Louis Heren

Who was Louis Heren?

Louis Philip Heren was one of the great foreign correspondents of the 20th century. He spent his entire career on The Times and was an author of political theory, memoirs and autobiography.

Heren was born in the East End of London. His father, a printer on The Times, died when Heren was two years old. As it was a paternalistic company in those days, Heren was able to leave school at 14 to begin work as a messenger on the newspaper. He moved up to work in various departments before the onset of World War II. He joined the British Army as a private soldier in 1939, and served in France, the Western Desert, Burma and the Netherlands East Indies. After being demobbed as a major in 1946, he returned to The Times and was made a foreign correspondent.

Heren made his mark covering Indian independence in 1947, creating a furore in Britain and India with graphic eyewitness accounts of communal massacres in the Punjab. Subsequently he was posted to Israel, Beirut, Jordan, Korea, Vietnam, Egypt, Singapore, India, Germany and Washington, DC. He was the first to report to the world the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.