He was a brave soldier, an MP and minister, a campaigning journalist and - most of all - a reporter's reporter. Kieran Faganremembers with affection Bill Deedes who died last week, aged 94
It was the voice I recognised. On a dreary November Sunday evening in Belfast, in the near-empty foyer of the Europa hotel, an old man tottered towards me.
"Do you know where the recepshun for the Shociety of Editorsh is being held, dear boy?" Bill Deedes inquired.
"Come on, I'll show you."
And so we stood at the pedestrian crossing on Great Victoria Street waiting for the lights to change. "Not too shteady, dear boy, take your arm, if you don't mind."
He asked where I was from. "Dublin, yesh dear boy... Mother's people were from Dublin, Chevenix, sholicitors, Merrion Shquare... don't make too much of that connection around here, shome of them don't go for it."
A huge security man stood in the door of a pub. "Lord Deedes," I announced grandly and we swept in.
I looked around for a seat for him in the small crowded room,. He shook his head, and made for the bar. As I left an hour later, Bill was tete-a tete with the prettiest woman in the place.
Next morning, Deedes showed up just as the first session of the conference began. He was out of breath. "Very ugly shenes," he said. He had been to Holy Cross school in the Ardoyne, where Catholic children had run the gauntlet of violent loyalist demonstrators to get to school, while the other hundred visiting hacks ate a posh breakfast.
Deedes knew his duty - to bring those "ugly shenes" to the notice of the wider world.
And in that brief tableau you have the whole man. The four careers in one. The young war correspondent in Abyssinia in 1935, where a version of him become the character William Boot in the Evelyn Waugh novel Scoop; the officer decorated for bravery in the second World War; the MP for Ashford in Kent in the 1950s, becoming a minister, who left politics to become editor of the Daily Telegraph, and then his last two decades as a roving reporter and much loved columnist.
Each could serve for a full life, but with Bill Deedes they are just pointers to the extraordinarily inquisitive yet respectful, diffident yet persistent, streak which took every opportunity life gave him.
When Max Hastings replaced him as Telegrapheditor in 1986, Deedes went back to being a reporter. He recognised the opportunity offered by "new technology". The reporter with a laptop computer and later the "satnav" phone, the electronic notebook, could travel the world, filing immediate copy from the scenes of great events and disasters.
The next two decades were the most fruitful. He went to Angola and Bosnia with Princess Diana, reporting on her anti-mine campaign. He criss-crossed the world in his late 80s - Angola, Kenya, Zimbabwe, India, where he suffered a slight stroke which he blamed on not being able to get whisky in a "dry" state, but still wrote his reports and sent them back to London.
He reported from Darfur in his 90th year. His writings were clear, like letters home from a much travelled if slightly old-fashioned uncle. The facts first, then a slight change of pace as, metaphorically speaking, he folded his arms, and rocked back on his heels. "If I might venture an observation . . ."
His manners, on and off the page, were impeccable. In person, he had the English habit of needing to address you by some handle, if not your name. "My dear," "old boy," "Shquire," and even "my lord" were deployed.
He was a High Tory, but recognised the responsibility for the less well off his party discarded in the Thatcher years. His army years formed him, but did not silence him on the evils of bullying in the military. A recent return to the battlefields unsettled him.
"In old age it is disquieting to be reminded how many young men on the threshold of life died in Normandy." He lit a candle in memory of the German dead.
He had the countryman's eye for the "harbingers of spring, the white candles of the horse chestnut blossom," seen from the window of his Kent home, as a Telegraphreader reminded us this week. He liked cricket and rugby too, and was pained by the ban on hunting. My last note from him in 2003 quotes "Mr Jorrocks of the Old Surrey and Burstow" hunt, a favourite reference.
The public persona, the figure of fun of the spoof Denis Thatcher correspondence in the satirical magazine Private Eye, his "shome mishtake surely" understated response to yet another item of misinformation, amuses but tells us very little.
His celebrated reply to letters from incandescent readers lambasting the Telegraphfor being mealy-mouthed about the restoration of hanging, or some other Tory article of faith - "My dear Brigadier, I feel there is much good sense in all that you have to say to me" - has gone around the world.
His friend and fellow editor Charles Moore came closest to explaining Bill Deedes to us when he observed that conservatives must choose between being grumpy and bloody-minded about the modern world, or express the more kindly part of their culture, and that was the way Deedes chose.
For those lucky enough to work in journalism, the example is clear. Go and talk to people, listen to what they say. Then tell it in as straightforward and unvarnished way as you can.
And if as a reader you have a decent newspaper to read, like this one, you probably owe much of it to it to those who loved Bill Deedes and were inspired by the way he practised his craft.
Cheerio Shquire, we'll miss you.
• Kieran Faganis a former Irish Times journalist