EDEN CONFIDENTIAL: Moral maze for the BBC's Michael Buerk over new passport trends now
During a long and distinguished career, he regularly reported harrowing stories, many from apartheid-era South Africa and, most famously, from Ethiopia when it was laid waste by famine in 1984.
But it was only two decades later, in a beautifully written memoir, The Road Taken, that broadcaster Michael Buerk, presenter of The Moral Maze on Radio 4, exposed the truth about his own father, a Canadian bigamist whose 'war wound' was, in fact, a scar from a hernia operation.
His father had been born not, as he claimed, in 1920 but 1914, and his entire life was layered in deceit.
Now, aged 78, Buerk has discovered that those layers even helped obscure the truth about his own life – in particular, his birthplace.
Michael Buerk arrives for the press night of Just For One Day, the Live Aid musical at The Old Vic Theatre in London, February 13, 2024
The father of BBC newsreader Michael Buerk, Gordon Carl Buerk, born in Winnipeg, Canada
Far from being born in Birmingham, as Buerk has always believed – and as he faithfully recorded in successive passports – he wasn't even born in Britain.
'Michael thought he was born in the UK but actually was born in Canada,' a friend tells me. 'He's just got his first Canadian passport.'
Buerk declines to discuss how he made this startling discovery, but has never made any secret of the enduring pain his father caused.
In The Road Taken, serialised in the Daily Mail 20 years ago, he recounted how his mother, Betty, met his father at a Christmas dance in 1944.
Dazzled by the Canadian – who styled himself 'Captain Gordon Charles Buerk' and said he was a widower who'd been torpedoed in the Mediterranean and survived 'hand-to-hand fighting in Italy' – she married him in April 1945. Michael was born the following February.
Soon afterwards, his father's first wife, Helen – still very much alive in Canada – learned of his marriage to Betty.
She magnanimously agreed to a speedy divorce – after which, astonishingly, Betty and Gordon married for a second time in Birmingham. But the union speedily unravelled. Betty died the summer her son took his O-Levels.
Buerk met his father only once, tracing him to Vancouver in 1972. By then, Gordon was dying – 'a portly little old man, with a cad's moustache nailed to a fading face'.
But, I'm told, Michael is now ready for a return journey. 'He's intending go back soon,'
