Few journalists with a successful career in Fleet Street would quit at the age of 42 and work for the rest of their active life with development and environmental charities. But after working for Reuters, the Guardian, the Observer, the Times and the Daily Herald, partly in Cyprus during the troubles, my friend John Rowley, who has died aged 91, gave up his job as deputy editor of the Western Mail in 1973 and joined the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF).
He was persuaded to take the job by the assistant secretary-general, Patrick Crosse, who himself had left the Reuters agency and was keen to produce publications of quality to communicate the importance of population and development issues to an influential audience. John recalled that Patrick said, as if suggesting a walk round the park: “Why don’t you take a swing through Asia? Find out what’s going on. And why not take a photographer with you?” Thus he teamed up with Mark Edwards, the environmental photographer, to make many reporting trips across the developing world.
Born in Tipton, West Midlands, to Alice (nee Bloomer) and Selwyn Rowley, John moved with his family to Jersey in 1933 when he was two years old and grew up during the German occupation of the Channel Islands, his parents both teaching in Jersey schools. He went to school at Victoria college in Jersey and studied international relations at the LSE in London.
I first met John in 1978 when he hired me as his deputy at IPPF. We produced a quarterly journal, People, which was published in three languages with a circulation of 25,000. People and its supplements, Earthwatch and AIDSWatch, pioneered coverage of population, development and related environmental issues, and won a number of international media awards.
In 1992, People and its supplements merged to form a new publication, People & the Planet, launched at the Earth Summit in Rio, jointly published until 2010 by John’s charity Planet 21, along with IPPF, the World Conservation Union (IUCN) and the UN Population Fund (UNFPA). He retired from editing in 2012.
John married Mandy (Maureen) Green in 1953, and they had four children, Selwyn, Helen, Ruth and Matthew. They divorced in 1980, and the following year he married Mani (Rajamani) Kodicara, becoming stepfather to her two daughters, Rekha and Renu. Mani died in 2020, and he is survived by the six children, 13 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
