David Willey OBE (1953)

David Douglas Willey died of heart failure in Trevignano Romano (one hour north of Rome) on 11 July 2026 at age 93. For more than forty years he served as the BBC’s foremost and longest-serving worldwide correspondent, reporting from Europe, Africa, South America and Asia.

His father, Douglas Elliot Willey, born in 1903 in Grimsby, was a school master married to Marguerita  (Rita) Mary Caine (1903 – 1977) of Venice, Italy.

Their son David Douglas Willey was born 17 October 1932, and brought up in Marlow, Buckinghamshire. Mother Rita introduced him to Italy — to Venice and to the Italian language. Unlike David’s Anglican father, Rita was a Roman Catholic and brought David into that religion.  On Sundays in High Wycombe, father and son would attend their different churches, located next door to each other.

He was educated at Sir William Borlase’s Grammar School and then at Queens College in Cambridge, where he studied Law. He was then at Reuters Agency in Rome, where he covered the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957.

He transferred to Algeria in 1960, where he became a freelance reporter and the BBC East Africa correspondent. The BBC sent him to South Vietnam, where he covered the war from Saigon for five years. He also reported during that period from China and Laos.

After a period in London he was named the BBC Rome correspondent in August 1972. Willey’s highly praised ten-part BBC 2 TV series  Italians led to his first book, a social panorama of Italy in the early 1980’s.

His assigment was to cover Italy itself, but in 1978 the Church elected its first non-Italian pope in over 400 years, the Polish Karol Jozef Wojtyla, who took the name of John Paul II. From that point correspondents including David Willey became more focused upon the Vatican than upon Italy.

After making some forty voyages with Pope John Paul II, in 1992 Faber & Faber published David’s first papal biography, God’s Politician: John Paul II at the Vatican.  As the title indicates, it was not a religious work.

In 2013, the  Argentinian Jesuit Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Maria Bergoglio, was elected as Pope Francis.  For New York publisher Simon & Schuster David wrote The Promise of Francis: The Man, the Pope, and the Challenge of Change. In it he incorporated research into the pope’s previous life in his native Argentina and  discussed serious Vatican problems, from clerical sexual abuse to financial cover-ups.

A Goodreads review said that David “tells the inside story of how this most unlikely man came from ‘the end of the world’ to lead the world’s largest corporation into the future, stirring millions to interest and faith again through his frank speeches and benevolent beliefs.”

For decades David also wrote for the London Observer, the Tablet and the Sunday Telegraph. While continuing to follow ongoing turmoil within the Roman Catholic church, including its controversies over divorce and abortion, he also covered issues from the theft of works of fine art to kidnappings, terrorist attacks, Fascist bombings and Communist coalitions attempted in Italian governments.

In 2004 Queen Elizabeth II awarded David the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his services to broadcast journalism.

For forty years he lived with his partner, journalist and author Judith Harris, in Rome and Trevignano Romano.

Written by David’s partner, Judith Harris.