, but all that young Endre wanted to do was to write.  He spoke good German, as well as Italian and French, and he opted to study at Vienna University.
After graduating, Endre married and had a son, Imre; but after his marriage broke up in 1935, he went to London in pursuit of his ambition to become a writer.  He found work as a translator with the Fox Film Corporation, married again (briefly), and had another son.

When war broke out in 1939 he joined the British Army, serving first in the Pioneer Corps and then in the Intelligence Corps in Italy.  After the war he became a naturalised British subject, and Endre Hajos became Andrew Hargrave.
He worked in London for the Australian Broadcasting Company and then moved into newspaper journalism, as a reporter with the Northern Echo in Darlington; then he joined the Scottish Daily Mail, which was printed in Edinburgh at the time.  But it was with the rival Scottish Daily Express in Glasgow that he made his name as a journalist with an unrivalled knowledge of industrial and political affairs in Scotland.  His most momentous "scoop" was breaking the news, in January 1960, of a huge investment by the British Motor Corporation in a truck plant at Bathgate.
While he was at the Scottish Daily Express he suffered personal tragedy when his first son, Imre, a student at Budapest University, was killed in the Hungarian uprising in 1956.  Andrew, fearful for his son's safety, had wanted to be sent to Hungary as an Express correspondent, but he discovered too late that his passport was out of date: Russian tanks had moved into Budapest and his son, a member of a student delegation driving across a bridge over the Danube to present a petition of protest to the government, died when their vehicle was hit.
Andrew settled easily into life in Glasgow with his third wife, Marguerite, a Welsh-Scottish civil servant whom he had met in 1946 at a Labour Party do in London.  He took an active part in Labour politics and was on intimate terms with most of the top Labour Party politicians in Scotland.  He left the Scottish Daily Express in the early sixties to go freelance.  He joined the Financial Times in 1966 and worked in its Frankfurt office for a time.  In 1985 he published a book on the new "sunrise" electronics industry in Scotland: Silicon Glen: Reality or Illusion - a Global View of High Technology in Scotland.
Andrew was held in unfailingly affectionate respect by all his colleagues: short, stocky, and intellectually combative, he was a generous and hospitable friend as well as an outstanding pundit of his time.  His ninetieth birthday party in January was a nostalgic and memorable occasion for his many old friends and colleagues.
Andrew Hargrave is survived by his wife Marguerite, three sons, and eight grandchildren.  The funeral will be at Glasgow Crematorium, Maryhill, on Friday at 2.30pm.

MAGNUS MAGNUSSON KBE (WHO WORKED WITH ANDREW HARGRAVE ON THE SC0TTISH DAILY EXPRESS    IN THE 1950s)

Imre Hajos 1935 - 1956

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Michael A Hargrave: mhargrave@bigpond.com
First Published: 25 January 2001
Last Updated: