Addressing the Humbert Summer School in August 1992 in Ballina, Co Mayo, on “Post-Maastricht Europe without borders”, David shocked his mainly pro-EU audience by declaring “the very name Delors brings to mind the aplomb of a taxi driver nervously watching in the rear mirror a passenger he knows will not pay his fare”.
Born in Blackburn on January 17, 1941, David’s Belfast-born mother Sallie’s maiden name was Stewart. Her father, the Reverend Dr David Stewart, was a distinguished genealogist and historian of Northern Ireland’s largest Protestant denomination. His weekly pulpit was Cregagh Presbyterian Church in east Belfast.
David’s daughter Harriet recalls: “David Stewart was over 90 when he died and some of David’s earliest memories were of holidays spent with his grandparents in Ireland after the Second World War.”
In a classic instance of a mixed marriage within Protestantism, the young Sallie converted to the established Anglican Church after she married Jim Haworth and reared their two sons, David and Patrick, as Anglicans.
However, David’s many friends, who gathered last Friday at the crematorium in the Uccle district of Brussels were unaware of his tangled religious inheritance. Mourners heard Geoff Meade, retired Europe editor at Press Association, quote Tony Blair — “the hand of history” had borne down on David Haworth.
Haworth, the doyen of the Brussels press corps, when under the age of 21 ran away with his bride-to-be to Gretna Green on the Scottish-English border after Sallie and Jim refused to approve the marriage.
Watching TV from his hospital bed with Geoff during the coronation of King Charles, David pointed to the stall in Westminster Abbey where he had once sat demurely as a choir boy.
David had wanted to become an actor, but instead studied law at University College London in deference to Sallie and Jim’s wishes. Thus England lost a budding “Rumpole of the Bailey” when David defected to the Fourth Estate.
David’s career stretched back to the Daily Sketch and he worked with Bernard Ingham on the industrial desk of the London Observer before moving to Brussels when the UK and Ireland joined the then EEC. He filed news copy from there to the Observer, the International Herald Tribune and the Irish Independent, but in the 1980s he spent time as European Commission spokesman in Washington under the late Andy Mulligan, the Irish rugby player, also from Belfast.
There he befriended “the beloved publisher” Llewellyn King, who admired David “as unique, acerbic, kind and supremely generous — generous in ways that are not common: he shared his friends and his institutions”. Edward Steen described David as “an unusual fellow, witty and mischievous, with great patience and, intriguingly, not without sadness in his life. Above all, he had a poet’s sense of what really matters: wine, laughter and the love of friends”.
David’s favourite Italian restaurant in Rue Archimède, Brussels, was Rosticceria Fiorentina and his favourite Viennese café was Alt Wien, preferably with his lovely Austrian partner Ulli Braun, whom he met in 1996 after Austria joined the EU.
Since early 1990 David had been diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes but characteristically did not let this dampen his joie de vivre.
The AEJ’s honorary president, Otmar Lahodynsky, on learning at Bangkok Airport of David’s passing, climbed 3,000 metres above sea-level to the rock monastery Tiger’s Nest in Bhutan, where he recited prayers for the dead with a Buddhist monk who told him David had already reached eternity.
Pat Humphreys, with whom David authored an amusing guide to Helsinki and Finland, will oversee his wish to have his ashes scattered over Lake Saimaa in Finland next month.
Returning to David’s funeral service in the Anglican rite, a Boris Johnson story was mistold. As I was the only witness, it should be told accurately.
One Friday evening in Kitty O’Shea’s bar, Brussels, in December 1990, I was enjoying a few libations with David when he spotted an old friend enter the crowded premises. It was Bill Deedes, immortalised in Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Scoop.
David invited Bill to join us and introduced me as the press secretary of Ray MacSharry, then European Commissioner for Agriculture.
Bill told us he would soon be joined by his staff correspondent, Boris Johnson. We enjoyed Bill’s company for some time. When Boris did arrive, flustered and full of apologies for his lateness, Bill bought him a drink and they moved to the privacy of the table next to us. Needless to say, Bill’s glass soon stood empty and forlorn.
“Boris, buy Bill a drink,” David mouthed as Boris yapped on, with his own glass hardly touched, while his senior colleague stared at his long consumed glass.
“Yes, buy Bill a drink,” I chimed in, reminding Boris in my most menacing Scottish accent that it was his round. This intervention startled Boris, who embarrassingly whispered back: “I’ve no money.”
After David’s funeral his friends gathered in Uccle in the Brasserie Prince d’Orange, where he in days past loved to sing and dance to the music of Foster and Allen. David was no ordinary grandson of the manse.