William Deedes, 1913-2007

...the news pages were controlled independently by a "managing editor...

...Gathered together in one street, before their newspapers were dispersed around London, journalists shared an esprit de corps that overrode their rivalries, and a belief that theirs was the most exciting and liberating way of life...

...He was a crisp and elegant writer and, at 84, was the oldest person ever to win a "Reporter of the Year" award...

...and well into his nineties he traveled the world as a crusading journalist, at one point going with Princess Diana to Angola in support of her campaign against antipersonnel mines...

...The length of his journalistic career was, in itself, remarkable...

...Hartwell, the last member of the Berry dynasty to own and manage the newspaper, was so shy that he, as far as possible, avoided personal contact with his staff...

...After losing the editorship, he was immediately hired by his successor as a columnist and roving reporter...

...Born into wealth and privilege and sent to Harrow, he was taken away from school at 16 when his father was ruined by the 1929 stock market crash and found a job as a cub reporter on the Morning Post, a conservative paper that was later to be subsumed, together with Deedes, by the Daily Telegraph...

...I have never given an order, and I never will," he boasted to one of them...

...in real life, the young Deedes, wearing a double-breasted, pinstripe suit, brought with him 600 pounds of luggage that included different riding boots for winter and summer...

...an age of liquid lunches and lazy afternoons in which journalists were forgiven everything, provided their copy was good and appeared on time...

...He also believed that journalism should never be nasty...

...but for their once dynamic newspaper, it was twilight time...

...In Scoop, Boot arrives in Africa with an absurdly large amount of equipment, including cleft-sticks for sending messages...

...Bill Deedes was not just a huge enthusiast for this world, who liked a drink and smoked cigarettes from a cigarette holder...

...Abandoning politics to rejoin the Telegraph as editor, he found himself aboard another sinking ship and did little to help keep it afloat...

...He was at ease, however, in his role as principal courtier to a man even more diffident than himself— the man who was forced to sell the Telegraph to Black, the late Lord Hartwell...

...These are some of the reasons he is mourned...

...This was not Deedes's fault, except to the extent that he failed to impress on Hartwell the need for radical changes to avert the financial collapse brought on by the rapacity of the print unions...

...For his journalists, it was a happy time of gentlemanly discourse and convivial drinking in Fleet Street pubs...

...family, the person holding the title of "editor" only ran the opinion section of the paper...

...We don't want to hurt anybody," he told the editor of the Telegraph's gossip column...

...he was also a man of great modesty and amiability, who took public transportation rather than taxis, ate in cheap restaurants, treated everyone as equals, befriended the young, and made friends wherever he went...

...Apart from pleasing Hartwell, his main purposes were to keep his journalists calm and contented and to avoid confrontations...

...But it is not these accomplishments that explain the surge of nostalgia that greeted the news of his death...

...The Labour prime minister, Gordon Brown, said Britain owed Deedes "a huge debt of gratitude," and that "few have served journalism and the British people for so long at such a high level of distinction...

...Margaret Thatcher called him "a dear friend" who had had "a uniquely distinguished career in politics and journalism...

...As a reporter, Deedes went on to cover Neville Chamberlain's fateful meeting with Hitler in Bad Godes-berg in 1938 and—after fighting in the war and being decorated for bravery—returned to the Telegraph and continued to write for it for the rest of his life, even during his 24 years as a Conservative member of parliament...

...Deedes said, after joining Harold Macmillan's foundering Conservative government in 1962, "A sinking ship is my spiritual home...

...and he was, anyway, something of a fatalist...

...As a modest, diffident man, with a deep distrust of ideology, Deedes would have hated Black's dogmatism and grandiloquence...

...It is his status as the last survivor of a golden age of Fleet Street, an age in which newspapers, flush with money, could tolerate eccentricity and waywardness among their staffs...

...Sir William (later Lord) Deedes, who died last month at the age of 94, two days after starting (but failing to complete) his latest weekly column for a paper to which he had been linked for 70 years, would never, in any event, have worked for Black, whom he once described to a colleague as "the biggest bore on earth...

...Given what happened to the Telegraph on Deedes's watch, it might be thought surprising that his death prompted a huge outpouring of praise and affection throughout the British media—even in newspapers of the left that had little sympathy for his old-fashioned, paternalistic conservatism...

...So Deedes was effectively only half an editor and, furthermore, a half that would never challenge his proprietor or publish anything that he thought would not meet with his approval...

...He seemed thus to possess few of the qualities required of a man in his position, and his editorship also coincided with a period of deepening crisis that culminated in the loss of the newspaper to Black...

...It was the Morning Post that sent him on his first major assignment in 1935 to cover the war in Abyssinia, where he was to meet Evelyn Waugh, who was representing the Daily Mail there, and inadvertently inspire him to create the character of William Boot, the bumbling hero of his 1938 satirical novel, Scoop...

...But he was also, as both proprietor and self-styled "editor-in-chief," the undisputed boss, and he was treated by Deedes with a deference bordering on sycophancy...

...He would have thought it disloyal to question his boss's judgement on any matter...

...by Alexander Chancellor The Daily Telegraph that Bill Deedes edited from 1974 to 1986—the year in which Conrad Black bought the newspaper and ousted him—was an institution that would be unimaginable today, and one that must have already seemed antediluvian to its thrusting new Canadian proprietor...

...In the unique command structure created by the Berry Alexander Chancellor, former editor of the Spectator, now writes for the Guardian, and is the author, most recently, of Some Times in America...