Phil Pendry died at the age of 99 at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital Veterans Centre on March 9.Courtesy of family
Operating out of London in 1956, CBC news cameraman Phil Pendry was sent to Moscow with correspondent Don Gordon to cover a delegation of visiting Canadian businessmen. When Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev blew his cool during a speech to the Canadians, Mr. Pendry captured the outburst.
Mr. Khrushchev, a volatile Communist with a penchant for public tantrums, demanded the footage be seized. The quick-thinking cameraman slipped the film to Mr. Gordon, who stuck a roll into each of his armpits. Mr. Khrushchev, possibly hip to the ruse, shook the hand of the reporter. But the film did not drop.
Mr. Pendry, a British-Canadian who shot old movie newsreel material, documentaries and spot news the world over as a member of the first generation of television news cameramen, died at 99 at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital Veterans Centre on March 9.
He knew the power of his camera. Sometimes subjects wanted his footage censored, as was the case with Mr. Khrushchev, but others put on acts precisely for public consumption, sometimes grimly so. Mr. Pendry remembered the way Congolese mercenaries asked a cameraman for advice on how to stage the shooting of their prisoners.
During his career, Mr. Pendry filmed for CBC, Warner-Pathé News, BBC, CTV, NBC, Newsworld International and the National Film Board.John Robert Arnone / Canada, Canadians & The Beatles./Supplied
“We always walked away from anything like that,” he told the Toronto Star in 1971. “But the mere sight of the cameraman turned people on, made them want to perform.”
Mr. Pendry carried a camera, tripod and a sense of urgency and humanity into the globe’s hot spots: Algiers, Cyprus, Northern Ireland, Congo, Cambodia. Or in Toronto, on May 11, 1952, when things got heated in Maple Leaf Gardens. A 6,300-strong peace rally led by Rev. James G. Endicott included a number of not-so-peaceful incidents.
A squad of husky, young ushers jostled photographers when they tried to take pictures of disturbances, frisked audience members whom they suspected of harbouring anti-peace ideas, and unceremoniously bounced hecklers.
Mr. Pendry, the lone movie cameraman present, was a special target for the ushers. His camera was taken from him and he was “mauled badly” on separate occasions as he tried to document the disturbances, according to a news report.
In addition to filming for CBC, Mr. Pendry shot for Warner-Pathé News, BBC, CTV, NBC, Newsworld International and the National Film Board.
He collaborated with renowned Canadian foreign correspondents including Bill Cunningham and Michael Maclear. Mr. Pendry told The Globe and Mail in 2024 that Mr. Cunningham was the best-dressed correspondent he had ever worked with and that he loved food.
Mr. Pendry particularly enjoyed Japanese cuisine and pie à la mode was his dessert of choice.John Robert Arnone / Canada, Canadians & The Beatles./Supplied
“You would be lucky to get a coffee break with Michael Maclear, but Bill always stopped for an amazing lunch.”
(Mr. Pendry himself particularly enjoyed Japanese cuisine. Pie à la mode was his dessert of choice. Typically he would decide on a restaurant he liked and then order the exact same meal every time he dined there.)
The late Mr. Cunningham once recalled his colleague’s colourful nature. The pair were admitted into the presidential palace in Caracas to interview Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, who was surrounded by heavily armed guards. Asked by a protocol officer to introduce himself and his crew, Mr. Cunningham said he was with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and that Mr. Pendry was his cameraman.
Before the correspondent could utter another word, Mr. Pendry cut in: “Mr. President, I outranked you. I was a sergeant in the British Army and you were only a colonel.”
In no military force is a non-commissioned officer superior to a colonel, but Mr. Chavez realized the joke and laughed uproariously. “You’re right,” he replied. “Sergeants outrank everyone.”
Mr. Pendry filmed enough segments with 60 Minutes mainstay Morley Safer around the world to merit an invitation to speak at the Toronto-born TV journalist’s Manhattan funeral in 2016. He recalled the two of them being confronted by members of the Irish Republican Army in Belfast. Asked if they were Catholic or Protestant, Mr. Safer replied, “Jewish.” The combatant then asked, “Catholic Jewish or Protestant Jewish?”
According to those who knew him, Mr. Pendry was not given to boasting or dropping names.
“He told stories, but only when you asked him to,” said his friend, Christian Wehrli. “What moved me most about Phil wasn’t his impressive biography. It was that despite everything he had witnessed − war, suffering, human failure − he did not carry a single millimetre of cynicism within him.”
Mr. Pendry was conscripted into the British Army in his late teens. After swapping his rifle for a camera, he was posted to a defeated Germany as a photographer attached to pathologists searching for the remains of escaped Allied prisoners of war who were caught and taken illegally to Nazi concentration camps.
Mr. Pendry, pictured around the 1940s, was conscripted into the British Army in his late teens.Courtesy of family
“I experienced absolute and complete embarrassment at the condition of the inmates as compared to my own state of well-being,” he wrote in an article published in More of Our Canada magazine in 2021. “My only reaction was to hide behind my camera, and use it as a shield against the reality of the situation, which was fear-inducing.”
After his discharge from the British Army in 1948, he arrived in Canada in 1951 after meeting a Trans-Canada Air Lines stewardess in London. He pursued her all the way to the ski hills of Mont-Tremblant. The romance went downhill from there, but he stayed in Montreal, obtaining citizenship as a cameraman with the National Film Board and later living in Toronto between overseas assignments.
From 1955 to 1970, he was stationed at CBC in London for seven years, then Tokyo for two, Paris for one and London again for five more. During the second stint in the swinging British capital, he manned the camera for Yoko Ono’s Film No. 4, which was a series of people’s bottoms.
“He used CBC film stock for it,” said John Arnone, author of Canada, Canadians and The Beatles. “Canadian taxpayers footed the bill.”
Ms. Ono’s husband, John Lennon, showed up one day at Mr. Pendry’s flat asking for a piece of his wife’s art she had gifted the cameraman. It was a pane of glass hanging in Mr. Pendry’s kitchen. Mr. Lennon said it was needed for an art show in London, and that he would return it.
But the Beatle broke his promise.
“The next time Phil saw it was at a Yoko Ono exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario years later,” Mr. Arnone said.
During the Beatles’ Let it Be sessions, Mr. Pendry was behind the camera for a morning chat with Mr. Lennon and Ms. Ono for a CBC segment that became known unofficially as the “Two Junkies Interview,” a reference to heroin use. (The Cold Turkey singer momentarily excused himself because he was sick.)
Mr. Pendry admitted to being scared while in the secessionist state of the Republic of Biafra while covering the Nigerian Civil War (1967-70). The Biafrans employed South African mercenaries who were often former (or still practising) criminals. “We were warned against going out on patrol with them, as they were prone to eliminate camera crews and divide the spoils.”
In 1971, he accepted a Canadian Film Award, given to him as the year’s top television news cameraman, with his one good arm. He had broken his left shoulder falling off a wall in Northern Ireland while shooting footage for the CBC special The Sleepy Grass.
Mr. Pendry once explained the job of covering wars. “It is really very easy,” he told Mr. Arnone. “You get a phone call at home from the assignment editor; you catch a plane to any given destination where the war is going on; you arrive, book into a hotel and then get into a taxi or some form of transportation that takes you to the front and you take your camera out. I mean, it takes a certain amount of knowing when to go and when to shoot, but basically it’s like falling off a log, and very easy to do.”
Phillip Charles Pendry was born in London on Jan. 8, 1927. His father, Roy Hatfield Pendry, had been gassed in the First World War and later died from the complications. His mother was Theresa Pendry (née Feldman). Everyone called her “Billie.” Roy was a chef when the pair met; they later became part-owners of a fashionable dining club in Kensington Gardens.
Their son was 12 years old in 1939 when Britain declared war on Germany. He was living with his grandmother when a Luftwaffe airburst bomb blew the roofs off almost every house on the street. “It also left me with a stammer that lasted until I was well into my teens,” Mr. Pendry later recalled.
Operation Pied Piper was enacted to evacuate civilians from cities to safer places. Young Phil was one of hundreds of children to board a train one morning out of London with nothing but a standard-issue gas mask in its cardboard box and a backpack with a change of underwear.
He was billeted with a family in Welby, a tiny village in Lincolnshire, about 240 kilometres north. Their small cottage had no running water, no electricity and an outhouse.
“I was struck by how far back in time I had travelled,” he wrote in More of Our Canada. “Our only communication link to the outside world was a small tube radio powered by a wet-cell battery.”
His attendance at school was spotty. While watching a movie crew working on a film near the village one day, he was commandeered to hold a fishpole that swivelled and directed the boom microphone during shooting. Soon after, he was hired as a second assistant cameraman. He was 14 years old and officially in the movie business, with a union card and his own clapper board.
Mr. Pendry in Uganda in 2017.Courtesy of family
Without his parents’ permission, he ran away from the village and rented a room above a pub outside London to work at Denham Film Studios and Pinewood Studios.
By the time he was 17, he had worked on the comedy Tawny Pipit and war dramas The Way Ahead, The Way To The Stars and the Noel Coward co-directed In Which We Serve.
The thrice-married cameraman (and three-time divorcé) preferred working with female colleagues, whose approach was “usually more informed and direct,” as he explained it.
He once took a model he met in a London nightclub to the Congo as his sound person. In 2013, he was asked how many times he had taken a gorgeous woman to a war zone. “A half a dozen times at least,” the 76-year-old told filmmaker Philip Bloom. “Still do, if I can.”
In his leisure time, he restored Victorian writing boxes and other antiques. The animal lover was fond of horses and always carried dog treats in his pocket wherever he went.
He leaves his daughters, Jane Pendry, Annabelle Pendry and Michelle Scace; ex-wife Nancy Pendry; and grandchildren, Charlie Scace, Griffin Scace, Owen Evans, Archer Evans and Thomas Germain-Pendry.
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