Obituary: Sonia Horsfall

Sophie (Sonia) Szapiro, broadcaster: born Vilna, Russia 1906; twice married (one son); died London 19 November 1993.

THE WORD 'intelligentsia' is defined in Chambers' dictionary as 'the intellectual or cultured classes, originally especially in Russia'. This was indeed Sonia Horsfall's natural home - especially in Russia, though she left Russia while in her early teens. She carried this sense of belonging to great literature, painting and music beyond Russia, to Germany, to France, to England, and at the end of her life to Italy. It was a life deeply affected by the great upheavals of the century.

Sonia Horsfall's father, Oskar Szapiro, was a distinguished doctor who became a general in the Red Army, not a fighting one, but in charge of medical services. It was something of which she was always deeply proud. Her mother, Charlotte, was German, well-connected and comfortably off, something else of which she was deeply proud. In spite of her father's important role in the revolution, and because of what seemed her mother's stable family background in Konigsberg, the Szapiros soon fled thither. It was a numerous family and jobs for refugees are a problem, and Sonia, a very beautiful girl, was destined by her solid German uncles to be a receptionist in a restaurant in charge of the salads.

This of course was not her metier, but being bilingual in German and Russian she found herself a job as a Foreign Office clerk. One difficulty was the difference in alphabets which forced her to make her own adjustments to a Russian typewriter. The government job paid well, nearly 10 times what the restaurant had promised, but she won no praise from her family. Her uncles' sour comment on Government prodigality was 'dieser Idioten'.

Moving to Berlin, she studied Chinese at the university. She married but the shadow of Hitler fell. Her husband was Aryan and she had Jewish blood. Divorce was mandatory. He was later to die fighting the Russians on the Eastern Front. As the anti-Semitic laws grew harsher Sonia fled to England taking a job as a housekeeper with a respectable English family and there she met her second husband, Tom Horsfall, a commander in the Royal Navy. The difference in lifestyle to Russia and Germany must have been considerable but her beauty and the air of a grande dame never deserted her. She was outstanding in any society.

The war and the BBC brought great opportunities. Overseas broadcasts were just beginning, the new German service being one of the most remarkable ever set up, studded with famous names. She promptly found employment. In the French Service, again full of famous names, she found particular friendship and support in John Weightman, later Professor of French at London University. In 1941 the Germans invaded the Soviet Union and Sonia Horsfall joined the new Russian Service. Indeed she helped create it and sustained it throughout the rest of her life. Writing highly literate features on books and films she presented a wider world to her impoverished Soviet listeners.

The BBC Russian Service, throughout the war and the Cold War that followed, was maintained by two great pillars; an old friend of Sonia's from both Russia and Berlin, Anatole Goldberg, supplied the political strength, Sonia the cultural strength. Goldberg and Horsfall may have contributed as much as any to the collapse of Soviet Communism. Yet there was always something of the grandeur of the ancien regime about Sonia. She disapproved of the break up of the empire. Inferior peoples, she seemed to think, were stupidly rejecting their Russian heritage. She was angered, too, by the removal of the name of Leningrad and the restoration of St Petersburg. She had lived in Leningrad and its erasure was a denial of history.

Her air of authority was instantly recognisable. She told of one incident on a visit to the Soviet Union when she was involved in an industrial dispute. A group of indignant and striking workers begged her to mediate for them with their management, choosing her because of her air of command and the aristocratic way she spoke. She spoke at least five languages fluently, though English had to be learnt the hard way. Like Edward Lear she could not speak Spanish, one of her few failures, but she refused to condescend to use a phrasebook.

Holidays were generally spent in France with her two elder brothers, both American citizens, one a well- known architect and painter the other a leading scientist. Her son Nicholas Horsfall is a great classical scholar living in Italy and teaching Latin to the Romans with an intellectual rigour owing much to his mother. Sonia's new Italian family and her granddaughter Sofia brought a golden glow to her last years. The intelligentsia, that Russian speciality, had indeed spread.

(Photograph omitted)