It was the night of Nov. 27, 1956, and 18-year-old Hungarian student Pallai did as advised by a local farmer: “Go as close as you can to the border guards’ camp, as they won’t expect you there, and when the searchlight sweeps round, flatten yourself to the ground.”
Pallai related this story to the Hungarian International Press Association at a dinner almost 60 years later. “It took about two weeks to crawl across, it seemed to me. I’ve never been so frightened in my life, but we made it. Fortunately, in the spring, they had taken up the mines, and we got into Austria,” he added.
The Austrians were decent and did what they could, but were overwhelmed by the numbers fleeing the turmoil in Hungary. With 1,300 refugees put up in a camp designed in World War 2 for 400 people, the men voted to allocate what food there was to the elderly, women and children.
“We lived on black coffee for three or four days. Then I hitchhiked to Vienna. I was very upset, because I didn’t want to leave Hungary. I was really homesick for years,” he recalled.
Ahead lay the democratic West and freedom. But Pallai was not merely seeking a better life; he was fleeing to save it. A month earlier, filled with revolutionary zeal, he had looted a rifle from an armoury at the beginning of the Hungarian uprising, and in its defence, he’d spent days battling the Hungarian State Security Police, the infamous ÁVH, from bullet-pocked buildings in Buda and Pest.
But with the return of Soviet forces, the poorly organized revolutionaries faced inevitable defeat, and capture meant certain death. Pallai’s father, himself a disillusioned former communist, told him: “Leave!” But now, just days later in Vienna, where to?
Péter Pallai: Fear Conquers Fear “The press building [we were defending] had huge windows with very wide ledges, and I saw, from the opposite house, someone firing at us. I was pretty frightened, but so incensed that I stepped onto the ledge and tried to shoot him. I don’t know whether I got him. They had automatic weapons, and I had to jump back into the room. And that’s when I realised that I had been standing on this ledge. I had a terrible fear of heights, and I threw up straight away. [In battle] you lose every normal sense that you have, you are so frightened.”
Pallai toyed with France (“They have beautiful women, wine and weather, but no jobs”), Scandinavia (“But it’s horribly cold”), and England. At the British Embassy, to his amazement, he was offered passage, a work permit and the chance to continue his studies.
“The condition was to pass an entrance exam in September 1957. I knew no English, except the names of jazz instruments. I was totally convinced that I wouldn’t pass an exam, but they said we’d get evening classes for English. Great! If not university, so what? I’ll still live,” he said, recalling his thoughts at the time.
Two days later, he was flown to England. By February, Pallai found himself in London with Imre, a retired dentist, “heroically” digging the foundations of Islington’s new public library.
He knew the job from his compulsory “volunteer” summer work in Socialist Hungary, but fearing for his older friend, he told him, “Take it easy. Don’t kill yourself.”
“We were going at a really leisurely pace, and suddenly a guy came to us who I’d never seen on the site before. He slowly and clearly said how popular we were, how all the guys sympathised with what happened in Hungary, but the pace at which we worked was not good. I said we would work faster, and he said: ‘No, no! I’m from the union! Slow down!’” Pallai first thought he was being sarcastic, but then the penny dropped.
“That’s when I learned what English democracy and the labor movement stood for,” he told his journalist audience, adding, to howls of laughter, “I couldn’t work slower.”
Péter Pallai: Solidarity and Purity “What struck me at Széna tér [in Buda] was that, after a day’s fighting, nobody went home. People allowed totally unknown, filthy young people with weapons into their flats and let them sleep there. There was such solidarity, it was really touching. There were boys and girls in the room. There must have been 20 of us, and somebody very heroically said: ‘Let’s not start anything with the girls, let’s keep the revolution pure.’ That was very charming and very beautiful, and that I will always remember.”
The builders’ laborer later enrolled at the London School of Economics and, on graduation, took up teaching at Sloane Grammar School in Chelsea, where he quickly made an impact.
“He was a very popular teacher. [Once] he took myself and one or two other boys to the Russian Embassy in London. We were studying the [Bolshevik] Revolution and he somehow arranged for us to meet one of the Consular Officials, who gave us an insight into the dynamics of that period,” Kevin Fuller, now retired from the British Foreign Office, recalls from his school days.
Pallai gave up full-time teaching in 1968 to join the BBC World Service in London, and in the next three decades worked as a presenter and producer of rock, jazz, current affairs and documentary programs. He moved to Budapest in 1996, where he headed the BBC Hungary bureau. Gyula Csák began life as a trainee radio journalist with Pallai in 1996.
“Péter was a mentor, a friend, and a father figure to me, teaching me every trick in the book with quiet authority and a wonderfully unique sense of humor. I was privileged to work with him for three and a half years, until his retirement in mid-1999,” Csák, now an editor with investigative research group Bellingcat, told the Budapest Business Journal.
Pallai spent that retirement working tirelessly to promote jazz within Hungary and advance the cause of Hungarian musicians in London and beyond.
Réka Irk, editor-in-chief of jazz.hu, described Pallai as “the ambassador of Hungarian jazz” in her eulogy for the website. Pallai was married three times, and had two sons and a daughter.
Alan Johnson, acclaimed author and retired politician, a former minister in both the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown U.K. governments, was a pupil at Sloane Grammar School in the 1960s. In his autobiography “This Boy,” Johnson credits Pallai as having “begun to prise open a window on the world for me.” He told the BBJ: “He taught history and economics, but with a dash and glamor that no other teacher could match […] Péter Pallai and George Orwell are the two principal reasons I never became a communist.”
This article was first published in the Budapest Business Journal print issue of November 14, 2025.
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