From Terence Netto
If you worked with him, it wasn’t hard to figure that James Alexander Ritchie, who died yesterday at the age of 75, was a born newspaperman.
The minute he sensed a story was brewing, his instincts would flare such that everything else that might earlier have been on his schedule would be shed in favour of the pursuit.
James would jump on his motorcycle, or in his later years drive his beat-up jalopy, to race to the scene where the story was brewing, to ferret out the facts and do the interviews.
Pen and frayed notepad would be in hand, but one sensed James did not need these accoutrements because he had an absorbent mind, down to the exact words that the interviewees disbursed when talking to reporters.
James joined the New Straits Times in 1972 as a cadet reporter after stints as a teacher in Malacca upon completion of a Higher School Certificate in Kuching, where his father was retiring as the head of the Sarawak police.
It was no surprise then that James was a shoo-in for NST’s crime desk when it was formed in September 1973.
Crime reporters take time to incubate and James took all of two years before he became a favourite of Malay Mail editor PJ Joshua, in that he would supply the man with juicy stories for the afternoon paper’s front pages.
These were crime stories which, aided by Joshua’s flair for design and layout, were presented with the brio that suggested both Joshua and James were to tabloid journalism’s manner born.
Talented as they were, the two journalists did not flourish because of the detention of A Samad Ismail, the managing editor being tapped shortly to become group editor, under the Internal Security Act in June 1976.
Everyone with journalistic talent in the NST suffered a diminution of their career prospects.
Samad was a great spotter of journalistic talent, having been a good journalist himself, His detention was a mortal blow to the NST group that had been poised to go up in quality under his leadership.
Not being one to submit meekly to untoward fate, James grabbed the opportunity in March 1981 to go to Kuching to head the NST office there.
His taste for the outdoors and for the rugged wilds of Sarawak saw him travel the length and breadth of the state, writing stories on the diverse ethnic groups, lifestyles and cultures he encountered.
If he drew too close to the powers-that-be in Sarawak and if the head office in Kuala Lumpur felt uneasy with the proximity, James would let them know that if they wanted him back in KL, he would prefer to quit and stay put in Kuching.
It helped that he had a wife in Helen, a Malacca native, who was safely ensconced in the MAS office in Kuching.
Fascinated with the diversity of the ethnicities in Sarawak, James knew he could not confine himself to mere reportage and the writing of articles only. He had to move into the less ephemeral format of books and catalogues – and thus began another phase of his career, this one as author.
He wrote several books, most of them done to certify James Ritchie as author, and not merely journalist. These books were on the politics and historic personalities of Sarawak.
The best of them was probably the one on Libau Rentap, an Iban warrior of the late 19th century. The writing here was helped by James succeeding in getting a good editor.
Whenever he had one, he shone.
Terence Netto is a senior journalist and an FMT reader.
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.