Lawrence of Asia

What's my earliest recollection? Perhaps when I was about five years old, in 1917, standing on a railway bridge in the London suburb of Wimbledon and asking my mother: 'What are all those soldiers doing down there on the platform?' And she saying they're probably on their way to the front. And me wondering, in my ignorance, what kind of place this 'front' must be. Anyway, she was probably wrong. When the regiments left for the slaughter of the Somme and Passchendaele they left from Waterloo in the small hours, to cut down on the tearful leave taking."

So recounted the former veteran BBC Far East correspondent in My Century: Anthony Lawrence in 1999, when aged 87, for what would become a double CD compilation.

Today, Lawrence, who remained in Asia - in Hong Kong - celebrates his 100th birthday and tomorrow, a host of friends, BBC people and others who worked with him will attend a party at the Foreign Correspondents' Club (FCC) in Ice House Street to mark his centenary.

One hundred years ago, in Wimbledon, "I burst in on an astonished world", quips Lawrence, out for a regular lunch at the FCC. "I had two older brothers, Edward or Ted and Arthur. Arthur was the one intelligent member of the family. He really was intelligent." Arthur died young in a train crash. "I had a younger brother, Stephen, and sister, Mildred."

A fellow journalist remembers Lawrence speaking in a bar in Australia while covering the visit of the British Queen Mother in 1958. In a light coloured suit, he reportedly sounded more Oxford than Oxford, offering everyone in the bar a drink in the clipped tones of the BBC. Lawrence's radio voice is easy to listen to. He was a newsman with the flair of the raconteur as he told a story - often of ordinary people - to explain the intricacies of an Asian political situation for an international audience. But he's not all that posh.

"The school I went to was in a very rough neighbourhood and sometimes a few boys would even turn up barefoot and the headmaster would issue an appeal for shoes that could be repaired," recounts Lawrence in My Century.

"My father's secretarial job in London can't have earned him very much. He had a brother, Uncle Arthur, jokingly called 'The Wicked Uncle'. He had been a very well-known journalist at the Daily Mail, but now lived in a bedsit. His wife had left him. He had the crumpled look of a man who had not lived wisely but well. When he came to visit … I loved to listen all about lead stories and rows in the newsroom … Already I'd long made up my mind to be a journalist.